I know not how it may be
with other readers, but for myself I feel inclined to resent this
hail-fellow-well-met manner with its jaunty "_we_ will vote." In some
cases, Mr. Masson's indecorums in respect of style may possibly be
accounted for as attempts at humor by one who has an imperfect notion of
its ingredients. In such experiments, to judge by the effect, the pensive
element of the compound enters in too large an excess over the hilarious.
Whether I have hit upon the true explanation, or whether the cause lie
not rather in a besetting velleity of the picturesque and vivid, I shall
leave the reader to judge by an example or two. In the manuscript copy of
Milton's sonnet in which he claims for his own house the immunity which
the memory of Pindar and Euripides secured for other walls, the title had
originally been, "_On his Door when the City expected an Assault_."
Milton has drawn a line through this and substituted "_When the Assault
was intended to the City_." Mr. Masson fancies "a mood of jest or
semi-jest in the whole affair"; but we think rather that Milton's quiet
assumption of equality with two such famous poets was as seriously
characteristic as Dante's ranking himself _sesto tra cotanto senno_. Mr.
Masson takes advantage of the obliterated title to imagine one of Prince
Rupert's troopers entering the poet's study and finding some of his
"Anti-Episcopal pamphlets that had been left lying about inadvertently.
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