B 3 132 flflZ 
 

 
 
Cassiral ©Hitters. 
 
 Edited by John Jiic/iard Green. 
 
 MILTON 
 
 BY 
 
 STOPFORD A. BROOKE. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 
 
 1903. 
 

 o mighty-mouth d inventor of harmonies, 
 o skill'd to sing of time or eternity, 
 god-gifted organ-voice of england, 
 
 milton, a name to resound for agf3 : 
 whose titan angels, gabriel, abdiel, 
 starr'd from jehovah's gorgeous armouries, 
 tower, as the deep-domed empyrean 
 
 kings to the roar of an angel onset — 
 me rather all that bowery loneliness, 
 the brooks of eden mazily murmuring, 
 and bloom profuse and cedar arches 
 charm, as a wanderer out in ocean, 
 where some refulgent sunset of india 
 streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle, 
 and crimson-hufd the stately pai.mwoods 
 whisper in odorous heights of even." 
 
 Tennyson. 
 

 
 MILTON. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 
 
 Birth of Milton. — Bread Street, in the City of 
 London, as one turns out of Cheapside, was famous 
 in Queen Elizabeth's days for its Mermaid Tavern, 
 where Shakspere, Beaumont, and their fellows met 
 to drink canary wine, and to put " each their whole wit 
 into a jest." Not far from its doors, though on the 
 other side of the way, at the sign of the Spread Eagle 
 — the device of the Milton family — John Milton, the 
 poet, was born, on Friday, December 9, 1608, some 
 eight years before Shakspere's death. He was baptized 
 in All Hallows Church, in the same street, December 
 20th ; and his name still stands on the register which 
 was saved when the church itself was destroyed in the 
 Great Fire. The boy lived in his father's house for 
 sixteen years, and may often have seen the figures of 
 the great poets after their carousing, go gaily down 
 the street, and " tasted the air they left behind them." 
 It pleases our fancy to think that the shadow of Shaks- 
 pere may have fallen on Milton's eager face and the 
 Master of English Drama touched the Master of 
 English Epic. 
 
 His Parentage. — Richard Milton, the poet's 
 grandfather, was one of a Roman Catholic family 
 in the rank of yeomen, whom we can trace occupy- 
 ing land near Oxford as far back as 1550. He clung 
 to his religion and was fined, as we know from the 
 Recusant Rolls for Oxfordshire, for refusing to at- 
 tend his parish church. But his son, John Milton, the 
 poet's father, left the faith of his ancestors, and became 
 
2 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 a Protestant. Exiled from his home, he took refuge 
 in London, where he set up as a scrivener, in a 
 business which united a great part of the work done 
 now by attorneys and law-stationers. About 1600 he 
 married Sara, whose maiden name is variously given 
 as Bradshaw, Haughton, or Caston, a woman of ex- 
 cellent charity, and had six children, of whom three 
 died in childhood. Of the other three the eldest was 
 Anne, afterwards Mrs. Phillips, and by a second 
 marriage Mrs. Agar : the second was the poet : and 
 the third, Christopher Milton, born in 16 15, became 
 a judge and was knighted. The father must have 
 prospered, for he sent his two sons to Cambridge, 
 and he retired in 1632 to Horton, near Windsor. His 
 grave Puritanism was of that earlier type which still 
 loved the arts, and wished more for the reformation 
 of the Church than its overthrow. He destined his 
 son for the Church, he employed Cornelius Jansen to 
 make a portrait of the boy at ten years old, and he was 
 himself so skilled a musician that in 1601 we find him 
 one of a band who published twenty-one madrigals on 
 the Triumphs of Oriana, and later on as the composer 
 of some tunes in a book of psalms, two of which, York 
 and Norwich, are still popular. From Horton he 
 followed his son's college career with interest, and 
 though he appears to have remonstrated with him 
 because he was giving up his life wholly to poetry and 
 literature, the remonstrance seems to have been slight. 
 Milton's Latin poem in answer declares that his 
 father only pretends to hate the Muses, thanks him 
 for "not sending him where the way lay open for 
 piling up money," and is a half-laughing expression of 
 his belief that his " dear father" did not really mean 
 his blame. It is quite plain that no one could have 
 been more proud of a son, or more indulgent of his 
 literary leisure. At the age of thirty-two Milton had 
 not earned a sixpence. 
 
 His Education. St. Paul's School, 1620- 
 1625. — When Milton was a boy, drest as his picture 
 shows him, in a close-fitting black-braided dress, and 
 
i.J THE EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 3 
 
 with a lace frill round his throat, he had in his own 
 words, "by the ceaseless diligence and care of my 
 father (whom God recompense) been exercised to the 
 tongues and some sciences as my age would suffer, by 
 sundry masters and teachers both at home and the 
 schools." His quickness and parts soon showed them- 
 selves ; and we hear from Aubrey x that at eleven years 
 old he was already a poet. Before he went to school, 
 and while he was there, Thomas Young, aftenvards 
 a well-known Puritan divine and one of the authors 
 of Smectymnuns, was his tutor. " Under his guidance," 
 Milton says, in a Latin elegy, "I penetrated into 
 the recesses of the Muses, saw the sacred and 
 green places of Parnassus, and drank the Pierian 
 cups," describing in this lofty manner the fact that 
 Young first led him to make verses. In 1622, 
 when Young left England, Milton had been at St. Paul's 
 School for about two years under Mr. Gill, the head- 
 master and his son Alexander Gill, and remained 
 with them for four years, from 1620 to 1624 — 5. The 
 father knew English poetry well, and part of his book 
 Logonomia Anglica — a treatise on etymology, syntax, 
 prosody, and kindred subjects — is full of examples 
 taken from the English poets. It is probable that 
 the boy read many of the well-known poems of his 
 time while still at school, and perhaps possessed a 
 copy of that Folio-Shakspere published in 1623 of 
 which we know he made use before 1630. At any 
 rate, he knew his Spenser, and had carefully read 
 Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas' Divi?ie Weeks 
 and Words, a poem on the Creation and the Fall, 
 and the sacred history of the world. We find their 
 influence, and it is supposed the influence of others, 
 in the first poems we possess from Milton's hand, 
 
 1 John Aubrey, the antiquarian, 1626 — 97, knew Milton and 
 wrote a memoir of him. Another memoir of Aubrey's was 
 embodied by Anthony Wood in the Fasti Oxonienses (1691 — 2). 
 And the last of these earliest sources of information on Milton's 
 life is Edward Phillips' Memoir, 1694. Phillips was Milton's 
 nephew and pupil. 
 
4 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 " done by him at fifteen years old," a paraphrase 
 of Psalm cxiv., and another of Psalm cxxxvi. They 
 have been praised, and the latter Psalm has some 
 of his melody, but I am inclined to agree with 
 Johnson's half-contemptuous phrase. " They raise no 
 great expectations j they would in any numerous 
 school have obtained praise, but not excited wonder." 
 Along with this English training he became a Latin 
 and Greek scholar, till he was "full ripe for acade- 
 mical training." We may conjecture from a letter 
 written to Young in 1625, and acknowledging the 
 gift of a Hebrew Bible, that he had already learned 
 some Hebrew, and either now, or later at college, 
 he had by his father's advice added to the ancient 
 tongues French and Italian — " the flowers which 
 are the boast of Gaul, and the speech which the new 
 Italian, attesting the barbarian inroads by his diction, 
 pours from his degenerate mouth." His interest in 
 Italian may have been stirred by the friendship which 
 even at school he formed with Charles Diodati, 
 nephew of that Giovanni Diodati, who made the Italian 
 version of the Scriptures in 1607 ; a friendship which 
 lasted unbroken until death dissolved its union but not 
 its love. The ardour which he gave to friendship he 
 gave also to his work. Aubrey, Wood, and Phillips 
 all bear witness to his "indefatigable study," his 
 " prompt wit and insuperable industry ; " and his own 
 account of his toils at school fitly closes the account 
 of this part of his life. 
 
 " My father destined me while yet a little boy for 
 the study of humane letters, which I seized with such 
 eagerness, that from the twelfth year of my age I 
 scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before 
 midnight ; which indeed was the first cause of injury 
 to my eyes, to whose natural weakness there were 
 also added frequent headaches. All which not re- 
 tarding my impetuosity in learning, he caused me to 
 be daily instructed, both at the grammar-school and 
 under other masters at home, and then when I had 
 acquired various tongues, and also not some insig- 
 
l] THE EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 5 
 
 nificant taste for the sweetness of philosophy, he sent 
 me to Cambridge." 
 
 Life at Cambridge. — Milton went up to 
 Cambridge and was enrolled as a lesser pensioner 
 of Christ's College under the tutorship of William 
 Chappell, afterwards Dean of Cashel and Bishop of 
 Cork, on the 12th February, 1624, that is, according 
 to our reckoning, in 1625. He remained a little more 
 than seven years in the university, till July, 1632, 
 when he left it, a Master of Arts, at the age of 
 twenty-three. The rooms " honoured by Milton's 
 name " are still pointed out : the first-floor rooms on 
 the first stair on the left-hand side of the court near 
 the gate, and his presence dwelt about the place for 
 Wordsworth — 
 
 " Yea, our blind Poet, who, in his later day, 
 Stood almost single ; uttering odious truth — 
 Darkness before, and danger's voice behind. 
 Soul awful — if the earth has ever lodged 
 An awful soul — I seemed to see him here 
 Familiarly, and in his scholar's dress 
 Bounding before me, yet a stripling youth, 
 A boy, no better, with his rosy cheeks 
 Angelical, keen eye, courageous look, 
 And conscious step of purity and pride." 
 
 The lines well introduce the image of the youth and 
 the image of his mind during his college life. 
 Immediately after his enrolment he returned to 
 London, and describes himself as "in the midst of 
 town distractions; not, as usual, surrounded with 
 books." The day after this letter King James died, 
 27th March, 1625, and twelve days after Milton 
 matriculated at Cambridge. We may say then that 
 his literary life began with the accession of Charles I. 
 1626. — The spring of 1626 found Milton hard at 
 work, " tied night and day to his books," but a quarrel 
 with his tutor sent him, in a kind of rustication, to 
 London, till, before the end of the Easter term, the 
 matter was arranged, and on his return he exchanged 
 the tutorship of Chappell for that of Tovey. That 
 
6 MILTON. |chap. 
 
 quarrel was supposed to have been aggravated by a 
 whipping received from Chappell, because over the 
 words " some unkindness " contained in a note 
 derived by Aubrey from Christopher Milton, there is 
 the interlineation " whipt him." But though Johnson 
 hence assumes that Milton was one of the last 
 students at either university who suffered the public 
 indignity of corporal punishment, there is no further 
 proof of it. Milton's words to his friend Diodati in 
 the spring of 1626 are full of offended dignity : "At 
 present I care not to revisit the reedy Cam, nor does 
 regret for my forbidden rooms grieve me. Nor am I 
 yet in the humour to bear the threats of a harsh 
 master, and other things intolerable to my disposition. 
 If this be exile . . . then I refuse neither the name 
 nor the lot of a runaway, and gladly I enjoy my state 
 of banishment." In the same elegy he describes his 
 life in London, and it is not that of the starched 
 Puritan. The " pomp of the theatre" and the 
 "garrulous stage" or "furious tragedy" drew him 
 forth. " The thick elms and the troops of maidens, 
 virgins of Britain to whom the first glory is due," 
 delighted him more than " the hoarse murmuring 
 school " by the banks of Cam, and the " naked fields," 
 that " ill suit the votaries of Apollo." 
 
 It was during this visit that Milton's first original 
 poem in English was written — On the Death of a Fair 
 Infant — the daughter of Mrs. Phillips, and his niece ; 
 and he alludes in it to the plague now raging in London. 
 Before the year ended he had written two Latin elegies 
 on the deaths of the Bishops of Winchester and Ely, 
 and both are marked, even though their thoughts are 
 commonplace, by the soaring rapture with which he 
 always entered on the description of the vision of 
 heaven. The Bishop of Winchester was Lancelot 
 Andrewes. It illustrates the great change that passed 
 over Milton that in the Reason of Church-government 
 (1641) he attacks the very man he now so highly 
 praised. The same year produced two more Latin 
 elegies — on the medical Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Gostlin, 
 
1.1 THE EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 7 
 
 and on the University Bedel, Richard Ridding, with 
 a long Latin poem on the Gunpowder Plot. 
 
 1627 is only marked by a metrical letter to Young, 
 in which Milton hopes that his old master will soon 
 return from Hamburg to the joys of his native land. 
 Next year the hope was fulfilled, and Young came 
 back to be Vicar of Stowmarket. It is said that 
 Milton not only kept the promise he makes in July 
 1628 of visiting Young, but also that he visited him 
 frequently. 
 
 In 1628 he wrote a Latin poem for a fellow of 
 his College who had to be respondent in one of the 
 philosophical disputations then practised, on the thesis 
 — That Nature is not subject to Old Age. In the May 
 of that year he was again in London, and for the first 
 time smitten with one of the fleeting loves of youth. 
 He describes his walk among the "crowd of goddesses" 
 that thronged the ways, and the youthful impulse that 
 carried him along, till one pre-eminent over the rest 
 sent, at a glance, unaccustomed pain into his heart. 
 " I inly burn in love," he cries ; " I am all one flame ; 
 meanwhile she who alone pleased me was snatched 
 away from my eyes never to return." The rhetorical 
 elegy that tells this story and dwells on his passion 
 makes us feel that there was nothing in it. Eighteen 
 years afterwards, when he published the Latin elegies, 
 he added a postscript to this one, in which he blames 
 the whole thing as a youthful folly. In reality he was 
 entirely wrapt up in his work, and a letter to Alexander 
 Gill declares his intention to spend the vacation in 
 deep literary repose, and to hide himself among the 
 bowers of the Muses. But this was interrupted by a 
 call to deliver an oratorical exercise in his College 
 at the annual university frolic of the students. 
 
 Prolusiones Oratoriae. — The seven Latin 
 Prolusiones Oratorice were delivered at Cambridge and 
 afterwards published, along with his Familiar Letters, 
 in the last year of his life, 1674. The first of these 
 is on the question whether Day or Night is most 
 excellent. It has a faint vein of humour, a strong 
 
g MILTON. [chap. 
 
 vein of love of nature, and an allusion to the fact of 
 his unpopularity in the College. The second is a 
 short essay on the Music of the Spheres, which was 
 but a symbol of the harmony of Law in the Heavens \ 
 but if we " carried pure and snow clean hearts, then 
 should our ears sound and be filled with that most 
 sweet music of the ever- wheeling stars." The third 
 is an attack on the Scholastic Philosophy as at once 
 useless and irritating, and is of interest here, for it 
 goes to prove that he supported the study of facts 
 as the ground of knowledge, and was discontented, 
 as his prose works prove he continued to be, 
 with the methods of teaching at the universities. The 
 fourth and fifth are metaphysical discussions of no 
 interest even to Milton ; and the seventh will here- 
 after be mentioned. The sixth, which is the oratorical 
 exercise mentioned above, was an address, half in 
 earnest, half in ponderous fun, on the subject that 
 "sportive exercises are not always in the way of 
 philosophical studies." Its literary interest lies in this 
 — that the lines entitled At a Vacation Exercise, and 
 published among his English poems, form part of it, 
 and that already we find here the poet who did not 
 care to use his powers on light or festive subjects or 
 jests, " in which I do acknowledge my faculty to be 
 very slight," but on graver ones — 
 
 " Such where the deep transported mind may soar 
 Above the wheeling poles ; and at Heaven's door 
 Look in, and see each blissful Deity. " 
 
 The biographical interest is in the proof it gives that 
 during the first years of his university course there 
 were many who, " on account of disagreements in our 
 studies, were altogether of an unfriendly and angry 
 spirit " towards him ; but that now this quarrel was 
 entirely made up, and that he was " pervaded with 
 pleasure " at finding himself and his powers frankly 
 acknowledged by the University. 
 
 1629. — The next year, March, 1629, he took his 
 degree of Bachelor of Arts, and signed " willingly and 
 
I.] THE EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 9 
 
 ex animo " the three articles of assent to the Articles, 
 the Common Prayer, and the King's Supremacy. 
 Immediately after, his Latin poem, on the Approach 
 of Spring, is full of youthful ardour, and rings with 
 the joy the youth felt in the new life of Nature and in 
 the love that Spring stirs within the world and man. 
 But though it celebrates love almost in the manner 
 of his favourite Ovid, and sets Milton far apart 
 from his later Puritan gravity, it does not represent 
 in any way his deeper thoughts or the ground of 
 his character as a young man. That is done in 
 the sixth elegy, written to " Diodati, residing in 
 the Country," immediately after Christmas, 1629. 
 In the beginning we find the Milton of the 
 Renaissance lightly reproving his friend for thinking 
 that festivity and poetry cannot go together. Song 
 loves Bacchus, and Bacchus loves song. Ovid's verses 
 in exile were bad because there were no dainties and 
 no wine. Have you not music to inspire you ? the 
 harp touched by nimble hands, and the lute that times 
 the fair ones as they dance in the tapestried hall ? 
 Light elegy is the care of many Gods ; and its poets 
 may drink good old wine. 
 
 This is one side of Milton ; but his sympathy with 
 these pleasures was a distant one ; he could feel with 
 them, but he did not feel them in his deeper self; and 
 when they appear as in L Allegro, they are modified 
 by his native gravity and holiness to a quiet delight 
 in those beautiful things which had with them purity 
 and temperance. The other and the stronger side of 
 the man appears in the elegy when he speaks 
 of his own aspirations as a poet — He who sings 
 the holy decrees of the gods and pious heroes 
 and the heaven of Jove, let him live sparely, let 
 herbs be his harmless food, and clear water from a 
 beechen cup give him a sober draught. Let his youth 
 be chaste and free from sin, his morals rigid and his 
 hand stainless. So lived Orpheus and Homer. For 
 the poet is dedicated to the gods and is their priest. 
 This is the truer Milton — and the noble thoughts 
 
io MILTON. [chap. 
 
 well introduce the poem which he sent with this letter 
 to his friend Diodati ; the Ode on the Morning of the 
 Nativity. " It is a gift," he says, " I have presented to 
 Christ's natal day. On that very morning, at day 
 break, it was first conceived." 
 
 1630. — The following January saw the birth of 
 the Ode on the Circwncision, and about the same 
 period we may date the pieces entitled On Time 
 and At a Solemn Mustek, and at Easter, the fragment 
 called The Passion, "a subject the author finding to 
 be above the years he had when he wrote it, and 
 nothing satisfied with what was begun, left unfinished." 
 That Easter term and the following autumn were 
 made desolate in Cambridge by the fierce descent of 
 the plague upon the town, and Milton's voice is only 
 heard during the rest of the year in his epitaph on 
 Shakspere, which being inserted in 1632 among other 
 verses, in the second folio edition of Shakspere, was 
 the first poem of his that appeared in print. 
 
 1631 opens with the two epitaphs on Hobson, 
 the university carrier, and in Easter term was made 
 the epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, a 
 graceful tribute to one whom Ben Jonson praised with 
 his rough power in an elegy in the Underwoods. The 
 summer was passed in the country, " among groves 
 and rivers, and under the beloved village elms, where 
 I had supreme delight with the Muses." 
 
 1632 was his last year at Cambridge. The sonnet 
 " On Attaining the Age of Twenty-three," was 
 probably written in January, and he closed his 
 academic course with an oration, delivered when he 
 took his Master's degree and again subscribed the 
 three articles of Assent at the Commencement held on 
 July 3. It is the seventh of the Prolusiones Oratorio*, 
 and a noble address on the subject — That Knowledge 
 makes Men happier than Ignorance — and it is full of 
 the enthusiasm of one who in his college course had 
 felt the truth of which he spoke ; whose soul, " not 
 content with this darksome prison-house, had reached 
 out far and wide, till it filled the world itself and space 
 
I.] THE EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. n 
 
 beyond that, in the divine expatiation of its magni- 
 tude," and who had, in his devotion to knowledge, 
 " by living modestly and temperately, tamed the first 
 impulses of fierce youth, and by reason and constancy 
 of study had kept the heavenly strength of the mind 
 pure and stainless." It was thus he had lived, and 
 when he left Cambridge, he had conquered his early 
 unpopularity. He was now " loved and admired by 
 the whole university, particularly by the Fellows and 
 most ingenious persons of his House." Moreover he 
 bears his own witness to his college repute ten years 
 after in the Defensio Secunda, saying that he had 
 "more than ordinary respect, above any of his 
 equals," from the Fellows of his college, who wished 
 him to stay, and " wrote him many letters, then and 
 afterwards, full of a singular affection." In spite 
 of his literary ardour, he did the ordinary work of the 
 college with resolute activity. It is Wood's statement 
 that as at school so at Cambridge, " t'was usual with 
 him to sit up till midnight at his book, which was the 
 first thing that brought his eyes into the danger of 
 blindness. By his indefatigable study he profited 
 exceedingly — performed the academical exercises to 
 the admiration of all, and was esteemed a virtuous 
 and sober person, yet not to be ignorant of his own 
 parts," a phrase which suggests that even at 
 Cambridge Milton had that deliberate self-confidence 
 and esteem which was one of his marked character- 
 istics, and which arose in a great degree out of 
 an individuality unweakened by any sense of shame 
 for wrong, strengthened daily by the knowledge of 
 his own faithfulness to right. Nor was his personal 
 charm less than his intellectual power. He was of 
 middle height, his complexion exceeding fair and 
 of delicate colour, his voice delicate and tunable. 
 Dark gray eyes and auburn hair falling on his 
 shoulders went with an oval face, and though 
 there was so much of the woman in his look that 
 he was called "the lady of Christ's," yet his gait 
 was erect and manly, and his figure not so very slight 
 
12 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 but that, armed with his sword, in which he had daily 
 practice, he thought himself a match for any one. He 
 moved so that men said he had courage and undaunt- 
 edness, and the quaintness of his own statement that, 
 so far as he knew, he had never been thought ugly 
 by any one who had seen him, is fully borne out by 
 Aubrey's saying that he " lodged a harmonical and 
 ingenious soul in a beautiful and well-proportioned 
 body." 
 
 The College Poems. — The temper in which 
 these poems were written, its ideality, its seriousness, 
 the religious grandeur and loud angelic trumpet-note 
 of some of them, their love of music and of high 
 philosophy as the music of the soul, is best discovered 
 in some of the words he uses when, in 1642, he gave 
 an account of his youth, its studies and its aspirations. 
 At first his favourite authors were the smooth elegiac 
 poets. But though applauding their art, he deplored 
 the men, and turned in preference to the " two famous 
 renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but 
 honour of them to whom they devote their verse, dis- 
 playing sublime and pure thoughts without transgres- 
 sion. And long it was not after when I was confirmed 
 in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate 
 of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, 
 ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composi- 
 tion and pattern of the best and honourablest things. 
 " Next — for, hear me out now, readers, that I may tell 
 you whither my younger feet wandered — I betook me 
 among those lofty fables and romances which recount 
 in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded 
 by our victorious kings, and from hence had a renown 
 over all Christendom. There I read it in the oath of 
 every knight, that he should defend, to the expense of 
 his best blood or of his life, the honour and chastity 
 of virgin and matron. From whence even then 
 I learnt what a noble virtue chastity sure must be, 
 to the defence of which so many worthies, by such a 
 dear adventure of themselves, had sworn. Only this 
 my mind gave me that every free and gentle spirit 
 
I.] THE EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 13 
 
 ought to be born a knight. Thus from the laureate 
 fraternity of poets, riper years, and the ceaseless 
 round of study and reading, led me to the shady 
 spaces of philosophy, but chiefly to the divine 
 volumes of Plato and his equal Xenophon. Where, 
 if I should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and 
 love — I mean that which is truly so, whose charming 
 cup is only virtue " (he repeats the motive of Comus), 
 " which she bears in her hand to those who are 
 worthy ; the rest are cheated with a thick intoxi- 
 cating potion which a certain sorceress, the abuser of 
 Love's name, carries about — and how the first and 
 chiefest office of Love begins and ends in the soul, 
 producing those happy twins of her divine generation, 
 Knowledge and Virtue — with such abstracted subli- 
 mities as these, it might be worth your listening." 
 
 This stately purity of thought and life is one of the 
 foundations of his stately style, and it was the temper 
 of his youth and the ground tone of the College poems. 
 The earliest among them, On the Death of a Fair 
 Infant, is like the first poetry of young men, 
 imitative. The first stanza recalls Shakspere, the 
 rest, till near the end, Spenser, whose stanza, leaving 
 out the sixth and seventh lines, is adopted. Spenser's 
 very manner is used, and certain peculiarities of his 
 rhythm ; and the classical allusions, which are 
 sometimes absurdly out of tune with the subject, and 
 already exhibit one of Milton's faults — the want of 
 proportion between the thought and its illustration — 
 are done also in Spenser's way. In the middle 
 of the poem Milton himself is heard in such lines 
 as, Whether above that high first-moving sphere, and 
 Or that crowned Matron, sage, white-robed Truth, and 
 still more vigorously at the end of the ninth stanza, 
 till, in the two last, imitation and classicism are 
 wholly forgotten, and Milton appears as the youthful 
 Puritan, with the Puritan sense of national sin, with 
 reverent and homely piety, not as yet sublime. The 
 Vacatiofi Exercise was written two years later. 
 This is remarkable for its invocation to his native 
 
i 4 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 tongue, whose service he means to use in some graver 
 subject. He seems to say that the later Elizabethan 
 poetry had been spoiled by 
 
 "... Those new-fangled toys, and trimming slight 
 Which takes our late fantastics with delight." 
 
 He commands English to clothe itself in the rich 
 robes and gay attire, 
 
 " Which deepest spirits and choicest wits desire ; " 
 
 and he proceeds at once to give an example in the 
 first fine Miltonic outburst we have (lines 33, &c.) in 
 which the voice doomed to sound forth majestic 
 things is heard. And we find here, already, his epic 
 aspiration. He hopes to sing hereafter of the gods, 
 of the heavens, and of the secret things that came 
 to pass when nature was in her cradle, 
 
 " And last, of kings and queens and heroes old." 
 
 The Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity came 
 next, 1629. The introduction is in the modified 
 stanza of Spenser ; the rest of the ode is written in 
 a vigorous, but somewhat jolting metre, which the 
 felicity of its management, and the curious felicity 
 of the diction redeem from clumsiness. Its rough 
 strength much ennobles passages where strength of 
 conception is eminent, but it increases the shock 
 we receive from the fantastic conceits of the poem. 
 The argument is very simple. At the Child's birth 
 the world was at peace, and peaceful all nature. 
 In the hush of the universe the shepherds hear the 
 angel song, and heaven bursts into singing, which, 
 were it to last, the golden age were come. But 
 so it cannot be, and in sharp contrast with the 
 sweet music of joy, Milton paints the judgment- 
 day. Not till after that will be our full bliss, but 
 in Christ's birth that coming glory is begun. The 
 old dragon and his brood are shorn of their power • 
 all the pagan gods and oracles mourn and fly away, 
 and .the Virgin lays her Babe to rest. Peace begins 
 
I.] THE EARLY LIFE OF MILTON, 15 
 
 and peace ends this splendid song, and between the 
 goals of peace, in finely contrasted music, the sacred 
 beauty of the Christian heaven and the solemn unity 
 of God is set over against the " dismal horror " and 
 polytheism of the pagan worship. Yet he is kind 
 to the Greeks : his love of classic beauty seized him 
 as he wrote the nineteenth and twentieth stanzas ; 
 and the touch of medievalism when the ghosts and 
 the yellow-skirted fays slip away from the morn com- 
 pletes this strange Renaissance mingling of Christianity, 
 classicism, and the middle ages. 
 
 The poems on The Circumcision and The Pas- 
 sion are connected in thought with the Ode on the 
 Nativity, and seem to have been attempts of metre 
 and manner at the great subject of the Redemption. 
 They are failures, and it is probable that Milton felt 
 that Giles Fletcher, who with his brother Phineas was 
 the closest imitator of Spenser, had treated the sub- 
 ject in this way as well as it could be done. But the 
 abrupt and powerful rhythm in which he had wrought 
 the Circumcision, and which suits so well for the quick 
 rush and quick closing of condensed thought, pleased 
 his ear, and he used it, much improved, and with great 
 force in the lines On Time, and with a glorious 
 splendour in the poem On a Solemn Music, the spirit 
 and power of which may be best expressed by saying 
 — using his own line about the seraphim — that Milton 
 
 there 
 
 " His loud uplifted angel trumpet blew." 
 
 The Epitaph on Shakspere needs no praise — those 
 on Hobson only prove by their cumbrous witticisms 
 how absent humour was from Milton's mind. He is 
 like his own elephant in them : 
 
 " The unwieldy elephant, 
 To make them mirth, used all his might and wreathed 
 His lithe proboscis." 
 
 The Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester 
 is pathetic and graceful, and though less quick in 
 hitting the point than the Epitaph of Ben Jonson, 
 
 2 
 
16 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 from which it is imitated, is more tender and more 
 true. The metre, the seven-syllabled trochaic, the 
 trick of which, as used with wonderful sweetness by 
 Shakspere and the Elizabethans, we seem to have 
 lost, was never, even by Milton himself, more ex- 
 quisitely used than in this little lyric. As to the Song 
 071 May Morning, it is less imitative than the rest, 
 and if a little commonplace, is yet natural, and pro- 
 phesies the newer and happier manner of the 
 Allegro. 
 
 Departure from Cambridge. — Before Milton 
 
 left Cambridge, he had to consider what kind of life 
 
 he would lead, and long before his last year at the 
 
 university he had given up the idea of entering the 
 
 Church. A letter written to a friend, and dated by 
 
 the sonnet written " On his being Arrived at the Age 
 
 of Twenty-three," which he sends in the letter, and says 
 
 was composed " some while since," admits us to his 
 
 thoughts upon his life. His friend had admonished 
 
 him for his " tardy moving," and that "he had given 
 
 up himself to dream away his years in the arms of 
 
 studious retirement." His letter, dwelling on his 
 
 desire to make use of " the talent " — an image that 
 
 recurs in a later sonnet, " and that one tale?it which 
 
 Hwas death to hide — " and God's commandment to 
 
 use it, and on his desire of immortal fame, says that 
 
 it may be he does not press forward at once, having 
 
 " a religious advisement how best to undergo — not 
 
 taking thought of being late, so it give advantage to 
 
 be more fit .•" and the pith of it all is inclosed in the 
 
 sonnet, one of the most solemn and beautiful pieces 
 
 of personal writing in English poetry. The fact was 
 
 that " perceiving what tyranny had invaded in the 
 
 Church, and that he who took orders must subscribe 
 
 slave," and being " Church-outed by the prelates," he 
 
 turned, and turned with infinite relief and joy, to a 
 
 literary life, especially to poetry, feeling that his style, 
 
 " and chiefly in versing, by certain vital signs it had, 
 
 was likely to live." It was a conclusion which at first 
 
 dismayed his father, but he records in a Latin epistle 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 17 
 
 of this time, addressed to him, the arguments he 
 used, and their affectionate and grateful tone soon 
 conquered the old man's dislike. 
 
 Life at Horton, 1632-38. — On leaving Cam- 
 bridge, he went to live with his father at Horton 
 in Buckinghamshire, a man without a business in life. 
 He had thought of the profession of the law, but the 
 vision of a noble fame, not that which is 
 
 " Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies; 
 But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes, 
 And perfect witness of all-judging Jove ; 
 
 enthralled him, and he gave himself up to quiet work in 
 quiet leisure. " My footsteps," he says, " shall avoid 
 the eyes of the profane. Be far off, watchful cares, be 
 far off, all quarrels." With his father's consent, 
 then, he stayed at Horton, and " spent there a complete 
 holiday in turning over the Greek and Latin writers ; " 
 learning now and then when he went to London 
 "something new in mathematics and music, in which 
 sciences he delighted." And in this manner he passed 
 five years and nine months, from July, 1632, to 
 April, 1638, that is, till he was thirty years of age. 
 
 The place was pretty, a land of pasture, and corn, 
 and wood, and orchard, watered by many streams, 
 and fed by the Colne. Not far off flowed the Thames, 
 and a short walk would bring Milton to the meadows of 
 Eton, and in sight of the towers of Windsor, " bosomed 
 high in tufted trees." Among this scenery, and 
 coloured by it, five poems were made by Milton, the 
 Sonnet to the Nightingale, the Allegro and Penseroso, 
 the Arcades, and the Comus ; and of these the Comns 
 written in 1634, is justly thought to be the last. The 
 Lycidas, finished in November, 1637, was perhaps 
 composed in London. These six poems represent the 
 poetic activity of six years. 
 
 The Sonnet — 
 
 " O nightingale, that on yon blooming spray 
 Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still," 
 
 strikes the same two notes of bright and pensive 
 
18 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 sentiment about nature and man which are worked 
 into full subjects in the Allegro and Penseroso. It is 
 the sonnet of a Lover and a Poet, and one might 
 conjecture from it that Milton was at this time not 
 quite fancy-free. 
 
 " Whether the Muse or Love call thee his mate, 
 Both them I serve, and of their train am I." 
 
 The Allegro and Penseroso, the resem- 
 blances to which in previous writers, as in Burton, 
 and Beaumont and Fletcher, only prove that Milton 
 had read English literature, and could better what 
 he borrowed if he borrowed it — represent Nature, 
 and Man, and Art as they appear to a man filled 
 with an imaginative joy and an imaginative sadness. 
 The Allegro, which begins with the early morning 
 and ends at night, is paralleled thought by thought, 
 scene by scene, with the Penseroso, which begins 
 with the late evening and ends towards the noon of 
 the next day. But the Penseroso closes with the 
 wish — which, not paralleled in the Allegro, makes 
 us know that Milton preferred the pensive to the 
 mirthful temper — That he may live on into old age, 
 the contemplative life, 
 
 " Till old experience do attain, 
 
 To something like prophetic strain." 
 
 Both poems are ushered in with a stately intro- 
 duction, and change to a quicker and lighter measure, 
 of which the scheme appears to be trochaic, though 
 iambics are often introduced and especially in the 
 Penseroso. The greatest pains is bestowed upon the 
 rhythm. There is nothing hazarded, nothing careless, 
 yet the poems move, it seems, with careless grace. 
 They are a landmark in the metrical art of poetry, and 
 they are conscious of their art throughout. 
 
 The words are arranged and chosen to imitate or 
 suggest the thing described : alliteration is used to 
 heighten the effect, but much more sparingly than 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 19 
 
 by the earlier men, such as his "original," Spenser. 1 
 Throughout the Allegro the verse frequently rushes 
 as if borne along by very joy ; its character is swift- 
 ness and smoothness. Few if any pauses occur in the 
 midst of the lines. Throughout the Penseroso the 
 verse frequently pauses in the midst of the lines. It 
 rests, like a pensive man who, walking, stops to think, 
 and its movement is slow, even stately. 
 
 Both poems are full of natural description. But it 
 is neither the description which imposes one's own 
 feeling on nature, nor the moralising description of 
 Gray, nor does it even resemble that description which 
 in Shelley and Wordsworth was built on the thought 
 that Nature was alive and man's companion. It is 
 the pure description of things seen, seen not neces- 
 sarily through the poet's own mood, but always in 
 direct relation to Man and to the special mood of 
 man's mind which Milton has chosen as the ground- 
 work for each poem. 
 
 The allusiveness of the poems — and extreme 
 allusiveness is a characteristic mark, and often a fault, 
 of the poetry of Milton — pleases by the claim it 
 makes on study. The extreme simplicity of the two 
 motives — and Milton, however his poems are in- 
 volved, has always a simple motive — makes these 
 poems simple, and this is one reason why children 
 as well as others understand and have pleasure in 
 them. The picturesqueness of the scenes, the clear- 
 cut and vivid outline of the things described — and 
 this also is a constant excellence of Milton, though 
 he sometimes wilfully spoils it by digression, — is also 
 a source of delight to young and old: while the work 
 of the higher imagination is felt as a shaping power 
 in the poems, as the Orphean music which has har- 
 monized and built them into that unity which is the 
 highest and last demand of Art. 
 
 The Arcades. — It may be that the Arcades has 
 no right to this place, that the arguments based on 
 
 1 "Milton has acknowledged to me," says Dryden, "that 
 Spenser was his original." 
 
