"[27]
Who now reads the ancient writers? Who systematically reads the great
writers, be they ancient or modern, whom the consent of ages has marked
out as classics: typical, immortal, peculiar teachers of our race? Alas!
the _Paradise Lost_ is lost again to us beneath an inundation of
graceful academic verse, sugary stanzas of ladylike prettiness, and
ceaseless explanations in more or less readable prose of what John
Milton meant or did not mean, or what he saw or did not see, who married
his great-aunt, and why Adam or Satan is like that, or unlike the other.
We read a perfect library about the _Paradise Lost_, but the _Paradise
Lost_ itself we do not read.
I am not presumptuous enough to assert that the larger part of modern
literature is not worth reading in itself, that the prose is not
readable, entertaining, one may say highly instructive. Nor do I pretend
that the verses which we read so zealously in place of Milton's are not
good verses. On the contrary, I think them sweetly conceived, as musical
and as graceful as the verse of any age in our history.
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