We shall have to content ourselves, therefore, by a brief reference to those who have already given this matter their attention.
That Milton was under great obligations to Vondel's drama has been maintained by Dutch men of letters for generations. It has also become the contention of several distinguished English critics. Even as far back as 1825 the poet Beddoes, in a review of "Hayley's Life and Letters" (_Quarterly Review_, vol. xxxi.), says: "An effect which has hitherto not been noticed was then produced by the Dutch poets. In their school Joshua Sylvester (who lived amongst them) learnt some of the peculiarities of his versification; and if Milton was incited by the perusal of any poem upon the same subject to compose his 'Paradise Lost,' it was by studying the 'Lucifer' and 'Adam in Ballingschap' of Vondel, for he tried his strength with the same great poet in the 'Samson Agonistes;' Vondel being, indeed, the only contemporary with whom he would not have felt it a degradation to vie."
Mr. Edmund W. Gosse, in a brilliant essay entitled "Milton and Vondel," was, we believe, the first Englishman who gave the subject conscientious study.
For this, on account of his knowledge of the difficult Dutch language, he was peculiarly fitted. Mr. Gosse, in his own interesting manner, tells how, during the seventeenth century, the Dutch, then one of the most vigorous languages of Europe, was much more studied than it is to-day; how the patriot Puritan, Roger Williams, having learned the language in Holland during his exile there, taught it to John Milton, then Cromwell's Latin secretary; how Milton also must have heard of the great fame of the "Lucifer," and of the storm of fanatical opposition that greeted its publication, from some of the Dutch diplomats whom it was his place to entertain; how, too, he could hardly have been ignorant of the name of the distinguished author of the drama, since it is known that he was well acquainted with Hugo Grotius, who was a warm admirer and the bosom friend of Vondel.
In addition to these and other reasons, Mr. Gosse then brings forward a plausible array of internal evidence, showing many points of similarity in the construction and in the treatment of the two poems, summing up with the conclusion that Milton was undoubtedly under considerable obligation to his great Dutch contemporary.