20 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 its position in the Cambridge MSS. which put it back 
 to 1 63 1, are true; but it is at least so linked to Comns 
 in poetical relationship and in its history that it is best 
 to discuss it here. It is a small portion of a masque 
 given by some noble persons of her family to the 
 Countess Dowager of Derby at Harefield, at evenfall : 
 the masquers coming up the avenue of elms called the 
 Queen's Walk, a memorial of the visit of Elizabeth 
 during which she had heard Burbidge's players first 
 play Othello. The subject was worth the muse of 
 Milton. The Countess, now in venerable age, was 
 not only a great figure in English society — a Spencer 
 by birth, married first to Lord Strange, afterwards Lord 
 Derby ; married secondly to the Lord-Keeper Egerton 
 afterwards Lord Chancellor to King James, Baron 
 Ellesmere and Viscount Brackley — she was also 
 bound up with the literature of England. Lord 
 Strange, in his time a poet and a patron of the drama, 
 is the Amyntas of Spenser. She herself is the Ama- 
 ryllis of Colin Cloufs Come Home Again ; and of the 
 three sisters whom Spenser had known at Althorpe 
 in Elizabeth's early time, she was his favourite. To 
 Elizabeth, Lady Carey, he dedicated Muiopotmos, to 
 Anne, Lady Compton, his Mother Hubbard's Tale, but 
 to Alice Spenser, then Lady Strange, he inscribed in 
 1 59 1, The Teares of the Muses, a poem that describes 
 and mourns over the state of literature. When we think 
 then of how much of the great past seemed to meet 
 in her, we are not surprised by Milton's outburst : — 
 
 " Might she the wise Latona be, 
 Or the towered Cybele, 
 Mother of a hundred gods ? 
 Juno dares not give her odds." 
 
 The poem itself is slight, the introduction not very 
 worthy. The eighty lines of rhymed verse seem to 
 be hampered in thought and movement by the needs 
 of rhyme. One is driven to feel how much better 
 Milton would have made them in the vehicle of blank 
 verse. But they contain one splendid passage on his 
 
I.J EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 21 
 
 favourite subject of the spheral music that the nine 
 Sirens sing ; — 
 
 11 And the low world in measured motion draw 
 After the heavenly tune." 
 
 The songs which close it are pretty, but below 
 Milton's power. The whole piece, in fact, bears the 
 stamp of the occasional. 
 
 Comus. — The name Comus was given to this 
 masque after Milton's death. Its proper description 
 is "A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, 
 before the Earl of Bridgewater, Lord President of 
 Wales." Lord Bridgewater was stepson of the 
 Countess of Derby and son of Lord Chancellor 
 Ellesmere, and was married to his stepsister, Lady 
 Frances Stanley. He was made Lord President of 
 Wales and went down, with his powers freshly defined 
 by a Royal Letter, to the castle of Ludlow, his official 
 seat, in 163 1. His family accompanied him, and 
 among them his youngest daughter Lady Alice Eger- 
 ton and her two younger brothers, Viscount Brackley 
 and Mr. Thomas Egerton. These three were the 
 Lady, and The Two Brothers in the Masque of 
 Comus which was now acted, at the close of the long 
 festivities, on Michaelmas night, 1634, in the great hall 
 of the castle. Lawes, 1 the musician, took the part of 
 the Attendant Spirit. It is not known who acted 
 Comus and Sabrina. 
 
 The first scene discovered a wild wood, and Lawes, 
 as the Attendant Spirit, descended, singing a part of the 
 epilogue transposed for the occasion, the words To 
 the ocean being altered to " From the heavens," and 
 ending with the line, Where a cherub soft reposes, 
 
 1 Lawes, son of Thomas Lawes, Vicar- Choral of Canterbury, 
 a well-known musician, who, Milton says, reformed his art. 
 Composer of airs to the poems of Waller, Carew, and Cart- 
 wright. Published Ayres and Dialogues for one, two, and three 
 voices. Introduced, it may be from Italy, a softer character 
 into English music. See Comus, lines 84, &c, 494, &c. , and 
 Sonnet XIII., in which his art and its smoothness are dwelt 
 upon, also his faith and worth . 
 
22 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 changed from " Where young Adonis oft reposes" 
 so that it was a song of arrival, not of departure. 
 Then the speech was made in which the matter of 
 the masque was laid down and connected with the 
 special occasion in the lines beginning : — 
 
 " And all this tract that fronts the fallen sun 
 A noble peer of mickle trust and power 
 Has in his charge." 
 
 Comus then enters and his crew ; and then the Lady 
 who is lured away ; until her brothers, instructed by 
 the Spirit in the guise of Thyrsis, and helped of 
 Sabrina, rush in and rescue her from Comus. The 
 scene changes then, Ludlow Castle appears, and the 
 festal games ; the country dancers disperse when 
 Lawes, as the Spirit, presents Lady Alice and her 
 brothers to the earl ; they dance a courtly measure, 
 and the Spirit speaks the epilogue — " But now my 
 task is smoothly done." 
 
 The play was published anonymously by Lawes in 
 1637, Milton consenting with some shy shrinking from 
 the venture. It was he who supplied the motto, and 
 said with the shepherd in Virgil, 
 
 " Eheu ! quid volui misero mihi ; floribus Austrum 
 Perditus." 
 
 It was republished with the first collective edition of 
 his poems in 1645, and again in 1673. Since then 
 it has become far-famed, and critics have sought 
 for its sources and have found them in Peele's 
 Old Wives' Tale, in Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, 
 in Ben Jonson's masque of Pleasure Reco?iciled 
 to Virtue, in a Latin extravaganza called Comus, 
 by Hendrik van der Putten, a Dutchman, and 
 in the Odyssey; but it little matters where this 
 and that came from, the poem, as we have it, 
 is Milton's in every line, in thought, in style, in 
 build, in imaginative and moral power. It settled 
 Milton's rank as a poet among all men capable of judg- 
 ing. Sir Henry Wotton's voice was, we may be sure, the 
 voice of all men of culture : — " A dainty piece of enter- 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 23 
 
 tainment, wherein I should much commend the tragical 
 part if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Doric 
 delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto I must 
 plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our 
 language." The phrase Doric delicacy is not ill-said ; 
 but it is not in the lyrics, which are excelled by many 
 of the Elizabethan lyrics, but in the full-weighted 
 dignity of the blank verse that the poem was then 
 unparalleled. Moreover it was marked by a greater 
 grandeur of style and thought, by a graver beauty, 
 and by a more exercised and self-conscious art than 
 any poem of its character which England had as yet 
 known. It belonged to the Elizabethan spirit, but 
 it went beyond it and made a new departure for 
 English poetry. The way it showed could not be 
 walked in by the men of the Restoration and the 
 Revolution. It was before its time ; but that is at 
 once the good and the evil fortune of a great genius. 
 
 Johnson's sturdy criticism on it has much force and 
 is admirably written ; but in condemning it as a drama, 
 he is carried beyond good sense to lose sight of its 
 beauty as a poem. Moreover his arrows do not hit the 
 target. Comus is not a regular drama, but a masque, 
 and a masque obeys laws distinct from those of 
 the regular drama. The masque depends for 
 success not only on the poetry, which here is splen- 
 did, but also and chiefly on its occasion, and away 
 from the occasion its dramatic, fitness cannot be 
 judged. It depends also on the decoration and 
 music, and these are so knit to the occasion that, 
 even when they are reproduced, they have not the 
 same value as at the time they were first made. No 
 one can judge how far Comus contradicts Johnson's 
 judgment of its want of interest as a dramatic repre- 
 sentation, unless he can recreate in his mind not only 
 the scene, and the " occasion," and all its interests, but 
 also all the feelings of the spectators, and the thought 
 of the story in their minds to which the masque 
 spoke ; and this was work of which Johnson at least 
 seems incapable. Comus was written for such an 
 
24 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 occasion, and only in the atmosphere of the moment 
 can its dramatic merits be judged. 
 
 Still that Comus soars beyond the occasion is plain 
 enough. It displaced itself as a masque to rise into 
 a poem to the glory and victory of virtue. And its 
 virtue lies in the mastery of the righteous will over 
 sense and appetite. It is a song to Temperance as the 
 ground of freedom, to temperance as the guard of all 
 the virtues, to beauty as secured by temperance, and 
 its central point and climax is in the pleading of these 
 motives by the Lady against their opposites in the 
 mouth of the Lord of sensual Revel. 
 
 It is moreover raised above an ethical poem by 
 
 its imaginative form and power ; and its literary worth 
 
 enables us to consider it, if we choose, apart from its 
 
 dramatic form. Its imagination, however, sinks at 
 
 times, and one can scarcely explain this otherwise 
 
 than by saying that the Elizabethan habit of fantastic 
 
 metaphor clung to Milton at this time. When he 
 
 does fall, the fall is made more remarkable by the 
 
 soaring strength of his loftier flight and by the majesty 
 
 of the verse. Nothing can be worse in conception 
 
 than the comparison of night to a thief who shuts up, 
 
 for the sake of his felony, the stars whose lamps burn 
 
 everlasting oil, in his dark lantern. The better it 
 
 is carried out and the finer the verse, the worse it is. 
 
 And yet it is instantly followed by the great passage 
 
 about the fears of night, the fantasies and airy tongues 
 
 that syllable men's names, and by the glorious 
 
 appeal to conscience, faith, and God, followed in its 
 
 turn by the fantastic conceit of the cloud that turns 
 
 out its silver lining on the night. This is the 
 
 Elizabethan weakness and strength, the mixture of 
 
 gold and clay, the want of that art-sensitiveness which 
 
 feels the absurd : and Milton, even in Paradise Lost, 
 
 when he had got further from his originals, falls into 
 
 it not unfrequently. It is a fault which runs through 
 
 a good deal of his earlier work, it is more seen in 
 
 Comus than elsewhere; but it was the fault of that 
 
 poetic age. 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 25 
 
 October, 1634 — November, 1637. — Three 
 years passed after the making of Cotmis before the 
 making of Lycidas. Milton went to and fro between 
 Horton and London, and probably stayed some time 
 at Oxford in 1635, when he was incorporated as 
 Master of Arts of that University. He suffered the 
 loss of his mother in April, 1637 ; and we find him 
 shortly after the death of Ben Jonson, in the August 
 of that year, writing to Diodati from London. A few 
 phrases in these letters are of interest and illustrate 
 his work. "My genius," he says, "is such that no 
 delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything 
 holds me aside until I reach the end, and round off 
 as it were some period of my studies." " What God 
 has resolved concerning me," he says in another letter, 
 " I know not, but this I know at least — He has in- 
 stilled into me a vehement love of the beautiful. 
 Not with so much labour, as the fables have it, is 
 Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpine, as 
 I am wont day and night to seek for this idea of the 
 beautiful through all the forms and faces of things 
 .... You ask what I am thinking of? So may the 
 good Deity help me, of immortality — I am pluming 
 my wings and meditating flight." The letter closes 
 with an account of his reading of Greek and Italian 
 History, and his wish to leave a place where he was 
 cramped, and to find a lodging in some Inn of the 
 lawyers where there was a pleasant and shady walk. 
 
 Lycidas. — What he meditated at this time and 
 through his Italian journey was an Epic, but his wings 
 bore him now into the flight of Lycidas. We see in it 
 that vehement love of the beautiful, and I have no 
 doubt that when he began it he wrote it with the close 
 intensity of which he speaks above. It was finished in 
 November, 1637. It could scarcely have been begun 
 till the end of September, for there is no mention 
 either of its subject or itself in his letters to Diodati, 
 the last of which is dated September 23. Edward 
 King, its subject, was a college friend of Milton's, a 
 favourite of fortune and of all who knew him. Sailing 
 
26 MILTON. [chap 
 
 from Chester to Dublin to visit his people, the ship 
 struck on a rock in a calm sea, and he was drowned. 
 His friends at Cambridge proposed a volume of 
 memorial verses in Greek, Latin, and English. It 
 saw the light in 1638, and Milton's Lycidas is the 
 last poem in the book. 
 
 It is a pastoral, and in the form of other pastorals ; 
 with its introduction and its epilogue, and between 
 them the monody of the shepherd who has lost his 
 friend. Under the guise of one shepherd mourning 
 another, all Milton's relations with Edward King are 
 expressed, and all his thoughts about his character 
 and genius ; and the poem, to be justly judged, must 
 be read with the conditions of the pastoral as a form 
 of verse present to the mind. That is enough to dis- 
 pose of Johnson's unfavourable criticism, which quarrels 
 with the poem for its want of passion and want of 
 nature, and for its improbability. It is not a poem of 
 passionate sorrow, but of admiration and regret ex- 
 pressed with careful art and in a special artistic form ; 
 and the classical allusions and shepherd images and 
 the rest are the necessary drapery of the pastoral, the 
 art of which, and the due keeping to form in which, 
 are as important to Milton, and perhaps more so, than 
 his regret. We are made aware of this when we find 
 Milton twice checking himself in the conduct of 
 the poem for having gone beyond the limits of the 
 pastoral. 
 
 The metrical structure, which is partly borrowed 
 from Italian models, is as carefully wrought as the 
 rest, and harmonized to the thoughts. " Milton's 
 ear was a good second to his imagination." Lycidas 
 appeals not only to the imagination, but to the 
 educated imagination. There is no ebb and flow of 
 poetical power as in Covins ; it is an advance on all 
 his previous work, and it fitly closes the poetic labour 
 of his youth. It is needless to analyse it, and all 
 criticism is weaker than the poem itself. Yet we may 
 say that one of its strange charms is its solemn under- 
 tone rising like a religious chaunt through the elegiac 
 
j.] EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 27 
 
 musick ; the sense of a stern national crisis in the 
 midst of its pastoral mourning ; the sense of Milton's 
 grave force of character among the flowers and 
 fancies of the poem ; the sense of the Christian 
 religion pervading the classical imagery. We might 
 say that these things are ill-fitted to each other. So 
 they would be, were not the art so fine and the poetry 
 so over-mastering ; were they not fused together by 
 genius into a whole so that the unfitness itself 
 becomes fascination. 
 
 Political and Social Aspects of these 
 Poems. — Puritanism, when Milton began to write, 
 was not universally apart from literature and the fine 
 arts. In its staid and pure religion Milton's work had 
 its foundation, but the temple he had begun to build 
 upon it was quarried from the ancient and modern 
 arts and letters of Greece and Italy and England. 
 And filling the temple rose the peculiar incense of 
 the Renaissance. The breath of that spirit is felt in 
 the classicalism of the Ode to the Nativity, in the love 
 proclaimed for Shakespeare, in the graceful fancy of 
 the Epitaph to Lady Winchester, and in the gaiety of 
 the Ode to a At ay Morning. But a new element, other 
 than any the Renaissance could produce, is here ; the 
 element that filled the Psalms of David, the deep, 
 personal, passionate religion of the Puritan, possessing, 
 and possessed by, God. Over against the Renaissance 
 musick is set the high and devout strain of the first 
 sonnet and of the Odes to Ti?ne and A Solemn Musick. 
 Even while at Cambridge, the double being in Milton 
 makes itself felt, the struggle between the two spirits 
 of the time is reflected in his work. These con- 
 trasted spirits in him became defined as the political 
 and social war deepened around his life. The 
 second sonnet still is gay, fresh with the morn of love, 
 Petrarca might have written it ; the Allegro does not 
 disdain the love of nature, the rustic sports, the pomp 
 of courts, the playhouse and the land of faery, nor does 
 the Pe?iseroso refuse to haunt the dim cathedral. But 
 yet, in these two poems more than in the Cambridge 
 
28 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 poems, the deepening of the struggle is felt. Milton 
 seems to presage in them that the time would come 
 when the gaiety of England would cease to be shared 
 in by serious men ; when the mirth of the cavalier 
 would shut out the pleasures derived from lofty 
 Melancholy, because they shut out the devil ; as the 
 Puritan pensiveness would be driven to shut out the 
 pleasures of Mirth, because they shut out God. While 
 he gives full weight in the Allegro to " unreproved 
 pleasures free," he makes it plain in the Penseroso 
 that he prefers the sage and holy pleasures of thought- 
 ful sadness. These best befitted the solemn aspect of 
 the time. A few years later and the presage had come 
 true. Milton is driven away from even the Allegro 
 point of view. In Comus the wild licence of the 
 court society is set over against the grave and tem- 
 perate virtue of a Puritan life. The unchastity, the 
 glozing lies, the glistering apparel that hid moral 
 deformity, the sloth and drunkenness, the light fan- 
 tastic round x of the enchanter's character and court, 
 are (it seems likely) Milton's allegory of the Court 
 society of his time. The stately philosophy of the 
 Brothers which had its root in subduing passion and its 
 top in the love of God ; the virginal chastity of the 
 Lady, and at the end the releasing power of Sabrina's 
 purity, exalt and fill up more sternly the idea of the 
 Penseroso and symbolise that noble Puritanism which 
 loved learning and beauty only when they were pure, 
 but holiness far more than either. It may be, as Mr. 
 Browne supports, that there is a second allegory within 
 the first, of Laud and his party as the Sorcerer com- 
 mending the cup of Rome by wile and threat to the 
 lips of the Church and enforcing it by fine and im- 
 prisonment j paralysing in stony fetters the Lady of 
 the Church. It may be that Milton called in this poem 
 on the few who, having resisted like the Brothers, 
 but failed to set the Church free, ought now to employ 
 a new force, the force of Purity ; but this aspect of 
 
 1 Mr. Browne has well drawn notice to the echo of the 
 Allegro in the songs of Comus : 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 29 
 
 the struggle is at least not so clear in Covins as in 
 Lycidas. In Lycidas Milton has thrown away the last 
 shreds of Church and State and is Presbyterian. The 
 strife now at hand starts into prominence, and not to 
 the bettering of the poem as a piece of art. It is 
 brought in — and the fault is one which frequently 
 startles us in Milton — without any regard to the unity 
 of feeling in the poem. The passage on the hireling 
 Church looks like an after-thought, and Milton draws 
 attention to it in the argument. " The author . . . 
 by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy 
 then in their height." But he does not leave Laud 
 and his policy nor the old Church tenderly. When 
 he felt strongly, he wrote fiercely. The passage is a 
 splendid and a fierce cry of wrath, and the rough 
 trumpet note, warlike and unsparing, which it sounds 
 against the unfaithful herdsmen who are sped and the 
 " grim wolf with privy paw," was to ring louder and 
 louder through the prose works, and finally to clash 
 in the ears of those very Presbyterians whom he now 
 supported. There is then a steady progress of thought 
 and of change in the poems. The Milton of Lycidas 
 is not the Milton of Comus. The Milton of Comus is 
 not the Milton of the Penseroso, less still of the Allegro. 
 The Milton of the Penseroso is not the Milton of the 
 Ode to the Nativity. Nothing of the Renaissance is 
 left now but its learning and its art. 
 
 Continental Journey, 1638-39. — Milton left 
 London in 1638, ten years before the Peace of 
 Westphalia, in the last decade of the Thirty Years 
 War. Passing through Paris in May, he saw Grotius, 
 "the first of living Dutchmen," who took his visit 
 kindly. Letters from Lord Scudamore, the am- 
 bassador, carried him through France ; and passing 
 through Genoa, Leghorn, and Pisa, he came to Florence, 
 where he stayed two months. " There immediately," 
 he says, " I made the acquaintance of many noble 
 and learned men whose private academies 1 also (which 
 are an institution there of most praiseworthy effect, 
 
 1 Clubs of dilettanti, 
 
30 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 both for the cultivation of polite letters and the 
 keeping up of friendships) I assiduously attended. 
 The memory of you, Jacobo Gaddi, of you, Carlo 
 Dati, Frescobaldi, Coltellini, Bonmattei, Chimentelli, 
 Francini, and of many others, always delightful and 
 pleasant as it is to me, time shall never destroy." 
 He had a happy time, interchanging literary work 
 with his new friends, and awakening their wonder at* 
 his powers. An ode and a letter written in his praise 
 by Francini and Dati, testify not only to their admi- 
 ration of his culture but of his lofty morality. Nor 
 was this praise earned by any reticence on his religious 
 views. "With singular politeness," he says, " they 
 conceded me full liberty of speech on this delicate 
 subject/' a liberty, he allows us to understand in the 
 Areopagitica, of which they themselves regretted their 
 want. The well-known lines in the Paradise Lost 
 suggest to us that he visited Vallombrosa, and we 
 know that he saw Galileo at Arcetri, and may have 
 looked at the moon with him as he pictures the 
 Tuscan artist doing 
 
 " At evening, from the top of Fesole, 
 Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, 
 Rivers and mountains, in her spotty globe." 
 
 Florence drove its enchantment into his heart ; " I 
 eagerly go," he writes, "for a feast to that Dante of 
 yours, and to Petrarca, and a good few more, nor has 
 Athens itself with its pellucid Ilissus, nor old Rome 
 with its banks of Tiber, been able to hold me, but that 
 I love to visit your Arno and these hills of Faesule." 
 This was written on September 10, and we find 
 him next at Rome, " where the antiquity and 
 ancient renown of the city detained him nearly three 
 months." At Rome, as at Florence, cultivated society 
 was organised into academies, and Milton was received 
 gladly into their circle. Lucas Holstenius, the German 
 librarian of the Vatican, took care to mention him 
 to the Barberini, and at the cardinal's palace he may 
 have first heard Leonora Baroni, the greatest singer 
 of the time. Three Latin epigrams addressed to her 
 
J J EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 31 
 
 record his delight with her voice. As at Florence, so 
 here, men wrote verses in his praise, and to one of 
 them, Salsillus, Milton sent a Latin poem in which 
 he speaks of his own land where the worst of all the 
 winds blows, and of the beauty of the oaks of Faunus, 
 of the grove of Egeria and the swollen Tiber — names 
 which seem to prove that he had wandered over the 
 Campagna. Thence he went to Naples, where he 
 spent two months. Manso received him, the friend 
 of Tasso and Marini, in whose house the Gerusaleimne 
 Conquistata had been finished ; 
 
 " Fra cavalier magnanimi e cortesi 
 Risplende il Manso." 
 
 "This nobleman honoured the author, during his 
 stay in Naples, with every kindness in his power, and 
 conferred on him many acts of courtesy. To him, there- 
 fore, his guest, to show himself not ungrateful, sent 
 the following piece of verse." This was the epistle 
 to Manso, in Latin hexameters, afterwards published 
 in 1645. One passage in it is of importance, in which 
 he prays that he may have such a friend, " if perchance 
 I shall ever call back into verse our native Kings, and 
 Arthur stirring wars even under the earth that hides 
 him, or speak of the great-souled heroes, the Knights 
 of the unconquered Table." Already he was medi- 
 tating an epic, and this was its subject. He recurs to 
 his early love of it in his later days. {Par. Lost, I. 580.) 
 But while he lived this rich and social life, Scotland 
 had openly rebelled, and the discontents in England 
 rather increased than lessened. The fame of these 
 things reached him as he was thinking of journeying 
 to Sicily and Greece, and he broke up his stay abroad. 
 " The sad news of civil war coming from England, 
 called me back, for I thought it disgraceful, while my 
 fellow-countrymen were fighting for liberty, that I 
 should be travelling abroad for pleasure." So he 
 started for home, lingering four months more at 
 Rome and Florence ; seeing Lucca, and travelling 
 to Venice through Bologna and Ferrara. Through 
 3 
 
32 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 the whole time, though warned of danger lying 
 in wait for him at Rome, he spoke boldly of his 
 religious opinions, but without obtrusiveness. " I had 
 made this resolution, not of my own accord to intro- 
 duce conversation about religion, but if asked respecting 
 the faith, then whatsoever I should suffer, to dissemble 
 nothing." And at Rome whenever it was attacked, he 
 defended his religion most freely. With this tour are 
 connected his five Italian sonnets and one canzone, 
 written as I think Masson renders probable — the first 
 as compliment to some Bolognese lady, the rest to 
 some foreign lady with whom he fell much in love : 
 they bear the stamp of a real, but a passing passion. 
 After a month at Venice, whence he shipped the books 
 and music he had collected, he came home swiftly, 
 lingering only a week at Geneva, where he was daily 
 in the society of John Diodati, the Professor of Theo- 
 logy, and the uncle of his friend Charles who had but 
 lately died. We know the exact date of his sojourn 
 at Geneva, for being asked by the Cerdogni family to 
 write something in their album, he wrote the last lines 
 of Comus — 
 
 " If Virtue feeble were, 
 
 Heaven itself would stoop to her." 
 
 *' Caelum, non animum, muto, dum trans mare curro." 
 
 Junii 10, 1639, Joannes Miltonus, Anglus. 
 
 Early in August we find him in England, and this is 
 his own witness to the life he lived abroad. 
 
 " I again take God to witness that in all those places 
 where so many things are considered lawful, I lived 
 sound and untouched from all profligacy and vice, 
 having this thought perpetually before me, that though 
 I might escape the eyes of men, I certainly could not 
 the eyes of God." 1 
 
 Return to England. -The King's war with the 
 Scots, commonly called the first Bishop's war, was just 
 over in July, 1639, when Milton returned to England, 
 and though public affairs were full of interest, his 
 
 1 Def. Secunda. 
 
i.] EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 33 
 
 private grief for the death of his oldest and best 
 loved friend, Charles Diodati, weighed most heavily 
 on his heart. It was not long before he " deplored 
 himself and his solitary condition," in his Latin elegy 
 on the death of Damon. It is written in hexameters, 
 and is an absolute pastoral, deliberately and minutely 
 worked after the manner of the Sicilian poets, the 
 nymphs of whose river, Himera, he invokes at the 
 beginning to " tell this later Sicilian story." Masson's 
 translation of it is admirably done, and he justly claims 
 to have been the first to bring out its biographical 
 interest. In spite of the conventional form, the strong 
 and almost impassioned grief of Milton for his friend 
 fills the whole poem. What faithful companion, he asks, 
 
 " Now will cling to my side in place of the one so familiar, 
 
 ****** 
 
 Who will bring me again thy blandishing ways and thy laughter, 
 All thy Athenian jests, and all the fine wit of thy fancies ? 
 
 ****** 
 
 Scarcely does any discover his one true mate among thousands, 
 Or, if a kindlier chance shall have given the singular blessing, 
 Comes a dark day on the creep, and comes the hour unexpected, 
 Snatching away the gift and leaving the anguish eternal." 1 
 
 But the deeper interest of the poem lies in its revela- 
 tion of Milton's sustained purpose to write a heroic 
 poem. We have seen that he was projecting in Italy, 
 stirred thereto by his Italian friends, " to leave some- 
 thing behind him so written to after times as that they 
 should not willingly let it die." He alludes to the sub- 
 ject in his mind — a song of the Kings of our Island, 
 Arthur and the Round Table, in his poem to Manso. 
 In this elegy he seems to have decided on the theme 
 and to have begun it. I quote Masson's translation — 
 
 " I too — for strangely my pipe for some time past had been 
 sounding 
 Strains of an unknown strength — 
 
 1 Masson's translation, Miltoris Life, vol. ii. p. 85. Those 
 who wish to read a translation of the Elegies had better look 
 for them in Cowper's poems. They are not accurate trans- 
 lations, but they are those of a poet, 
 
34 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 I have a theme of the Trojans cruising our southern headlands 
 Shaping to song, and the realm of Imogen, daughter of 
 
 Pandras, 
 Brennus and Arvirach, dukes, and Bren's bold brother, 
 
 Belinus, 
 Then the Armorican settlers under the laws of the Britons, 
 Ay, and the womb of Igraine fatally pregnant with Arthur, 
 Uther's son." 
 
 Then he looks forward to hanging aside, forgotten, 
 his Latin pipe, and exchanging it for an English 
 one, content — 
 
 " If but yellow-haired Ouse shall read me, the drinker of Alan, 
 Humber which whirls as it flows, and Trent's whole valley of 
 
 orchards. 
 Thames, my own Thames, above all, and Tamar's western 
 
 waters 
 Tawny with ores, and where the white waves swinge the far 
 
 Orkneys. " 
 
 Fame urged him and love of England. The great 
 work of his genius was to be written in the tongue 
 that his countrymen could read. 
 
 The first sketch of Paradise Lost began the 
 fulfilment of this desire. It was made in London, 
 where he now took a lodging in St. Bride's Church- 
 yard, and found work to do in the education of 
 his two nephews, Mrs. Agar's sons by her first 
 marriage. Here, during the winter of 1639-40, 
 we have proof, from his jottings in a MS. now at 
 Cambridge, of the manner in which he employed 
 himself. He was searching for a subject for a great 
 poem. He seems soon to have given up the British 
 theme, and to have tended towards a Scriptural one. 
 He filled the seven pages of the MS. in question 
 with subjects and detailed sketches of the form of 
 subjects, sixty-one of which are Scriptural and thirty- 
 eight from British history. Most of them, when they 
 are at all expanded, are in the dramatic form ; but the 
 epic and the pastoral are now and then suggested. 
 The most remarkable thing in the list is that in the 
 years 1640 — 42, more than twenty years before the 
 work was done, the subject of Paradise Lost was 
 
i.] EARLY LIFE OF MILTON. 35 
 
 conceived. There are four drafts for it, three of 
 them standing together as the first in the list, the 
 fourth jotted down some time afterwards. They are 
 all in the dramatic form, and we know from Aubrey 
 and Philips that the invocation of Satan to the Sun, 
 in the Paradise Lost, book iv. 32-41, was written 
 about 1642, and intended as the beginning of the 
 drama. In the quiet of his lodging, these were his 
 purposes, and, were it not that his country and the 
 great cause of liberty called him forth, we might 
 regret that so much was lost to literature, that now for 
 twenty years the magnificent voice of Milton's song 
 was hushed. It may be that Paradise Lost was 
 grander from the long experience of a great political 
 crisis, but the lighter and more youthful touch and 
 tone of the Allegro and Pense/vso, and the artful beauty 
 of Lycidas never, and could not ever, reappear. He 
 felt the surrender of his hopes very deeply ; he bound 
 himself never wholly to surrender them, as long as 
 he lived. While the times of chiding lasted he 
 would cherish them, and when the noises ceased, 
 fulfil them ; but not how. There was other work 
 more needful; and in 1641, in his Reason of Church 
 Government, he told the world of his thoughts of a 
 great English poem, of his present necessity to give 
 up the doing of it, and of his resolve to do it, in 
 words full of a noble pathos. 
 
 " Neither do I think to covenant with any knowing 
 reader that for some few years yet I may go on trust 
 with him toward the payment of what I am now 
 indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the 
 heat of youth, or the vapour of wine . . . nor to be 
 obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her 
 Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to the Eternal 
 Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and all know- 
 ledge, 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, insight into all 
 seemly and generous arts and affairs. " 
 
36 MILTON, [chap. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE PROSE WORKS. 
 
 It was a longer time than he thought before Milton 
 could soar again, with his singing robes about him. 
 Already the Long Parliament was sitting when he 
 moved from St. Bride's Churchyard to Aldersgate 
 Street, and the strenuous work of that Parliament, 
 the measures it took for discipline in the Church, 
 measures which in Milton's mind prophesied a reform 
 in the manners and institutions of the Common- 
 wealth, roused him to political action in behalf of his 
 country. " I resolved/' he says {Defensio Secunda), 
 " though I was then meditating other matters, to 
 transfer into this struggle all my genius and all the 
 strength of my industry/' The Prose Works are 
 dedicated to Liberty, and Milton in his Defensio 
 Secunda divides them for us. He believed there were 
 three species of liberty essential to the happiness of 
 social life, — religious, domestic, and civil liberty. 
 The five pamphlets we shall presently describe con- 
 cerned the first. Under the head of domestic liberty he 
 ranks three questions — the conditions of the conjugal 
 tie, and to this belong his four tracts on divorce ; the 
 education of youth, discussed in the short treatise 
 to Samuel Hartlib ; the free publication of thoughts, 
 and this is treated in the Areopagitica. We may our- 
 selves rank the two Defences of the People of England 
 and the Eikonoclastes and the other treatises of that 
 time as belonging to the discussion of civil liberty; 
 while the pamphlets after Cromwell's death equally cry 
 out for and defend religious and civil liberty. Lastly, 
 the treatise on Christian Doctrine is in fact one long 
 demand for liberty of theological thought. 
 
 It was a warfare then in which Milton engaged, and 
 he fought the battle with all his intellectual and moral 
 
ii.] THE PROSE WORKS. 37 
 
 power. And he fought always in the van, until, as the 
 literary champion of the Commonwealth, his name 
 became known, side by side with Cromwell's, over 
 Europe. In the course of the warfare he passed from 
 Presbyterianism to Independency. In it he linked 
 himself closely to Cromwell, but not so blindly as not 
 to first warn him against becoming faithless to liberty, 
 and afterwards to look back with dispraise upon a 
 Government which had at least tended to a tyranny. 
 There was no one else in England to do this work for 
 liberty, and Milton felt himself forced into it ; and if 
 it was not always done in a manner we should wish, 
 we ought to remember that Milton was out of his 
 true province in it, and that the sacrifice he made of 
 his Poetry may have tended to embitter his Prose. 
 
 The Pamphlets on Episcopacy and Church 
 Reform introduce Milton's prose works and his 
 life for twenty years. The first pamphlet was entitled, 
 Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in Efigland 
 and the Causes that hitherto have hindered it, 1641. 
 It grew up out of the war of pamphlets that arose on 
 the presentation of the petition against Episcopacy, 
 and out of the debates on Church Reform in the Par- 
 liament. Bishop Hall's Humble Remonstrance against 
 the Petition was met by an answer, written by 
 Smectymnuus, the title formed by the initials of the 
 writers, Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas 
 Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurston. 
 Archbishop Usher then took up the ball on the side of 
 a modified episcopacy, and the contest, thus carried on 
 without, was supported within the Houses by the High 
 Church Party who wished to retain episcopacy as it 
 was ; by the Root and Branch Party who wished to 
 destroy it ; and by the Reforming Party who wished 
 to purify it from all its evils. The course of the 
 contest was interrupted by the trial and execution of 
 Strafford, and it was shortly after his death, probably 
 in the beginning of June, that Milton's pamphlet 
 appeared, taking, with sarcastic fierceness, the side 
 of the Root and Branch party. It inquires why the 
 
38 MILTON* [chap. 
 
 Reformation was arrested in England ? It was arrested, 
 he answers, by three sets of persons, the Antiquitarians, 
 who defend prelacy because it is ancient and sacred ; 
 the Libertines, who defend it because it least troubles 
 their licence ; the Politicians, who, unworthy of the 
 name, defend it for its consistency with monarchy. 
 All that has ever been spoilt of political and religious 
 reform has been spoilt, he says, because " The 
 Bishop's foot has been in it," and he ends with 
 a magnificent outburst of poetic prayer that the 
 Omnipotent King may deliver England from the wild 
 boars that have broken into His vineyard. 
 
 The second pamphlet, in answer to Usher's, and 
 entitled, On Prelatical Episcopacy, appeared almost 
 immediately after the first, and through twenty-four 
 pages Milton mocked in it the Antiquitarian view of 
 episcopacy. The third pamphlet instantly followed. 
 It replied to Bishop Hall's Defence of his Humble 
 Remojistrance, and its title tells the tale of its contents 
 — Ani??tadversions upon the Remonstrants' Defence 
 against Smectymnuus, 1641. It comments step by 
 step on Hall's work, and is both tiresome, and as 
 coarse as Swift in his coarse mood ; nor is the coarse- 
 ness redeemed by Swift's incisiveness. A few passages 
 of great nobility succour the weary reader, but only 
 make him the more regret that Milton should have 
 fallen into so much brutality. It was not till after the 
 Grand Remonstrance in November and December, 
 1 64 1, and the attempt to arrest the Five Members in 
 the following January, and perhaps after the Bill for 
 excluding Bishops from Parliament had passed in 
 February, that Milton again appeared in the lists. 
 The fourth pamphlet was published under his own 
 name, the three previous ones being anonymous, and 
 was called, The Reason of Church-government urged 
 against Prelaty. Having argued on the origin and 
 nature of true Church-government, and that Prelaty 
 does not contain or perform it, he proceeds in the 
 second book to show that Prelaty opposeth the reason 
 and end of the Gospel — in its outward form of eternal 
 
II.] THE PROSE WORKS. 39 
 
 pomp — in its ceremonies which deform the truth — -in 
 its jurisdiction which connects a spiritual body with 
 the state. The treatise then ends with a chapter on 
 the mischief that Prelaty does in the state. Our first 
 interest in the pamphlet is, that it proves that Milton 
 more than tended at this time to the system of Church- 
 government laid down by the Presbyterians. Our 
 second interest is, that having put his name to the 
 pamphlet, he thought himself bound to say something 
 about himself, and the preface to the second book 
 contains a sketch, parts of which have been quoted, 
 of his life, and his work, and his aims, and his reasons 
 for leaving poetry for prose, reasons which all who 
 care for liberty in religion and in political life sym- 
 pathise with and honour. " For me, I have determined 
 to lay up as the best treasure and solace of a good 
 old age, if God vouchsafe it to me, the honest liberty 
 of free speech from my youth where I shall think it 
 available in so dear a concernment as the Church's 
 good." It was for this high end that he left his literary 
 calm to use a manner of writing in which he had 
 " but the use of his left hand," and embarked " in a 
 troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes." It 
 seemed to his indignant heart that the writing of 
 poetry was impossible until the land " had once enfran- 
 chised herself from this impertinent yoke of Prelaty 
 under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no 
 free and splendid wit could flourish." 
 
