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that in reading Paradife Loft we read a book of universal knowledge.

But original deficience cannot be fupplied. The want of human interest is always felt. Paradife Loft is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wifhed it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harraffed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; ; we defert our master, and seek for companions.

Another inconvenience of Milton's defign is, that it requires the description of what cannot be described, the agency of spirits. He saw that immateriality fupplied no images, and that he could not show angels acting but by inftruments of action; he therefore invefted them with form and matter. This, being neceffary, was therefore defenfible; and he fhould have fecured the confiftency of his fyftem, by keeping immateriality out of fight, and enticing his reader to drop it from his thoughts. But he has unhappily perplexed his poetry with his philofophy. His infernal

and celestial powers are fometimes. pure fpirit and sometimes animated body. When Satan walks with his lance upon the burning marle, he has a body; when, in his paffage between hell and the new world, he is, in danger of finking in the vacuity, and is fupported by a gult of rifing vapours, he has a body; when he animates the toad, he feems to be mere fpirit, that can penetrate matter at pleasure; when he starts up in his own fhape, he has at leaft a determined form; and when he is brought before Gabriel, he has a fpear and a Shield, which he had the power of hiding in the toad, though the arms of the contending angels are evidently material.

The vulgar inhabitants of Pandemonium, being incorporeal Spirits, are at large, though without number, in a limited space; yet in the battle, when they were overwhelmed by mountains, their armour hurt them, crushed in upon their fubftance, now grown grofs by finning. This likewife happened to the uncorrupted angels, who were overthrown the fooner for their arms, for unarmed they might cafily as fpirits have evaded by contraction or remove. Even as fpirits they are hardly spi

ritual;

ritual; for contraction and remove are images of matter; but if they could have escaped without their armour, they might have efcaped from it, and left only the empty cover to be battered. Uriel, when he rides on a fun-beam, is material; Satan is material when he is afraid of the prowefs of Adam.

The confufion of fpirit and matter which pervades the whole narration of the war of heaven fills it with incongruity; and the book, in which it is related, is, I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is increased.

After the operation of immaterial agents, which cannot be explained, may be confidered that of allegorical perfons, which have no real existence. To exalt caufes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has always been the right of poetry. But fuch airy beings are, for the most part, fuffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale, and Victory hovers over a general, or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do no more. To give them any

real

real employment, or afcribe to them any material agency, is to make them allegorical no longer, but to fhock the mind by afcribing effects to non-entity. In the Prometheus of Æfchylus, we fee Violence and Strength, and in the Alceftis of Euripides, we fee Death, brought upon the stage, all as active perfons of the drama; but no precedents can justify abfurdity,

Milton's allegory of Sin and Death is undoubtedly faulty. Sin is indeed the mother of Death, and may be allowed to be the portress of hell; but when they ftop, the jour ney of Satan, a journey defcribed as real, and when Death offers him battle, the allegory is broken. That Sin and Death should have fhewn the way to hell, might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the paffageby building a bridge, because the difficulty of Satan's paffage is described as real and sensible, and the bridge ought to be only figurative. The hell affigned to the rebellious fpirits is described as not lefs local than the refidence of man. It is placed in fome distant part of fpace, feparated from the regions of harmony and order by a chaotick waste and an unoc

cupied vacuity; but Sin and Death worked up a mole of aggravated foil, cemented with afphaltus; a work too bulky for ideal architects,

This unfkilful allegory appears to me one of the greatest faults of the poem; and to this there was no temptation, but the author's opinion of its beauty.

To the conduct of the narrative fome ob jections may be made. Satan is with great expectation brought before Gabriel in Paradise, and is fuffered to go away unmolested, The creation of man is represented as the confequence of the vacuity left in heaven by the expulfion of the rebels; yet Satan mentions it as a report rife in heaven before his departure,

To find fentiments for the ftate of innocence, was very difficult; and fomething of anticipation perhaps is now and then difco, vered. Adam's difcourfe of dreams feems not to be the speculation of a new-created being, I know not whether his answer to the angel's reproof for curiofity does not want fomething of propriety: it is the speech of a

man

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