palace battlements, which furnishes so elegant an entertainment for our English audience, desires that he may be conducted to Mount Citharon, in order to end his life in that very place where he was exposed in his infancy, and where he should then have died had the will of his parents been executed.

As the author never fails to give a poetical turn to his sentiments, he describes in the beginning of this book the acceptance which these their prayers met with, in a short allegory formed upon that beautiful passage in holy writ,And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar, which was before the throne: and the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God *.'

-To heaven their prayers

Flew up, nor miss'd the way, by envious winds
Blown vagabond or frustrate; in they passed
Dimensionless through heavenly doors, then clad
With incense, where the golden altar fumed,
By their great Intercessor, came in sight
Before the Father's throne.-

xi. 14.

We have the same thought expressed a second time in the intercession of the Messiah, which is conceived in very emphatical sentiments and expres

sions.

Among the poetical parts of Scripture, which Milton has so finely wrought into this part of his narration, I must not omit that, wherein Ezekiel,

consists, seem to have been carefully revised by their author and to have undergone various and considerable alterations in consequence of his revisal.

* Rev. viii. 3, 4.

speaking of the angels who appeared to him in a vision, adds, that every one had four faces, and that their whole bodies, and their backs, and their hands, and their wings, were full of eyes round about:

-The cohort bright

Of watchful cherubim, four faces each
Had, like a double Janus, all their shape
Spangled with eyes.—

ib. 127.

The assembling of all the angels of heaven, to hear the solemn decree passed upon man, is represented in very lively ideas. The Almighty is here described as remembering mercy in the midst of judgement, and commanding Michael to deliver his message in the mildest terms, lest the spirit of man, which was already broken with the sense of his guilt and misery, should fail before him:

-Yet lest they faint

At the sad sentence rigorously urged,
For I behold them soften'd, and with tears
Bewailing their excess, all terror hide.

ib. 108.

The conference of Adam and Eve is full of moving sentiments. Upon their going abroad, after the melancholy night which they had passed together, they discover the lion and the eagle, each of them pursuing their prey towards the eastern gates of Paradise. There is a double beauty in this incident, not only as it presents great and just omens, which are always agreeable in poetry, but as it expresses that enmity which was now produced in the animal creation. The poet, to show the like changes in nature, as well as to grace his fable with a noble prodigy, represents the sun in an eclipse. This particular incident has likewise a fine effect upon the

imagination of the reader, in regard to what follows; for at the same time that the sun is under an eclipse, a bright cloud descends in the western quarter of the heavens, filled with a host of angels, and more luminous than the sun itself. The whole theatre of nature is darkened, that this glorious machine may appear in all its lustre and magnifi

cence:

-Why in the east

Darkness ere day's mid-course? and morning light
More orient in yon western cloud that draws
O'er the blue firmament a radiant white,

And slow descends with something heavenly fraught?
He err'd not, for by this the heavenly bands
Down from a sky of jasper lighted now

In Paradise, and on a hill made halt ;
A glorious apparition.-

ib. 203.

I need not observe how properly this author, who always suits his parts to the actors whom he introduces, has employed Michael in the expulsion of our first parents from Paradise. The archangel on this occasion neither appears in his proper shape, nor in the familiar manner with which Raphael the sociable spirit entertained the father of mankind before the fall. His person, his port, and behaviour, are suitable to a spirit of the highest rank, and exquisitely described in the following passage:

-Th' archangel soon drew nigh,

Not in his shape celestial: but as man
Clad to meet man: over his lucid arms
A military vest of purple flow'd,
Livelier than Meliboan, or the grain
Of Sarra, worn by kings and heroes old,
In time of truce: Iris had dipt the woof:
His starry helm, unbuckled, show'd him prime
In manhood where youth ended; by his side
As in a glist'ring zodiac, hung the sword,

Satan's dire dread, and in his hand the spear.
Adam bow'd low; he kingly from his state
Inclined not, but his coming thus declared.

ib. 238.

Eve's complaint, upon hearing that she was to be removed from the garden of Paradise, is wonderfully beautiful. The sentiments are not only proper to the subject, but have something in them particularly soft and womanish:

Must I thus leave thee, Paradise? Thus leave
Thee, native soil, these happy walks and shades,
Fit haunt of gods, where I had hope to spend
Quiet, though sad, the respite of that day
That must be mortal to us both? O flowers,
That never will in other climate grow,
My early visitation, and my last
At even, which I bred up with tender hand
From the first opening bud, and gave ye names!
Who now shall rear ye to the sun, or rank
Your tribes, and water from th' ambrosial fount?
Thee, lastly, nuptial bower, by me adorn'd
With what to sight or smell was sweet: from thee
How shall I part? and whither wander down
Into a lower world, to this, obscure

And wild? How shall we breathe in other air
Less pure, accustom'd to immortal fruits?

ib. 269.

Adam's speech abounds with thoughts which are equally moving, but of a more masculine and elevated turn. Nothing can be conceived more sublime and poetical than the following passage in it:

This most afflicts me, that departing hence
As from his face I shall be hid, deprived
His blessed count'nance: here I could frequent,
With worship, place by place where he vouchsafed
Presence divine; and to my sons relate,
On this mount he appeared, under this tree
Stood visible, among these pines his voice
I heard; here with him at this fountain talk'd:
So many grateful altars I would rear

Bred only and completed to the taste

Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance,

To dress, and troll the tongue, and roll the eye;
To these that sober race of men, whose lives
Religious titled them the sons of God,
Shall yield up all their virtue, all their fame,
Ignobly, to the trains and to the smiles
Of these fair atheists.-

ib. 614.

The next vision is of a quite contrary nature, and filled with the horrors of war.. Adam at the sight of it melts into tears, and breaks out into that passionate speech,

-O what are these?

Death's ministers, not men, who thus deal death

Inhumanly to men, and multiply

Ten thousand fold the sin of him who slew

His brother: for of whom such massacre

Make they, but of their brethren, men of men? ib. 675.

Milton to keep up an agreeable variety in his visions, after having raised in the mind of his reader the several ideas of terror which are conformable to the description of war, passes on to those softer images of triumphs and festivals, in that vision of lewdness and luxury which ushers in the flood.

As it is visible that the poet had his eye upon Ovid's account of the universal deluge, the reader may observe with how much judgment he has avoided every thing that is redundant or puerile in the Latin poet. We do not here see the wolf swimming among the sheep, nor any of those wanton imaginations which Seneca found fault with, as unbecoming this great catastrophe of nature. If our poet

has imitated that verse in which Ovid tells us that there was nothing but sea, and that this sea had no shore to it, he has not set the thought in such a light