 The fifth pamphlet was called forth by Bishop Hall's 
 scurrilous answer to the Animadversions. The Bishop 
 did not hesitate to describe Milton as likely to have 
 spent his youth in loitering, bezzling, and harloting, 
 and to have been vomited out from the university 
 into a suburb sink in London. " Where his morning 
 haunts are, I wist not, but he who would find him 
 after dinner must search the playhouses and the 
 bordelli, for there I have traced him." Milton's reply 
 was entitled — An Apology against a Pamphlet calld 
 A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions of the 
 Remojistr ant against Smectymnuus, 1642. It was not 
 
40 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 signed, but it needed no signature. It was Milton's 
 defence against the attacks on his character, it reite- 
 rated with ferocious scorn the attack on Hall, and it 
 entered afresh into the Church question. The per- 
 sonal part has a deep interest, and in it he assembles 
 the history of his studies, as already partly quoted, 
 and the principles which swayed his youth — purity, 
 chivalry, devotion to the noblest books and characters 
 — the principles of the Lady's answer to Comas. It is a 
 beautiful passage, and one of the few in which Milton's 
 style and thought in prose reaches simple excellence. 
 
 The Civil War. — This fifth pamphlet of Milton 
 was probably published in March 1642. During the 
 following months, the King being at York and the 
 Parliament at Westminster, the country was rapidly 
 gliding into civil war. On the 9th of August, the King 
 issued his proclamation for the suppression " of the 
 present rebellion under the command of Robert, Earl 
 of Essex." On the nth the Commons of England 
 rose one by one each in his place, and answered 
 the proclamation by swearing to stand by Essex with 
 their lives and fortunes to the end ; and on the 
 22nd, on the evening of a very stormy and tempestuous 
 day, Sir Edmund Verney raised the royal standard 
 at Nottingham Castle, and the Civil War began. The 
 battle of Edgehill followed in October. In November 
 the King advanced to Brentford, seven miles from 
 London ; and all London, dreading spoliation, sent 
 out its trainbands to support Essex and drive the King 
 back. It was then that Milton wrote his sonnet, 
 Whe?i the assaull was intended to the City. It is de- 
 lightful to meet, in the very midst of his controversial 
 pamphlets, with this classic verse, sweet as melody 
 and art can make it, equally tempered with beauty 
 and severity. 
 
 Milton's First Marriage. — Not long after, 
 about Whitsuntide, 1643, Milton journeyed to the 
 country and returned "a married man that went 
 out a bachelor, his wife being Mary, the eldest 
 daughter of Mr. Richard Powell, Justice of Peace, of 
 
ii.] THE PROSE WORKS. 4* 
 
 Forest Hill near Shotover, in Oxfordshire." No one 
 knows how the marriage came to pass. The only 
 connection traceable between the families, independent 
 of the fact that the Miltons and Powells were both 
 Shotover people, is that in 1627 Richard Powell 
 acknowledged a debt to Milton of 500/., and Milton 
 may have visited them as a friend who did not 
 press his debt. There was no community of feeling, 
 for the Powells were Royalists. It was dangerous 
 for Milton to go near Oxford, where the King held 
 his court ; and yet, in spite of all this, he stayed a 
 month in the house. He was thirty-five years old, 
 Mary Powell was seventeen ; yet he married her. 
 It was not a lucky beginning and it ended ill. When 
 she came to live with her husband, she found it 
 very solitary; no company came to her; oftentimes 
 she heard his nephews beaten and cry, and the life 
 was irksome to her. A month had scarcely passed 
 when her friends, " possibly incited by her own desire," 
 wished her to go back for the rest of the summer. It 
 is not the least strange part of this strange business 
 that Milton consented, with the understanding how- 
 ever that she should return at Michaelmas. Meanwhile 
 his father came to live with him. 
 
 The Four Divorce Tracts of Milton group 
 themselves round this curious story. Masson seems 
 to have proved, if Phillips' date of the marriage is 
 right, and it is the strangest part of the story, that 
 Milton actually wrote the first of these tracts — the 
 Doctrine of Discipline and Divorce — while his wife was 
 still with him. If so, he must have fiercely repented 
 his marriage before the honeymoon was over. At any 
 rate, two months before the time fixed for her return, on 
 August 1 st, 1643, the first edition was published. And 
 it contained enough to disperse any wonder aftertimes 
 might have at his wife's refusal to return, for not only 
 was its thesis this — That indisposition, unfitness, or 
 contrariety of mind is a greater reason of divorce 
 than any other reason — but also it was loaded with 
 expressions which paint in the bitterest way the horrors 
 
42 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 of a man burdened with an uncongenial wife, ex- 
 pressions which his wife would naturally take to her- 
 self, and which Milton drew, it seems, from his own 
 experience. Dwelling on this view, he came to think it 
 not only applicable to his own case, but to the man's 
 slavery in an unfit marriage over the whole world : and 
 he resolved to make it a part of his struggle for freedom, 
 to set men at liberty from the tyranny of an indis- 
 soluble marriage bond. He may have been spurred to 
 this by his wife's refusal to return at Michaelmas; at 
 any rate, on February 2nd, 1644, in answer to the 
 abuse and criticism that fell on him from all sides, he 
 put forth a second edition, much enlarged, of his 
 Tract, signed with his name, and headed by a bold 
 address to the Parliament. It is a fresh instance of 
 the daring of Milton ; no man had ever more the 
 courage of his opinions. The re-edited tract filled 
 men's minds, and he was soon placed as a " Divorcer" 
 among the tribes of sectaries which the restrictions of 
 the Presbyterian party, speaking from the Westminster 
 Assembly and the Parliament, had multiplied and 
 remultiplied in England. Opposition only inflamed 
 Milton, and in July appeared his second Divorce 
 Tract, entitled the Judgment of Martin Bncer con- 
 cerning Divorce, in which he deliberately challenged 
 the Assembly; followed on March 4th, 1645, by two 
 more, the Tetrachordon, or expositions upon the four 
 chief places in Scripture which treat of marriage, and 
 Colastcrion, a punishing reply to his assailants. Two 
 sonnets, in which he mocked his adversaries, closed 
 the controversy. 
 
 The Education Tract. — While the divorce 
 pamphlets were being written Milton engaged in two 
 other subjects pertaining to liberty, — Education, and 
 the liberty of expressing Thoughts. He was living 
 quietly in his garden-house, and he took pupils and 
 tried on them his system of education; and out of 
 this experience, and out of long talks with a new 
 friend, Samuel Hartlib, a German who was pushing 
 Comenius' method of teaching in London, grew his 
 
II.] THE PROSE WORKS. 43 
 
 little tract on Education. (June, 1644.) It is well 
 worth reading ; it is short, clear, and eloquent. A 
 whole scheme for a complete and generous education — 
 " that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and 
 magnanimously all the offices, both private and pub- 
 lic, of peace and war," is drawn forth. It attacks the 
 methods of the Universities, and lays down its own 
 method. Not only studies and arts are prescribed, but 
 knowledge of agriculture, of warlike and physical 
 science and medicine, of theology and poetry ; and, in 
 the latter, "of what decorum is, which is the grand 
 masterpiece to observe " — of martial exercises, and of 
 music. Journeys also are insisted on, that the youths 
 may gain practical knowledge of their own land and of 
 foreign states, and learn to enjoy the beauty of the 
 world. These things rightly taught in academies built 
 for the purpose over England " might in a short time 
 gain them to an incredible diligence and courage, 
 infusing into their young breasts such an ingenuous 
 and noble ardour as could not fail to make many 
 of them renowned and matchless men." It is plain, 
 however, that the system would do for none but 
 youths of leisure and fortune, and is directed towards 
 the creation of accomplished senators, judges, generals, 
 and artists — in fact, towards the formation of a highly 
 cultured class. It goes with the Miltonic feeling of 
 the necessity of the mere mob of men being governed 
 by the best. 
 
 The Areopagitica. — In the midst also of the 
 divorce controversy, and arising out of it, another 
 struggle for liberty engaged Milton : the liberty of 
 unlicensed printing. Printing in England had long 
 been subjected to the censorship of delegates ap- 
 pointed by the state. All publications had to be 
 licensed. Of late the censorship had fallen into 
 desuetude, and only thirty-five publications were 
 registered in the beginning of 1643. In June a strict 
 ordinance of printing was passed, and ^^^ publications 
 were registered in the latter half of the same year. 
 The press was brought under the strict control of a 
 
44 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 set of Presbyterian censors. Milton had despised the 
 ordinance and published his first Divorce Tract and 
 the second edition of it without a licence. When the 
 second tract appeared (it was licensed) in July 1644, 
 the Assembly answered its challenge by denouncing 
 it to Parliament. Mr. Herbert Palmer preached 
 against it in St. Margaret's Westminster, as a book 
 fit to be burned, and the Stationers' Company, jealous 
 for their book trade, which the unregistered publica- 
 tions interfered with, petitioned Parliament against 
 them, and seizing the opportunity, instanced Milton's 
 first tract as one of those blasphemous and evil pro- 
 ductions which the slackness of the law allowed to 
 get loose. A committee on printing was appointed, 
 and Milton's pamphlet was mentioned as one whose 
 author was to be inquired for. The matter was not 
 carried out, but Milton's mind was turned to the whole 
 subject, and, " On the subject of the liberation of the 
 press, so that the judgment of the true and the false, 
 what should be published and what suppressed, should 
 not be in the hands of a few men, and these mostly 
 unlearned and of common capacity, erected into a 
 "censorship over books — an agency through which no 
 one almost can or will send into the light anything 
 that is above the vulgar taste — on this subject, in the 
 form of an express oration, I wrote my Areopagitica." 
 It was published November 24, 1644, unlicensed and un- 
 registered ; being an address to Parliament for liberty 
 to publish without license or registering — a prayer to 
 Parliament to repeal their law. The stationers accused 
 him for it before the Lords, but the matter was dropped 
 and the company baulked of its vengeance. 
 
 Milton's Censorship. — This is the best place 
 to notice the strange fact that during the whole of 
 the year 1651 Milton acted as Censor of the Press. 
 Masson thinks that this censorship was not much 
 more than a supervision of the Commonwealth's 
 weekly paper — The Mercurius Politicus. But it 
 seems to have been more ; for he was examined on 
 the question of having licensed the Racovian Cati- 
 
ii.] THE PROSE WORKS. 45 
 
 chism, a Socinian work which was condemned by the 
 Parliament, and is said to have replied that he saw no 
 reason why the book should not be printed. It 
 would appear then that he exercised his censorship in 
 a tolerant manner, but that does not alter the strange- 
 ness of the fact that he exercised it at all. Nor is 
 his friendship for Marchamont Needham or his asso- 
 ciation with him much to his credit. Needham 
 began by editing the Mercurins Britannicus on the 
 popular side and then the Mercurius Pragmaticus for 
 the royalists, and then again turned his coat and 
 edited the Mercurius Politicus for the Common- 
 wealth. It was this man who became " a great crony " 
 of Milton's, and to him and Needham, I presume for 
 these "press" services, Bradshaw left ten pounds 
 a piece in his will. It is not an association by which 
 Milton is honoured, and his being a censor at all 
 of the press does not seem quite worthy of the 
 writer of the Areopagitica. 
 
 All who care for English literature have read the 
 Areopagitica. It is the most literary of Milton's 
 pamphlets, eloquent, to the point, and full of noble 
 images splendidly wrought and fitted to their place. 
 Its defence of books and the freedom of books will 
 last as long as there are writers and readers of books. 
 Its scorn of the censorship of writing is only excelled 
 by its uplifted praise of true writing. It calls on the 
 Parliament to defend books. " As good almost kill 
 a man as kill a good book." The censorship which 
 killed so many was a Papal invention that had come 
 into England ; and it was an evil invention. The 
 scholar should have liberty to read all books, bad and 
 good, for his virtue should not be "fugitive and 
 cloistered," but disciplined by the trial of good and 
 evil reading. Nor did " licensing " attain its end ; it 
 did not stop bad books ; and even if that end were right 
 — who is to find intelligent and just licensers? The 
 miseries of the true author at the hands of licensers 
 are then described, and we find that Milton's voice 
 was the voice of a large party. Nevertheless he does 
 
46 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 not tolerate " Popery and open superstition, or evil 
 against faith and manners." He adds saving clauses 
 to his principle. But the whole force of the treatise 
 is on the side of liberty, and it ends with a fine series 
 of passages in which he claims liberty of conscience 
 and of the expression of opinion for all the various 
 sects and schisms, whose varieties prove, not the 
 danger and overthrow, but the strength, and zeal, and 
 life of the religious intelligence of England. 
 
 Milton wholly ceases to be Presbyterian. 
 — " It cannot be guessed," he says in the Areopagitica, 
 "what is intended by some but a second tyranny 
 over learning, and will soon put it out of controversy 
 that Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us 
 both name and thing." That is almost the same 
 phrase as the last line of the sonnet On the Forcers 
 of Consciefice — 
 
 " New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large." 
 
 This sonnet, written early in 1646, embodies 
 Milton's position and the results of the Areopagitica y 
 a little more than a year after its publication. He was 
 now not only an Independent, but one of Cromwell's 
 type, who knew no "minister" beyond himself; and 
 not only an Independent, but a sectary, "a divorcer." 
 The Presbyterians could not let him alone, and the 
 Areopagitica only sharpened their venom. A Mr. 
 Baillie, in his Dissuasive, Edwards in his Gangrana, 
 books that were catalogues of the sects and their 
 evils, attacked him by name. Milton, who never 
 spared his adversaries, and met them with tenfold their 
 own fury, wrote his sonnet, and wrought into it closely 
 and fiercely all his wrath. The Presbyterians had set 
 up " a classic hierarchy " — the system of Presbyterian 
 classes to force men's consciences — They had added to 
 their livings — " seized the widowed whore Plurality " — 
 " A. S." Dr. Adam Stuart, and Rutherford, men who 
 had written for strict Presbytery against the Indepen- 
 dents, are bound up in the same scorn as " shallow 
 Edwards and Scotch what d'ye call " (Baillie), and the 
 
II] THE PROSE WORKS. 47 
 
 line " Clip your phylacteries, though baulk your ears/' 
 was in the first draught, " Crop ye as close as marginal 
 P(rynne's) ears." It was not wise to meddle with 
 Milton, and his sonnet (con coda, with a scorpion tail 
 of six verses) sets him on the side of the New Model 
 in the army, against the Scots, and against the 
 Assembly. 
 
 Milton's Home Life, early in 1645, had mean- 
 time changed. To carry out his divorce views, his wife 
 now being away nearly two years, he thought of 
 marrying again. He had had the society of women 
 during her absence. It was his chief diversion in the 
 winter of 1643, 44, to visit the Lady Margaret Ley, 
 daughter of that Earl of Marlborough who was Lord 
 High Treasurer in the reign of James I. ; and his son- 
 net to her records his admiration. She was much 
 older than Milton, and married : but a lady younger 
 and unmarried engaged at the same time his thoughts, 
 and to her he wrote the sonnet entitled, To a Virtuous 
 Young Lady. It is conjectured that she was the very 
 Miss Davis whom he now, in 1645, had a design 
 of marrying. The news came to Oxford, where the 
 Powell family were in great trouble, and where the 
 King's cause was decaying. Everything urged the 
 Powells to bring about a reconciliation with one who 
 could help them seriously in the crisis. An interview 
 was managed in a friend's house, Milton's wife sud- 
 denly appeared, fell on her knees, and 
 
 " Her lowly plight 
 Immovable till peace obtained from fault 
 Acknowledged and deplored, in Adam wrought 
 Commiseration. " 
 
 A few weeks after, for Milton was changing his 
 house from Aldersgate to Barbican, his wife took up 
 her life again with him. 
 
 Publication of Poems. — It was now, in a 
 moment of quiet, that Milton prepared and published 
 the first collected edition of his poems, January 2, 
 1646. Humphrey Moseley, an enterprising publisher, 
 who, almost alone among his brethren, devoted himself 
 
 4 
 
48 MILTON. [chat. 
 
 to putting forth books of general culture, was his 
 publisher. The English Poems came first, then the 
 Sonnets, English and Italian, then the Arcades, Lycidas, 
 and Comus — and after a break in the paging, the Latin 
 Poems — the Elegiarum Liber, and the Sylvarum Liber. 
 Moseley, whose name we ought to remember as one 
 who when the age was overwhelmed with theological 
 and political pamphlets loved good literature and set 
 it forth, himself asked Milton for the MSS.; and in 
 his preface wrote with honest pride of his work, " Let 
 the event guide itself which way it will, I shall deserve 
 of the age by bringing into the light as true a birth as 
 the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser 
 wrote, whose poems in these English ones are as rarely 
 imitated as sweetly excelled." It is pleasant to hear 
 this silver note of the love of pure literature among 
 the braying of the controversial trumpets, as pleasant 
 as it must have been for many to read, in quiet 
 leisure, poems that seemed to come out of a world 
 above the smoke and stir of this dim spot, out of 
 the region where wars and chiding were at rest. 
 And Milton himself in the motto placed before the 
 volume seems to wish to recall to men's minds by 
 his book that his true place was not among these 
 noises, but among the laurelled choir. He begs, with 
 Thyrsis, that his brow may be girt with the nard of 
 the field lest an ill tongue may hurt the poet yet to be, 
 
 " Baccare frontem 
 Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua future" 
 
 Literary Work. — Within a few weeks after this 
 publication, as if it had stimulated his poetical vein, s 
 he wrote the two Divorce sonnets — On the Detraction 
 which followed on my writing certain Treatises — and 
 the sonnet on Henry Lawes, whom he now, at his 
 house in Barbican, saw frequently. Then came the 
 anti-Presbyterian sonnet of which I have spoken 
 already ; and Milton, having discharged his thunder, 
 sat down to his work with his pupils. The Powells 
 came up from Oxford to stay with him, and in the 
 
 
II.] THE PROSE WORKS. 49 
 
 midst of the crowded house his first child was born, 
 Anne, on the 29th July, 1646 ; "a brave girl, though 
 she grew up more and more decrepit." Shortly after- 
 wards Mr. Powell and Milton's father died, and one 
 other friend, Mrs. Catherine Thompson, to whose 
 memory he wrote the Fourteenth Sonnet. The Latin 
 Ode to John Rous, on the loss of a copy of the 
 poems, shows that Milton could still play a little ; 
 and a letter to Carlo Dati, in answer to one from this 
 Florentine friend, speaks of his loneliness among un- 
 congenial persons, and recalls the earlier days when 
 he was happier, and his brighter life in Italy. This 
 letter was written in the spring of 1647, when Milton, 
 now left by the Powell family, and at first much 
 engaged in education, suddenly broke off all tutor- 
 ing, left his house in Barbican, and removed to High 
 Holborn. This change was made in the interval of 
 time between Cromwell's and Fairfax's march through 
 London in August, and the King's flight from Hampton 
 Court to the Isle of Wight in November, 1647. In 
 heart a republican, and already prepared to defend 
 that cause, he was employed on peaceful schemes of 
 literature, on collecting materials for a Latin Dic- 
 tionary, on a Complete History of England, and on 
 a Methodical Digest of Christian Doctrine. So 
 vigorous was his intellect that in the very midst of 
 a tremendous political crisis, of fierce controversy, 
 and of renewed attacks on himself by the Presby- 
 terian Church-government under which religious 
 London was now enslaved, he projected, and was 
 carrying out the work of three men. What he did 
 in the way of poetry was to translate nine of the 
 Psalms, lxxx. — lxxxviii. into metre, and badly done 
 they were. 
 
 The Second Civil War. — Then began the 
 second civil war, and Moab, and Gebal, and Ammon, 
 and Amalek, whose overthrow he had sung in the 
 eighty-third Psalm, were scattered at Preston and 
 Colchester, and he celebrated his joy at the begin- 
 ning of September, 1648, in his sonnet, On the 
 
50 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester ; and 
 prophesied in it that a nobler task yet awaited his 
 hand ; the freedom of truth and right from violence, 
 and of public faith from fraud. His hope grew greater 
 with every step towards a republic, and when the 
 treaty between Charles and the Parliament was broken 
 up, and the king arraigned, sentenced and executed, 
 January 30, 1649, he threw himself heart and soul 
 into the work of defending the acts of the Common- 
 wealth. A new period of his life now begins, and a 
 new class of works. We have but to mention that in 
 October, 1648, his second daughter, Mary, was born 
 at the house in Holborn. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE COMMONWEALTH AND MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 
 
 Milton's first Political Pamphlet. — A month 
 after the death of the King monarchy was formally 
 put aside, and in two months more the Common- 
 wealth was proclaimed. Meanwhile, Milton published 
 on the 13th of February his pamphlet on " The 
 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates ; proving, That it 
 is lawful!, and hath been held so, through all ages, 
 for any, who have the power, to call to account a 
 Tyrant, or wicked King, and after due conviction, to 
 depose and put him to death, if the ordinary Magis- 
 trates have neglected or deny'd to do it." His re- 
 publican ardour was so great that he was employed 
 on this tract during the trial of the King; and it 
 entered into the lists of the great controversy about 
 Charles's death, just a fortnight after his execution, 
 and four days after the Eikon Basilike had appeared. 
 The argument of Milton's work is based on the prin- 
 ciple that all men are naturally born free. They bind 
 themselves together in communities. They, because 
 they freely choose a king, may freely depose him ; 
 much more may they depose and slay a tyrant who 
 
in.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 51 
 
 reigns only for himself and his faction, and this is the 
 duty of the magistrates. Charles was such a tyrant, 
 and the irregular acts of the army are defended, 
 because the magistrates had neglected their duty. 
 
 Milton as Latin Secretary. — The work was 
 not commanded, but done out of his own desire ; and 
 it was so happily timed that it brought him state 
 employment. " No one ever saw me going about, 
 no one ever saw me asking anything of my friends, 
 or stationed at the doors of the court with a peti- 
 tioner's face — I kept myself almost entirely at home, 
 managing on my own resources to lead my frugal 
 life. I turned myself to the task of drawing out 
 the history of my country — when lo ! the Council of 
 State, invites me, dreaming of nothing of the sort, 
 to a post in connexion with it, with a view to the use 
 of my services, chiefly in foreign affairs." It is thus 
 he tells the tale of his appointment as Latin Secretary, 
 or Secretary of Foreign Tongues. It was given him 
 a month after his Tract on The Tenure of Kings and 
 Magistrates, when he was forty- one years of age, and 
 his salary was 288/. 135-. 6\d. a year. He continued 
 in this office, even after his blindness, to the end of 
 the Commonwealth. With the real government or 
 politics of the country he seems to have had nothing 
 to do, nor does his advice ever seem to have been 
 asked. The letters he wrote to foreign governments 
 were written under instructions, and the style and 
 wording were alone left to him. In fact he was 
 nothing more, politically, than the literary clerk of the 
 Foreign Office. But beyond this, and quite distinct 
 from it, and the real reason of his appointment, he 
 was used by the government as its pamphleteer. 
 He was the first of those literary partizans who, a 
 hundred years later, came to be so frequently em- 
 ployed by our governments. In his case, however, 
 the work he had to do was done, not for pay or for 
 self in any form, but through love of the cause ot 
 the Commonwealth, and with an ardour which only 
 too frequently degenerated into ferocity. The ferocity, 
 
52 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 the coarseness, the odious personalities, were charac- 
 teristic of the controversial writings of the day, and 
 Milton, unworthy of his own dignity, but with great 
 intellectual force, is more ferocious, more coarse, 
 more personal, and descends to more brutal detail 
 than any of his fellows and opponents. Leaving 
 aside this fault, the work he had to do was done as 
 no other man in England could have done it, and 
 perhaps, had it not been so fierce, it had not told as 
 it did on England and on Europe. 
 
 The second political pamphlet, this time done 
 to order, was the Observations upon the Articles of Peace 
 with the Irish Rebels, on the letter of Ormond to Colonel 
 /ones, and the Representation of the Presbytery at 
 Belfast. It was published in May, 1649, when 
 Ormond was trying to bring the Irish, the English 
 settlers, and the Scotch Presbyterians all together to 
 the cause of Charles II. 
 
 The Eikonoclastes, the third of these, was sent 
 forth from his new lodgings near Charing-Cross on 
 October 6, 1649. The Eikon Basilike, to which it 
 was an answer, purported to be written by Charles I. 
 himself in his last years. It was a book of prayers 
 and meditations, and entitled A Portraiture of his 
 Sacred Majesty in his Solitude and Sufferings. Ac- 
 cepted as the King's, it is generally believed to have 
 been written by Dr. Gauden, afterwards Bishop of 
 Exeter. It echoed and doubled the cry of horror 
 which arose after the King's execution in England and 
 Europe ; and its popularity was such that within the 
 year fifty editions of it appeared in various languages. 
 Milton's answer met the book chapter by chapter, 
 and his anti-royalism is stronger in the Eikonoclastes 
 than in the Tenure of Kings. It convinced none 
 of the opposite side, but it strengthened the hands 
 of those who agreed with it. A second edition of it, 
 much enlarged, was set forth in 1650. 
 
 The Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, his 
 fourth political pamphlet, made more noise ; indeed 
 it sent his name over the whole of educated Europe 
 
in.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP 53 
 
 There was no scholar so famous on the Continent as 
 Claude de Saumaise — Salmasius — the Leyden pro- 
 fessor, and Charles II. being at the Hague, engaged 
 him to. write a book against the Commonwealth. In 
 November, 1 649, the Defensio Regia pro Carolo I. was 
 ready, and soon arrived in England. It was a slavish 
 advocacy of the divine right of kings, and a violent 
 attack on the regicides. Written in Latin, its effect 
 was not likely to be great in England, but it would 
 deepen the distrust and hatred of the Commonwealth 
 abroad. Milton's answer, the Defensio pro Popido 
 Anglicano, appeared in April, 165 1. It meets Sal- 
 masius's arguments point by point, with reasonings 
 which have more to do with quotations from autho- 
 rities than with the principles in question, but its main 
 end, and a politic one, since the weight of Salmasius' s 
 defence lay in his reputation, was to hold up Salmasius 
 to the laughter and contempt of Europe. Were that 
 but done, Milton wisely thought, Salmasius's book 
 would have little value. And it was done. By skilful 
 scorn of his Latin and scholarship, by utter contempt 
 of his intelligence, by unutterable abuse, laid on 
 without stint or modesty, by making him ridiculous as 
 a henpecked husband — " an eternally speaking ass, 
 ridden by a woman," is one of the last epithets — Milton 
 made the Defensio Regia absurd in making its author 
 absurd. The scholars on the Continent who were 
 envious of Salmasius chuckled at the mauling their 
 "wonderful one "had got from "the English mastiff." 
 Complimentary messages poured in; Holland, France, 
 Denmark, Sweden, and Germany were full of Milton's 
 fame, and the Council of State returned him a vote 
 of thanks and of money for his book in vindication 
 of the Parliament and people of England. And by 
 this time, at the end of 165 1, men's eyes abroad 
 began to see that the Commonwealth was not to be 
 despised. Cromwell had reconquered Ireland, the 
 battle of Dunbar had been fought, Worcester had 
 followed, and Cromwell was now at Whitehall, the 
 chief of a great and established state. 
 
54 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 Home Life and Blindness. — At the beginning 
 of 1652 Milton left the official rooms he had occupied 
 in Whitehall, and removed to a pretty garden-house 
 in Petty France, Westminster, in which he lived for 
 eight years. It was here that his eyes, much worn 
 by his work on the £>efensio, totally failed about the 
 middle of 1652. 
 
 " What supports me, dost thou ask? 
 The conscience, friend, to have lost them overpli'd 
 In liberty's defence, my noble task, 
 With which all Europe rings from side to side." 
 
 A son had been born to him in March, 165 1, but it 
 had died an infant, and he was now alone with his 
 daughters, the last and third of whom, Deborah, was 
 born in May, 1652. It was about this time, when the 
 quarrel between Cromwell and Vane had come to an 
 abrupt close by Cromwell's expulsion of the Rump of 
 the Long Parliament and dissolution of the Council of 
 State in April 1652, that Milton wrote and sent his 
 two sonnets to these men. The original title of the 
 first explains its aim. To the Lord General Cromwell, 
 May, 1652, on the Proposals of Certain Ministers at 
 the Co?mnittee for Propagation of the Gospel. That 
 Committee was in fact set to consider the question 
 whether the Commonwealth should have an Estab- 
 lished or a Voluntary Church, and it decided in favour 
 of the former. Milton's sonnet is an appeal to 
 Cromwell, who sat on the Committee, to do away 
 with a hireling Church. 
 
 " Help us to save free conscience from the paw 
 Of hireling wolves, whose Gospel is their maw." 
 
 The sonnet to Vane, in its appeal to him as 
 knowing what severs spiritual and civil power, is 
 directed to the same end. Fully wrapt up in these 
 English questions, he was not so lost in them as not 
 to feel care for nations beyond England, and his letter 
 written in June to Philaras, an Athenian, is of special 
 interest. He speaks in it like a scholar of to-day, 
 who full of gratitude to Greek literature, longs for 
 
in.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 55 
 
 Greek liberty. " Whatever literary advance I have 
 made, I owe to steady intimacy with the writings of 
 the old Athenians from my youth upwards. Were 
 there in me such a power of pleading, that I could 
 rouse our armies and fleets for the deliverance of 
 Greece, the land of eloquence, from her Ottoman 
 oppressor, — to which mighty act you seem almost to 
 implore our aid — truly there is nothing I could more 
 desire to do. For what did even the bravest men of 
 old or the most eloquent, consider more glorious or 
 more worthy of them, than, by pleading or bravely 
 acting, to make the Greeks free and self-governing 
 (eXevdepovc; kcu avTovojjLovq). There is, however, some- 
 thing else to be tried, and in my judgment far the 
 most important : namely that some one should arouse 
 and rekindle in the minds of the Greeks, by the 
 relation of that old story, the old Greek valour itself, 
 the old industry, the old patience of labour. Could 
 some one do that .... then I am confident neither 
 would the Greeks be wanting to themselves, nor any 
 other nation wanting to the Greeks. Wl 
 
 It is pleasant to come across a letter so full of 
 interest to English literature in the midst of angry 
 disputes ; but its tone of apartness from strife was not 
 long the tone of Milton. 
 
 Regii Sanguinis Clamor. — He had waited a 
 whole year in vain for a reply from Salmasius who 
 was " biting his thumbs at Leyden, in silence, not 
 knowing how to salve his wounds and scars." Others 
 however took up his defence, and among many pam- 
 phlets, one at last appeared about August, 1652, 
 which called aloud for a reply. Issued anonymously, 
 its title was, Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Caelum ad- 
 versus Parricidas Anglicanos — The cry of the King's 
 blood to Heaven against the English Parricides. It 
 was able, scurrilous to excess, full of charges against 
 Milton's personal character, and generally attributed 
 to Alexander Morus. Moms was a Frenchman of 
 
 1 See for the whole letter, Masson's Life of Milton, vol. iv. 
 p. 444* 
 
56 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 Scotch descent, who had been professor of Greek and 
 a popular preacher in Geneva. Moving to Amster- 
 dam he made a friendship with Salmasius, which was 
 soon broken up by a domestic scandal. 
 
 Milton in 1653.— Milton did not answer this 
 pamphlet at once. His health was infirm, he was 
 grieved for his eyes ; but being relieved in December, 
 1652, of the heavier details of his secretaryship which 
 were put into Thurloe's hands, he employed the time 
 thus gained in making ready the answer. While he 
 waited, looking for Salmasius' attack, he was some- 
 what consoled for his ills by a new friend, who became 
 his assistant secretary, clung faithfully to his fortunes 
 and was worthy of his love. For it was late in this 
 year of 1652 that he made the acquaintance of 
 Andrew Marvell, whom he at once recommended 
 to the Council for employment. The dissolution 
 of the Rump of the Long Parliament by Cromwell 
 in April, 1653, was approved of by Milton. He 
 attested that approval at the time, if we may believe 
 that the letter was his which Masson supposes was 
 written to Marvell in the May of that year — A 
 letter to a gentletnan in the country, touching the 
 dissolution of the late Parlia?nent. Philip Meadows 
 was now joined to him as assistant, and Milton did 
 but little state work during the interim of Cromwell's 
 dictatorship. Among other friends, Roger Williams, 
 the colonist and president of Rhode Island, was 
 frequently with him. His translations of Ps. i.— viii. 
 and perhaps that of Horace, Ode v., Bk. i., were 
 made this year. At the end of it he heard of Sal- 
 masius' death, and saw the Protectorate begin. 
 
 Defensio Secunda.— It was not till May, 1654, 
 that Milton's answer to the Regit Sanguinis Clamor 
 appeared. Salmasius had died in September, 1653, 
 and Milton fell upon the unfortunate Morus, who, 
 he presumed, had written the book. A great part 
 of the Defensio Secunda is a terrible, reiterated, and 
 exhausting invective against Salmasius, Morus, and 
 the printer Ulac, who had published the Cry of the 
 
Hi.] MILTON'S SFXRETARYSHIP. 57 
 
 Royal Blood. Their lives and everything ill they had 
 ever done are pitilessly raked up ; again and again, 
 like an unsated shark, Milton returns to the charge 
 to draw fresh blood from his dead and living foes ; 
 it is the most merciless thing in our literature. 
 He had some cause for this, for he had been shame- 
 lessly vilified by the author of the tract ; and one 
 great interest of his reply is that in it, in self-defence, 
 he wrote a connected autobiographical sketch of 
 himself, on which all those who have written his life 
 have based their work. 
 
 Its Historical Interest is that, being written 
 after the Protectorate was established, it gives Milton's 
 view of that change of government. He repeats the 
 chief charges against Cromwell and defends him again 
 from them ; he makes fine panegyrics on Bradshaw, 
 Fairfax, and many other men of the Commonwealth, 
 and a most noble one on Cromwell, in which he 
 approves of the Protectorate, though not without 
 delicate warnings of its dangers. He bids Cromwell 
 remember how dear a thing is the liberty now 
 intrusted to him, and how disastrous it would be 
 should he invade the liberty he had defended ; and 
 the liberty he implores him to defend is one which 
 may be best preserved and established — by associating 
 with him the wisest companions of his labours ; by 
 the taking away of the evil of a state Church ; by 
 refraining from over legislation, keeping only those 
 laws which restrain positive crime; by making better 
 provisions for education ; by doing away with all 
 censorship of the press ; and by giving absolute 
 freedom to opinion. The point on which he was 
 strongest was the disestablishment of the Church. It 
 was the point on which Cromwell did not yield an 
 inch ; he did not answer the cry of Milton's sonnet 
 nor the prayer of the Defensio Secunda. 
 
