Mark Pattison, indeed, who speaks for Oxford, denies that Milton was a regularly learned man, like Usher or Selden. That is, I understand, he had made no exhaustive studies in professional fields of knowledge such as patristic theology or legal antiquities. Of course not: Milton was a poet: he was studying for power, for self-culture and inspiration, and had little regard for a merely retrospective scholarship which would not aid him in the work of creation.
Be that as it may, all Milton’s writings in prose and verse are so saturated with learning as greatly to limit the range of their appeal. A poem like “Lycidas,” loaded with allusions, can be fully enjoyed only by the classical scholar who is in the tradition of the Greek pastoralists, who “knows the Dorian water’s gush divine.” I have heard women and young people and unlettered readers who have a natural taste for poetry, and enjoy Burns and Longfellow, object to this classical stiffness in Milton as pedantry. Now pedantry is an ostentation of learning for its own sake, and none has said harder things of it than Milton.
. . . Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior . . .
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself.
Cowley was the true pedant: his erudition was crabbed and encumbered the free movement of his mind, while Milton made his the grace and ornament of his verse.
How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,