He
writes _Basan_ for _Bashan_, _Sittim_ for _Shittim_, _Silo_ for _Shiloh_,
_Asdod_ for _Ashdod_. Still more, however, does he seem to have been wary
of the compound sound _ch_ as in _church_. Of his sensitiveness to this
sound in excess there is a curious proof in his prose pamphlet entitled
'An Apology against a Pamphlet, called A Modest Completion, etc.,' where,
having occasion to quote these lines from one of the Satires[368] of his
opponent, Bishop Hall,
"'Teach each hollow grove to sound his love,
Wearying echo with one changeless word,'
"he adds, ironically, 'And so he well might, and all his auditory besides,
with his _teach each!_'" Generalizations are always risky, but when
extemporized from a single hint they are maliciously so. Surely it needed
no great sensitiveness of ear to be set on edge by Hall's echo of _teach
each_. Did Milton reject the _h_ from _Bashan_ and the rest because he
disliked the sound of _sh_, or because he had found it already rejected
by the Vulgate and by some of the earlier translators of the Bible into
English? Oddly enough, Milton uses words beginning with _sh_ seven
hundred and fifty four times in his poetry, not to speak of others in
which the sound occurs, as, for instance, those ending in _tion_. Hall,
had he lived long enough, might have retorted on Milton his own
"Manli_est_, resolut_est_, br_east_,
As the magnetick hard_est_ iron draws,"
or his
"What moves thy inquisition?
Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall,
And my promotion thy destruction?"
With the playful controversial wit of the day he would have hinted that
too much _est-est_ is as fatal to a blank-verse as to a bishop, and that
danger was often incurred by those who too eagerly _shun_ned it.
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