 The Pro Se Defensio. — The chief person 
 attacked by Milton suffered not only in reality, 
 but in anticipation. Morus heard of the Defensio 
 Secunda before it appeared, and caused it to be 
 
58 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 plainly told to Milton that he was not the author 
 of the Cry. Milton did not believe his denial, but 
 before a year had passed by — partly in October, 1654, 
 and partly in April, 1655 — Moms replied in his Public 
 Testimony against the Calumnies of J oh?i Milton. Mil- 
 ton had already finished his reply to the first part 
 of this Testimony, but delayed it till he had also 
 answered the Supplement of April. The completed 
 book, the Pro se Defensio, appeared in August, 1655 : 
 in which he not only reiterates the immoral charges 
 against Morus, but, in spite of the proof to the con- 
 trary, asserts that he is rightly called the author of 
 the Regii Sanguinis Clamor. But he asserts it in a 
 modified form. He maintains that though Morus may 
 not have written the pamphlet, yet that he made himself 
 responsible for it. He asserts that Morus edited it, 
 prefixed a letter to it signed by his name, wrote the 
 defamatory iambics at the end, and took the credit of 
 the work until the storm arose. And all this, except 
 that Morus wrote the abusive iambics, seems to be 
 true. The thing not true is the authorship of Morus. 
 The real writer was Dr. Peter du Moulin, sometime 
 rector of Sheldrake, near York, who. himself in 1670, 
 claimed the authorship, and declared that Milton when 
 he wrote the Pro se Defensio knew that the Clamor 
 was not written by Morus, but by himself: but 
 " preferred my getting off scatheless to being found in 
 a ridiculous position himself." I cannot bring myself 
 to believe that Milton knew who was the real author, 
 but it seems plain that he was carried away by the 
 heat of controversy into an unworthy position. Inde- 
 pendent of the inexcusable ruthlessness of his pursuit 
 of Morus' character, he strove hard to make him 
 responsible, on the ground of a single letter and of 
 the editorship, for the whole of the pamphlet. Masson 
 says that after the Pro se Defensio, Milton preserved a 
 " dignified silence " on the matter. It does not seem 
 a dignified silence, and it does seem that, so far as 
 the personal controversy goes, Morus occupies a 
 better position than Milton. 
 
ill.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP 59 
 
 The End of the Controversial Period of 
 
 Milton's life draws near, and we are heartily glad to 
 leave behind us the records of his personalities. Full 
 of the deepest interest while they are autobiographical, 
 they are worse than uninteresting when they are bio- 
 graphical of an opponent. Milton was not an amiable 
 man, when he was traversed, either at home or 
 abroad. He was pleasant with his friends when his 
 friends were fond of him and gave back his courteous 
 praise \ he was pleasant when he was happy, and being 
 more happy when he was young, he was pleasantest 
 then. But he could not bear with patience domestic 
 misfortune which he had brought on himself; he was 
 a severe father and husband ; and when he was 
 attacked by an adversary he returned the blows, not 
 only for the sake of justice and truth but also be- 
 cause he was injured in his proud self-esteem, with 
 an unequalled ferocity. His intense individuality 
 made him all the more unfit for personal controversy ; 
 but much of the bitterness and violence of the manner 
 is to be accounted for by the painful repression for 
 so long of his true nature, and by the sacrifice of his 
 natural work. But, with all exceptions, no grander figure 
 stands forth in the whole of English literature, scarcely 
 any grander in English history, than the figure of the 
 blind, resolute, eloquent man who now, fallen on days 
 that grew graver and graver, sat in his room at West- 
 minster, impassioned for work, still more impassioned 
 for liberty; having done with personal wars; and 
 looking forward always to the time when he might 
 let himself loose, and, leaving the disputes and 
 passions of earth, soar into the poetic air in which 
 alone he breathed with ease and pleasure and 
 triumph. He loved beauty, not only the beauty of 
 human passion or of nature, but still more the solemn 
 beauty of lofty thought, more than any man in England 
 has ever loved it; and yet, in the midst of the 
 crowding imaginations into which he shaped the 
 messages his celestial patroness, Urania, sent him, he 
 kept himself to the work he thought needful for his 
 
60 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 fellow-citizens, and waited quietly, until all other 
 work was done, to do his greatest work. 
 
 Home Life and Second Marriage. — During 
 this last controversy, we only hear his lofty music in 
 one noble poem, the sonnet On the late Massacre 
 in Piedmont, written after the letter he had put into 
 Latin for the Protector and sent to the Duke of 
 Savoy, in July, 1655. During the winter, "being 
 now quiet from state adversaries and public contests," 
 he fell back on the work of his three large compila- 
 tions ; and seeing many friends, Lady Ranelagh, 
 Cyriack Skinner, Henry Lawrence, and others, was 
 happy and at rest. The gentle and patient sonnet to 
 his blindness, and the resolute one on the same subject 
 addressed to Cyriack Skinner, belong to this time ; 
 and the more cheerful and artistic side of his life 
 is revealed in two social sonnets to Lawrence and 
 Skinner, in which he invites them to supper. In 
 reading, composing, and in writing state letters, the 
 time wore quietly away till the 12th of November, 
 1656, when Milton married his second wife, Katharine 
 Woodcocke ; and nearly four months afterwards a 
 letter to Em eric Bigot speaks of his calm and patient 
 life. " I am glad to know," he says, " that you are 
 assured of my tranquil spirit in this great affliction of 
 the loss of sight, and also of the pleasure I have in 
 being civil and attentive in the reception of visitors 
 from abroad. Why, in truth, should I not gently bear 
 the loss of sight, when I may hope that it is not so 
 much lost as retracted inwards for the sharpening 
 rather than the blunting of my mental edge." A blow 
 fell upon him in the following February when he lost 
 his wife, and in the last of his sonnets he records his 
 grief, his love, his hope of meeting her in heaven. 
 The only other literary work . he did was to edit 
 Raleigh's Cabinet Council. 
 
 The State Letters. — During the second Pro- 
 tectorate Milton remained in office, and was now 
 assisted in it, in September, 1657, by Andrew 
 Marvell. In August, 1658, the series of state letters 
 
III.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 61 
 
 he had written for Cromwell closes five days before 
 the death of the Protector. They number 132 in all, 
 forty four written during the Commonwealth and 
 Cromwell's Dictatorship, eighty-eight during the 
 Protectorate. As the Protectorate lasted almost the 
 same time as the previous governments, Milton's work 
 during it was doubled, and it may be that in some of 
 the more important letters, such as those to the Duke 
 of Savoy and to the King of Sweden, we have the 
 result not only of Cromwell's will and Thurloe's sense, 
 but also of Milton's thought. Yet it was not as the 
 Latin clerk that he had any fame during the Pro- 
 tectorate, but as the writer. " He was mightily im- 
 portuned," says Aubrey, "to go into France and Italy. 
 Foreigners much admired him, and offered him great 
 preferments to come over to them, and chiefly came 
 to England to see O. Protector and Mr. J. Milton, and 
 would see the house and chamber where he was born." 
 It was a time of quiet, so quiet that he took up at 
 last his great poem. Paradise Lost was certainly 
 begun and conceived as an epic before the close 
 of the Protectorate, but the disastrous descent into 
 ruin after Cromwell's death of the cause he loved, 
 forced Milton back into politics. 
 
 From Cromwell's Death to the Restoration. 
 — During Richard's Protectorate Milton was still 
 Latin Secretary, and wrote seventeen state letters 
 (the last two for the restored Parliament being the 
 last he ever wrote) before the 25th of May, 1659, 
 on which day Richard sent in his abdication. He 
 did no more work of this kind, but he was nominally 
 continued as Latin Secretary until the publication 
 of his Ready and Easy Way, in March, 1660. The 
 opinions of that pamphlet, the growing anti-Repub- 
 licanism of the Council of State when it and Monk 
 were left in the management of the State on March 16, 
 were presumably the causes of his dismissal, and this 
 is the probable date of it. 
 
 The Pamphlets of this time were three ; the first 
 two on the question of a Church; the third on the 
 
62 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 question of a free Commonwealth. Taken together, 
 they fix Milton's political position during this period, 
 and they are supplemented by two letters on the 
 state of affairs to a friend and to General Monk. 
 Milton had always been divided from Cromwell on 
 the question of a State Church, and now with a new 
 Parliament and Protector he hoped to gain a hearing 
 on the subject. He divided the matter into two 
 parts. " Two things there be which have been ever 
 found working much mischief to the Church of God 
 and the advancement of faith, — Force on the one 
 side restraining, and Hire on the other side corrupting, 
 the teachers thereof." 
 
 The first pamphlet addressed to the Parliament of 
 1659, took up the question of Force, and its title 
 explains its bearing — A Treatise of Civil Power in 
 Ecclesiastical Causes : Shewing that it is not lawful for 
 any Power on Earth to compel in Matters of Religion. 
 He argues this proposition under four heads and 
 with absolute firmness. The last sentence is a 
 direct attack on Cromwell for his support of a 
 State Church. " Had he (the magistrate) once learnt 
 not further to concern himself with Church affairs, 
 half his labour might be spared and the Common- 
 wealth better tended." Milton's political position now 
 becomes clearer. He had supported the Protectorate 
 in the Defetisio Secunda, but with warnings given 
 to Cromwell of the dangers it might bring to liberty ; 
 and as time went on he saw the wisdom of his 
 warnings. His republicanism could not have approved 
 of the measures of Cromwell in the latter years of 
 his government, and we find him ominously silent 
 on political matters during those years. But he was 
 a personal friend to Cromwell, and in state employ. 
 He would then content himself with silence, especially 
 as he could see no chance of things being bettered 
 by opposition. Now however that Cromwell was 
 dead, and he himself still employed by a Republican 
 Parliament, he broke silence, and in this treatise 
 of Civil Power, expressed not only his blame of 
 
in.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 63 
 
 Cromwell's State Church policy, but plainly ranged 
 himself on the side of the Old Republican party. 
 A letter from one of this party (Moses Wall), quoted 
 by Masson, accepts him as one of the good old cause. 
 The second pamphlet fixed his position even more 
 plainly. It was put forth in August, 1659, — Consider- 
 ations touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings 
 out of the Church. It abolishes tithes, and does away 
 with all taxation of any form for the support of 
 religion ; it makes the payment of ministers wholly 
 voluntary. The former pamphlet disestablished, this 
 wholly disendows the Church. It contains an ad- 
 ditional reflection on Cromwell for making the Church 
 his ward — " to subject her to his (the magistrate's) 
 political drifts and conceived opinions by mastering 
 her revenue, and so by his Examinant Committees 
 to circumscribe her free election of ministers is 
 neither just nor pious !" The prefatory address to 
 Parliament separates him still more from the Crom- 
 wellite party. He calls the Parliament — that is, the 
 remnant of the Rump whom Cromwell had dissolved 
 " the authors and the best patrons of religious civil 
 liberty that ever these islands brought forth." The 
 next sentence is still more remarkable. " The care 
 and tuition of whose peace and safety, after a short 
 but scandalous night of interruption, is now again, 
 by a new dawning of God's miraculous providence 
 among us, revolved upon your shoulders." The 
 phrase in italics has been thought to be a reference 
 to Cromwell's Protectorate. If so, Milton's action 
 now would be a violent reaction, considering he had 
 been with Cromwell all these years ; and the phrase 
 seems not only unworthy of their long association, 
 but scarcely reconcilable with the praise in the 
 Defensio Secunda. It may be that it refers, as Masson 
 conjectures, to "the fortnight or so of ' Wallingford 
 House usurpation' which broke up Richard's Parlia- 
 ment and Protectorate," but it certainly looks like the 
 other. At any rate the whole drift of the address 
 and the treatise is against the measures of the 
 5 
 
64 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 Protectorate and in behalf of the ideas of the 
 Republicans of the Parliament. 
 
 A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Ruptures of 
 the Commonwealth, written after Lambert had driven 
 out the Parliament on October 13, begins Milton's 
 political recommendations. In the anarchy then pre- 
 vailing he left the question of a State Church aside and 
 turned to the question of the right form of govern- 
 ment. In this letter he sketches a constitution, formed 
 of a Council of State and an Army Council, both 
 bound by a solemn oath to support each other, to 
 establish liberty of conscience, and to resist Monarchy. 
 But bold as Milton seemed, he had not much hope 
 of good ; things seemed to him " worthier of silence 
 than of commemoration. What is needed is not one 
 to compile a history of our troubles, but one to happily 
 end the troubles .... amid these our civil discords 
 or rather sheer madnesses." The course of affairs 
 was not likely to make him less despondent. No 
 sooner was the Rump Parliament restored than 
 Monk marched into London, and Milton, still 
 hoping, prepared a new political pamphlet ; but 
 when Monk seceded from the Rump, when he 
 brought back to Parliament the members who had 
 protested eleven years ago against the Commonwealth 
 and had been shut out in consequence, and when the 
 Rump was " roasted " in the city, Milton felt that the 
 Republican cause was lost. Still he would not give 
 way, and on Monk being made Dictator he published 
 his pamphlet, March 3, 1660. 
 
 The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free 
 Commonwealth was a determined plea for a Repub- 
 lic against a Monarchy ; full of fierce warnings and 
 declamation against kings, and ending with a daring 
 application of Jeremiah's cry against Coniah to 
 Charles II. Modern democracy would hardly approve 
 of its main suggestion that the government should be 
 carried on by a Grand Council or Parliament of the 
 ablest men, to sit in perpetuity and do their business 
 by means of a Council of State ; but the suggestion 
 
in.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 65 
 
 agrees with Milton's view of a government of the 
 best, and with his dislike, even his contempt, of the 
 uneducated mob. Its argument and ideas were 
 repeated in a private letter to Monk — Present Means 
 and brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth. Both 
 fell dead on Monk and the Parliament ; royal ism 
 grew, Parliament was dissolved, and the Convention 
 Parliament summoned, April 25, 1660. He now 
 stood alone, with Lambert, against the whole nation. 
 
 Attacked on all sides, preached against by Dr. 
 Griffiths, looked coldly on by the General and the 
 Council, held up as fruit ripening for Tyburn, like 
 Abdiel, " among the faithless faithful only/' he set 
 himself to resist to the death. His notes on Dr. 
 Griffiths' sermon were followed by a second and en- 
 larged edition of the Ready and Easy Way, in which 
 he drew a fierce picture of the servile court and the 
 overwhelming evils of monarchy. It was answered 
 by two sharp pamphlets, No Blind Guides, and The 
 Dignity of Kingship asserted. But Milton had no 
 more to say. On the 8th of May Charles was pro- 
 claimed, on the 29th he entered London ; and Milton, 
 quitting his house in Petty France, lay in hiding against 
 the storm — while his Defensio Prima and Eikojwclastes 
 were burnt by the hangman — in a friend's house in 
 Bartholomew Close, till the Act of Indemnity in 
 August. For a time in custody, he was finally re- 
 leased in December, probably at the intercession of 
 Sir W. Davenant, the new Poet Laureate, to whom 
 Milton had done the same kindness under the 
 Commonwealth. So closed the long battle of 
 twenty years, and Milton, having done with Action, 
 took up, not exhausted, Contemplation; poor, but 
 rich in imagination, blind, but illumined with inward 
 light— 
 
 " He that has light within his own clear breast 
 May sit i' the centre, and enjoy bright day." 
 
66 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 PROSE WORKS AND SONNETS. 
 
 The Prose Works, as a whole, are not 
 readable. They are controversial; the interest of most 
 of their controversies is past, and they have all the 
 vices of controversy. They descend to brutalities of 
 personal abuse and recrimination; they are often 
 coarse, they are full of the miseries of debate. It is 
 only their force which, in their abusive passages, 
 saves them from being revolting. We step from 
 passages full of stately thought and splendid diction 
 into passages which we are almost ashamed to 
 read. It is the manner of the time, but it is not 
 a pleasant manner. The arguments are always pas- 
 sionate, but they are intellectually arranged. Their 
 arrangement, which is more on the ground the oppo- 
 nent occupies, his points one after another being taken 
 up, than on the ground of ideas, makes them cold in 
 spite of their passion. They are overloaded, piled up 
 with metaphors, syllogisms, and cold sarcasms. Illus- 
 trations, quotations, old myths in new forms, texts, 
 geography, all the kind of learning we find in Burton's 
 Anatomy of Melancholy, are poured, frequently without 
 careful choice, into the treatises. They are polemical, 
 but it is inaccurate to call them theological, or to say 
 that their controversy is religious. They are really, with 
 few exceptions, treatises in defence of religious, 
 civil, and social liberty. This was Milton's own 
 view of them, and if we are not much interested in 
 them, it is because the liberty they asked for is nearly 
 altogether won. 
 
 But there is another side. They have, throughout, 
 intellectual force, and the ease that comes of it. The 
 impression of an intense individuality settles down on 
 us, as we read, like a physical weight. Their ardour 
 for, and their belief in, the things maintained ; the sense 
 of a great moral power accompanying them, makes on 
 us that impression of distinct and powerful character 
 
ill.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 67 
 
 which in itself is a great part of style. Their mannei 
 is always victorious ; an audacity and a defiant life 
 fill their controversy. At times they rise into an elo- 
 quence which has nothing like it in English literature 
 for grandeur, and music, and splendour. This elo- 
 quence is mostly found in passages that have been 
 inspired by religious rapture. But his philosophic 
 love of temperance, based in him on intellect as well 
 as on conscience, and his love of liberty also inspire 
 him. The lines from Comus describe his temper in 
 these eloquent hours — 
 
 " Yet should I try, the uncontrolled worth 
 
 Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits 
 
 To such a flame of sacred vehemence, 
 
 That dumb things would be moved to sympathise." 
 
 Perhaps he is greatest of all when he binds up 
 religious rapture and the passion of liberty into one, 
 and pours forth prayer to God in behalf of freedom. 
 But I do not think such passages are pure prose. 
 Milton himself prefaces his outburst about " Zeal" by 
 saying, "That I may have leave to soar a little." 
 And they have the kind of construction he uses in 
 blank verse, and their music is like that of Paradise 
 Lost, a music like a fugue, overlapping and involved. 
 What Jubal did, Milton does here in these organ- 
 passages, 
 
 11 His volant touch 
 Instinct, through all proportions low and high 
 Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue." 
 
 He is nearly at his best as a prose _ writer in the 
 Areopagitica — he is quite at his best in the simple 
 and noble pieces of defensive autobiography. 
 
 Sonnets. — The Sonnets of Milton belong mainly 
 to the period of his prose writings. The ideal sonnet 
 is a poem of fourteen lines distributed into two 
 systems. The first system consists of the first 
 eight lines, and should be complete in itself; the 
 second system, of the six remaining lines. The eight 
 lines ought to have only two rhymes, and these rhymes 
 are arranged in a fixed order. The first, fourth, fifth, 
 
6S MILTON. [chap. 
 
 and eighth lines must rhyme with each other. This 
 is the " strong framework " of the sonnet. Within 
 this, the second, third, sixth, and seventh are also to 
 rhyme together. This is the inner filling up of the 
 framework of the first system. After the first system, 
 at which there is a pause in the thought, the second 
 system of six lines ought only to have two rhymes ; 
 one after another, a b, a b, a b. This is the perfect 
 sonnet. But sonnet writers, especially in English, 
 where rhymes are not so numerous as in Italian, 
 allow themselves the relaxation of two rhymes within 
 the filling up of the framework of the first system, 
 and make the second and third rhyme together, and 
 the sixth and seventh. They relax still further in 
 the second system and bring into it three rhymes, 
 and these are arranged in almost any order which 
 suits the convenience or fancy of the writer. 
 
 The sonnet arose in Italy. Wyatt brought it from 
 Italy to England and wrote it more strictly than 
 Surrey who relaxed it. The poets who followed were 
 content to interchange its rhymes as they pleased, 
 provided that the whole poem consisted of fourteen 
 lines. Spenser and Shakspere adopted each a 
 special type, and established it. They both use 
 three quatrains with a pause in the sense after each, 
 and then a couplet at the close, which epigram- 
 matically resumes or points the thought of the sonnet. 
 But Spenser uses only five rhymes, while Shakspere 
 uses seven. In both, the rhymes are alternate in the 
 three quatrains, but Spenser makes the last rhyme of 
 the first quatrain begin the second, and the last of 
 the second begin the third. His form, then, has less 
 rhymes than Shakspere's, but it is less compact in 
 the parts. Both, as well as Drummond, who kept 
 nearly to the Italian form, held to the rhyming 
 couplet at the close, which was an abomination in 
 critical eyes. Milton uses it but once in his English 
 sonnets. 
 
 Milton brought back the sonnet to its original and 
 strict type, the type that Petrarca fixed. He calls his 
 
hi.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 69 
 
 first sonnet a composition in the Petrarchian stanza. 
 The first was written on leaving Cambridge, the second 
 at Horton. Five Italian sonnets and a canzone follow, 
 and were written in Italy. The eighth was written 
 in 1642, and the last sixteen when he had entered 
 into the noises of his controversial career. Then 
 
 " In his hand 
 The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew 
 Soul-animating strains. 
 
 Johnson said, " three of them were not bad ; that 
 Milton's was a genius that could hew a colossus out 
 of a rock, but could not carve heads on cherry- 
 stones." It is a strange judgment. If anything is re- 
 markable in Milton's sonnets it is their noble man- 
 ner. The three controversial ones, on the Divorce 
 Tracts, and on the Forcers of Conscience, fall below 
 the stately level, but that is to be expected. The last 
 of these three is forcible enough, and Milton, as if he 
 thought the subject transgressed the dignity of the 
 sonnet, separated it from that form of verse so far 
 as to add a tail to it. It was a sonnet con coda, a 
 form used by the Italians in satire. The two first 
 are jenx d* esprit, and, like all Milton's works of that 
 kind, awkward and lumbering. 
 
 Four were written to women. Because Milton was 
 bitter against the bad woman in Dalila, because he held 
 strong views on the supremacy of man, it has been 
 too much forgotten how much he loved and honoured 
 women. The Tracts on Divorce speak of the com- 
 fort, "ravishment," and support in matters of love, in 
 home life, in intellectual conversation, in piety, and 
 in civil concerns, which a man may have of a woman. 
 The " honoured wife of Winchester " earned his early 
 praise ; the Italian sonnets, in the midst of their 
 conceits, seem to record a real passion, though a 
 brief one, and they are touched with a dignity which, 
 more even than the phrases used, mark his reverence 
 for his lady. The Lady in Com us will not be used 
 to support the theory that he despised women 
 though he made them inferior to men : she is 
 
?o MILTON. [chap. 
 
 as noble in intellect as in purity. All through 
 Paradise Lost, Eve's intelligence is only less than 
 Adam's : she has many fine qualities, mostly the 
 poetic ones, which Adam has not, and even after 
 her fall the reverence of Adam for her is insisted on. 
 His love for her never fails ; it is made supreme. 
 And here, in the sonnets, he sketches, with all the 
 care and concentration the sonnet demands, and each 
 distinctively, four beautiful types of womanhood — the 
 " virgin wise and pure" ; the noble matron, " honoured 
 Margaret " ; the Christian woman, his friend, whose 
 ' ' works, and alms, and good endeavour " followed her 
 to the pure immortal streams ; the perfect wife, whom 
 he looked to see in heaven — 
 
 " Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shine 
 So clear, as in no face with more delight." 
 
 The personal sonnets have great and solemn beauty, 
 the beauty that belongs to the revelation of a great 
 spirit. We may well compare the first sonnet, with its 
 quiet self-confidence, its resolved humility, its aspi- 
 ration to perform the great Taskmaster's work, with 
 the sonnet written, twenty years after, on his blindness, 
 in 1652. It looks back over many sorrows and 
 tumults to the earlier one ; and, depressed by his 
 blindness, he thinks how little has been, and may 
 now be done ; but deep religious patience helps him 
 to think that God works, and that 
 
 " They also serve who only stand and wait." 
 
 Not less noble in thought, not less stately in expres- 
 sion, but full of the veteran's consciousness of work, 
 is the sonnet written three years later to Cyriack 
 Skinner, also on his blindness. He does not bate 
 one jot of hope, but steers right onward. What 
 supports him — having lost his eyes ? 
 
 " The conscience, friend, to have lost them overpli'd 
 In liberty's defence, my noble task." 
 
 These three sonnets read together and, dated 1631, 
 1652, 1655, bring together three aspects of Milton's 
 
III.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 71 
 
 nature and two divisions of his life. The sonnet 
 written when the Assault was intended to the City, and 
 three others, written to Lawes, and Mr. Lawrence, and 
 Cyriack Skinner, may also be called personal. They 
 show Milton in his artist nature as the poet who knew 
 his own worth ; as the lover of music and as the 
 musician ; the lover of Italy, of Dante's poem, and 
 of Tuscan airs ; the bright and tender friend ; the 
 lover of cheerful society ; the lover of classic verse. 
 No sonnets in the English tongue come nearer than 
 those to Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner to the mingled 
 festivity and serious grace of Horace, and their re- 
 ligious spirit, graver than that of Horace, makes them 
 Miltonic. 
 
 Of the political sonnets, the finest is that to Cromwell. 
 Those to Fairfax and Vane are "noble odes," but 
 the ode to Cromwell is written like an organ song 
 by Handel in his triumphant hour. More solemn 
 still, and justly called a psalm, is the stern and 
 magnificent summons to God to avenge His 
 slaughtered saints, slain by the bloody Piedmontese. 
 It is harsh, some have said; nay, it is of great 
 Nature herself: it has "a voice whose sound is like 
 the sea." 
 
 Milton, after the Restoration, lived for a short 
 time in Holborn, but soon removed to Jewin Street, in 
 Aldersgate. He had lost a large sum of money and 
 was now poor, 
 
 " On evil days now fallen, and evil tongues, 
 
 In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, 
 And evil tongues." 
 
 He had not much comfort from his daughters. The 
 two youngest were " condemned to the performance 
 of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages 
 of whatever book he should think fit to peruse — a 
 trial of patience beyond endurance; it was endured 
 by both for a time — yet the irksomeness of this 
 employment could not always be concealed, but 
 broke out more and more into expressions of uneasi- 
 
72 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 ness ; so that at length they were all, even the eldest 
 also, sent out to learn embroideries in gold and 
 silver." This is Phillips' account, and it stirs our 
 pity for the children. But it is plain from Milton's 
 will, in which he leaves the portion due to him from 
 Mr. Powell "to the unkind children" he had by his 
 first wife, that there was undutifulness on their side. 
 Christopher Milton gave evidence that Milton had 
 complained to him that " his daughters were careless 
 of him being blind, and made nothing of deserting 
 him." Elizabeth Fisher's evidence declares that 
 Mary Milton had said, on hearing of her father's 
 wedding — "that that was no news, but if she could 
 hear of his death that was something : " and that 
 Milton had further told her, " that all his said children 
 did combine together and counsel his maid-servant to 
 cheat him in her marketings, and that his children had 
 made away some of his books and would have sold 
 the rest of his books to the dunghill woman." It is a 
 piteous picture on both sides of the account ; and the 
 only spot of light in it is that his youngest daughter 
 Deborah, who was Milton's favourite, and who was 
 only eleven years old when he was in Jewin Street, 
 may not have been so bad as the rest. She certainly 
 used to speak of him with fond enthusiasm when 
 she was an old woman. 
 
 Friends, however, still clung to him — Lady Ranelagh, 
 Andrew Marvel 1, Marchamont Needham the political 
 writer, young Lawrence, Cyriack Skinner, Dr. Paget, 
 Edward Phillips, his nephew who helped him in his 
 literary work, and Thomas Ellwood the Quaker who 
 became one of his readers. At Dr. Paget's recom- 
 mendation, Milton now married, while he was still in 
 Jewin Street, Elizabeth Minshull, of a good Cheshire 
 family, a wise and kindly woman, who kept her house 
 and her husband excellently well. Shortly after this 
 marriage he lodged at the house of Millington, the 
 bookseller of Little Britain, who used to "lend a 
 guiding hand to his dark steps," and then, in 1664, 
 took a house in Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill 
 
in] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 73 
 
 Fields, where he remained ten years, until he 
 died. 
 
 Milton's last Works. — It was here that he com- 
 pleted Paradise Lost and wrote Paradise Regained and 
 Samson Agonistes. During this time he went on with 
 and finished his History of Britain, published in 1669 ; 
 his Treatise on Christian Doctrine, hereafter noticed ; 
 his Artis Logical, 1672 ; and his Latin Accidence, 1669. 
 He continued to work on the collection of materials 
 for a Dictionary of the Latin Tongue. In 1673 he 
 issued a Tract on True Religion, in which I regret to 
 say his toleration failed him. He urged Protestants 
 to join their forces against " Popery," and, while they 
 refrained from punishing " the Papists ; ' in religion 
 or property, not to tolerate the public or private 
 performance of their rites. A compilation, A Brief 
 History of Muscovy, was published after his death in 
 1 686= In 1673 he republished, with some additions, 
 his early poems ; and in the next year, the year in 
 which he died, his Familiar Epistles in Latin appeared, 
 and with them the Academical Exercises at Cam- 
 bridge, and a translation of the Declaration of the 
 Poles on the Election of John Sobieski. This was his 
 last literary work. 
 
 Milton's Mode of Life during these ten years 
 remained unchanged. Once, in 1665, during the 
 violence of the plague, he stayed in Buckinghamshire 
 in a house taken for him by Ellwood at Chalfont St. 
 Giles. After the Great Fire and the publication of 
 Paradise Lost, his reputation grew. Numbers of 
 visitors and foreigners came to see him, "much more 
 than he did desire." Among the rest was Dryden 
 who, on reading the epic, broke out — " This man cuts 
 us all out, and the ancients too ! " He received his 
 friends at six in the evening and talked to them till 
 eight. There was then a supper of olives or some 
 light thing, and after supper he smoked his pipe and 
 drank a glass of water and went to bed at nine. He 
 rose early, at four in summer and five in winter, and 
 after listening to a chapter or two in the Hebrew Bible, 
 
74 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 " contemplated " and worked within himself. At 
 seven his man came to him again and then read and 
 wrote for him till the midday dinner. After dinner 
 he used to walk in his garden or play on the organ, 
 and either sing himself or make his wife sing, and 
 the rest of the afternoon was given to work. There 
 were daily about him " persons of man's estate who 
 greedily catched at the opportunity" of reading 
 to him, of writing from his dictation, and of assist- 
 ing him in the many references, books and maps he 
 had to consult during the composition of his later 
 works. The old man, whose eyes seemed still clear, 
 and whose beautiful hair still fell upon his shoulders, 
 had many helpers, and the house was pleasant. His 
 own talk was " extreme pleasant," intermixed with 
 satirical humour. He was grave, though not melan- 
 choly, or not until the later part of his life, and had 
 " a certain serenity of mind, not condescending to 
 little things," yet bright through his sadness, and not 
 to be subdued with pain. " In his gout fits he w r ould 
 be very cheerful, and would sing," and his daughter 
 Deborah used to say that he was " delightful 
 company j the soul of the conversation," on account 
 of "a flow of subject and an unaffected cheerfulness 
 and civility." He loved the " urbanity which com- 
 prehends not only the innocent refinements and 
 elegances of conversation, but also acuteness and 
 appropriateness of observation and reply," 1 and 
 Vossius and Heinsius speak of his courteous, and 
 gentle, and affable, and contented ways. He loved 
 hospitality ; to have " mirth that after no repenting 
 draws," to indulge, by the fire on a sullen day, the 
 cheerful hour, to have the neat repast 
 
 " Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise 
 To hear the lute well toucht, or artful voice 
 Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air. 
 He who of these delights can judge, and spare 
 To interpose them oft, is not unwise." 
 
 1 Christian Doctrine. 
 
III.] MILTON'S SECRETARYSHIP. 75 
 
 Yet no one could be more temperate. He was very 
 sparing in the use of wine, abstemious in his diet, not 
 fastidiously nice or delicate in his choice of dishes, 
 "eating and drinking that he might live, not living 
 that he might eat and drink." This was his simple, 
 sacred, happy way of life, and out of it grew the beau- 
 tiful spirit of inner imagination that did not cease 
 
 " To wander where the Muses haunt 
 Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill, 
 Smit with the love of sacred song ; " 
 
 nor to feel the celestial Light shine inward, and 
 irradiate his mind through all her powers. VVe know 
 from Paradise Lost and Samson how deeply his blind- 
 ness oppressed his heart; how "an age too late," he 
 thought, in one of his sad hours, and a " cold climate " 
 and years had damped his wing ; how, cut off from 
 the cheerful ways of men, and surrounded by cloud 
 and ever during dark, he sorrowed that he could not 
 see 
 
 ' * Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn, 
 Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, 
 Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine. " 
 
 Nor less did the state of his country afflict him. He 
 fears for it, in the close of his History of Britain, the 
 revolution from like vices, without amendment, of like 
 calamities to those he has described. His patriotic 
 piety, has almost left him, he says, without a country. 
 He heard around him the noise of Bacchus and his 
 crew. But none can read Paradise Lost without wonder 
 at a fulness of creative power which must have made 
 him happy. He is no object of pity. And he had 
 great allies and comfort. He thought of the old 
 t blind poets and prophets, and compared his fate, 
 and perhaps his fame, with theirs j nightly he visited 
 Sion and his flowery brooks ; in his soul he felt the 
 holy Light, "its sovran vital lamp;" the thoughts 
 that " voluntary move harmonious numbers " were 
 his food : Urania led him, an earthly guest, into the 
 heaven of heavens, and when he returned to earth, 
 
76 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 visited his slumbers, unimplored, and while he slept 
 dictated to him and inspired — 
 
 " Easy my unpremeditated verse." 
 
 This was his inner life, nor does the picture of him 
 given to us by an ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire, 
 Dr. Wright, lessen but rather enhance our sense of its 
 beauty. " He found John Milton, then growing old, 
 in a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in 
 an elbow chair, and dressed neatly in black ; pale, but 
 not cadaverous ; his hands and fingers gouty, and with 
 chalk-stones. He used also to sit in a gray coarse 
 cloth coat, at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, 
 in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air. And 
 so, as well as in his room, he received the visits of 
 people of distinguished parts, as well as quality." 
 
 Death. — His gout was hereditary, and he died of 
 it, but so peacefully that none knew the moment that 
 he passed away on Sunday, November 8. He was 
 buried beside his father, in the chancel of St. Giles, 
 Cripplegate, November 12, 1674. "All his learned 
 and great friends in London, not without a friendly 
 concourse of the vulgar," went with his body to the 
 grave. So, at last he joined himself 
 
 " With those just spirits that wear victorious palms." 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 PARADISE LOST. — PARADISE REGAINED.— SAMSON AGONISTES. 
 
 Paradise Lost was ready for publication at the 
 end of 1666. The Archbishop of Canterbury per- 
 formed his duty of licensing through his chaplains, 
 and the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, after some hesitation, 
 chiefly caused by the lines 594-599, Bk. i., where 
 the disastrous twilight of the sun " with fear of change 
 perplexes monarchs," placed his imprimatur on the 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 77 
 
 cover. On April 27, 1667, Samuel Simmons, pub- 
 lisher, agreed with Milton to give him 5/. for the MS., 
 and after each of the first four editions 5/. more, each 
 edition reckoning at 1,300 copies. The book was 
 then published, August 20 — Paradise Lost, a Poem, 
 written in Ten Books, by John Milton. It was a small 
 quarto of 342 pages, raised in a subsequent issue (there 
 were many fresh titles) to 356 pages by the addition of 
 the address of the printer to the reader ; by Milton's 
 preface, entitled " The Verse ; " and by the prose argu- 
 ments to the several books. The book, which was 
 well got up and printed, sold for 3s. — about 7s. 6a 1 . of 
 our money — and the first edition was exhausted in 
 eighteen months. Milton's receipt to Simmons for 5/. 
 more on April 26, 1669, tells us that the first edition 
 of his poem brought him in exactly 10/. The second 
 edition, in 1674, the year of Milton's death, was 
 published in twelve books instead of ten. Three 
 new lines were added to the beginning of Bk. viii. 
 and five to the beginning of Bk. xii. Bks. vii. 
 and x. being each divided into two. Commendatory 
 verses were inserted at the beginning by Barrow and 
 Marvell, but still greater praise than these gave him 
 was given him by John Dryden, who, having obtained 
 leave from Milton " to tag his verses " in rhyme, made 
 an opera out of Paradise Lost {The State of Lnnocence), 
 but said in his preface that the original was undoubt- 
 edly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime 
 poems which either this age or nation has produced. 
 The third edition appeared in 1678, and Simmons, in 
 1680, paid Milton's widow the 5/. he owed her since 
 1678, and 3/. more "in full payment of all my right, 
 title, or interest which I have or ever had in Paradise 
 Lost ; " that is 2/. less than his original agreement. 
 Simmons sold his copyright to Aylmer, who had 
 published the Epistolai Familiares, who again sold it, 
 one half in 1683, and the second half in 1690, to 
 Jacob Tonson, the well-known publisher, who set out 
 the fourth edition, in 1688, by subscription ; the third 
 book, they say, so published in England. All the 
 
78 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 best men of the day subscribed, Dryden and Somers 
 being foremost in the work. It was in this edition 
 that, under White's portrait of Milton, Dryden wrote 
 the lines so often quoted : — 
 
 " Three Poets in three distant ages born, 
 Greece, Italy, and England, did adorn. 
 The first in loftiness of thought surpassed ; 
 The next in majesty ; in both the last : 
 The force of nature could no further go : 
 To make a third she joined the former two." l 
 
 The sixth edition was made remarkable by the anno- 
 tations of Patrick Hume, and it was after the ninth 
 that Addison's criticisms in the Saturday Spectators 
 from January to May, 17 12, excited a wider interest 
 in the poem. Since then the editions are too 
 numerous to mention. The poets Tickell and Fenton 
 edited it, the latter with a pleasant life. Bentley edited 
 it, and, under the supposition that Milton's amanuensis 
 made mistakes in spelling and in words, inserted 
 whole sentences, and amended it in his own fashion, 
 " a supposition rash and groundless, if he thought it 
 true ; and vile and pernicious, if, as is said, he in 
 private allowed it to be false." Bishop Newton's 
 edition is with notis variorum. It is superseded by 
 Todd's edition, and by Mr. Thomas Keightley's, and 
 Mr. R. C. Browne's, all of them books well worth 
 consulting. The last edition is one to which all 
 who love Milton are deeply indebted, and the 
 writer of this little Primer especially — Milton's Poetical 
 Works, by David Mas son. 
 
