WHITING, FLORENCE B. Milton's literary milieu.

<pb id='025.png' n='1962h1/A/0863' /> BREDVOLD, LOUIS I. The intellectual milieu of Dryden; studies in some aspects of seventeenth century thought.

From the delineation of this profoundly depressing milieu, by the aid of which, if the fate of London and Liverpool were to-morrow as that of Herculaneum and Pompeii, we should be able to reconstruct the gutters of our Imperial cities (little changed in essentials since the days of Domitian), Gissing turned his sketch-book to the scenery of rural England.

"Literary" epic differs much more in the specific purpose of its art, as civilized societies differ much more than heroic, and also as the looser milieu of a civilization allows a less strictly traditional exercise of personal genius than an heroic age.

"Gentlemen talk of the just medium (juste milieu)" he said, "as if it embraced a clear political creed.

#milieu#, m., middle; #au de#, p.29, l.31, amid.

It is youth who can see a tangible devil at work in every party or sect opposed to its own, whose enemy is always a villain, and who finds treachery and falsehood in the friend who is occasionally bored or indifferent: it is middle age that has discovered the reasonable sweet juste milieu of human naturewho knows few saints perhaps, but is apt to find its friend and grocer and shoemaker agreeable and honest fellows.

But this is not to say that investigation of the "authentic" epic poet's milieu may not be extremely profitable; and for settling the preliminaries of this essay, I owe a great deal to Mr. Chadwick's profoundly interesting study, "The Heroic Age"; though I daresay Mr. Chadwick would repudiate some of my conclusions.

Our present spatial milieu has settled down to a seemingly three dimensional finality because our thought-form has become so habitual as to give rise to certain geometric axioms.

Novels don't really do thatthey only make people want to escape from middle-class conditions, what everyone is the better for seeing is not how life might conceivably be handled, but how it actually has been handled, freshly and distinctly, by someone in a commonplace milieu.