litotes

I had never heard the word litotes, which means “words doctors use to remind you they’re smarter than you are.”

If you were feeling technical, you might call it "litotes" and Milton pulls a similar trick in his line: "Love, not the lowest end of human life".

It's outlined in general and unemotional terms in the climactic sixth and seventh stanzas, with a faint touch of extra-dry humour in the litotes of "pointed questions", "whoever they had come to see", etc.

Miosis, mī-ō′sis, n. diminution: litotes.

The delicacy which prompts a later generation to reject that name is by no means necessarily a result of stricter habits, is far more often due to the flatness which comes of untiring repetition and to the greater piquancy of litotes.