and of all disguises in this! We remembered his enterprise, as we beheld him doffing the darkness of the lost angel, putting on the coronet, and "the wings of many coloured plumes sprinkled with gold," to impose on Uriel. Thus we learn that Satan was "a liar from the beginning." But how strikingly has the poet, true to the spirit of the Sacred History, combined the utmost vileness with this magnanimous outlawry .The fallen angel wraps himself in the semblance of the toad, that there should be only a step from the rebel prince to the reptile. This is a noble stroke for the imagination; it relieves us from those false sympathies in which we had too precipitately indulged; and when the final act of perfidy is performed, the consciousness of meanness, which it adds to the natural dignity of the plotting fiend, places him still farther from our sympathies.

"Oh, foul descent! that, I who erst contended, With gods to sit the highest, are now constrained Into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime."

Every circumstance conspires to make this being mean and dastardly to our eyes; gradually our ardent admiration cools, till when

Nature feels the wound, and gives signs of woe,

that all is lost, while

"Back, to the thicket slunk

The guilty serpent,"

we hate more passionately but more wisely, than we admired; we exult, as the unexpected and applauding hiss greets the achievement in Pandemonium, and the fiend becomes the reptile he similated.

CHAPTER XV.

PARADISE LOST.

BUT we will devote a little more time to this wonderful poem, and to the observation of some of its more obvious beauties. It is understood that we write for the young, and that we write to aid them to perceive and to enjoy the pictures and raptures of the imagination. One of the difficulties, and the greatest the poet had to contend with, was the description of the Spiritual world and its inhabitants; Heaven, Hell,

Angels, Demons; and he has poured over each subject the utmost affluence of language and poetry. Let the reader pause over the following description of the occupations of Heaven :

"No sooner had th' Almighty ceased, but all
The multitude of angels, with a shout

Loud as from numbers without number, sweet
As from blest voices, utt'ring joy, Heav'n rung
With jubilee, and loud Hosannas fill'd
Th' eternal regions: lowly reverent

Tow'rds either throne they bow, and to the ground
With solemn adoration down they cast

Their crowns, inwove with amarant and gold;
Immortal amarant; a flow'r which once

In Paradise, fast by the tree of life,

there grows,

Began to bloom; but soon, for man's offence,
To Heav'n removed, where first it grew,
And flow'rs aloft, shading the fount of life,
And where the riv'r of bliss through midst of Heav'n
Rolls o'er Elysian flow'rs her amber stream;

With these, that never fade, the spirits elect

Bind their resplendent locks inwreath'd with beams,
Now in loose garlands thick thrown off, the bright
Pavement, that like a sea of jasper shone,
Impurpled with celestial roses smiled.

Then crown'd again, their golden harps they took,
Harps ever tuned, that glitt'ring by their side
Like quivers hung, and with preamble sweet
Of charming symphony they introduce
Their sacred song, and waken raptures high;
No voice exempt, no voice but well could join
Melodious part,-such concord is in Heav'n."

The design of Paradise Lost is the most superhuman that ever filled the mind of a poet; the design of every other mighty epic looks tame when compared with it. Homer only narrates how cities were thrown into convulsion and war, on account of a harlot ; and the Æneid only grows out of the same conception. Dante certainly could never have laid the plan of such a poem; Tasso is the great epic poet of modern times. But in all these instances the plan of the poet was laid on earth, or if, as in the case of Dante; the scenery was in another world, yet the characters and the allusions were of the events of earth and time: but Milton set his genius to work upon a world all spirit;—for surely a world without sin, a world plunged strangely into sin by some mysterious wrenching from the dominion of the Divine law and purity, may be included in such a generalization. There were no precedents for such a plan. The gods of Homer were the transcripts of impure imaginations only; the heroes of the Eneid were mortal and imperfect. Shakspear, in his "Troilus and Cressida," had held up the seige of Troy and all the Trojan warriors to a well deserved scorn; he had lashed them with his powerful dramatic satire, and had made the occasion of their contests simply ridiculous;

and doubtless in this light it was regarded by Milton. The supernatural machinery of the "Jerusalem Delivered" was worthy of the Gothic Mythology; it was worthy of the age in which it was written; more cannot be said of it. But Milton chose a subject for an epic, without a parallel in literature, the cause of moral evil in the world. The occasion of those terrible discrepancies, which all may observe between the thing that is, and the thing that ought to be, this was the subject he proposed to himself; it involved every possible kind of poetry to describe spirits, to delineate the course of events would include dramatic character and action; and what a field for sublime speculation! and what a theatre for the choral harmonies of the Blest, and the dissonances of the Lost, and all nature, and all the spiritual world outspread for description and dissertation! Let the reader sit down but a short time, and think what requisites were necessary before even the canvass could be spread to receive a design so vast as this, and he will be amazed. The demand was no less than that every kind of learning should pour its ample store throughout the poem. The diction, too,-how necessary that it should not be so mellifluous, as weighty, to bear up the grandeur of the theme; not the volatility of