 Mode of Composition. — We have seen in the 
 course of this book how the thought of a great epic 
 grew up in Milton's mind, and how, between 1640-42, 
 Paradise Lost, conceived as a drama, was present to 
 his eyes. Four different drafts of it exist, and I have 
 
 1 The thought is borrowed from Selvaggi's complimentary 
 lines : — 
 
 " Graecia Moeonidem jactet sibi, Roma Maronem ; 
 Anglia Miltonum jactat utrique parem." 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 79 
 
 already mentioned that the lines — Bk. iv., 32-41 — 
 were written about 1642, and were designed for the 
 beginning of the tragedy. At the age of fifty, at the 
 close of the Protectorate, 1658, he began the poem in 
 the house in Petty France, and all but completed it, 
 according to Aubrey, in 1663. It was in 1665 that 
 he showed it, finished, to Ellwood the Quaker ; the 
 two years being probably spent in correcting and 
 revising it. The Plague and the Fire delayed its 
 publication till 1667. It was composed at intervals 
 and dictated to his two younger daughters, or to his 
 wife, or to any amanuensis that happened to be near. 
 " I had the perusal of it," says Phillips, " from the very 
 beginning — in a parcel of ten, twenty, or thirty verses 
 at a time, which, being written by whatever hand 
 came next, might possibly want correction as to the 
 orthography and pointing ; and having, as the summer 
 came on, not being showed any for a considerable 
 while, and desiring the reason thereof, was answered 
 that his vein never happily flowed but from the 
 Autumnal Equinoctial to the Vernal, and that what- 
 ever he attempted at other times was never to his satis- 
 faction, though he exerted his fancy never so much, 
 so that, in all the years he was about this poem, he 
 may be said to have spent but half his time therein." 
 Richardson the painter has handed down some 
 further details. That when he dictated, as we have 
 seen, not only to his daughters, but to any one at 
 hand — he sat leaning backward obliquely in an easy 
 chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it. That 
 he frequently composed in bed on a morning — that 
 when he could not sleep, but lay awake whole nights, 
 he tried, but not one verse could he make. At other 
 times flowed " ' easy his unpremeditated verse,' with 
 a certain impetus and cestro, as himself seemed to 
 believe. Then, at what hour soever, he rung for his 
 daughter to secure what came. I have also been 
 told he could dictate many, perhaps forty, lines, in a 
 breath, and then reduce them to half the number." 
 The Verse is blank verse, the unrhymed metre of 
 6 
 
80 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 five accents and ten syllables, first used by Surrey in 
 his translation of the Fourth ^Eneid. When Milton 
 says in his preface that his neglect of rhyme is an 
 " example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty 
 recovered to heroic poem," he either did not know of 
 Surrey's effort, which would be strange, or he chose 
 to disdain it as a translation. It had long been the 
 habit to use blank verse in the drama, and Milton 
 had done it already in the Comus. In the drama 
 many licences were permitted, nay, encouraged, and 
 Milton uses these in Comus, and with more freedom 
 still in Samson Agonistes. He keeps within stricter 
 limits in the narrative blank verse of Paradise Lost and 
 Regained, but he does use, in varying quantity through 
 these books — a quantity varying towards increase in 
 the parts where dialogue occurs — the "weak ending" 
 of an additional svllable, and he admits feet of three 
 syllables with frequency into his lines, instead of the 
 regular iambus. Sometimes, but very rarely, he ad- 
 mits two feet of three syllables, lengthening his line 
 thus to twelve syllables. And of course he uses, 
 exactly as he thought most fit, the trochee, or the 
 spondee, instead of the iambus, in the ordinary line of 
 ten syllables. His stops occur most frequently at the 
 end of the third foot, but they are fixed, according to 
 his sense of poetic fitness, at the end of any of the ten 
 syllables, and all who care for blank verse would do 
 well to study them where they occur, and to ask the 
 reason Milton chose then and there to place them. 
 Their frequent change gives great variety to the verse, 
 and often great beauty and force ; but the variety 
 is sometimes dearly bought, and then we reluctantly 
 remember Johnson's judgment, that this way of pro- 
 ducing variety changes the measures of a poet to the 
 periods of a declaimer. When Milton recommended 
 that "the sense should be variously drawn out from 
 one verse to another," he recommended an excellent 
 thing, but he made very large demands on his principle. 
 It is almost impossible sometimes to distinguish, on 
 hearing them, where Milton's lines begin or end, and 
 
iv.] TARADISE LOST. 81 
 
 when that is the case, the fit idea of blank verse is 
 wronged. There is a natural pause at the end of a 
 line, and it ought not to be in the midst of a word, 
 nor should it separate a qualifying word from the 
 word qualified — a substantive from its adjective, a 
 preposition from the words it governs, a personal 
 pronoun from the verb that governs it, and into these 
 faults, though rarely, Milton falls in his passion for 
 variety. The natural pause in the middle of the 
 verse in strictness obeys the same rules, but some 
 have doubted its existence, and, at any rate, it has 
 been so played with, that there is nothing to blame in 
 Milton's constant violation of its rules, rules which, if 
 carried out, would too much fetter the movement of 
 blank verse. 
 
 When he demanded for true musical delight not 
 only the sense variously drawn out from one verse 
 to another, but also "apt numbers and fit quantities of 
 syllables," he was thinking of his own practice. His 
 apt numbers are well dwelt on by Dr. Guest. " Per- 
 haps no man ever paid the same attention to the 
 quality of his rhythm as Milton. What other poets 
 effect, as it were by chance, Milton achieved by the 
 aid of science and art ; he studied the aptness of his 
 numbers, and diligently tutored an ear which nature 
 had gifted with the most delicate sensibility. In the 
 flow of his rhythm, in the quality of his letter sounds, 
 in the disposition of his pauses, his verse almost ever 
 fits the subject and so insensibly does poetry blend 
 with this — the last beauty of exquisite versification — 
 that the reader may sometimes doubt whether it be 
 the thought itself, or merely the happiness of its 
 expression, which is the source of a gratification so 
 deeply felt." 
 
 As to the "fit quantities of syllables," I con- 
 jecture that Milton meant that in every line it was 
 enough if the requisite number of accents were found, 
 within the fair limits of the variety allowed to blank 
 verse. He stretched those limits sometimes to their 
 utmost extent, but when he did so it was not from 
 
82 MILTON. [chap, 
 
 laziness or from an oversight. We may be quite cer- 
 tain that when so great an artist in verse, as Milton, 
 was writing, lines which seem to us unmusical were 
 made so with a purpose, and that we cannot rashly 
 condemn them until we know his purpose. He in- 
 sists on accents that seem to us most strangely put, 
 in order that we may understand his thought more 
 clearly ; in order that he may express his thoughts in 
 a very brief compass ; in order that he may make 
 some particular thought or particular thing in his 
 description emphatic. Take one of the least musical 
 lines in Milton, the last line of Paradise Regained, 
 and accent and read it thus : — 
 
 " Home— to his mother's house— private— returned. 5 ' 
 
 It seems impossible to have pleasure in the awkward 
 verse; but Milton wished to put all these thoughts 
 and facts into one line, and he did it by his accents. 
 Take two other well-known lines and read them as 
 accented underneath — and they are as fine as possible. 
 
 " An'd— Tiresias and Phineus— prophets old." 
 " Burnt — after them, to the bottomless pit." 
 
 It has been said that the following line has more 
 than five accents ; but Milton meant it to have only 
 five. The accent in each of the three first couples 
 marks that the description of the several kinds of 
 similar things ceases — 
 
 " Rocks, caves— lakes, fens— bogs, dens— and shapes of death." 
 
 In every case, especially where one word of one syllable 
 is dwelt on so as to have the value of two syllables, 
 the reader is called on by Milton to find meaning in 
 his accentuation ; nor do I know of a single instance 
 in which the rule of five accents is really violated : 
 though there are thousands of instances in which the 
 accents are placed with a freedom, an audacity, an 
 absolute carelessness of mere rule which are only 
 lawful to a great artist. Nor may he use this license 
 
IV .] PARADISE LOST. 83 
 
 unless he happens to be writing at a white heat of 
 imagination, and Milton, more cool in Paradise Re- 
 gained than in Paradise Lost, fails in music when he 
 is over reckless in metre. We do not complain, we 
 are delighted with the daring of 
 
 " Shook the arsenal, — and fulmined over Greece," 
 but we do complain, and justly, of lines like these — 
 
 " But to vanquish by wisdom hellish wiles," 
 
 ***** 
 
 " Such solitude before choicest society." 
 
 There is all the difference between the first and the 
 two last lines that is made by the imagination on fire, 
 and the imagination asleep or exhausted. 
 
 The Style is always great. On the whole it is 
 the greatest in the whole range of English poetry, so 
 great that when once we have come to know and 
 honour and love it, it so subdues the judgment that 
 the judgment can with difficulty do its work with 
 temperance. It lifts the low, gives life to the com- 
 monplace, dignifies even the vulgar, and makes us 
 endure that which is heavy and dull. We catch our- 
 selves admiring things not altogether worthy of 
 admiration, because the robe they wear is so royal. 
 No style, when one has lived in it, is so spacious and 
 so majestic a place to walk in. It is like the fig-tree 
 he describes, which 
 
 " In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms 
 Branching so broad and long, that in the ground 
 The bending twigs take root, and daughters grow 
 About the mother tree, a pillared shade 
 High overarcht, and echoing walks between." 
 
 Fulness of sound, weight of march, compactness of 
 finish, fitness of words to things, fitness of pauses to 
 thought, a strong grasp of the main idea while other 
 ideas play round it, power of digression without loss of 
 the power to return, equality of power over vast spaces 
 of imagination, sustained splendour when he soars 
 
 "With plume so strong, so equal and so soft," 
 
84 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 a majesty in the conduct of thought, and a music in 
 the majesty which fills it with solemn beauty, belong 
 one and all to the style ; and it gains its highest 
 influence on us, and fulfils the ultimate need of 
 a grand style in being the easy and necessary ex- 
 pression of the very character and nature of the man. 
 It reveals Milton, as much, sometimes even more 
 than his thought. 
 
 It has its faults. It is often, not only needlessly, 
 but as it were of set purpose, involved; "not dense 
 merely, but contorted or gnarled in structure," as 
 Mr. Masson, with regard to certain passages, well 
 says. It loses freedom of movement in its involu- 
 tions ; it delays too long, as it winds in and out, 
 to express the thought or the image ; it is rarely 
 brief, even where brevity would be the life of thought. 
 It is troubled with ellipses, and the inversions are 
 sometimes, even when they are deliberate, weari- 
 some. The Latinisms and forms of expression 
 belonging to other languages are frequent, and have 
 been much blamed, but they are a true part of the 
 style, and the natural property of the man. But 
 blame as we like, one thing is true, the style is 
 never prosaic. The poetic form was Milton's native 
 tongue. 
 
 The Cosmography. — The Universe in Paradise 
 Lost consists of Heaven or the Empyrean, of Hell, of 
 Chaos, and of our World. 
 
 Heaven is on high, indefinitely extended, and walled 
 towards Chaos with a crystal wall, having opal towers 
 and sapphire battlements. In the wall a vast gate 
 opens on Chaos, and from it runs a broad and 
 ample road, " powdered with stars," whose dust is gold, 
 to the throne of God. The throne is in the midst of 
 Heaven, high on the sacred hill, lost in ineffable light. 
 In the hill is a cave whence the alternate light and 
 shade of Heaven proceed, for the angels rest in sleep 
 and wake to work. Around the hill is the vast plain 
 clothed with flowers, watered by living streams among 
 the trees of life, where on great days the angelic 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 85 
 
 assembly meets ; and nearer to the hill is the pave- 
 ment like a sea of jasper. Beyond, are vast regions, 
 where are the blissful bowers of " amarantine shade, 
 fountain, or spring ; " among which in fellowships 
 of joy sit the sons of light. The trees bear ambrosial 
 fruitage and the vines nectar ; the ground is covered 
 each morn with pearly rain and the boughs with mel- 
 lifluous dews. In the midst is the Fount of Life, 
 shaded by the leaves and flowers of the Tree of Life, 
 that also grows 
 
 — " where the river of Bliss through midst of Heav'n 
 Rolls o'er Elysian flow'rs her amber stream." 
 
 These regions extend infinitely, as varied in landscape 
 as the earth — tree-clad hills and vales, woods, streams 
 and plains ; and among them the archangels have 
 their royal seats built as Satan's was, far-blazing on a 
 hill, of diamond quarries and of golden rocks. 
 
 Chaos is opened on by the great gate. It is a 
 a vast immeasurable abyss — 
 
 " Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild, 
 Up from the bottom turned by furious winds 
 And surging waves." 
 
 Hot, cold, moist, and dry strive here for mastery. It 
 is " the womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave." — 
 Noises loud and ruinous fill it, but the loudest noise 
 is where, on its frontiers, towards Heaven, Chaos and 
 his consort Night, amid the warring elements, keep 
 their pavilion. 
 
 Hell lies in the depths of Chaos, a fall of nine days 
 and nights from Heaven. In its midst, and it is con- 
 ceived as circular, is the bottomless lake of fire, 
 into which pour the four rivers, Acheron, Phlegeton, 
 Styx, and Cocytus. Around the lake a vast space 
 of dry land extends, formed of solid fire, in one of 
 whose hills Pandemonium was formed entire, and 
 rose out of it, when formed, like an exhalation. 
 The City of Hell is afterwards built round Pande- 
 monium on this dry ground of fire, and the country 
 round the city is broken with rock, and valley, and 
 
86 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 hill, and plain. Further on, in another concentric 
 band, we catch a glimpse of a desert land, seemingly 
 moist, but giving no relief ; full of rocks, caves, lakes, 
 fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, round which 
 Lethe, like the fabled Ocean stream, flows in a circle, 
 and environs Hell. After that is the realm of cold, 
 
 " Beyond this flood, a frozen continent 
 Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms 
 Of whirlwind and dire hail — " 
 
 a land of snow and ice, deep as the Serbonian bog, 
 over which Satan soars high on his way to the gate, 
 and the cold of which is as fire. Then come the 
 bounds of Hell, and the three-folded gates. Over all 
 is the concave vault of fire. This is Milton's geo- 
 graphy of Hell, within four concentric circles. 
 
 Our World as Milton calls it, the whole solar sys- 
 tem and the stars, is linked to Heaven and to Hell, 
 and in Chaos. It is a vast hollow sphere, hung at 
 its zenith by a golden chain from the Empyrean. 
 Its lowest point is distant from Hell as far as one of 
 its radii extend. It is this dark globe that Satan 
 sees from Chaos, by the light of Heaven, and on its 
 outer round he alights, as on a continent of waste 
 land. It is beaten by the winds of Chaos and has 
 only light on that side of it which is turned to Heaven. 
 At its very zenith a bright sea flows as of liquid 
 pearl, from which a mighty structure of stairs leads 
 up to Heaven's gate. Over against the stairs a passage 
 down to the Earth opens into the hollow sphere. At 
 this opening Satan looks in upon the starry heavens 
 of all this world, which fill the " calm firmament," and 
 flies amongst innumerable stars to the Sun and thence 
 to Earth the central point of the nine spheres. 
 
 Milton accepts then for his poetic uses the Ptole- 
 maic system, of which the earth was the centre. 
 Around the Earth revolved the spheres of the Seven 
 Planets, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, 
 Jupiter, and Saturn. The eighth sphere was the 
 firmament of the Fixed Stars, the ninth or Crystal- 
 
IV.] PARADISE LOST. 87 
 
 line Sphere, was inclosed in the tenth the Primum 
 Mobile or the First Moved, the last of the hollow 
 shell. They all circled round the Earth with " a 
 complex combination of their separate motions in- 
 vented to explain the phenomena of the heavens." 
 This is Milton's " World." When the souls who 
 are destined to the Paradise of Fools fly upwards, 
 Bk. iii. 481, 
 
 " They pass the planets seven, and pass the fixed, 
 And that crystalline sphere whose balance weighs 
 The trepidation talked, and that first moved." 
 
 He uses this scheme because it suited his poetic 
 imagination, and because it was the scheme accepted 
 by his youth. But he had seen Galileo in 1638, and 
 says he "was a prisoner to the Inquisition for think- 
 ing in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and 
 Dominician licensers thought," and more than twenty 
 years afterwards, during which one may suppose he 
 did not neglect to gain knowledge, he makes Raphael 
 sketch for Adam the Copernican system (viii. 15-178) 
 and shows his own knowledge of it in (iv. 592-97). 
 The angel hints that the question is obscure, but it 
 is plain that whatever Milton professed, Raphael 
 followed Copernicus. The Ptolemaic system is not 
 adopted then by Milton because he held it to be the 
 clearly right view of the universe, but because it was 
 suited to his poetical wants. Lastly, as this vast sphere 
 was linked to Heaven by its chain and staircase, 
 so it was linked to Hell by the mighty causeway 
 which Sin and Death had beaten together out of 
 Chaos ; high arched, and made fast with pins of ada- 
 mant and chains to the outside base of this round 
 world. 
 
 The Christian Doctrine. — The views of Mil- 
 ton in theology and religion at the time when he wrote 
 Paradise Lost are of importance towards the critical 
 understanding, even towards the poetic appreciation 
 of the poem. They are contained in the treatise on 
 Christian Doctrine, which was written at the close of 
 
88 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 his life and finished after the Restoration. To read it 
 is to know, and with great exactness, the views he 
 held at the time when he was composing Paradise 
 Lost. This treatise, entrusted to Cyriack Skinner by 
 Milton, along with a collection of his letters to foreign 
 princes and states, was not published in his lifetime. 
 Daniel Skinner tried in 1676 to induce Elzevir to print 
 it, but he declined. The papers were then taken away, 
 and fell, we know not how, into the hands of the Home 
 Secretary. In 1823 they were found in one of the 
 presses of the Old State- Paper Office, Whitehall, in- 
 closed in an envelope — " To Mr. Skinner, Merchant " ; 
 and shortly after, search being made, letters were 
 found which proved the authenticity of the work. 
 
 It was the result of the labour of several years, of 
 "constant diligence and an unwearied search after 
 truth ; " and it embodies the final principles of Milton's 
 belief. He had written on the " three species of liberty 
 — religious, domestic, and civil." The preface of this 
 treatise declares that the Church cannot be disturbed 
 by the investigation of truth. It is his object to " make 
 it to appear of how much consequence to the Chris- 
 tian religion is the liberty not only of winnowing and 
 sifting every doctrine, but also of thinking and even 
 writing respecting it, according to our individual faith 
 and persuasion. Without this liberty there is neither 
 religion nor gospel — force alone prevails — by which 
 it is disgraceful for the Christian religion to be 
 supported. Without this liberty we are still enslaved 
 .... under the law of man, or to speak more truly, 
 under a barbarous tyranny." These are words which 
 seem to anticipate the Latitudinarians, and claim 
 individual reason, exercised on the Scriptures with 
 absolute freedom of discussion and inquiry, as the 
 sole judge in matters of faith. Theological liberty 
 was the last " species of liberty" Milton defended and 
 exacted, and that he did it in his old age proves that 
 he had not degenerated. It would be useless and 
 impossible to go through this long treatise, and we are 
 not investigating the theology of Milton ; but there 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 89 
 
 are opinions laid down in it which concern the criticism 
 and comprehension of Paradise Lost, and Paradise 
 Regained, and Samson Agonistes, and I shall make short 
 statements of these opinions. Milton holds : — 
 
 1. That God, as far as we are concerned to know, 
 is of the form which He attributes to Himself in the 
 sacred writings, and that He feels as He is there 
 represented to do. The presentation then of the 
 Father in Paradise Lost is not only poetical, but 
 actually as Milton conceived it. 
 
 2. God decreed nothing absolutely which He left 
 in the power of free agents. God foreknew that 
 Adam would fall of his own free will. His fall was 
 therefore certain, but not necessary, since it proceeded 
 from his own free will, which is incompatible with 
 necessity. 
 
 3. All men are generally predestinated to eternal 
 life — on condition of faith in Christ. There is no 
 such thing as eternal reprobation or eternal pretention. 
 Predestination then is not only of grace, but also ot 
 the will and belief of men, and all men are given 
 sufficient grace to believe, if they will. Both these 
 (2 and 3) will be found underlying Paradise Lost and 
 Paradise Regained. 
 
 4. The Son of God existed before the world was 
 made, but was not co-eternal with the Father ; nor 
 co-essential ; nor co-equal. He is not in any sense 
 the supreme God ; His nature and power are divine, 
 but the nature is given and the power delegated. 
 Nothing can be clearer than that Milton was a 
 deliberate Arian. The argument is long, laborious, 
 and resolute. That he was an Arian, makes passage 
 after passage in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained 
 clear. He did not dramatise heaven, as some have 
 said, by dividing the Father and the Son. They 
 were two Persons to him. 
 
 5. The Holy Spirit is a minister of God, a creature, 
 created of the substance of God, probably before the 
 foundations of the world were laid, but later than the 
 Son and inferior to Him. 
 
96 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 6. Matter was produced out of God, not out of 
 nothing, and of this productive stock, in itself a 
 substance and intrinsically good, all things were 
 made ; that is, form was given to them, for the thing 
 itself is matter and form. Creation out of nothing is 
 untrue, and since all things are thus of God, no 
 created thing can be finally annihilated. 
 
 7. Souls are not pre-existent ; the soul and the 
 body are not two distinct things. The whole man is 
 soul, and the soul man, an animated, sensitive, and 
 rational substance. The spirit of man is partly human, 
 but is inspired from God, and therefore is called the 
 divine virtue, fitted for the exercise of life and 
 reason, which is infused into the organic body. In 
 each man the soul is born, and is produced by the 
 power of matter. — If we keep these definitions in 
 mind, much that is obscure in Milton will become 
 clear. 
 
 8. The sin which is common to all men is that 
 which our first parents, and in them all their posterity, 
 committed, when, casting off their obedience to God, 
 they tasted the fruit of the forbidden tree. 
 
 9. Its result is death. Death is, first, guiltiness ; 
 Adam's shame is death. It is, secondly, the loss of 
 the right reason by which men discern the chief good. 
 It is, thirdly, the death of the body : not the sepa- 
 ration of soul and body, but the death of the soul, 
 and the spirit, and the body ; the death of the whole 
 man. — All these three die, and all are raised together 
 at the resurrection. It is, fourthly, eternal death, the 
 punishment of the lost. — These are the four degrees 
 of death, but the second does not exclude certain 
 remnants of the divine image which are left in us, and 
 not extinguished. For " if our personal religion were 
 not in some degree dependent on us, and in our own 
 power, God could not properly enter into covenant 
 with us, neither could we perform, much less swear 
 to perform, the conditions of that covenant." 
 
 10. Christ satisfied God's justice by fulfilling the law, 
 and paying the required price for all mankind. 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 91 
 
 " Die he, or Justice must ; unless for him 
 Some other able, and as willing, pay 
 The rigid satisfaction, death for death. 
 
 . So Man, as is most just, 
 Shall satisfy for Man, be judged and die." 
 
 n. There is in Christ the union of two natures; 
 but the divine nature is not of the same essence as the 
 Father, and the divine nature was in partial abeyance 
 during his life on earth. Being a creature, this divine 
 Person was capable of temptation and of fall. 
 
 12. The decalogue is abrogated and is not binding 
 on Christians. This may account for the omission 
 of it in the Vision of Bk. xii. Milton was a strong 
 anti-Sabbatarian. 
 
 13. Christ will reign on the earth during the times 
 of the Last Judgment. 
 
 14. The world will be burnt up at the end; heaven 
 and earth will be renewed in purity, and possessed in 
 perpetuity of delight by the saints. 
 
 15. From the subjection of the body, as from a 
 fountain, the special virtues in general derive their 
 origin. 
 
 16. Marriage was indissoluble before the Fall. 
 Since then, divorce, nay, even polygamy, are lawful ; 
 fitting cause being shown. The man has absolute 
 rule over the woman. 
 
 It is plain from many of these propositions that to 
 call Milton Calvinistic is absurd. 
 
 The Interest of Paradise Lost is partly 
 connected with its theology. The form of the poem is 
 the epic form of the Greeks and Romans, and one of 
 its interests as a work of art is Milton's conduct of the 
 epic. The filling up of the form is partly invented and 
 partly derived from Scripture. The character and 
 the greater part of the action are invented ; but the 
 part derived from Scripture has a theological system 
 attached to it. It is a true objection which says that 
 this scheme of theology, so far as it intrudes, lessens 
 the interest of the poem. It is not a true objection 
 which says that it destroys that interest. And it is not 
 
92 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 its presence, but its presence in an argumentative form, 
 which is alien to art. It chiefly appears in the talk of 
 the heavenly persons, and in their lips it is necessarily 
 divorced from the human passions which, when they 
 play round a theological scheme, add to its interest. 
 And the scheme, in itself, is abstract and logical and 
 as such repugnant to art. One thing, however, be- 
 longing to the theology has grandeur, and is capable 
 of artistic treatment. It broods over all these parts 
 of the poem with its vast wings. It is the con- 
 ception deepest in Puritanism and the source of its 
 power — the overshadowing idea of the sovereignty of 
 God. In the great struggle, God is always certain 
 of victory. 
 
 The Political Interest of the Poem belongs to 
 this idea. God's sovereignty makes all other sove- 
 reignty and power nothing. A Puritan could not be 
 an aristocrat, nor conceive of Heaven as an aristocracy. 
 It is true God ruled all, but He ruled because He was 
 pure goodness, and He asked obedience on that 
 ground. That is not the imperial ground of rule, and 
 Milton does not give that title to God. He is the 
 Almighty Father, the King of Heaven, never the 
 Emperour. That title is reserved for Satan. Beneath 
 God's rule, though there are orders and degrees, all 
 are equal and free. The Heaven of Milton is a 
 republic, if I may use the term, under the sway of 
 Infinite Goodness. Satan rebels because the Son is 
 placed over the angels who are free and equal. 
 Abdiel allows the equality and the freedom, but 
 defends the supremacy of the Son by saying that 
 the Son is the visible form of God, and at one with 
 God, and that things remain as before. The only 
 change is that now, through the creation of the Son, 
 through God Himself becoming as an angel, He has 
 lifted the whole angelic body into higher dignity— 
 
 " And of our dignity 
 How provident He is, how far from thought 
 To make us less, bent rather to exalt 
 Our happy state under one Head more near (to himself \ 
 United/' 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 93 
 
 The whole of the arguments used in Bks. v. 
 and vi. go to prove that Milton's order of Heaven 
 was conceived as a republican one under God's 
 sovereignty. But it is a republic in which mob law 
 or universal suffrage are unknown ; in which the uni- 
 versal Lordship of God insisted on righteous order ; 
 and order was kept by the choice of the best in power 
 and intellect and goodness to rule the rest. All 
 through his work, both in prose and poetry, Milton 
 had a dislike, not so great as Shakspere's, but still 
 great, of that democracy which means the rule of the 
 majority. But he hated still more the oppressive and 
 tyrannical rule of irresponsible force, and he has 
 shown what his view of it is in Satan and his Hell. 
 Satan's rebellion is not the rebellion of the free against 
 oppression, but the attempt of an aristocrat in heart 
 to gain imperial power. Milton's Hell is aristocratic, 
 or rather it is the picture of a state under an imperial 
 tyrant who has made a servile court around him. The 
 Puritan who read of Satan's rebellion did not see in 
 it a picture of his own rebellion, and those who think 
 so must have but slightly considered their Milton. 
 He saw rather in Satan the picture of the tyranny 
 against which he had fought — the adversary, such as 
 Charles had been, surrounded by Belial and Moloch 
 and Mammon, the representatives of sensuality, and 
 oppressive force, and evil wealth, and by Beelzebub, 
 in whom I have often fancied we may trace the linea- 
 ments of Strafford (Bk. ii. 300). 
 
 The Interest of the Story itself is not only 
 of the story, but of the problem and struggle it re- 
 presents, the problem of the origin of evil, the struggle 
 of a moral being against evil without him. The 
 latter is the artistic motive of the poem, and it 
 has always, and in all literatures, interested man- 
 kind. It is the foremost subject of art. The story 
 in Genesis is one of its forms ; and it is of very little 
 consequence, so far as the main interest goes, whether 
 we take the story as literally true or not. If we 
 should make it wholly fabulous, we are yet excited by 
 
94 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 the temptation and the inward strife it causes. But 
 the subject, as it came before Milton, had a special 
 condition attached to it. He was obliged to conceive 
 evil tempting those who had never known evil. That 
 condition was fortunate, for it made the subject almost 
 new — the primal contest of untried and simple good- 
 ness with evil. But it was also unfortunate, because it 
 necessarily forced Milton to deprive himself of all the 
 play of the complex passions stirred when evil from 
 without meets good and evil within a man, and the 
 abstraction of these passions and their results made 
 his work extraordinarily difficult. 
 
 The inherent fault of the subject also belongs to this 
 condition. We have no experience of the innocent 
 position of Adam and Eve, and we cannot sympathise 
 with their struggle against temptation except in imagi- 
 nation. So far our human interest in them, is not great. 
 But in proportion to the loss of that interest is the gain 
 of our interest in the work of the artist. He is driven 
 by his subject into pure imagination, pure invention. 
 We are in a world of beings who belong to our 
 common humanity, but without the all-modifying 
 element of evil. Where they are apart from us, the 
 interest of the poem is in the artistic treatment; 
 where they are at one with us, the interest is in the 
 old human subject which all the great artists of the 
 world have either touched or developed. To say the 
 poem gives no pleasure, or that Adam, and Eve, and 
 Satan do not interest us because we do not take the 
 story literally, is simply not the fact. Why do people 
 read Paradise Lost? First, because the story in- 
 terests them ; secondly, because of its fine passages ; 
 thirdly, for its art ; lastly, for all these three wrought 
 into a splendid whole and unity by the imagination of 
 a great genius. Paradise Lost is one of the few 
 universal poems of the world ; imperial in the sense 
 that the work of Homer and Virgil and Dante and 
 Shakspere is ; worthy to exercise command over the 
 heart and intellect of all ages. Its majesty and 
 beauty are beyond praise ; its faults should be spoken 
 
tv.] PARADISE LOST. 95 
 
 of by smaller men with truth, but with reverence. 
 But all may tell of the pleasure that it gives them, and 
 strive to find the sources of that pleasure, and the 
 more fully any one can do this, the more he will feel 
 his soul enlarged. It is this I have endeavoured to 
 do in the following pages. 
 
 PARADISE LOST. 
 
 The First Book.— The subject is "Paradise Lost" 
 — " Of man's first disobedience." In asking how 
 it was lost, Milton introduces the author of its loss, 
 and the poem opens with the description of Satan 
 in Hell, awaking to the consciousness of his ruin. 
 The story of Heaven lost to him prepares our thought 
 for the story of Paradise lost to man. He gathers 
 his whole host together, resolves on war by guile 
 since force is unavailing, and, telling of a new 
 world on which they may seize, and the fame of which 
 he had heard in Heaven, calls a council in Pande- 
 monium, "suddenly built out of the deep," where 
 they may resolve how to hurt God by an invasion of 
 evil into the new-made Earth. In this way, though 
 with a vague and undefined touch, the main subject 
 is impressed upon our minds, and from the very 
 beginning we look forward to Man as the hero of 
 the epic. 
 
 But what a way it is, and through what a splendid 
 range of pictures we are led ! The force of con- 
 ception never fails. The interest, step by step with 
 the gathering of the host of Hell, is slowly accumu- 
 lated to the point where Satan reaches the height 
 of his thought, and sorrow, and invective. It is like 
 the growth of a thunderstorm, from its rising in the 
 horizon to its outburst in the zenith. At first Hell is 
 silent — then the fallen archangel awakes and looks 
 around hirn in sorrow, and this solitary picture of 
 him isolates him for ever in our imagination. He 
 calls on Beelzebub, and the passion of the poem 
 
 7 
 
96 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 begins in the mingled mournfulness and pride of the 
 speech. Together they make their way to the burn- 
 ing shore, and the two figures stand alone, hewn 
 into reality by Milton's sculptural imagination. The 
 rest lie tossing and astonied on the fiery lake, and 
 the fierce scorn of Satan's awakening summons has 
 less of sorrow now, and more of pride. The interest 
 deepens and the picture fills as the whole host hover 
 on wing under the cope of Hell and light upon the 
 plain. All Hell is now awake. The mental progress 
 of the angels is the same as Satan's. At first con- 
 fused and sorrow-stricken, they soon marshal their 
 armies in array, and, when the great banner is unfurled, 
 their sorrow yields to fixed thought, deliberate valour 
 succeeds to rage, and waving their ten thousand 
 banners, they await their chief's command. One 
 would think, so magnificent is the scene, that the 
 imagination could be no further lifted. But at this 
 very moment Milton, rising majestically, creates the 
 noblest speech and picture in the Book. Pride, sor- 
 row, splendour of imagery, and splendour of resolve 
 are mingled into the image of Satan and in his words ; 
 and these are reflected in the description of the host 
 and their passion, till, at the word of war, "millions of 
 flaming swords out-flew," and the climax at last is 
 reached. Throughout, the grandeur of the picture 
 has increased with the growing grandeur of the 
 thought. The book is built on the same lines as 
 those of David's noblest psalms — an outburst of im- 
 petuous passion, swelling, and rising in the midst 
 into intensity ; then slowly dying down, with touches 
 of soft beauty at the close, and relieved in the de- 
 scent by episodes of thought which unite them- 
 selves, though at a distance, to the main subject. 
 The episode, in which the leaders of the host are 
 described, as they will be afterwards worshipped on 
 earth, occurring before the climax, serves to lower 
 the pitch of excitement to the point at which it can 
 be roused again without weariness. When the descent 
 begins after the climax, the episode of the building 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 97 
 
 of Pandemonium relieves yet fills the lurid picture, 
 and animates and lightens Hell itself. The tale be- 
 comes less and less sombre, and before long is made 
 beautiful. The lovely and learned play of Milton's 
 imagination diversifies it. Architecture is brought in 
 with the recollected pleasure of one who had seen 
 the Pantheon, and classic fable adds itself to art, and 
 two similes, one of bees busy in a dewy land and 
 one of faery sport in the forest, bring us clean out ot 
 the murky air of Hell. These images serve to rest 
 the imagination, wearied with the strain so heavily 
 laid upon it, and the work is like that of Nature 
 herself, when, at the dying of the thunderstorm, she 
 fills the western Heavens with passages of tender 
 coloured cloud and sky. A few lines, at the end, which 
 describe the great lords in council, nobly re-introduce 
 the subject 
 
 Book II. — The Second Book begins with the 
 council which decides that the ruin of man shall be 
 attempted. An episode then describes the employ- 
 ments and amusements of the rebel angels while 
 they await the news of the ruin of man, and the 
 rest of the book tells of Satan's meeting with Sin and 
 Death, whom he calls on to follow him to the task 
 of the ruin of man. At every point, even to the last 
 moment, when the Ruiner sees, beyond Chaos, the new 
 world within whose sphere Earth lies, we are directed 
 to the main subject, and wait, with a kind of awful 
 expectation, for the appearance of Adam, around 
 whom and whose fate, all Hell and all its indwellers 
 are thus gathered. Yet, in face of this, and of the 
 similar collecting of all the interest of Heaven around 
 Man in the next book, there are critics blind enough 
 to say that Satan is the hero of the epic. 
 
 Milton's intellectual force is nowhere better shown 
 than in the speeches of the conclave. Satan's brief 
 introduction of the debate is more proud in its as- 
 sumed humility than his loudest boasting ; and Mil- 
 ton's object is to deepen our sense of his pride and 
 his isolation. — " I was first in Heaven : I am first 
 
98 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 now, but only by your choice. It were possible to 
 envy the highest in Heaven, but in Hell, where pre- 
 eminence of place means pre-eminence of pain, who 
 would envy? Here, then, faction cannot be ; we are 
 more naturally united in Hell than in Heaven." — He 
 makes revenge the key-note of the council. 
 
 Moloch declares for open war — If God cannot destroy 
 us utterly, let us take what revenge we can ; we can- 
 not suffer more than now — more would be annihilation; 
 and that would be better, if He can inflict it, than this 
 endless misery." — This is the image of brute force in its 
 despair, in its blind anger, in its hatred of pain and 
 its weakness to endure it. 
 
 Belial, at the other pole of temperament and 
 thought, replies, that a reason for war, grounded 
 on despair, is of itself a reason against war. There 
 is no room for revenge ; God is unconquerable : and 
 to be annihilated is not to be desired. 
 
