No More Learning

An examination of other passages, where there is no antithesis, goes to
show that the lengthened form of the pronoun is most frequent before a
pause (as vii. 95); or at the end of a line (i. 245, 257); or when a
foot is inverted (v. 133); or when as object it precedes its verb (v.
612; vii. 747), or as subject follows it (ix. 1109; x. 4). But as we
might expect under circumstances where a purist could not correct his
own proofs, there are not a few inconsistencies. There does not seem,
for example, any special emphasis in the second wee of the following
passage:

Freely we serve.
Because wee freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall (v. 538).


On the other hand, in the passage (iii. 41) in which the poet
speaks of his own blindness:

Thus with the Year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, &c.

where, if anywhere, we should expect mee, we do not find it, though it
occurs in the speech eight lines below.
It should be added that this
differentiation of the pronouns is not found in any printed poem of
Milton's before Paradise Lost, nor is it found in the Cambridge
autograph. In that manuscript the constant forms are me, wee, yee.
There is one place where there is a difference in the spelling of she,
and it is just possible that this may not be due to accident. In the
first verse of the song in Arcades, the MS. reads:

This, this is shee;

and in the third verse:

This, this is she alone.

This use of the double vowel is found a few times in Paradise Regain'd:
in ii. 259 and iv. 486, 497 where mee begins a line, and in iv. 638
where hee is specially emphatic in the concluding lines of the poem. In
Samson Agonistes it is more frequent (e. g. lines 124, 178, 193, 220,
252, 290, 1125). Another word the spelling of which in Paradise Lost
will be observed to vary is the pronoun their, which is spelt sometimes
thir. The spelling in the Cambridge manuscript is uniformly thire,
except once when it is thir; and where their once occurs in the writing
of an amanuensis the e is struck through. That the difference is not
merely a printer's device to accommodate his line may be seen by a
comparison of lines 358 and 363 in the First Book, where the shorter
word comes in the shorter line. It is probable that the lighter form
of the word was intended to be used when it was quite unemphatic.