Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out His Seraphim with the hallowed fire of His altar to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases; to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs.'

At one time it seems that he intended, in the spirit of a true patriot, to compose an epic on the legendary history of the early British kings, of which Prince Arthur and his devoted knights should be the heroes. He intimates this in the Latin ode which he sent as a parting gift to his courteous and noble friend G. B. Manso, Marchese di Villa, at whose hospitable house he had enjoyed the society of many Italian poets and scholars, and from whom he had heard the story of the chequered life of Torquato Tasso.

And in his Church Government, in 1641, he still holds that after the example of Tasso, who had sung the victories of his countrymen over the infidel, "it haply would be no rashness from an equal diligence and inclination to present the like offer in one of our own ancient stories."

But the events which recalled him hastily to England, when he "thought it base to be travelling for amusement abroad while his fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at home," when he expressed his hopes for the future of his country in these magnificent sentences, "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle renewing her mighty youth and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam, purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance"-those years which revealed to him where lay his real strength and made all earthly actions and passions seem to him but trifles of an hour, these, it doubtless was which led him to the choice of a theme as far above the exploits of Achilles and Æneas, of Geoffrey, Tancred, or King Arthur, as heaven is above the earth and angels greater than men, and determined him to pursue

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme;"

nothing less than in the guise of poetry to

"Assert eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men."

For this his whole previous life had been a preparation. He had amassed an amount of information that is perfectly astounding. Some small idea of the breadth and solidity of his reading may be formed by collating the countless allusions and parallelisms which crowd his poetry, with the list of authors quoted on political, social, and other subjects in his Commonplace-book, the MS. of which has recently been discovered and printed. The Holy Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek as well as in the principal versions then known; the poets, historians, and philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, the later Latin poets; the fathers of the church, both Greek and Latin; the greatest poets of Italy, and those of England from Chaucer to his own time, especially Shakspere, Spenser, Sidney, and Jonson; together with every mediæval and contemporary historian, statesman, lawyer, philosopher, and divine, whether writing in Latin or in their respective vernaculars, were his familiar friends.

Every profound thought, every grand idea, every beauteous image, every creation of every age and clime was treasured up in his insatiable memory, not like the specimens or works of art in a museum, but as seed in a genial soil ready to spring up and yield still richer harvests of wisdom and imagination. In this he differs from all but a few of the world's greatest poets. He does not borrow the thoughts of others to make up for any want of his own; they reproduce themselves in new aspects and connections, welling up as the spontaneous outcome of his own exuberant imagination, blending with the creations of his own genius, and nearly always improved, refined, and elevated, by having passed through his brain.

But for nearly a quarter of a century his Muse had been silent, though his pen was incessantly employed. Not that controversy had a stronger attraction for him or had gained an overpowering influence over his mind, for in that very

polemic from which I have already so largely quoted he says: "I trust hereby to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies." Overwhelming must have been that sense of duty with which the love of his unhappy country possessed him thus to induce him to forego his aspirations, to let those talents which he firmly and justly believed to be a divine gift, a burden laid on him by God himself, to lie so long in abeyance. It was not until the restoration of monarchy, and with it the irruption of a flood of corruption and immorality which no power of his could any longer stem, forced him to an unwilling retirement from the world, that he at length in his old age undertook the last and greatest effort of his life.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

The subject of the poem, as simply but grandly set forth in the opening verses, is the fall of man, and the entrance of evil into this beauteous world, turning what was once an "earthly paradise" into a moral wilderness. But vast and awful as are its remoter consequences, the mere incident of the lapse of two simple beings from a state of perfect innocence to one of imperfection and weakness, but still loving and loved by their Creator, though it might well form the theme of an elegy, could not in itself furnish materials for an epic poem.

To construct such a work from the starting-point of the fall, two opposite courses lay open, and we may suppose that they naturally presented themselves to the mind of our great poet. It might either be carried down to its effects as exhibited in the seeming triumph of Satan, in the reign of wickedness and impiety, of cruelty and lust, until "it repented the Lord that he had made man," and by the awful catastrophe of the deluge he swept from off the face of the earth that race of physical and moral giants who had so long defied him to the face; or it might be traced back to its proximate cause in ages long anterior to the creation, and its scene removed to the world of spirits.

He chose the latter course, partly because while Scripture and tradition give just sufficient intimation of such antecedent cause to justify the attempt, these hints are so vague as to leave ample room for the poetic imagination to fill up the details in accordance with dramatic necessities without violating the religious sense by the least distortion of or addition to the words of inspiration, and partly because of the greater scope for the consideration of the fall in relation to the scheme of redemption afforded by such a mode of treatment. Mankind had seen and heard enough of wars and crime, of anarchy and lawless passions. It is only where light and darkness, freedom and oppression, truth and falsehood are struggling for the mastery that the Christian can look on wars and revolu

tions with satisfaction, or recount them with feelings other than of disgust. The impure and bloody rites of paganism, the degrading religions of the old world, are by Milton fitly traced to the work of the evil one, and the gods of the heathen identified with devils as real personages; but in that dark and polluted atmosphere, without one gleam of light or goodness, there was no place for God or Christ.

It has been objected that Milton does not explain the origin of evil, and only throws it one step further back; but such an attempt, there is no reason to believe, he ever intended. He represents the fall of our first parents as the act of Satan, in his vain endeavour to revenge himself on the Almighty, who had cast him into the lake of fire as the just punishment of his rebellion, and shows how he was foiled in his malicious efforts by the eternal counsels of the Blessed Trinity for the restoration of the human race.

Though God the Father and the Son are actors in this stupendous drama, the real hero is Satan himself, and in the delineation of his character Milton has shown no less originality than consummate skill. He felt how utterly inadequate, how grossly unfitted for such a part, was the popular conception of Satan. It seemed absolutely profane to represent the being who could be capable of marring God's fair creation, of disfiguring and well nigh destroying the divine image as impressed on man, of daring the Almighty on his throne, and plunging in equal ruin with himself millions of angelic beings as the ugly thing with cloven hoofs, a tail, and horns, half man, half beast, a sort of satyr or hobgoblin, which the vulgar imagination and monkish tales of the dark ages had pictured, and which was as much an object of ridicule as of dread. No! his Satan must be an archangel ruined, a creature, but the greatest of created beings, one" who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms," as great after his fall as when he stood erect in the presence of God, and still surrounded by hosts of fallen angels who own him as their lord. Beaten and baffled in his design on the throne of heaven, he seeks to revenge himself by blighting God's fair creation and dragging others into the ruin he had brought upon himself. Yet he is not the principle