 " Sad cure, for who would lose, 
 Though full of pain, this intellectual being, 
 These thoughts that wander through eternity." 1 
 
 " And is God likely to give annihilation ? He is far too 
 wise " — for Belial has sympathy with intellect, even 
 in God. Nor is the rest of his speech less full of the 
 contempt of the highly cultivated intelligence for the 
 brute bluster of Moloch. " What worse, they say, than 
 this Hell ? Is this quiet council of ours worse than 
 being chained on the burning lake ? We might be ten- 
 fold more wretched did God choose it. Therefore I 
 give my voice for peace. Who will say it is vile to live 
 in peace ? It is not vile to suffer. We risked all, and 
 the law is just which says, Suffer now. I laugh at those 
 who are bold with the sword, and not brave to bear 
 
 1 It is the yearning of intelligence to always know itself, it is 
 the ineradicable, unwearied curiosity of the Renaissance (nowhere 
 is the quintessence of its spirit better expressed), which Milton, 
 perhaps with intention, puts into the mouth of Belial. Lover 
 of knowledge as Milton was, yet, all through this epic, through 
 Paradise Regained, through Comus even, he urges temperance in 
 knowledge as well as in life, 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. t>0 
 
 the doom they risked. And if we suffer quietly, our 
 foe may remit his anger, our pain lessen, or we 
 become inured to it, or time bring better chance." 
 — This is the image of intellectual culture, without 
 goodness, made soft by sin, in a nation decayed by 
 luxury, and enslaved. 
 
 u War means, answers Mammon, either to disen- 
 throne God, or to regain our place. The first is im- 
 possible, the second unacceptable. Suppose He gave 
 us back our place, could we serve Him, spend an 
 eternity in servile worship of one we hate ? Let 
 us seek our good from ourselves, build a free empire 
 here, and win use out of ill -fortune, and ease out of 
 pain. Our world is dark, but we have skill to make 
 it magnificent : and, by length of time, our torments 
 may become our elements, native to us, and be no 
 longer pain. Dismiss all thought of war." — This is 
 the image of the empire of godless utility and wealth, 
 of that world which says, Man shall live by bread 
 alone. 
 
 All Hell applauds the speech. Then Beelzebub — 
 a sublime picture of a great minister touched with a 
 gleam of far-off beauty from another world than hell, 
 when the attention given to him is said to be as still 
 as night or summer's noontide air — takes up the argu- 
 ment. " Why speak of growing empires, why of peace 
 or war ? God will rule Hell as Heaven. Hell is His 
 empire, not ours. Peace will not be given, nor can 
 we return it. War has been tried, and we are foiled. 
 But we can study a less dangerous enterprise which will 
 ' surpass common revenge.' There is a new world, 
 and in dwellers in it, in whom God takes pleasure. 
 We may spoil His pleasure by ruining His creation." 
 The advice unites those who wish for war and peace. 
 In the silence that follows the question, Who shall 
 go — Satan claims the quest ; and Milton, in his manner, 
 closes the dark deliberation with a sweet natural 
 simile, out of place perhaps, but serving, as before, 
 to relieve the over-tasked imagination. 
 
 Of a true Hell there is nothing here. The speeches 
 
loo MILTON. [chap. 
 
 are those of ambitious rebels against rightful power. 
 It is not defenders of freedom that speak, but fallen 
 and tyrannous aristocrats. Nor are the amusements 
 of Hell, in the episode which follows, natural to that 
 dark dwelling. The Homeric games, the philosophical 
 discourse on retired hills, the music and heroic song in 
 the silent valley, the " bold adventure to discover wide 
 that dismal world," take our thoughts away from Hell. 
 Save in the first circle, we do not meet such pictures 
 in Dante's actual Inferno. There is no true horror or 
 pain in Milton's hell. He never saw the damned. 
 
 The poet now concentrates all his force on the 
 solitary figure of Satan. Two mighty similes, one, 
 where he is seen on his way to the gates like a fleet 
 hung in the air; the other, when he meets Death, 
 and seems incensed as a comet firing the length of 
 Ophiuchus, enlarge our vision of " the Adversary." 
 Death's image has claimed admiration, and justly; but 
 if the lines, which leave him indefinite yet "terrible 
 as hell," are sublime, the rest of the allegory of 
 him and of Sin is so definite, so conscious of allegory, 
 that it loses sublimity. Nor does the vision of Chaos 
 add much to the poem. At last we pass out of the 
 elemental war and see the lovely vision of the 
 Empyreal Heaven, and hanging from it, in a golden 
 chain, the pendent World ; that is the whole sphere in 
 which earth, and sun, and planets, and stars are 
 contained. 
 
 Book III. begins with a beautiful and personal 
 invocation that leads us at last into Heaven. As 
 the Second Book opens with the council in Hell, so 
 the Third opens with the council in Heaven. The 
 dramatic interest is less, but some interchange of 
 thought is preserved through the conversation of the 
 Father and the Son by Milton's Arianism, which makes 
 the Son a distinct person from the Father. The 
 whole effect, however, is dull. It is not that God 
 the Father " reasons like a school divine," but rather 
 that he expounds like a sectarian of the time ; no 
 school divine would have made the Fall of man the 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 101 
 
 starting point of theology, nor placed so much power 
 in the will of man. The coldness of the discourse 
 transfers itself to the verse. When it is over, the 
 employments of Heaven are described, as, in the 
 Second Book, after the council, the employments of 
 Hell. They are not as varied as those of Hell, and 
 are no more than praise ; but Milton loved praise and 
 its instrument, music, and his song at once lifts itself into 
 beauty. No ear less exquisite than his, no English poet 
 but himself could have heard the river of bliss — " Roll 
 o'er Elysian fields her amber stream/' The council 
 has been of man's faith and fall ; the songs of praise 
 are for the mercy to be shown to man after his Fall. 
 All Heaven, as in the previous book all Hell, is con 
 centrated on Adam. Again we expect his coming. 
 
 We draw nearer to him now, the centre of the 
 poem, for from Heaven we see Satan alighted on the 
 outside of the World. The rest of the book is taken 
 up with his wanderings. There is a curious piece 
 of mere fancy in the description of the Paradise 
 of Fools, which adds nothing to the poem, and is like 
 a vacation exercise, introduced because it wanted a 
 place somewhere. Its controversial element and its 
 fantastic and heavy imagery distract the attention from 
 the solitary and ranging figure of Satan on the desert 
 convex of the world, round whom Milton's imagina- 
 tion is nobly at work, picturing him as a vulture 
 searching for prey : till, coming to the opening in the 
 great roof, another magnificent simile keeps up the 
 notion of search, and paints him looking down into 
 the heaven of this world and all its stars, as a scout 
 who sees from a hill top at dawn an empire with its 
 glittering cities on the plain. We seem to accom- 
 pany the flight of Satan through the sky and stars 
 to the sun, so clearly do we see it through Milton's 
 eyes. The description of the sun, where it attempts 
 to be definite and scientific, is poor : but what can 
 better the vividness with which Uriel is carved before 
 our eyes, and with which the image of Satan, as a 
 stripling cherub, lives in form, and colour, and clothing? 
 
io2 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 They stand before us as if they were moulded from 
 the life, and their talk is more happy and natural 
 than usual in Milton, and seems the talk of angels. 
 The book ends in prospect of Eden. We are nearer 
 Adam when ' we see Satan alighted on Mount 
 Niphates. 
 
 Book IV., the most varied of all in interest and 
 beauty, closes that part of the poem in which Satan 
 is the chief figure, and introduces him to whom 
 we have so long been looking forward, Man, the 
 central figure of the epic. As before in thought, so 
 here in action, all Hell, in the person of Satan ; and 
 mil Heaven, in the archangelic interest of Uriel and 
 Gabriel, and in the vision of the scales of God, are 
 collected round Man. 
 
 The book opens with a cry for help against Satan, 
 as if, in the vivid shaping of his imagination, the 
 poet were present at the time and place : and 
 through the invocation the subject is again brought 
 forward. We look about and seek for Man. Satan, 
 too, is on the search, and his speech on Mount 
 Niphates is the key to Milton's strange estimate of 
 his character. The change of his aspect during 
 his outburst of wrath and envy is seen by Uriel from 
 the sun, and prepares us for the vigorous incident at 
 the end of the book. 
 
 We then enter the plain of Eden with Satan, and as 
 the whole of the previous books has been a long pre- 
 paration for the appearance of Man, so through nearly 
 one hundred lines we are slowly led to Paradise, where 
 Man dwells. Expectation, in Milton's manner, is kept 
 on tiptoe ; touch after touch is added to enhance what 
 is coming, as when " of pure now purer air meets his 
 approach." A splendid simile of the odorous winds 
 wafted from Paradise lifts still higher our imagi- 
 nation, but it is somewhat spoiled, also in Milton's way, 
 by a far-fetched allusion to the story of Tobit, and 
 still more, by a reversion to the controversial cry of 
 Lycidas against hireling wolves when Satan overleaps 
 the wall. But we do not even then get to Paradise. 
 
IV.] PARADISE LOST. 103 
 
 There is still a pause of expectation, and Milton 
 moralizes, and makes the map of Eden. Then at 
 last is Paradise ; and the lines he gives to it — in 
 metrical weight and balance perfect — (how beautiful 
 the sound of this — " Rolling on orient pearls and 
 sands of gold ; " and of this the thought and sound — 
 " Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose ; ") 
 are equal to the height of loveliness he seeks to 
 hold, and rise at the close, when one would think 
 music and loveliness could be no more — into fuller 
 beauty and more enchanted music (223 — 268). A 
 slight break, like an interlude, intervenes, and then t* 
 we see Man, the hero of the epic — 
 
 " Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall," 288, &c. 
 
 Lines worthy of the long preparation ! 
 
 We listen, and hear Adam speak, and the moment 
 we touch Man, we presage, in Adam's words, his fall. 
 There is but little to awaken our pleasure in the first 
 words of Adam's speech and of Eve's reply ; but when 
 Eve glides from describing her relation to Adam into a 
 remembrance of her own coming into life and meeting 
 with him, the poem becomes beautiful again in a series 
 of soft and vivid pictures. From their talk Satan who 
 has seen and envied them learns how to bring about 
 their fall, and the ever- recurring subject enters on a 
 new phase. Up to this point we have been expecting 
 Man, henceforth we begin to expect his fall ; and from 
 this moment, through four books, we are kept on 
 the stretch of this new expectation. Uriel glides now 
 from the descending sun to warn the angelic guard 
 of Satan's coming. Evening falls, and in the lines 
 so harmonious with its softness, we pass from the 
 excitement of the action to rest for a little on the 
 breast of Nature. 
 
 The book might have closed here, but Milton only 
 pauses for fresh creation. It is the crisis of the 
 interest of the first part of the poem, and now all 
 the characters come on by night as before by day ; 
 Adam and Eve in the midst, and the others circled 
 
104 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 round them. They are shown in the converse of 
 love and innocence. Adam calls Eve to sleep ; she 
 answers, praising him, in verses, soft as her breath 
 and as the tropic night ; and Adam's answer, dull at 
 first in its cold philosophy, passes into poetic beauty 
 when he speaks of the unseen spirits of the Heaven ; 
 and his joy at their songs, heard as they haunt the 
 garden, adds a new touch to the interest of Heaven 
 in Man, and to the beauty of Paradise. Still 
 Milton cannot leave these human creatures, his 
 great subject. Their bower is described, their 
 last prayer, their innocent passion, and their sleep. 
 From noon to midnight we have heard the tale 
 of their hours, as in the next book we hear it from 
 morn to noon — a whole day. Then round them 
 gathers Hell and Heaven. The moon shines on the 
 clear picture of Gabriel's watch; on Ithuriel and 
 Zephon dazzling through the garden; on Satan 
 squatted like a toad by the ear of Eve. Touched 
 by the spear he leaps to his full height ; and his 
 talk and that of the two angels in its interchange 
 of stately scorn and anger, is not less dramatic than 
 the vivid invention of Gabriel and the guard discerning 
 through the shade the advance of the two angels, with 
 the third "of regal port, but faded splendour wan." 
 Nor is the strong speech of Gabriel and Satan un- 
 worthy of archangels; none but Milton could have 
 conceived and expressed that meeting ; and the last 
 description, where " On the other side Satan alarmed" 
 (nothing can be more noble than the use, and the 
 placing at the end of the line, of the word) " Dilated 
 stood," fills the whole scene with sublimity. Then 
 God enters the action, also round Man, and hangs the 
 scale of battle in the sky. The weight of Satan mounts 
 upwards, and the Fiend flies away and with him night, 
 and morn arrives. 
 
 Book V. begins the second part of the poem. 
 Satan has fled, and keeps in the dark shadow of the 
 earth for seven days. During this time the main sub- 
 ject is untouched, and the long episodes of the story of 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 105 
 
 the War in Heaven and the fall of the rebel angels, 
 and the Creation of the World are introduced. But the 
 episodes bear on the main subject, and enhance its 
 interest before it comes and when it comes. The 
 war in Heaven is not described to narrate Satan's 
 fall so much as to warn Man against his own fall. 
 The Creation is described to complete the story of 
 Man ; all is told to keep us in expectation of the next 
 crisis of the poem, to which, in Bk. ix. Milton gives 
 all his strength. 
 
 The book opens with Adam's waking of Eve, and 
 with her relation of her dream in which the subject 
 of the epic recurs, and the coming crisis is indicated. 
 Adam's lecture on dreams has too philosophic an air, 
 but nothing can be nobler in thought and verse than the 
 great Hymn of Praise which follows. It is closer to the 
 devout force of a Hebrew lyric and to the grand sim- 
 plicity with which a Hebrew Psalmist realised God and 
 Nature than anything I know in Aryan literature ; and 
 in its cosmical embracing of a whole creation may be 
 compared not only to Psalm cxlviii., which it enlarges, 
 but also to civ., the great psalm of the whole universe. 
 It has its prologue down to line 159, followed by ten 
 divisions, like the verses of a hymn, but of unequal 
 length, and ending with an epilogue, if I may use the 
 term, of four lines. Like all Milton's greatest work, 
 it dilates the imagination ; and is worthy to be sung 
 by the primaeval Man and Woman. God hears their 
 praise, and sends Raphael to warn them of danger. 
 
 Milton's angels are the angels of a painter. Of 
 power and splendour and swiftness like Tintoret's, 
 clothed and coloured like Angelico's, they are not 
 described, they are made visible to the eye. Uriel was 
 glorious, but still more glorious is Raphael, springing 
 light from among the celestial Ardours, changing his 
 form at will, and standing, scattering fragrance, on the 
 eastern cliff of Paradise. Neither Adam nor Eve, when 
 they meet him, are lowered to our imagination by his 
 presence. They are equal in sinlessness to him, they 
 are only less as yet in ethereal nature, and Milton's 
 
io6 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 art in this distinguishing of two different natures is 
 exquisite. It is not so happy in the description of 
 their dinner and in their discourse. But the conver- 
 sation, apart from poetry, is interesting. It gives us 
 Milton's conception of the physical nature of angels, 
 and his notion of matter and spirit and soul. Spirit, 
 in Milton's sense of the word, is etherealised matter 
 — the matter of which angels are made ; and it is 
 into this that the body of Adam will change, if he 
 be obedient. But the soul is the man, and the 
 angel. "The whole man is soul," to quote Milton's 
 words elsewhere, " and the soul man." 
 
 The subject of the Poem recurs when Adam asks 
 what means the caution, " if we be found obedient," 
 and the question introduces the warning story ox 
 the angels who fell by disobedience. This is the 
 true chronological beginning of the epic. With 
 splendour of imagination, with sphere-music, made by 
 the angelic dance; and in verse which resounds with 
 that which it describes, the tale is told of the begetting 
 of the Son of God in whom God makes himself visible 
 to Heaven. The pleasure we have in the story is in 
 the royal verse, more than in the conception ; I may 
 even say that the verse makes the conception seem 
 greater than it is. We return to the interest of passion 
 in the rise into rebellion of Satan's envy and pride, 
 mingled with the charm of his friendship for Beelzebub. 
 Pathos is added to his cry in Heaven, " Sleep'st thou, 
 companion dear," when we remember how, in a 
 darker place, he has already with the same cry, turned 
 to his friend. It is a lovely instance of the art of 
 Milton. 
 
 The night journey of Satan's host to the North 
 fills the imagination, and is accompanied by the scorn 
 of God. Milton has been blamed for the derision 
 he puts in the mouth of the Father and Son ; but 
 he had his poetic authority in Psalm ii. ; and his 
 representation of God must be judged by the neces- 
 sities of epic treatment. The book closes with 
 the speeches of Satan, seen already as the great Liar 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 107 
 
 and Tempter ; and with the noble vision of Abdiel, 
 rising alone against the host, among innumerable false, 
 unmoved ; nor can one help thinking, as one reads, of 
 Milton himself, and that the lines at the end were 
 unconsciously, perhaps consciously, drawn from his 
 own position as he wrote. Fearless and compassed 
 round with foes, 
 
 " Nor number nor example with him wrought 
 To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind, 
 Though single." 
 
 Book VI. is filled with the War in Heaven. 
 The materialism of which it has been accused seems to 
 me apart from the point. Johnson says that the con- 
 fusion between spirit and matter fills the narrative 
 with incongruity. He does not know that Milton's 
 '•' spirit " is matter etherealised ; that the angels, 
 in his view, ate, drank, digested, slept, could fight 
 and be wounded, like Ares in the Iliad. He says 
 that the book is a "favourite with children, but is 
 gradually neglected as knowledge is increased." 
 This however is not a question of knowledge, but 
 of poetry, and of epic poetry. Milton needed 
 battles and Homeric combats, and he used them 
 frankly; and he desired to swell and enhance the 
 final vision of the Son of God in His overthrow of 
 the rebel angels. For two days he fills Heaven with 
 noisy and violent war, that at the end angelic 
 power might be as nothing before the silent single 
 omnipotence of Messiah's coming. And the gradual 
 growth of the battle to this terrific climax is poetical, 
 and gives, not a perfect, but at times a splendid 
 pleasure. No one who cares for the poetry cares 
 whether knowledge is satisfied or not. The story 
 and the things described stand on their own epic 
 grounds, and stand clear. The cannons are very 
 clumsy, it is true, but we must remember we do not 
 see them with Milton's eyes. Cannon, in his day, still 
 impressed the imagination. 
 
 The book opens with Abdiel' s return, The prepara- 
 
108 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 tions for war that meet him, his joyous reception, 
 the leading of him to the mount of God, the solemn 
 voice of approval, changing suddenly to the com- 
 mand to Michael to go forth to war, the dreadful 
 smoke and tempest from the hill, and the march of 
 the host, are all described in Milton's finest manner. 
 The march may well be compared, and Milton 
 meant it to be so, with the assembling of the hosts 
 in Hell : — and mark how the continuous advance and 
 the swiftness of both hosts, rushing to meet each 
 other, are echoed in the verse. There is not a 
 single full stop for thirty lines. The verse pauses 
 only with the description of the great apostate on 
 his chariot. Abdiel and he meet at the beginning 
 of the fight with Homeric speeches, and in Homeric 
 combat. It is the prologue to the battle, and surely 
 never was the noise of battle, and the "ridges 
 of grim war," and the swords that rose and fell, 
 wide wasting, told in more terrible verse than that which 
 follows, until Michael and Satan met, "while Expecta- 
 tion stood in horror." Their duel is inferior in force to 
 the others in the poem, and the description languishes 
 till night divides the armies. Nor is the council de- 
 scribed with the mighty power of the council in Hell, 
 and the introduction of science and its engines makes 
 the poetical atmosphere hard to breathe. The scoffing 
 jests of Satan and Belial may be paralleled from the 
 Iliad, but they lower, as the whole scene does, the dig- 
 nity of the poem ; and it is lowered still more by the 
 jingle of terms in the jests, the puns, and the quibbles — 
 unfortunate relics of the Elizabethans. Nor is the 
 answer the angels return to the cannon less below 
 the place and the contest. Mountains hurled through 
 the air disturb the conception of heaven, and are so 
 perilously near the absurd that they jar on the solemn 
 sense one ought to have of the first conflict between 
 good and evil. The only excuse is that Milton 
 wished to enhance the last picture, but it is not 
 excuse enough. The dialogue which follows between 
 the Father and the Son is overweighted with their 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 109 
 
 mutual praise ; and there are parts even in the last 
 description, noble as it is. which were perhaps better 
 away. Still, equal to the grandeur of the awful contest, 
 and in poetry which seems, like the chariot and the 
 wheels, to burn and bicker as it rolls, Messiah at last 
 appears, 
 
 " He onward came — far off his coming shone," 
 
 and the battle is over. Eternal wrath, gathered into 
 one mighty verse — 
 
 " Burnt after them to the bottomless deep." 
 
 The last lines insist on the subject. The tale is a 
 tale of warning, and the key-note of the first subject 
 of the poem — man's disobedience — is struck again. 
 However vast the circuit Milton makes, he returns to 
 the same centre. 
 
 Book VII. begins with Milton's invocation to 
 Urania to govern the latter half of his song. It has been 
 objected to as unnecessary, but we should be sorry to 
 lose the personal touches; nor does it injure, but 
 enhance, the solemn impression of the poem to have 
 a glimpse of the lonely singer, " on evil days though 
 fall'n, and evil tongues, with darkness and with 
 dangers compassed round " — whose soul was peopled 
 with the vision of Heaven and Paradise while ail 
 around him waxed the "barbarous dissonance of 
 Bacchus and his revellers," — and the words suggest 
 that after more than twenty years the imagery of 
 Comas again presented itself to his imagination. 
 
 The theme of the book is the Creation. It was not 
 written to put forth a scientific theory of the Creation. 
 It is an episode in an epic, not a treatise, and Milton 
 did not care whether the things said were true, or not, 
 to fact. He uses any materials which he thinks poetical, 
 and fitted for epic treatment. Sometimes he takes the 
 Ptolemaic view of the Universe, and sometimes the 
 Copernican, just as he wants them, just as he saw the 
 thing. It is the artist who, wanting to impress us with 
 the sense of Man being the centre of the poem, makes 
 
no MILTON. [chap. 
 
 the Earth the centre of Creation. It is the artist, who, 
 in the next book, wanting to subordinate Man to the 
 Omnipotence of God, sets Earth among the planets 
 that dance about the sun their various rounds. More- 
 over he followed the account in Genesis i. ; and 
 long before his time that was held to be a poetic 
 representation. Any way, Milton used it as such, 
 for, according to his imaginative needs, he enlarges 
 or modifies that account. 
 
 The opening conversation between Raphael and 
 Adam, in which the Angel, in his warning against 
 an intemperate desire of knowledge, suggests the 
 coming temptation, weights the whole description of 
 the Creation with the thought and sadness of the Fall. 
 The same note of anticipation recurs in the next book, 
 and I cannot draw too much attention to this method 
 of work in Milton. He wins our interest in Paradise 
 Lost by expectation, not surprise. It was the way of 
 the Greek Dramatists, it was Shakspere's way. The 
 audience know the conclusion, and wait for it. This 
 is the finest way to work, but only a great artist has 
 the power to do it well. For nothing which is re- 
 presented as said or done in the Poem can then 
 be left unmotived, or unbalanced, and no slipshod 
 work can pass. The advantages of it are great, 
 but only great genius can use them ; and the con- 
 clusion being known, the way in which it is brought 
 about, and its catastrophe heightened or softened, 
 lies open to continuous criticisms, criticisms which, 
 in a play or a story which rests on a surprise at the 
 end, cannot be given until the story is finished. In 
 Milton's work, expectation is everywhere, surprise 
 nowhere. 
 
 The account of the Creation is connected by way 
 of contrast with the preceding book, which is a book of 
 war and destruction. The Messiah, there Destroyer, 
 is here Creator ; and the motive of the Creation is to 
 repair the loss Heaven has suffered by the banishment 
 of a third part of its indwellers. The chariot of the 
 Son of God pausing on the shore of Heaven above 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. in 
 
 the abyss of Chaos, now outrageous from the tumult 
 made by the fall of the rebel angels, is a splendid 
 opening to the scenery of the Creation, but not 
 more grand than the phrase — "Silence ye troubled 
 waves, and thou Deep, peace." What follows is a series 
 of descriptions, full of magnificent lines : and for those 
 who wish to study Milton as a master of all the possi- 
 bilities of blank verse, there is no book so well worthy 
 of attention as Bk. vii. It is an amazing revelation of 
 what a great artist in verse can do. Here, also, he 
 allows himself to play with his vehicle, and being in 
 the humour to make the sound the echo of the sense, 
 fulfils his humour and delights to fulfil it. 
 
 The " broad bare backs" of the mountains up- 
 heaved into the clouds, the waters that hasten with 
 "glad precipitance," the grass and flowers that make gay 
 earth's " bosom smelling sweet," the trees that rise "in 
 stately dance," seem, as we read, to be created before 
 our eyes. The extremely involved construction of 
 the passage that describes the heavenly host, leaves, 
 if that be not my fancy, a sense of their involved 
 multitude and movement on the mind. The fish that 
 "glide under the green wave," or " bank the mid-sea," 
 or " tempest the ocean," are as vigorously sketched : 
 but with less beauty than the birds who "never 
 looked so beautiful since they left Paradise." Com- 
 pare, to give one example of the union of sound and 
 sense, these two contrasted descriptions : — 
 
 " There Leviathan, 
 Hugest of living creatures, on the deep 
 Stretcht like a promontory, sleeps or swims ; " 
 
 and this of the prudent crane that steers — 
 
 " Her annual voyage, borne on winds : the air 
 Floats as they pass, fanned with unnumbered plumes.' 
 
 When all is over and Earth "consummate lovely 
 smiled," Man appears. But as Man is the central 
 personage of the poem, Milton, to mark this, stops 
 the whole course of action. The Eternal Father 
 8 
 
ii2 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 himself comes down to intervene in the work. It is 
 one of the fine instances of the skill with which the 
 poem is conducted, and, at the same time, as usual, 
 the Fall, the subject of the whole, is reintroduced. 
 There is a pretty touch of reality, when Raphael, 
 describing the return of the Son of God, says that 
 Adam remembers how the earth and air resounded 
 then with harmonies, and the book ends with the 
 Sabbath and the Song of Creation. 
 
 Book VIII. — The whole of this book is devoted 
 to Man, the central personage of the epic. He is 
 pictured in various relations and with various 
 thoughts; his character is developed, his person 
 painted. In order that our imagination may be filled 
 with him, he tells the tale of his creation, of his 
 joy and innocence, of his early converse with God ; 
 of his meeting with and love of Eve ; and since we 
 know the conclusion, every touch of beauty and good- 
 ness throughout the tale deepens our pity as we look 
 on, and think of the ruin so near at hand. Our pity is 
 further deepened when Adam takes up the converse 
 with Raphael. We find him thirsting for more know- 
 ledge, and as in the last book, so here also, we are 
 made to look forward to that desire of forbidden 
 knowledge which was to produce the Fall ; we presage 
 it, and our sorrow for the fall begins. 
 
 The angel's answer, too discursive for its place, 
 takes us away from the matter of the Epic, but it 
 brings us closely into contact with that personality 
 which at times overweights the poem, — the personality 
 of Milton himself. We see how, even in elder years, 
 the new theories of knowledge were seized by him, 
 how he played with speculation ; nor can I doubt 
 that the lines 179-197 are Milton's latest conclusion 
 of what was the true aim, after much pursuit of know- 
 ledge, of human intelligence. And the lines — 
 
 " That not to know at large of things remote 
 From use, obscure and subtle, but to know 
 That which before us lies in daily hie, 
 Is the prime wisdom ; " 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 113 
 
 are a curious prophecy of that which the boundless 
 curiosity of the Renaissance was coming to, not only 
 in the new science which followed Milton's time ; not 
 only in the resolute study of mankind by the critical 
 school of the poets ; but also in that later school 
 which in Wordsworth started from the same ground, 
 but came to a different conclusion. 
 
 Adam, after this discourse on knowledge, proposes 
 to tell the tale of his creation, and Raphael is glad 
 to hear it, for he was away at the time, " on excursion 
 toward the gates of Hell." It is a good example of 
 Milton's art. By one slight touch, when the angel 
 describes the dismal gates and the noise within of 
 torment and loud lamenting, the poet recalls and 
 takes care that we shall not lose the first imprint 
 made upon our imagination, and prepares us for the 
 reappearance of Satan. Then Adam begins. The 
 vividness of his first moment of life is finely expressed, 
 but that which is most exquisite is the grace and the 
 temperance of the tale. The notes of innocence, 
 simplicity, and joy are preserved throughout. Adam 
 is not now the reasoner who is sometimes tiresome : 
 he talks like a man who loves the things of which 
 he speaks. He is both child and man. And the 
 conversation of God with him has the same tender 
 natural grace. As tenderly wrought and natural is 
 Adam's speech when he asks for a companion. Eve 
 seems to throw back her own charm upon the story. 
 God's smile " brightens " it, and the pleasant way in 
 which He draws out and plays with Adam's wish is of 
 that nature that belongs alike to God and Man, and is 
 not unworthy of a father ; nor is the verse in which the 
 whole is told less in harmony with the tale, " smooth 
 sliding without step." Then Adam tells of the creation 
 of Eve, which he has seen in vision. As Man has been 
 exalted in our eyes by Milton, so now Woman is lifted 
 into higher place by Adam's description and by his 
 love. We have seen Adam through Eve's eyes; 
 we now see Eve through Adam's. Love fills the 
 verse, and the lines 509-520, which close the tale, are 
 
H4 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 full of pure and exalted passion. In them Milton, 
 who has kept himself in hand up to this time, 
 never permitting himself to rise beyond one temperate 
 level, lets loose all his poetic power. The softness of 
 the whole is more soft in the close, and all the rapture 
 of its love, and all the rapturous outburst of Nature 
 herself to celebrate the nuptial hour of Adam and 
 Eve, are made more beautiful by the previous temper- 
 ance of the poet. 
 
 We pass from this into another discussion (stirred 
 by Adam's analysis of his passion for Eve) of what 
 passion is, its limits, its Tightness, and as to whether 
 the angels are possessed of it. The interest of the 
 dialogue is more personal than poetical. It seems to 
 me that Adam expresses what Milton thought of passion 
 when he was younger, and that Raphael expresses what 
 Milton thought of it when he was old, or perhaps that 
 both express a discussion that always went on in Mil- 
 ton's mind ; and I am confirmed in this by the allusion 
 in the line 591 to Petrarca's "scala amoris " and his 
 theory, founded on Plato, as to the final cause of 
 love, a theory which took possession of Milton's 
 mind when he was at Cambridge. 
 
 The discussion is not, however, introduced without 
 a poetic reason. It bears on the temptation. As in 
 the beginning of the book the passion for knowledge 
 is touched on, and we presage it as the cause of 
 the fall of Eve, so here the passion in love is touched 
 on, for Milton makes it the cause of the fall of Adam. 
 He perishes " through vehemence of love " for Eve. 
 When Raphael says " take heed lest passion sway 
 thy judgment," — we look forward to Adam's fall, and 
 when the Angel leaves the earth we prophesy the 
 mischief wrought in Eve by curiosity and in Adam 
 by passion. All has been made ready for the work 
 of the ninth book. 
 
 Book IX. brings us to the third and last part 
 of the poem. The episodes are at an end ; we 
 return to the subject. All has been told, all the 
 threads taken up and traced back. Nothing has been 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 115 
 
 left undone, untouched, unmotived. We reach the 
 catastrophe so long prepared for, so long expected. 
 Satan and Mankind are brought face to face, and 
 the ruin is wrought ; and Milton marks that this book 
 is the crisis of his poem by referring in the intro- 
 duction to the crisis of the Iliad and of the sEneid. 
 And he brings all his powers to bear upon the tale 
 and gathers into his representation of Adam and Eve 
 and Satan all that is chief in their aspect and their 
 characters. The force of Milton's intellect, his 
 analysis of motives and of character, his power of re- 
 presenting the passions, and especially love, what 
 dramatic turn he had, what pathos he had, his natural 
 description, his pictorial quality, his similes, what skill 
 he had in telling of change of character and of reaction 
 of feeling, are all called upon in this book to do their 
 best work, and he has held them firmly, and kept 
 them to their rigid duty. Unlike most of the other 
 books, there are very few passages which even 
 Landor 1 would think redundant. It is a stern and 
 mighty piece of work. 
 
 The importance of the book may be said to call 
 for the introduction, and the personal allusions in it 
 are pathetic and interesting. The true book begins 
 at line 49, when Satan, who has followed the shadow 
 of the earth for seven nights, rises like a mist into 
 Paradise. His speech still further develops his 
 character ; but the main point is that it fixes our 
 minds on Man, on all Creation summed up in Man, 
 on Man as made with care by God, as served by 
 angels. That is Milton's aim, for we have now come 
 to the crisis of Man's fate. 
 
 Satan creeping like a black mist through Paradise, 
 till he enters the serpent, fills the imagination with 
 dim dismay, and serves to heighten the brightness 
 and charm of the morning scene that follows when 
 Adam and Eve awaken. And Milton, to increase 
 
 See the two Imaginary Conversations, " Southey and 
 Landor," pp. 57—154, vol. ii. Works of W. S. Landor, Moxon's 
 ed. 1846. They are well worth reading. 
 
n6 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 the pity in our soul, and to intensify the tragic 
 horror of the ruin, paints one more picture of these 
 two, in their charm and innocence among the un- 
 tainted flowers, in simple work, and lovely love, and 
 in that delight of love and interchange of thought 
 that often stayed their labour, while they worked 
 together. On this he builds the simple motive of 
 their separation, for Eve thinks that they should 
 divide their daily toil. The proposal and its answer 
 lead Milton easily to develop more fully the characters 
 of Adam and Eve, and at the same time to increase 
 our expectation of the Fall, for Adam refuses Eve's 
 request through fear of the temptation which impends. 
 Adam's dread and Eve's innocent boldness alike, from 
 different points, increase our pity, and the play of 
 thought between them, if that can be called play 
 which, in this part at least becomes at times prosaic, 
 touched with Adam's lordly domesticity, still more 
 prepares us for the yielding of Eve to the tempter. 
 In her last speech but one, 322-341, she loses the 
 tone of sinlessness which Milton has so wonderfully 
 as yet preserved — it is one of the wonders of his work 
 — and is even petulant. She leaves Adam's side ; and 
 Milton makes his last and loveliest picture of her 
 innocence veiled in a cloud of fragrance among 
 the glowing roses ; nor can he here refrain from 
 painting again the beauty of Paradise. Her loveliness 
 • is heightened when we see her through the eyes or 
 Satan, and find him lured by it away from evil ; and 
 the simile of her, one in which Milton may have 
 described some quiet farm near Horton, with its 
 indwelling maiden, is the homeliest and the most 
 English in the whole of his work, 445-455. 
 
