the light of his secret purpose. It was not in his way to sit down to
read over all the Greek and Latin writers, as Casaubon or Salmasius
might do. Milton read with selection, and "meditated," says Aubrey,
what he read. His practice conformed to the principle he has himself
laid down in the often-quoted lines (_Paradise Regained_, iv. 322)--

Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself.

Some of Milton's Greek books have been traced; his _Arattis,
Lyeophron, Euripides_ (the Stepharnis of 1602), and his _Pindar_ (the
Benedictus of 1620), are still extant, with marginal memoranda, which
should seem to evince careful and discerning reading. One critic
even thought it worth while to accuse Joshua Barnes of silently
appropriating conjectural emendations from Milton's _Euripides_. But
Milton's own poems are the beat evidence of his familiarity with all
that is most choice in the remains of classic poetry. Though the
commentators are accused of often, seeing an imitation where there
is none, no commentary can point out the ever-present infusion of
classical flavour, which bespeaks intimate converse far more than
direct adaptation. Milton's classical allusions, says Hartley
Coleridge, are amalgamated and consubstantiated with his native
thought.

A commonplace book of Milton's, after having lurked unsuspected for
200 years in the archives of Netherby, has been disinterred in our
own day (1874). It appears to belong partly to the end of the Horton