 The wavering of Satan, his half repentance, his 
 fierce resolve, the suggestion, in his glistering and 
 tortuous and slow approach, of the qualities of evil, 
 the first address to Eve, are done with Milton's 
 astonishing power, and we enter now on that dis- 
 course of temptation between Satan and Eve, in 
 which, I think, more than in any part of the poem, 
 
tv.] PARADISE LOST. 117 
 
 save in the council of Hell, the force of Milton's intel- 
 lect is most supreme ; yet it is intellect in subjection 
 to the rule of imagination. Great as it is, the art is 
 greater, and the phrase " So glozed the tempter, and 
 his proem tuned," makes it plain that Milton meant 
 this to be a careful piece of work. The serpent begins 
 with praise of her beauty. " Only one to see thee ! God- 
 dess." Eve's vanity is touched, but she expresses it as 
 wonder and curiosity as to how he came to speak. The 
 "spirited sly snake" tells his story, doubling her 
 curiosity, and with a quick turn strengthens the appeal 
 to vanity ; " Thus made wise by eating, he has seen all 
 things in heaven and earth, but nothing like her, 
 Sovran of creatures, universal dame." The action is then 
 hurried, — Where is this tree? An abrupt description of 
 the way brings us to it, filled with a happy simile of the 
 serpent's head glistering like a misleading marsh-fire. 
 Eve recognises the forbidden tree, and starts back. 
 Not eat ! cries the serpent, yet lords of earth and 
 air; and then when Eve says, We shall die — collects 
 himself in act and motion like an orator to speak. 
 The simile of the orator weakens the action of the 
 dialogue. We are taken too far away. Even here 
 Milton could not avoid his fault of digression, and 
 Athens and Rome are, with a certain incongruity, 
 brought into Paradise. But the semblance of passion 
 in the speech of Satan, and the rhetorical beginning 
 are finely conceived and wrought. As to the argument 
 680-732, it is so concentrated that to analyse it would 
 take up three times Milton's space. To read it is to 
 gain a high opinion of Eve's intelligence. When at 
 the end Satan suggests that God is envious of them, 
 he uses a dead argument, for Eve could know nothing 
 of envy. But Milton, working at this white heat, can 
 scarcely be wrong, and may have unconsciously repre- 
 sented Satan as borne away out of cool argument into 
 passion against God, and into that passion of envy 
 which was closest to his heart. Eve still pauses; Satan's 
 words find their way ; her eye is lured to the fruit ; 
 it is also her hour of food— for Milton heaps up his 
 
US MILTON. [chap. 
 
 motives — and she muses in a soliloquy. She poises 
 the arguments to and fro, appetite and curiosity un- 
 derneath. There is no moral struggle of feeling. That 
 and its passions could only be after fall, and Milton 
 has striven throughout to keep them apart from his 
 representation of Adam and Eve. The intellectualism 
 of the talk of Paradise, and its occasional coldness and 
 want of interest is owing to this. Milton has been shut 
 out up to this time from all the vaster tragedy of man, 
 and shut out by the necessity of being true to his 
 subject. The whole of Eve's soliloquy, with the one ex- 
 ception of her praise of the serpent for his want of envy, 
 which is a slip of Milton's, is purely a discourse of in- 
 tellect. She eats — Nature sighs through all her works ; 
 she eats greedily, wishing for knowledge and Godhead ; 
 but Milton marks appetite as the thing for which she 
 most cares. Her first thoughts after the fatal tasting are 
 those of an intellect quickened into subtilty by evil. 
 The tree becomes her god, dieted wherewith she 
 will be as the gods. Bolder grown, she thinks the 
 gods will envy her, for she has won that which 
 was not in their power to give ; they envy that 
 they cannot give, and could they have given the 
 gift, the tree had not been there. She separates 
 God, that is, from His creation. She exults in her 
 wisdom, though it is secret, and the word catching her 
 thought, she thinks she herself may be secret ; and as 
 she has doubted God's omnipotence, doubts now his 
 omniscience, and passes from doubt into the very 
 temper of the Tempter. Satan himself might have 
 said — 
 
 " Other care perhaps 
 May have diverted from continual watch 
 Our great Forbidder, safe with all his spies 
 About him." 
 
 Then she slips into womanhood ; only, in her 
 womanliness, her love is tainted with selfishness. 
 She asks, how she will appear to Adam ? Shall 
 she keep the odds of knowledge to draw his 
 love, or render her more equal, or superior — a 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 119 
 
 thing not undesirable. But should God have seen, 
 and death touch her, and Adam have another Eve ; it 
 is "a death to think." And jealousy decides her to 
 make Adam share her fate. She loves him too well to 
 live or die without him. The force of Milton's work 
 is now a little lessened, but rightly, for the main crisis 
 is over. With this subtle " sciential " reasoning, with 
 Eve returning flushed with evil, her love distempered, 
 the bough of evil fruit in her hand, Milton contrasts 
 the innocent thoughts and love of Adam, and makes 
 his tender picture of Adam, carrying like a child a 
 garland for Eve's hair. Hurried, she breaks into the 
 tale, and 
 
 " From his slack hand the garland wreathed for Eve 
 Down dropt, and all the faded roses shed." 
 
 Then follows Milton's wonderful picture of passion in 
 its weakness. Adam's love is at first mixed with 
 horror, then it is eager to secure the beloved, then it is 
 sure that it must sin rather than lose its object ; To be 
 without her — "To live again in these wild woods 
 forlorn " — considering with passion's intensity the 
 ghastly blank of the future — it cannot be ! At last he 
 makes love's first reasoning — Nature draws me — " bone 
 of my bone thou art/' And having started argument, 
 love, as usual, argues on, but for nothing but itself. 
 "The thing is done ; who can recall it ? The serpent 
 lives, so may we : and is wise, and we too may be 
 wise, wise as gods. And God will scarce destroy his 
 prime creation, nay, all creation, for all will perish 
 with us ; and He will be loth to do that, for so the 
 adversary will triumph " — arguments all natural if he 
 had sinned ; but he had not. Yet Milton's meaning 
 is clear — Adam has sinned already ; in the weakness 
 of passion he had already eaten, for he closes with 
 a kind of scorn for all his reasoning. " However, 
 I with thee have fixed my lot." 
 
 Eve's answer is superfluous ; it repeats and more 
 weakly, the previous motives ; the two last lines are 
 
120 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 the only forcible ones, 988-89, and they are woman all 
 over. 
 
 "On my experience, Adam, freely taste, 
 And fear of death deliver to the winds." 
 
 Earth trembles again as Adam eats, and then 
 Milton makes lust the first consequence of the sin ; 
 and for those who wish to study a piece of Milton's 
 favourite contrasting, it is interesting to compare 
 Bk. viii. 510, &c, with this in Bk. ix. 1034, &c, for 
 Milton meant them to be in apposition. Reaction 
 follows, and with reaction Shame arrives, and Adam 
 finds himself in her grasp. His speech is naturally 
 depressed, but rises into passion again in the pathetic 
 outburst of regret, " How shall I behold the face," and 
 in the magnificent lines in which the pathos closes, 
 
 " Cover me, ye pines, 
 Ye cedars, with innumerable boughs 
 Hide me, where I may never see them more." 
 
 The simile of the Indian fig with its well-known 
 line — " High overarcht, and echoing walks between," 
 lifts what, in the following passage, seems unworthy 
 of poetry into dignity, but the finer work does 
 not again begin till the line " They sat them down 
 to weep," when Milton describes the high winds 
 of high passions that arise within them, and sovran 
 Reason subjected to sensual Appetite, and the 
 estrangement of love. The blame of Adam is followed 
 by the scornful defence and retorted blame of Eve, 
 and again by Adam's incensed defence and bitter 
 accusation of Eve, of all womanhood ; " and of their 
 vain contest appeared no end." It seems to us, 
 arriving at the close of the book and looking back to 
 the beginning, as if we had travelled over a world. 
 
 Book X. and the two which follow it have three 
 aims, all of them of epic importance. They are, first 
 to " justify the ways of God to man," a part of the sub- 
 ject set forth by Milton at the beginning, carried out in 
 the dialogues between the Father and the Son in the pre- 
 vious books, and insisted on in these three last books. 
 
IV.] PARADISE LOST. 121 
 
 Seccndly, to complete the story of the Fall by show- 
 ing its results, and, by connecting these results with 
 the whole history of the human race, to swell the 
 importance of this, the central event of the poem. 
 Thirdly, the purification of the hero, that is, of man- 
 kind, in Adam and Eve. These three are mingled 
 together in epic narration, but as they appear I will 
 draw attention to them. 
 
 The first result of the Fall is the departure of the 
 Angels from Paradise ; but though Adam loses their 
 companionship, he does not lose their interest or their 
 pity. All Heaven is stirred with sorrow for Man ; and 
 God and his Son meet the assembled Angels to de- 
 clare his sentence. The whole of this beginning, down 
 to line 228, when the Son returns from sentencing 
 Adam and Eve, is languid and weak. It is as if Milton 
 had been exhausted by the stupendous effort he made 
 in the Ninth Book. There is, indeed, a fine passage 
 at line 145, but throughout, especially where Milton 
 has almost textually adapted the words of Scripture, 
 the verse is less musical and more cumbrous than 
 anywhere else in the poem. Landor complains, with 
 justice, that the language placed in the Almighty's 
 mouth, at 615-640, in this book is ugly. He might 
 have called it, and with more justice, unpoetical. 
 
 We find Milton again in his power at line 230, 
 where Sin and Death are sitting at the gates of Hell, 
 that now stand open " belching outrageous flame far into 
 Chaos." It is a piece of noble imagination, where Sin, 
 not knowing of the sin of man, yet feels its attractive 
 power in Hell, and when Death sniffs from afar the smell 
 of mortal change on earth. The lines that picture the 
 grim Feature scenting his innumerable prey, and the 
 simile which heightens their force, are finer in their 
 ghastliness than even the celebrated passage that de- 
 scribes Death in the Second Book. Nor is the power 
 less, when Milton tells in magnificent verse the 
 making of the causeway between Hell and the round 
 of the world. Nothing can be greater than the image 
 of these two ghastly forms ranging Chaos, and beating 
 
122 MILTON. [CHAP. 
 
 into a shoal the solid and the dry, bound with Death's 
 petrific mace into fastness, wrought into a mole im- 
 mense ; though one cannot but wish that Xerxes and 
 his bridge were removed from the description. At 
 last, Death and Sin see, how vividly! Satan " in 
 likeness of an angel bright, Betwixt the Centaur and 
 the Scorpion steering." Satan's speech is weighty with 
 scorn and power and cruel joy. There is true devilry 
 in the phrase. " Him first make sure your thrall, and 
 lastly kill." 
 
 Milton's imagination fills their departure with ter- 
 ror ; the whole Heavens are blasted as they pass, 
 410-414. Nor is Satan's journey to Hell less instinct 
 with imagination : we hear the very roar of Chaos 
 beating on the bridge as he descends : and the 
 picture of him as he goes disguised through empty 
 Hell and suddenly opens forth on his throne from 
 invisible to visible, is in Milton's mightiest manner. 
 It is "penetrative imagination " that makes Satan now 
 resume his old magnificence in aspect and in speech. 
 It binds together his image at the beginning and 
 his image at the end, and a full picture of him 
 is left with us. It is natural also that he should 
 triumph here; he had reached his aim. But it is 
 only to heighten the catastrophe. Scorn he has 
 given, and brought shame on man, and scorn and 
 shame are his at the moment of his greatest pride. 
 He changes to a monstrous serpent, and all his 
 followers change with him. This is the last, the com- 
 plete fall of Satan. We hear of him no more ; the 
 result of the Fall is wrought in him, and we leave, 
 hissing and shamed and tortured, in utter degradation, 
 him whom some have strangely termed the true hero 
 of Paradise Lost. 
 
 The history of the result of the Fall is now continued 
 in the action of Sin and Death in Paradise, and when 
 Sin, in their fierce talk, says — " Till I in man residing 
 through the race," — she strikes one of the key-notes 
 of the following books. It is the race, and the effects of 
 sin on the race, that dwell through all the talk of Adam 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 123 
 
 and Eve, and through the vision Michael shows to 
 Adam, and through the talk of the Father and the 
 Son. It is not Adam only that Milton now sees. It 
 is Adam as all mankind. 
 
 The next result is a sorrowful change in Nature. 
 Through this which rouses Adam, we are brought back 
 to him, our true subject. Hid in shade and coming 
 night, he speaks, and the pathos of his first words soon 
 changes into his habitual reasoning. It is dominated 
 by the thought of the race. " I shall send on the curse, 
 he thinks, and all the curse of mankind will redound 
 on me. Did I ask God to make me ? " Yet, as he 
 argues on — the doom is just. " Why do I not die at 
 once ? How glad would lay me down, as in my 
 mother's lap ! " most pathetic are the lines ! " May I not 
 die and my soul live on, a living death ? No, I shall all 
 die, God cannot make death deathless. But death 
 may not be at one stroke, but the perpetuity of misery 
 such as I have now ? Death eternal and I eternal, and 
 my death eternal in my race, cursed and corrupt 
 through me — me utterly miserable and lost ! — ' from 
 deep to deeper plunged.' On me, me only, let the 
 curse fall." All night long he mourns, and calls on 
 death ; and the closing lines, 860-62, are full of Milton's 
 lovely tenderness, exquisite in Adam's reference to 
 outward nature after all this inward passion of thought 
 and pain. 
 
 In this, his Purification, at which Milton works 
 throughout, has now begun. Adam confesses the justice 
 of God, and his desire for death is a desire of self- 
 sacrifice, that he may save his race. One drop of 
 evil clings to him, his bitterness against that " bad 
 woman " ; till that is gone he cannot be more puri- 
 fied, nor yet Eve. Therefore Milton, knowing that 
 his epic work was now to ennoble Eve and Adam, 
 makes Eve draw near. Adam's violent speech has 
 been much blamed, but the censors have forgotten 
 how entirely natural it was, nor have they seen the 
 touch in it of love, " that too heavenly form ; " nor 
 that it is so fierce that love must be there, love cruel 
 
124 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 as the grave. No woman would hate Adam for it, 
 nor does Eve. The reply is full of beautiful love. 
 
 " While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps, 
 Between us two let there be peace," 
 
 are words that reach the height of tragic pathos. 
 The strongest thing in her speech, as in Adam's, is her 
 horror that her sin should be visited on the race. 
 When she, like Adam, says, " On me, me only let the 
 curse fall," she also reaches the spirit of sacrifice, and 
 another element enters into her purification : while 
 Adam, in feeling love again fill his heart for Eve, 
 steps into a higher life. Nothing can be more careful 
 than Milton's work in all this part of his subject. Still 
 dwelling on their wish to save their descendants from 
 the results of their fall, Eve, impetuously speaking, 
 proposes to Adam childlessness, or suicide. Adam's 
 love rises higher and he gains admiration of her 
 character. Another poetic necessity is satisfied in 
 this : but his reason, still keeping close to the 
 thought of the race, answers Eve, " If we are childless, 
 the promised seed will not redeem mankind." The 
 spirit of sacrifice in them both now works further 
 results. They think of the promise, of the pity already 
 shown them, and penitence and prayer begin ; and the 
 book ends leaving them prostrate where they sinned/' in 
 sorrow unfeigned, humiliation meek." 
 
 I have dwelt long on this, because it is a part 
 of Milton's epic work which I do not remember 
 has been much, if at all, treated of. Yet it fills 
 this book and the next ; and the conclusion of 
 the whole poem is its conclusion. Had not the 
 purification of the hero, to use the term, been 
 made foremost in these books, there would have been 
 little use for them. Had it not been there, had the 
 poem ended at the Ninth Book with some short con- 
 clusion, the complete epic character, supposing man- 
 kind, in Adam and Eve, to be the hero, would have, 
 I think, been wanting to the whole poem. 
 
 Book XI. carries on the three aims I have men- 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 125 
 
 tioned, and Man is still the hero, still the central 
 figure. Their " port is not of mean suitors " when 
 they pray ; Heaven is still engaged about them ; and 
 Milton makes the Son of God say to the Father that 
 their end is to be u made one with me as I with thee." 
 The discourse of the expulsion takes up the first 
 part of the book, and the ruling note of it is struck 
 — as also of the close of the poem — in the line — 
 
 " So send them forth, though sorrowing, yet in peace." 
 
 In Paradise the morning has come, and Adam and 
 Eve, softened by penitence, are further purified by 
 Milton. So much of Paradise has already returned 
 that Adam has seen a vision of God, and with it, has 
 felt peace. Then his honour for Eve deepens, for he 
 remembers the promise that she shall be the source of 
 redemption : and Eve herself feels that, having been 
 the Bringer of Death, she is now made the Source 
 of Life. This great idea purifies them. The pathetic 
 contrast which follows between Eve's hopes of pleasant 
 toil, as of old, in Paradise, and nature's contradiction of 
 her hopes, is done with that grand simplicity which is 
 Milton's own in pathos. The picturesque description 
 of the eagle and the lion driving their prey, two birds, / 
 a hart and hind — is lifted into the realm of the imagi- 
 nation by the suggestion in it of the coming expulsion ; 
 for the prey is driven to the eastern gate. Another 
 vivid contrast follows. In the East, whither the 
 guilty are to go, the sun is darkened at morn ; but 
 the west is all ablaze, whence comes Michael, the min- 
 ister of expulsion. Another of Milton's picturesque 
 methods is used, when he makes our eyes follow 
 through more than ten lines the approach of the arch- 
 angel through the garden. We know from the force 
 with which Milton paints the angel, how glad he is to 
 do it, but he does not forget that Adam is changed, 
 and Michael comes now, not as an angel, but as a man. 
 The sentence is followed by that pathetic cry of Eve, 
 lovelier and lovelier in its tenderness till the last and 
 loveliest lines. Nor is Adam's answer in its close less 
 
 1 
 

 126 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 beautiful and tender, though it is made distinct from 
 Eve's speech by the note of manliness. Another 
 element of purification is marked in this reply. The 
 devotion of worship has come, remorse is changed 
 into the memory of love, and that into love itself. 
 Lastly, one of the deepest thoughts of Milton's inner 
 life fills five lines of Michael's answer, 360-65, and 
 then the angel leads Adam to the Mount of Vision. 
 
 That Vision is introduced not only to reveal the 
 results of the Fall, but to work out still further 
 the purification of Adam. Milton dwells on this 
 i with care 360-65.37 0-76. There is too much geo- 
 graphical de < taTT""aTme beginning, but Milton loved 
 his roll of names, and we may well afford them 
 room. The first picture is of Cain and Abel and the 
 murder. It is short ; but Milton's long experience in 
 choosing the right things to describe so as to set the 
 imagination of the reader to create the whole, the 
 exquisite selectiveness of his art is nowhere better 
 shown than in this picture and the third (555-65). The 
 lazar-house is not of the same quality ; if ^ eems uv er- 
 worked ; we know he added to it : and the lines of 
 most interest are those at the close of the discourse 
 on death, in which we seem to read the temper of 
 Milton's sonnet at the age of twenty-three deepened 
 now in his old age. — 
 
 " Nor love thy life, nor hate ; but what thou liv'st 
 Live well ; how long or short permit to Heaven." 
 
 The picture of the corrupt civilisation which follows 
 the union of the children of Seth and of Cain is 
 Milton's reproduction in history of the spirit of Belial's 
 speech in the Second Book, as the next picture of War 
 and Injustice realizes the spirit of Moloch's speech, 
 and the next of Evil Peace the spirit of Mammon's 
 speech ; and it is worth while to compare the speeches 
 with the pictures. The reigns of luxurious art, of 
 violence, and of wealth are all finely wrought, but with- 
 out precise force, as if they were seen by the imagination, 
 not in sight, but in a dream ; not in reality, but in a 
 

 IV.] PARADISE LOST. 127 
 
 picture. They are so seen; but it is just because they 
 are so seen that they lack power. Then follows the 
 vision of the flood, full of fine lines, enough to sup- 
 ply many poets with material ; yet the theological 
 commentary of Adam and Michael weakens the effect, 
 and the passage falls below Milton's power. The 
 vision of the rainbow and Adam's joy thereat end 
 the book. 
 
 Book XII. closes this eventful history. The 
 Vision ceases ; and Michael narrates, in a rapid sketch, 
 the further results of the Fall, and of God's action, 
 continued through the history of man. The promise 
 given to Eve is fulfilled in the coming of the greater 
 Man. Sin and death are overthrown in His sacrifice 
 and a part of the blessings lost at the Fall is redeemed. 
 The history of the Christian Church is then told un- 
 til the final victory over Satan at the judgment-day, 
 when new heavens and a new earth arise and all that 
 was Lost is Won. It is difficult to say that all this I 
 is not necessary. It completes the subject of the, 
 vindication of God's ways to man ; the canvas is filled! 
 not only with man conquered, but with man the* 
 conquerour : the whole earth now made new — 
 
 " Shall be one Paradise, far happier place 
 Than this of Eden, and far happier days." 
 
 But to praise it in comparison with the rest is impossible. 
 The interest is only that of an annalist's tale. It is a 
 pity the poem should pass to its close through this 
 slow and dragging narration j and the political 
 and religious opinions of Milton lower the due dignity 
 of the Archangel's words by introducing too personal 
 and too controversial an element. At the end of it the 
 further purification of Adam is insisted on — 557 — 573, 
 and we are made to understand that thiT was~"aTr" 
 important in Milton's eyes by the sayings of Michael — 
 That now Adam had attained the sum of wisdom, 
 better than the knowledge he sought of old from 
 Raphael ; the wisdom of obedience and love of God, in 
 contrast with the false knowledge won by disobedience 
 9 
 
128 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 from the tree — and, That when deeds answerable to 
 that wisdom are added to it — 
 
 " Then wilt thou not be loth 
 To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess 
 A Paradise within thee, happier far." 
 
 The same ennobling and purifying power of thought 
 has been with Eve, dreaming in her sleep while Adam 
 saw and heard ; and both are in possession of wisdom 
 and inward Paradise, when they leave the Tree of 
 Knowledge and the earthly Paradise behind. It is 
 the true close of the Poem — the epic purification of 
 mankind. 
 
 Then comes the last scene : Adam, full of love, runs 
 before the angel to waken Eve ; she is ready to go with 
 him, for he is all things to her, all places. The cheru- 
 bim descend, in front the brandisht sword of God ; 
 and through the eastern gate " our lingering parents " 
 disappear. They look back, and see — 
 
 " The gate 
 "With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms," 
 
 and pass away ; and on our minds — all else gone, 
 Satan and Hell, God and Heaven and Paradise and 
 Angels — the image of Mankind alone remains. 
 
 The characters of Adam and Eve and 
 Satan are worth separate consideration, and I have 
 kept them for the most part out of my analysis of 
 the conduct of the poem. I could not do so alto- 
 gether, and a few repetitions are unavoidable. 
 
 Adam and Eve. — Adam is our primitive great 
 sire and Eve the mother of mankind. They are not 
 intended in any sense to represent men and women 
 such as we know them, worn with the wars of 
 thought and passion, made complex or dwarfed 
 by civilisation, but the archetypal man and woman, 
 fresh from the hand of God. They are primal, 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 129 
 
 and all in them is primal. There is nothing in all , 
 art which resembles this great outline of Milton, an 
 outline as of early gods, except Michel's Angelo's two 
 frescoes in the Sistine Chapel of Adam and of Eve 
 coming into life. These have the same ineffable breath ( 
 of first humanity by which the Adam and Eve of Milton 1 
 live. Both the man and the woman are sinless, without 
 sin's complexity and its knowledge ; both are free intel- 
 lectually and morally : both are perfect in health, and j 
 have in full degree all the natural passions. In both, f 
 Reason and Will are set as lords over their nature ; and 
 the reason, the will, and the passions act as Milton sup- 
 posed them to act in two fresh, simple, and perfect 
 persons who are wholly without experience. Milton 
 has, with extraordinary self-restraint, kept himself 
 within the necessary limits of this subject. When he 
 does not succeed in doing so, the transgression is so 
 remarkable that we are made to realise its rarity. Of 
 course, such limits prevent his delineation from interest- 
 ing those who care only for the agony or joy of the 
 human struggle as it is seen in CEdipus, or Hamlet, or 
 Faust, or for the storm of human action as seen in 
 Achilles or y£neas , but if we can leave these more 
 exciting phases of human life aside for a little, it may 
 give us pleasure at last to look on Milton's first man 
 and first woman while as yet their humanity had 
 neither agony nor action. 
 
 They were then made lords of all, the image of j 
 their glorious Maker, having truth, wisdom, " sanctitude 
 severe and pure," and placed in freedom. Adam is ' 
 formed for contemplation (intellectual strength of 
 reason), for valour (manly strength with tenderness). 
 Both these are the grounds of that absolute rule which 
 his "fair large front and eye sublime" declared. Next 
 to reason and strength in him is Love, and love after- 
 wards intensified by passion towards woman. Adam's 
 highest relation is not to her, but to God ; and 
 strength, and reason, and love are to be held in 
 subjection to God's will, because that will is good- 
 ness. Obedience is then his first and his only duty. 
 
130 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 It includes all others. That is Milton's conception 
 of absolute Manhood. In the Fall, the vehemence 
 of passionate love overthrows obedience to God, and 
 reason, and strength. 
 
 \f Eve is formed for softness and sweet attractive 
 grace; perfect in beauty, that from ''about her shot 
 darts of desire ;" as keen to desire all things as fit to 
 awake desire : subject to the man as he to God; but 
 her subjection " demanding gentleness," and " yielded 
 with coy submission, modest pride ; " full of love, but 
 love given " with sweet reluctant amorous delay." As 
 deep as reason is in Adam, so deep is curiosity in 
 Eve. This in Milton's absolute Womanhood. Finally 
 the vehemence of curiosity overthrows, at the Fall, 
 love, and subjection to man, and obedience to God. 
 
 In Adam's very first speech — IY . 410 ^— he reasons 
 through his own state and his duties to God, but he 
 begins it with his love to Eve. Eve, answering, does 
 not reason at all. She looks to Adam as he to God, 
 declares her relation to him and then glides at once 
 into womanhood, the pure primal womanhood as 
 Milton saw it ; which delighted to recall the first day 
 of her life, dwelling on its details one by one ; which 
 loved the charm of the past, and to paint it as a 
 picture ; which records a touch of happy and inno- 
 cent vanity, lost at once, when she is wooed, in 
 yielding and delighted love. In neither of them is 
 there a single trace of the wilder passions of the 
 soul which arise from unregulated sense or from un- 
 regulated questioning. Both are kept quite simple 
 
 ' and natural. Their love is tender and intelligent, but 
 it is also passionate. Pure sensuousness and deliberate 
 bodily passion are made by Milton to belong to the 
 very essence of their love. It is a marvel how he has 
 kept it free, and large, and pure, yet left it sensuous. 
 But there is a difference in their love. Eve, in her 
 womanhood, plays round her love, and adorns it 
 and makes it complex — but her love is never intense. 
 Adam's love has intensity ; he only sees Eve : but she 
 decks the arbour of love with flowers, and in one of 
 
TV.] PARADISE LOST. 131 
 
 her loveliest outbursts (iy. G^g) she, looking far more 
 deeply than Adam ever does into the beauty of the 
 outward world, brings all nature and all its life from 
 morn till night before her hearer, that she may illus- 
 trate and enhance her love ; nor does Milton fail to 
 mark her soft attractive grace in the sweetness of his 
 verse. 
 
 Adam, in his answer, loves this quality in Eve 
 — " Daughter of man and God, accomplisht Eve," 
 but himself delights more to speak of the causes of 
 things and their use. The speech of both when this 
 first talk is closed is worthy of these two sinless 
 figures. They are happy in God and one another, but 
 they are also happy, and this is one of the ground 
 tones of their characters, in their hope of a plenteous 
 race to issue from their love. On the foundation of 
 this thought Milton builds another description of 
 their passionate love. 
 
 At their next awaking in the Fifth Book it is still | 
 love which fills the scene, still the grace of Eve's \ 
 beauty, still the delight of desire in Adam. His call ' 
 to her to waken is the pure call of healthy and pas- 
 sionate joy, and in its innocent pleasure in the day and 
 the work of the day seems childish till we begin to 
 feel its large simplicity. The dream that Eve tells is 
 meant to show some of the roots of her character ; 
 those where she is weakest. In jt her love of beauty 
 is placed even before her curiosity of appetite and of 
 the unknown. That love of nature, so strong in her, 
 is touched ; that love of her own beauty, which, still 
 innocent, was not "yet vanity, is also touched here, as 
 it is in her first account of herself. The love of 
 power which Milton held to be inherent in woman, the 
 desire of the forbidden, the stirring of appetite through 
 beauty, are all made prominent. Yet Eve is saved 
 from having them sinfully, while we are made to recog- 
 nise their germs in her, because her dream is not repre- 
 sented as her own, but as the work of Satan. Adam's 
 answer still shows him, not complex like Eve, but simple; 
 made only as yet of two things — of reason and of love. 
 
132 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 Both reason and love are almost in extremes in him. 
 Were it not for his love, his discursiveness would be dull ; 
 were it not for the reason in him, his love would be 
 weak. After this talk they are both lifted out of 
 criticism by their splendid Psalm of Praise. It adds 
 to the great impression of this primitive man and 
 woman that they should both have, as native gifts, 
 the power of rapture and the power of eloquence. 
 
 In the association with Raphael their characters 
 are further developed. Eve loves to put things into 
 form ; she is taken up with the pleasure of hospitality, 
 of making things bright and ready, of giving happi- 
 ness. We see that her gardening is her joy, that she 
 treats the flowers like children, and delights in seeing 
 them also grow and shape themselves at her will. She 
 loves to feel in this way her power. Adam, on the 
 contrary, is all astir within his brain. No sooner is 
 the meal over, than he will not let the occasion pass 
 to know things above the world ; he would, in con- 
 templation of created things, by steps ascend to God. 
 He cannot rest for the "thirst he has of knowledge," 
 and when he knows, he reasons, argues, speculates, 
 entering on " studious thoughts abstruse," on quaint 
 speculations finally as to whether the angels loved. 
 Withal he does not lose courtesy, a noble patriarchal 
 courtesy, and out of it grows. one of the few speeches 
 in which Adam is made to have a poetic turn on any 
 subject save a lofty one (vii. 98 — 108). 
 
 Meanwhile Eve, delighted with the story of the 
 War and the Creation, moves away when the con- 
 versation turns to scientific matters. It is not, Milton 
 is anxious to say, that she is not capable of under- 
 standing these things, but that she reserved that 
 pleasure. 
 
 " Her husband the relater she preferred 
 Before the angel, and of him to ask 
 Chose rather ; he, she knew, would intermix 
 Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute 
 With conjugal caresses : from his lip 
 Not words alone pleased her." — Bk. viii. 50. 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 133 
 
 It is prim aeval womanhoo d, and the picture is worthy 
 of the first woman, when in lowliness majestic she 
 rose from her seat, and with " Grace that won who 
 saw to wish her stay," went among her fruits and 
 flowers — 
 
 11 With goddess-like demeanour forth she went, 
 Not unattended, for on her as queen 
 A group of winning Graces waited still, 
 And from about her shot darts of desire." 
 
 Over against this stately and noble beauty, the home 
 of desire, yet full of thought and gentleness, is set in all 
 the conversation with Raphael the steady, grave, secure 
 intelligence of Adam ; who lets his fancy rove when 
 it pleases him (viii. 185, &c), but is always master 
 of it to bring it home to the uses of daily life. 
 Afterwards, in contrast to the picture Eve has made 
 in the fourth book of her coming into life is set the 
 picture of the coming into life of Man, when Adam, 
 loving his socfal talk, delays the angel to tell the story 
 of his own creation. I can never read it (Bk. viii. 250, 
 &c.) without wonder and joy at anything so great and 
 fine, without reverence for the character which con- 
 ceived it. It is the true picture of absolute, first man- 
 hood, if we think of it as made at once out of 
 God. The physical man is first touched, and we see 
 him laid in balmy sweat, just born to life. His eyes 
 are fixed on heaven ; he springs to his feet ; he sees 
 all things — not their beauty, as Eve saw, but their 
 life — and at the sight, and at himself — Joy, first of 
 all the passions, springs into being. He peruses 
 himself; tries his powers, walking, running; tries 
 speech ; finds it and intelligence ; names all things ; 
 breaks into a burst of delight ; then reasons at once 
 from creation to a God. Who is God is his first 
 question? Why do I live, why so happy? is his 
 second. Then comes pensiveness, the first forerunner 
 of the sense of loneliness, and he falls to sleep. 
 Who else but Milton could have done this? Not 
 Shakspere, his soul was too involved with the 
 
134 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 trouble and doubt of the world. I wonder if any 
 one but a blind man could have done it. 
 
 Appetite then arises, Adam eats and wakes : and swift 
 following is that charming scene, the first longing of 
 native love for its mate, the first stirring of vague 
 desire, the first loneliness of man's heart, the root of 
 that love which is the deepest thing in Adam's cha- 
 racter. And God, here alone in Paradise Lost, seen 
 in the solemn human beauty which we can love, 
 gives him his desire : — 
 
 ' ' And the Vision bright, 
 As with a smile more brightened, thus replied." 
 
 And when Adam presses for a companion, answers — 
 
 " A nice and subtle happiness I see 
 Thou to thyself proposest." 
 
 No one but Milton could have touched this scene. 
 It plays with the Highest, but does not lower 
 Him, And the strange humour of the dialogue is full 
 of grave loveliness, and of the grandeur of God and 
 the first Man, till we come to the last and loveliest 
 lines — 
 
 " What next I bring shall please thee, be assured, 
 Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, 
 Thy wish exactly to thy heart's desire." 
 
 All the first thoughts,, all the primal desires of a 
 man are'sketched in this scene. Nor is the art less 
 which makes Adam only long to fill his loneliness, 
 which gives him only a vague want. It is different 
 when he sees the woman, 470, & c. Then vague 
 desire realises what it means ; passion is born, that 
 passion of which Adam speaks till the close of the 
 book, on which Milton insists as the conqueror of 
 reason, as the point where Adam alone was weak. 
 In the midst of this wonderful sketch, Milton, by 
 Adam's voice, draws his intensest picture of Eve, of 
 the " eternal feminine," as Goethe would call it. It 
 is a curious touch that while Adam confesses the weak- 
 ness of his nature under passion, he reasons on it as 
 if it were something outside of himself. In Adam 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 135 
 
 reason acts separately from passion. Even when he 
 is swept away by passion, his reason keeps its clear- 
 ness while it abdicates. It is the opposite in Eve. 
 
 When we next meet them, Eve wishes to leave 
 Adam, in order to divide their work. Her character 
 already begins to lose simplicity. Milton certainly 
 means to suggest in the womanhood he here draws 
 a desire "of some change, a vague weariness and impa- 
 tience of the continuous everyday order of life. It 
 is a part of Eve's deep curiosity which here appears. 
 Unconsciously deceiving herself, she feels and repre- 
 sents her dim weariness of life as desire to do the 
 work of the garden better by dividing it. Adam 
 is acute enough to see this ; if he did not we should 
 think less of his intelligence. Bk. ix. 247, 8. Then 
 Milton paints the woman's self-confidence; her readi- 
 ness to go and meet temptation, the readiness of un- 
 reasoning daring ; the woman's common laughter at 
 the man's prudence and fear. It is otherwise with 
 Adam. He does fear, he reasons about love ; really 
 loves more than Eve; begs her, and warns her, to 
 stay, but when she reproaches him in the woman's way 
 for mistrust, excuses himself, cannot stand her frown, 
 argues, but yields at last. She has her fancy ; she will 
 have it ; she can think of nothing else ; opposition only 
 fixes her. 
 
 In her talk with Satan Milton emphasises her yield- 
 ing to the persuasion of the new and strange. "Into 
 the heart of Eve his words made way," because she 
 was so wonderstruck and so pleased to wonder. Her 
 child-like vanity, her woman's love of power, are 
 now- no longer innocent. Satan calls her empress, 
 sovran of creatures, goddess among gods, — and 
 then, when she yields, all her qualities rush into 
 their extremes. Appetite becomes sensual, curiosity 
 becomes diseased desire, the desire of having her own 
 way sets her into rebellious contempt. God's forbid- 
 ding commends the fruit more, infers its good and 
 their want. The whole of her argument is nothing 
 more than — " I wish it." 
 
I3 6 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 And when she has taken the fruit she knows no 
 mean — she is wholly in her sin, all thought is lost, all 
 restraint, there is no vision of anything but self; 
 not of God, nor of Adam, only of satiated joy; until 
 the thought of another Eye by the side of Adam 
 makes her sick with jealousy. When she returns to 
 Adam, she has the boldness of the woman who, having 
 done wrong, and while the excitement of wrong con- 
 tinues, glories in her sin. She appeals to the man to 
 do wrong also, and to his weakest point — Sin now, 
 because you love me. As to Adam, he is repre- 
 sented as absolutely in her power through passion. 
 Resistance drops into dismay, and dismay rises out 
 of itself into passion. Then manhood comes in. 
 Having once resolved to give way to passion even 
 in sin— he becomes calm, and reasons on the whole 
 question. 
 
 But he reasons differently from Eve. She has no 
 fear ; Adam has. Eve in the pleasure of curiosity and 
 excitement does not and did not look forward. Adam 
 thinks of, and dreads the future ; but his love is more 
 than his dread. Not surprised, but with his eyes 
 wide open, he sins ; not deceived, but fondly over- 
 come. And then, the pure passion of their lives 
 changes to impure, and the Fall is complete. True 
 criticism will recognise that the whole of this, given 
 the conditions, is as fine, in its grave, though slow- 
 moving manner, as anything in Shakspere. 
 
 After the fall there is a languor in the characterisa- 
 tion of Adam and Eve. Milton had so long con- 
 sidered them and built them up the foundation of 
 innocence, that when he has to alter that foundation 
 altogether, he is troubled, and so troubled as to become 
 languid. I is a want of dramatic inventiveness, one 
 of Milton's greatest wants. The evil now added to 
 their characters does not make them, as it would 
 naturally do, more complex. They remain simple, and 
 the evil is rather their clothing than of themselves. 
 We might easily make this into a reason for praise, 
 and declare that Milton kept them simple on purpose, 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 137 
 
 because evil was so new to them. But that would 
 be over-subtle and untrue. He is right in keeping 
 the grand lines of their primal nature, but he was 
 perhaps unable to bring in the other elements. One 
 thing alone is added to their characters — pathetic 
 power, and it is nobly added. 
 
 The change itself and the purification of their 
 characters through repentance I have already dwelt 
 on. Adam is the first to repent, the first to act, 
 the first to reproach. He knows his moral state, 
 and he knows its end ; Eve only knows it through 
 Adam. The recrimination which follows, Bk. ix. 
 1 135, &c, is neither of Adam nor of Eve specially. 
 It is of essential human nature ; it is the simple 
 ordinary dull result of mutual guilt which is here 
 represented. A touch in Adam's outburst against 
 Eve in the next book angrily exaggerates one of the 
 ground tones of Milton's character of Eve — " longing 
 to be seen — even by the Devil himself." 
 
 Eve still remains the most interesting; she is always 
 more complex than Adam. Adam is, as before, made 
 up of the pure reason and of love to Eve ; and he sees 
 things and their true relations even more clearly than 
 before the Fall, because passion, having suffered from 
 itself, does not now master reason. This point Milton 
 has clearly marked, but it is different with Eve. Sin 
 has made Adam less but Eve more passionate. Having 
 suffered, she feels everything more keenly than she 
 did before she was guilty; she reasons less, and sees 
 things less plainly ; but she loves more. She has 
 gained intensity. The passionate way of looking at 
 life, not hers before, now makes her feelings lead her 
 where they will. As she lightly dared temptation 
 before fall, so now she resolutely dares the whole 
 punishment. " Let all the sentence light on me ! " 
 Adam's anger breaks down at once under his love. 
 Then his reason comes in. " Unwary and too desirous, 
 as before " — to think you could bear all the punishment 
 — ill-able to bear thine own. Nor can prayers alter 
 decrees ! — Eve, led by passionate desire for the rescue 
 
138 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 of the race from the curse, rushes into extremes. Let 
 us be childless — let us give ourselves death ! Adam's 
 strong intellect sees her proposals as folly, though he 
 respects the feeling at their root. 
 
 The whole difference between them is subtly marked. 
 When Adam fell, his reason, though mastered, retained 
 its clearness ; he yields to passion, but he knows he 
 is acting irrationally. But in Eve, passionate feeling 
 now that she has it, is the reason of her will. Her 
 whole body too alters under her intense realisation of 
 her emotion — 
 
 "So much of death her thoughts 
 Had entertained as dyed her cheek with pale." 
 
 The end is very lovely and full of womanhood. Once 
 Eve is reconciled to Adam, she thinks that all is well. 
 She forgets the sentence and returns to her work, 
 content. When she is forgiven she forgives herself, 
 and sees her life as good. When she hears that 
 she may not remain in Paradise, all the woman's 
 tender clinging to home and the life she loved breaks 
 out in her pathetic cry. Adam feels the same sorrow, 
 but his reason sees the impossibility of staying, and 
 he turns to rest in God. Last, after the Vision — 
 the love of both for one another is alone left for us 
 to think of. Adam hurries before the angel to wake 
 his beloved. Eve welcomes him as all things under 
 heaven to her, yet, always more complex than Adam, 
 thinks also of motherhood and of the salvation of the 
 race through her seed. It is the last womanly touch. 
 And Milton sends them forth hand in hand, happy in 
 their love. 
 
 The Character of Milton's Satan. — He has 
 been often said to be the hero of Paradise Lost It is 
 enough to say, in answer, that his history in that book 
 is that of a person in process of degrading change. 
 Adam, the true hero of the epic, and with him Eve, 
 are purified at the end. That which they have lost 
 they regain in another form — " a Paradise within thee, 
 happier far." Over against this purification is set the 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 139 
 
 degradation of Satan ; and his real fall is all the 
 greater for his apparent victory. 
 
 But at first he is not absolutely evil. There was 
 an epic necessity that he should be sublime, and that 
 we should be interested in him, and absolute evil is 
 mean, and wakes no pleasure. Therefore he is made 
 a mixed character, with evil passions in which good 
 still lingers. And these are held in one who has 
 genius and all its charm — great beauty, great intel- 
 lect, great emotions, great physical daring; in all 
 things proudly eminent. The evil finally masters the 
 good, but the good is made vivid and attractive by 
 the darkness which surrounds it. He is the image and ' 
 type of those great and selfish conquerors whose pride 
 it was to draw the admiring world after them; and 
 whom Milton detested more than any other men. In 
 a number of points the Satan of Milton resembles I 
 the Napoleon of history. 
 
 At the beginning Satan is then a mixed character. 
 Before he falls, as I maintain a second time in his 
 destruction of innocent beings, he is selfish, but with 
 abrupt touches of unselfishness. He js proud, but 
 his pride is for others as well as for himself. He is 
 full of envy and malice, yet he often hates these 
 passions in himself. He destroys, but it is with 
 difficulty he overcomes his pity for those he destroys. 
 He Js the great rebel against goodness, but he 
 persuades himself it is for the sake of freedom. 
 He brings_jvar_mto__heaven, and despises heaven, 
 yet he loves its beauty and would fain thither return. 
 He is God's enemy, yet he allows God's justice. 
 He revenges himself, yet revenge is bitter. He is 
 ruthless in his sacrifice of his comrades to his egotism, 
 but he so does it as to win the honour and retain the 
 love of those he sacrifices. He hates man, but he loves 
 his friend. He hates God, buf "at first his hatred is 
 not mean ; it is carried out with indomitable will and 
 courage, not to be subdued by pain. He ruins beauty, I 
 but he regrets its loss in himself and admires it in 
 others. He lets loose Hell, and Sin, and Death on 
 
 11 
 
140 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 earth, but in the doing of it he is sorry. It is the 
 mixed human character in which goodness is, but in 
 which evil predominates. It only ceases to be human 
 at the very end, when evil has driven out all good. 
 It is this humanity that makes him the most interest- 
 ing character in Paradise Lost to those who do not 
 read the poem to the close. 
 
 The Physical Presentation. — He is master of 
 all the fallen angels in Power ; above them all shone 
 the archangel — and we admire the power, for at first 
 it is made use of not only for selfish and brutal ends. 
 It is controlled by intellect ; adapted to carry out 
 conceptions and to rescue his followers; bound up 
 with courage and labour for others. The whole pas- 
 sage in which his flight over chaos is resolved on 
 and described illustrates this element of good in his 
 power. Again, in the garden, he claims, before 
 putting forth his might in battle with Gabriel, to have 
 used his strength for the sake of his people, and the 
 splendid picture of his physical greatness (iv. 985), 
 accords with his thoughts. It is impossible to con- 
 nect that sublime apparition with the foul image of 
 absolute evil. 
 
 Yet the evil errand and the evil in him have already 
 lessened his might. Zephon and Gabriel both tell 
 him that because he is wicked he is weak. Lower and 
 lower, as the poem goes on, his physical power sinks, 
 in exact proportion to the growth of evil in him. 
 When he comes to use it, not for others but only for 
 destroying happiness, it drops to deeper weakness. 
 Milton marks the point. Satan fears Adam as possibly 
 stronger than he — he who had met archangels. Satan 
 fears pain — he who, so strong was passion, did not 
 feel the burning marl. Adam is — 
 
 " Foe not informidable ! exempt from wound, 
 I not ; so much hath Hell debased, and pain 
 Enfeebled me, to what I was in Heaven." 
 
 This is the degradation of physical power. 
 
 The Degradation of Physical Beauty also comes upon 
 him, and it is the dying of the remnants of good which 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 141 
 
 steals away his splendour. Once that splendour was 
 only less than archangel ruined — his form had " not 
 lost all her original brightness." Step by step it falls 
 away. When he meets Uriel in the sun, he can still 
 take the likeness of a stripling cherub. But even this 
 form is ruined when, on Mount Niphates, his borrowed 
 face is dimmed, 
 
 " Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy and despair." 
 
 Later on, when he meets in Paradise Zephon and 
 Ithuriel and asks, in pride, if they know him not — 
 Think not, they answer, 
 
 " Revolted spirit, thy shape the same, 
 Or undiminisht brightness. 
 
 Thou resemblest now 
 Thy sin, and place of doom obscure and foul." 
 
 And bitter is Satan's grief. He saw and pined | 
 
 " His loss ; but chiefly to find here observed 
 His lustre visibly impaired." 
 
 Yet something yet remained ; Gabriel sees him coming 
 — "a faded splendour wan." It is not till he has 
 destroyed innocence that all his splendour goes from 
 him. When he enters hell on his return, his shape is 
 still starbright, but the shining is now "false glitter," 
 and then — at the very hour when he would be most 
 glorious — Milton, to mark the end of beauty which 
 has ceased to be the expression of any goodness, since 
 it has destroyed goodness, turns him into the hideous 
 dragon — "a monstrous serpent on his belly prone." 
 This is the degradation of beauty 
 
 The Intellectual Presentation. — He is easily 
 master of the rest in intellect. The dash and vigour 
 with which he answers Abdiel's argument (Book V.) 
 that submission is due to God because He is their 
 maker, is admirable, and Abdiel does not argue in 
 return. He denounces Satan as a blasphemer. But 
 the blasphemy is intellectual, and does not fall below 
 a certain grand style of thought and expression. 
 Milton marks that it is instinct with sophistry, with 
 
142 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 counterfeited truth, and the results it produces in 
 Satan are fatalism (855), and the scorn which fills 
 his speeches in the battle. But at first the addition 
 of evil to his character quickens his intellect beyond 
 that of the good angels. It is, however, as a tree is 
 quickened by a poisonous element added to its soil 
 which forces its life, and then hastens its decay. That 
 was Milton's idea. He makes the same thing take 
 place in Eve after she has eaten of the fruit. Her 
 whole nature is stimulated — senses, appetite, and 
 intellect. Both she and Adam feel " divinity within 
 them breeding wings." But the result is only the lower 
 cunning of the intellect (Bk. ix. 810, &c). Milton's 
 notion then is that intellectual power, at first quickened 
 by evil, degenerates into subtlety and then into 
 base cunning. And he works this out in a masterly 
 way. In the first great speeches of the fallen Arch- 
 angel and in all that leads to them ; in the rapidity 
 with which he conceives his plan, and provides for 
 its acceptance by the council; in the majestic rhetoric 
 and persuasion with which he binds all round him, 
 Satan's intellect is supreme. It confesses but despises 
 agony. And this intellectual force, in itself admirable, 
 is kept so, because it is used, as his power was, for 
 the succour of those he has ruined. But as evil 
 deepens in him towards the ruin of man for the sake 
 only of revenge, he loses breadth of intellect. He is 
 wholly different in the garden from the great Intelli- 
 gence he was in hell. The degradation is slow ; for so 
 far good clings to him that he cannot destroy without 
 regret. Not till he has beaten back all the remnant 
 of noble thoughts that urge him to pity, and fully 
 resolves on using his intellect to destroy innocence, 
 does he feel the loss of intellect. When he does, 
 Milton again marks the point clearly. Satan is afraid 
 to tempt Adam, lest he should be too clear-headed 
 for him. Behold alone, he says — 
 
 " The woman, opportune to all attempts, 
 Her husband, for I view far round, not nigh, 
 "Whose higher intellectual more I shun." 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 143 
 
 This is the degradation of intellect, and it is subtly 
 continued in the speech made in hell, before Satan is 
 made into a serpent. Compare its boasting, its weak 
 and scornful note with the majesty of the first speeches. 
 The archangel mind is gone. Nothing is now left but 
 the serpent's cunning. 
 
 The Moral Presentation of Satan is built on 
 the same lines, and passes through similar changes. 
 In Book V. the root of his evil is exposed. When 
 the Son of God is made vicegerent of Heaven, Satan, 
 fraught with envy, could not bear 
 
 " Through pride that sight, and thought himself impaired. 
 Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain." 
 
 Pride, out of intense self-desire, is that evil out of 
 which Milton makes all other evils rise. "We are 
 eclipsed," Satan says, we, " ordained to govern, 
 not to serve." And the same fierce note of " high 
 disdain from sense of injured merit " is struck at 
 once in the first speech in hell and in every speech 
 in Book I. Out of it flow naturally " the study 
 of revenge, immortal hate ; " the scorn of repentance, 
 and finally its impossibility. Not once, through the 
 Poem, does Milton.. let slirj_this pride. Whenever 
 Satan is touched towards sorrow, whenever he seems 
 near penitence ; it is this and the shame of being 
 lower than his own thought of himself, of being faith- 
 less to his vow of vengeance for the slight he has 
 suffered, which recall him to his evil work. It ends, 
 as he pursues the revenge it has instituted, by produ- 
 cing, as means to his revenge, the^ baser evils of envy, 
 and low craft, and falsehood and hatred of those who 
 have not wronged him. 
 
 At first the solitary grandeur of his pride, needing 
 no help and asking none, makes him for a time 
 sublime, lifts him above pain, above ruin, and gives 
 him a grave consolation in despair. All is not lost ; 
 the unconquerable will remains unbroken. The 
 same disdain that made him great to rebel makes 
 him great to resist his fate. Yet even here, at his 
 10 
 
144 MILTON. [chap 
 
 highest moment, Milton marks the weakness in 
 this, by making Satan boast too much. Nor is 
 this pride at first entirely evil, for it is not for him- 
 self alone. It is a mixed egotism. In Heaven, 
 before the war, it is pride for his class, or seems 
 so ; indignant that the angels should be under any 
 government not chosen by themselves, indignant 
 afterwards that they should serve man. And it is not 
 only pride for the honour of his class, but pride in the 
 courage, faithfulness, and glory, though withered, of 
 his followers. In the great passage, Bk. i. 600, in 
 which he speaks of this, he so far loses self in his 
 emotion as to break into tears ; made to touch at that 
 moment the least selfish instant of his life. With those 
 tears passed away the last traces of his archangel life ; 
 and they are, even to the fact that the tears came partly 
 out of the sensitiveness of genius to the excitement of 
 a vast crowd of followers moved with love, strangely 
 paralleled by the tears of the Emperour at Fontaine- 
 bleau. In this hour Satan's solitude of pride is 
 modified towards good by his sympathy with his 
 followers. But the natural isolation of pride carries 
 him away from this touch of good, and produces 
 scorn ; and the scorn suffers the same degradation that 
 affects the pride. 
 
 Satan's scorn in the battle in Heaven is poor, but 
 at least it is daring. His scorn in Bk. i. is the lofty 
 scorn of pain, and of his victorious foe, and it is 
 sympathetic with his followers. His scorn in Bk. ii. 
 has lost its loftiness and its sympathy. There is a 
 touch of contempt for his people in all he says. 
 He thinks them well ruined for his sake. Step by 
 step the scorn loses its remnant of nobleness, and 
 in the last speech of all it has fallen into the mindless 
 scoff of a degraded trickster. When Satan says he 
 has seduced man — 
 
 " And the more to increase 
 Your wonder, with an apple ; he (God) thereat 
 Offended, worth your laughter," &c., 
 
 his scoff is lower than himself : Milton could have made 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 145 
 
 it as noble as he liked. He made it, and purposely, 
 unworthy of Satan's previous lofty tone. His object 
 is to mark at all points the degradation of Satan after 
 he has used his powers for the destruction of innocence. 
 
 Satan's pride — to which I return — continues to 
 work within him, and isolates him from his followers. 
 In Bk. ii. he refuses service from others lest service 
 should entail equality. " Whole in himself and owed to 
 none," he goes upon his journey : it is a step down- 
 wards from the pride which could weep for sympathy. 
 But the degradation is again slowly wrought. When 
 he is alone and none can see his sorrow, his pride 
 breaks down again and again, and as often reasserts 
 itself. 
 
 The struggle in which he becomes wholly evil goes 
 through several phases. The first is on Mount Niphates. 
 The excitement of the scenes in Hell is over. The look 
 he fixes on the sun is "sad and grieved." His speech/ 
 begins in sighs. It is the image of one in whom pride/ 
 for the moment has given way to the consciousness'- 
 of misery and of hell within : in_.whom there is some 
 good. Conscience is alive, but it wakes despair ; and 
 he bursts out, like Prometheus, racked too like him, 
 in an address to the sun. The bright Light recalls 
 to him his ancient brightness, and for that he hates it. 
 Yet there is softness in his hate ; it is the hate of 
 tears. Self-pity thrills him through. And in the 
 softening he thinks of God, and for a moment breaks 
 into penitence — a strange touch in Milton's conception 
 of Satan which is repeated in Paradise Regained : — 
 
 Till pride and worse ambition threw me down, 
 
 Warring in Heaven against Heaven's matchless King : 
 
 Ah, wherefore ? He deserved no such return 
 
 From me, whom he created what I was 
 
 In that bright eminence, and with his good 
 
 Upbraided none ; nor was his service hard." — Bk. iv. 40. 
 
 He goes on — it is his confession — saying that all God's , 
 goodness wrought malice in him, because he disdained 
 subjection, because the weight of gratitude hurt his 
 pride. Had he been an inferior angel, he had been 
 
/ 
 
 146 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 now happy, since without ambition. Yet, no ! he 
 had free will to fall or not, and in any state — such 
 was his temper — he had fallen. Therefore he has 
 nothing to accuse but Heaven's free love dealt equally 
 to all — " Be then God's love accurst ! " — a fine, fierce 
 turn of his despair and hate. And the self-conscious- 
 ness of this awful temper of mind in him which makes 
 him curse love, overthrows his self-control; and 
 the depth of his wretchedness is unveiled : — 
 
 I " Me miserable ! which way shall I fly 
 Infinite wrath and infinite despair ? " &c. 
 
 The passion of this sorrow leads him to ask if he can 
 repent. Then his pride comes back. No — he thinks, 
 disdain forbids repentance, dread of shame among the 
 spirits beneath, who little know — and here again pride 
 in its lonely hour yields to pain — under what torments 
 he groans, how dearly he abides his boasting ! Yet 
 were he to repent — (and it is wise of Milton to make 
 Satan know himself so well ; the deceiver is not self- 
 deceived) — he could not remain submissive. He would 
 be filled again with disdain, and now "wounds of 
 deadly hate have pierced too deep." It may not be ; 
 God knows him as he knows himself. God would not 
 grant a useless peace, neither can he beg it — 
 
 " So farewell hope, and, with hope, farewell fear, 
 Farewell remorse : All good to me is lost ; 
 Evil, be thou my good : by thee at least 
 Divided empire with Heaven's King I hold." 
 
 This is the first struggle of the remnants of good with 
 self-degrading pride. 
 
 The next is when he sees Adam and Eve (Bk . _iv. 
 358). Envy seizes him, but the old heavenly delight 
 in beauty and goodness glides into his soul. He 
 wonders at their loveliness j he could love them, 
 so lively shines in them divine resemblance. Pity 
 follows the passing breath of love : — 
 
 " Ah gentle pair, ye little think how nigh 
 
 / Your change approaches 
 
 To you whom I could pity thus forlorn, 
 Though I unpitied." 
 
iv.] PARADISE LOST. 147 
 
 But his resolution holds firm ; and the touch of heaven 
 only serves to give the irony with which he opens 
 Hell to them a subtle note of regret and pathos. 
 The emotion in his irony influences him through his 
 sensitive nature (and at first Satan is represented as 
 highly strung to all fine things and answering in- 
 stantly to them), and his pity rises again. He is 
 loth to this revenge, yet public reason compels him — 
 It is not public reason : it is his own pride that drives 
 him to action, and with it also 
 
 " Honour and empire with revenge enlarged." 
 
 Milton marks the conscious self-deceit. Satan's public 
 reason is that necessity which is " the tyrant's plea." 
 This is the second struggle ; and its evil result is 
 shown at line 505, where all pity is gone and only 
 envy left. 
 
 If anything were wanting to confirm his resolve, it is 
 now given by Milton when Satan is discovered and led 
 before Gabriel and all the old wounds are re-opened. 
 The scene is filled throughout with touches which 
 insist on pride. "Not to know me argues yourselves 
 unknown " has almost passed into a proverb of pride : 
 he goes like a proud steed reined ; defiance lowers in 
 his look ; his scorn is still sublime ; the very bitterness 
 of pride is in his cry " Insulting angel ; " its isola- 
 tion in 
 
 " I therefore, I alone first undertook 
 To wing the desolate abyss ; " 
 
 its boasting in his scorn of "cringing " angels. 
 
 Gabriel's answer looks forward to that which pride 
 was sure to make Satan in the end. He is in the 
 archangel's eyes the sly hypocrite. Gabriel dwells on 
 hypocrisy, and it is a subtle thought, as being, even in 
 Heaven, the result of pride — 
 
 " Who more than thou 
 Once fawned, and cringed, and servilely adored ? " 
 
 And the speech makes us see plainly that those who 
 strangely claim Satan as the representative of demo- 
 
i 4 8 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 cratic liberty are wholly mistaken : for Milton marks 
 another point in Satan considered as the representative 
 tyrant, that " he would see?n the patron of liberty." 
 
 Seven nights pass by between this and Satan's next 
 appearance. Out of the lonely brooding of their 
 darkness he comes back to Paradise, resolved to 
 destroy. The third phase of his struggle has come, 
 but it is scarcely now a struggle. He sees the earth 
 and all its beauty — Bk. ix. ioo — and thinks with 
 what delight he would have walked it round; but 
 beauty does not soften him as before, it torments him 
 by contrast with the inward pain he suffers, " as from 
 the hateful siege of contraries." Good hurts him now. 
 " Only in destroying he finds ease " to his relentless 
 thoughts. The phrase marks his passage into com- 
 plete evil. Envy of man, and disdain, injured by man, 
 deepen, and deepen to greater baseness ; and when 
 he enters the serpent, the passage (163 — 178) in which 
 he describes his own " foul descent," that he who con- 
 tended with God should " imbrute his essence mixed 
 with bestial slime;" in which he confesses that 
 ambition and revenge descend to basest things ; in 
 which the recklessness of pure spite rescues him 
 from the shame of this touch of self-knowledge — is 
 Milton's summing up of Satan's moral degradation. 
 
 One last flicker of the lamp of goodness flares up 
 in him, and then dies, when he is — Bk. ix. 460-79 
 — surprised out of his evil thoughts by the beauty of 
 Eve — 
 
 " Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed, 
 Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge." 
 
 But the " hot hell within him " soon consumes his 
 delight, and Milton makes emphatic the reason why 
 Satan lost the remnants of goodness by repeating the 
 phrase — 
 
 " Save what is in destroying, other joy 
 To me is lost." 
 
 That is his ruin. He loses all good in destroying 
 good that has not wronged him. It is his second fall, 
 
iv.] PARADISE REGAINED i 49 
 
 his complete moral degradation. The speech in Hell 
 and the monstrous change that follows mark this as 
 they marked the others. There is not a trace of high 
 thinking or moral feeling left. 
 
 The Satan of Paradise Regai?ied is not the same 
 being. He is reconceived for the occasion. He is 
 the liar, the hypocrite, the gray dissimulator, weak in 
 power, intellectual still, but having only the intellect 
 of the sophist and the rhetorician, moved easily 
 to ill-temper, all his loftiness gone, a beaten foe from 
 the beginning. Only in one strange passage is there 
 a recollection of the great figure and spirit of Paradise 
 Lost. It is where penitence comes upon him for an 
 instant, where the soul-subduing power of Christ's 
 gentleness affects him ; a brief moment, for he recovers 
 instantly, unable to free himself from himself. But 
 in it we hear the old music and the old thoughts, and 
 touch the old character we know so well in the great 
 epic. This curious passage is well worth study — 
 Book III. 203 — 222. 
 
 Paradise Regained, with Samson Agonistes, 
 
 was published by John Starkey at the Mitre in Fleet 
 Street, 167 1. It was licensed in July, 1670; entered 
 on the books of the Stationers' Company in Sep- 
 tember, 1670 ; and the second edition of it appeared 
 in 1680. Its origin is to be found in a pretty story told 
 by Ellwood the Quaker. Visiting Milton in 1665 at 
 Chalfont, the poet put into his hands the MS. of 
 Paradise Lost. On returning it, " he asked me how 
 I liked it and what I thought of it, which I modestly 
 but freely told him ; and after some further discourse 
 about it, I pleasantly said to him, ' Thou hast said 
 much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to 
 say of Paradise found?' He made me no answer, 
 but sate for some time in a muse, then brake off that 
 discourse and fell into another subject." When the 
 Plague was over, Milton came back to London, and 
 Ellwood calling on him, " He showed me," he says, 
 " his second poem, called Paradise Regained, and in 
 
150 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 a pleasant tone said to me, ' This is owing to you, for 
 you put it into my head by the question you put to 
 me at Chalfont, which before I had not thought 
 of.' " 
 
 We know, then, from this that the poem was finished 
 in 1666, before the publication of Paradise Lost, and 
 that it remained four years in manuscript. Unlike 
 Paradise Lost, which lay simmering in Milton's mind 
 for nearly thirty years, Paradise Regained was the 
 swift conception and birth of a year. There is no 
 trace of it in the subjects jotted down in earlier days. 
 It bears the marks of haste ; but we may say that it 
 is contained in Paradise Lost. It is, in fact, the 
 sequel of that poem — rather a codicil than a sequel. 
 The subject of the great epic was the disobedience 
 of man in temptation, and the consequent loss of 
 Paradise to all mankind. The subject of Paradise 
 Regained is the reversal of this — the obedience of 
 man in temptation, and the recovery thereby of 
 Paradise to all mankind. Many useless pages have 
 been written on the strangeness of applying the title 
 to the one event of the temptation and victory of 
 Christ. The reason lies on the face of the thing. It 
 suited Milton as a poet to contrast temptation with 
 temptation. The moment he heard the phrase 
 Paradise Found, the subject in its form leaped to 
 its feet before his inward eye. He liked his work 
 himself; but the only origin for the common belief 
 that he preferred it to Paradise Lost is the passage 
 in Phillips' life : — " It is generally censured to be 
 much inferior to the other, though he (Milton) could 
 not hear with patience any such thing when related 
 to him " — words which may simply mean that Milton 
 was wearied by his critics. 
 
 The poem shares in the epic character and dignity 
 of Paradise Lost. Both are reflected on it from its 
 predecessor. The shghtness and inequality (almost 
 half of the book is given to one temptation) of the 
 treatment of the subject, the want of care which we 
 feel in many parts, the frequent pedestrianism of the 
 
TV.] PARADISE REGAINED. 151 
 
 style, the maimed movement of some of the verses, 
 the heavy and occasionally inadequate reasoning, the 
 picture of Satan and Christ attacking one another like 
 two disputants in the schools, lessen the dignity of 
 the poem. But still the grand style, and the grandeur 
 of Milton's character passing like a force through the 
 arguments, make the poem dignified ; and its large 
 movement over the classical themes of Rome and 
 Athens, and over great moral questions ; and the 
 noble way in which Nature is brought in to enhance, 
 contrast, or illustrate the story and its thoughts — 
 secure its dignity. A few gentle and homely pictures, 
 with more of the charm of common earth than any 
 in Paradise Lost, touch it with tenderness. Its note 
 is not the note of Paradise Lost, which is Fall ; it is 
 the note of victory, but the too argumentative treat- 
 ment robs it of the triumphant spirit which Milton 
 desired to give it. At its root its subject is the same 
 as that of Paradise Lost. It is the "great duel" 
 between good in man and evil without him — that 
 recurring, attractive subject which underlies almost all 
 national epics and all great tragedy, which no poet 
 of humanity has ever been able to avoid, and which, 
 treated in different ways by Milton in Comus and 
 Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost and Regained, 
 ought to be enough to free him from the charge of 
 being wanting in " humanism," if his intense and domi- 
 nating individuality is not enough to do so. The 
 error of the poem is not in the sameness of the 
 subject, but in the treatment of the same subject 
 a second time on the same lines. That he succeeds 
 at all in the poem manifests his power; that he 
 fails in the invention, energy, brightness, and beauty 
 of Paradise Lost, and that the movement is heavier 
 and more retarded, is only to be expected. The very 
 verse shares in the inevitable languor of a man doing 
 a second time the thing he has already done with his 
 full force. We ask, and ask more than once, Where 
 is the ear that heard and composed the harmonies of 
 Paradise Lost ? 
 
r^ MILTON. [chap. 
 
 Book I. — It begins with a proem like one of the 
 old mysteries. There are three pictures : of the Baptist 
 and Christ at the Jordan ; of Satan holding his gloomy 
 consistory in mid air and of his going forth to tempt 
 Christ ; of the Father in Heaven speaking to Gabriel 
 of the Son's victory over Satan. Milton, in his manner, 
 thus fills his theatre with expectant witnesses, all 
 concentrating their interest on the great duel now at 
 hand. 
 
 The main story is well introduced by the wandering 
 away of Christ, lost in thought : 
 
 " Thought following thought, and step by step led on," 
 
 into the desert. The long self-conscious soliloquy of 
 Christ, in which he tells the story of his past life, 
 strikes a false note ; and is unnatural in one whose 
 eyes were on the present and the future. The picture 
 of the Saviour in the wilderness ; the sudden intro- 
 duction of Satan, as an aged peasant, to illustrate his 
 gray dissimulation ; and the swift outbreak of the Fiend 
 into his true character, as if here also touched with 
 Ithuriel's spear, are all finely wrought. The first 
 temptation is then offered to Christ, but treated so 
 lightly that we see that Milton had no idea of its 
 meaning. The conversation which follows, being 
 founded on no clear view of the situation, is heavy, 
 and loses the solemnity of the hour and the personages 
 in its scolding tone on one side, and its smooth and 
 abject flattery on the other. 
 
 Book II. opens with a homely picture of the dis- 
 ciples of Christ, "close in a cottage/' praying for his 
 return; and with another, touched with tender mother- 
 hood, of Mary awaiting it ; and with a third of Satan 
 again in council with his peers (as in the second book of 
 Paradise Lost, but how different in power !), in which 
 Belial advises to " set woman in his eye and in his 
 walk," and Satan answers in a passage, full of Milton's 
 classic memories, and therefore full of poetry. All 
 the three pictures are used to carry the mind forward 
 to the lonely figure of Christ in the wilderness and 
 
IV.] PARADISE REGAINED. 153 
 
 to increase the importance of the coming action. 
 Immediately we find ourselves with Christ hungering 
 as the night falls. The dreams, happily suggested by 
 his hunger, his waking, the description of the fresh 
 morning and the birds and the hill top and the pleasant 
 grove beneath, are pure and lovely poetry. It is delight- 
 ful to come upon the passage. It is in this grove that 
 Milton doubles the first temptation by making Satan 
 set before Christ tables piled with rich foods and wines 
 and attended by nymphs ; a picture which only his 
 style saves, if it does save it, from theatrical vulgarity. 
 It is a mistake in art, because it tries to say in a more 
 ornate manner what has been said before in a simple 
 manner, and it involves an inconsistency. Satan has 
 told Belial that Christ must be tempted by manlier 
 objects that have a show of worth, and satisfy only 
 the lawful desires of nature. But now, in the teeth 
 of his opinion, he sets before Christ all the dainties 
 of the world, tempting him beyond the lawful desires 
 of nature. But the truth is Milton not having formed 
 a clear idea of the temptation, tried to get one by 
 repeating himself, and the Nemesis of unintelligent 
 repetition fell upon him. Christ's answer — I have a 
 right to all things, I will not take your gifts — has no 
 meaning, unless that Christ wished to say that the 
 gratification of appetite was nothing to him. But that 
 has been said before in the First Book, and Satan 
 himself had said it. In fact, this new picture, how- 
 ever poetically worked out, lowers the whole idea of 
 the subject ; makes the subtilty of the Devil common- 
 place, and so weakens the temptation ; and degrades 
 the lofty image which Milton wishes to give of the 
 Saviour. 
 
 The second temptation, that on the mountain, now 
 begins at the end of Book II. 406. It was that Christ 
 should win his kingdom by worship of the Devil, 
 that is, by using evil means in order to attain it. 
 Milton understands this, and his success in this part 
 of the poem is owing to his clear conception of his 
 subject. For, when a poet possesses that, he works 
 
154 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 with unconscious Tightness ; when he does not, his work 
 will be wrong in treatment, in ornament, in everything, 
 and the more he attempts to finish it, the more wrong 
 it will become. Here, the conception is right, and 
 carries everything with it. The conversation is easy, 
 the treatment is noble, it grows and swells to a climax, 
 the transitions are well managed, the ornament is 
 fitting, and the natural scenery adds force to the 
 thoughts and to the conclusion. The subject Milton 
 had to treat was in itself noble — wealth, honour, 
 arms, arts, and their kingdoms, set over against the 
 kingdom of Christ. 
 
 It begins before Satan, in the next book, brings 
 Christ to the "specular mount." High designs, high 
 actions are your aim, the Tempter says, and for these 
 riches are needful. 
 
 " Riches are mine, fortune is in my hand ; 
 They whom I favour thrive in wealth amain, 
 While virtue, valour, wisdom, sit in want." 
 
 The answer is well worth reading for its high and 
 grave morality, for its fine passage on riches, " the 
 toil of fools, the wise man's cumbrance," for the poli- 
 tical allusions to the kingship then in England, and 
 for the old Miltonic strain of Temperance in it, such 
 as we have listened to in Covins. 
 
 Book III. opens with the temptation of Fame. 
 " So wise in counsel for wisdom, in skill of conduct 
 in war, why deprive thyself of glory ? " The answer 
 is full of interest. The lines at 50-60, do not say 
 much for Milton's republican views. They have the 
 same half-contempt that Shakspere had for the mob, 
 and they sound strange in the mouth of Christ. The 
 definition of true glory is the same as that in Lycidas. 
 The scorn and wrath of Milton fill the lines which 
 paint the conquerors who left ruin behind them, and 
 were called Gods : and we cannot but feel that it 
 is himself, the grave and stern republican, to whom we 
 listen. Nor less do we hear him in the episode of 
 thought that follows when Satan, saying, " Think not 
 
rv.] PARADISE REGAINED. 155 
 
 so slight of glory ; therein least resembling thy great 
 Father," is answered by Christ, not out of Puritanic 
 theology, but out of the heart of the poet, that God 
 exacts glory from men — 
 
 " Not for glory as prime end, 
 But to show forth his goodness, and impart 
 His good communicable to every soul 
 Freely." 
 
 The next appeal is direct to Christ's kingdom. u Israel 
 is enslaved, zeal for thy Father's house, duty to free 
 thy country urge thee on. Verify the prophets." The 
 answer runs on principles that filled the whole of 
 Milton's life. "All things are best fulfilled in their 
 due time." " Who best can suffer, best can do, best 
 reign, who first well hath obeyed." At the end comes 
 that strange passage elsewhere noted in which Satan 
 would fain hide in the kindness of Christ. But the 
 Tempter soon changing, passes by an easy transition 
 to a further trial, and now brings Christ to the specular 
 mount. The landscape is very largely and nobly set 
 forth, and all Assyria is described ; and in splendid 
 verse the march and armament of the Parthian host. 
 All Milton is back again with us in a line like this, 
 " Chariots, or elephants endorst with towers." 
 
 " Jewry lies between Rome and Parthia : one or other 
 thou must choose for ally, wouldst thou hold thy 
 kingdom. Choose Parthia, I will gain it for thee." 
 
 Book IV. — Rejected, Satan now returns to the 
 same temptation in another form. He shows the 
 Saviour Rome; tells him of the monster Tiberius, 
 how easy to expel him ; " Aim therefore at no less 
 than all the world — then David's throne is thine." 
 The description of "great and glorious Rome, queen 
 of the earth," has in its verse alone a majesty worthy 
 of the city ; and so vivid is it that we almost behold 
 Rome restored in it, and the conflux at her gates, 
 nay, all the world gathered round her. In a long 
 succession of verses, name after name of peoples, seas, 
 and isles strike upon our ear, until in the magic 
 
156 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 mirror of the poet we see all nations, near and far, 
 bringing their homage and their wealth along the 
 Roman roads to the centre of the world. Christ answers 
 by arraigning the luxury of Rome j by mocking, with 
 perhaps a touch of scorn from Milton when he thought 
 of the embassies that congratulated the Restoration, 
 at the hollow lies of ambassadors; by tossing one 
 scornful line at Tiberius — 
 
 " Let his tormentor, Conscience, find him out ; " 
 
 and by a burst of eloquent wrath into which suddenly 
 rushes Milton's republicanism, 144-153. Then the 
 tempter, baffled and wrought to rage — and the way in 
 which the anger of failure makes him throw down the 
 mask, is one of the finest things in the book — turns on 
 Christ and says — " All this is mine, thou shalt have 
 it, if thou wilt worship me." He is answered in the 
 words of Scripture. The proposal and the answer are 
 not well brought in. They are made an incident 
 only in the temptation, when they are the idea of the 
 whole. 
 
 It is with great skill that Satan recovers himself, 
 195-210. Then he renews his work — Let pass then 
 the kingdoms of the world. But there is another 
 kingdom, the kingdom of the mind. Be famous then 
 by wisdom : you will need the arts ; and he shows the 
 Saviour Athens. This is one of the noblest descrip- 
 tions in Milton, beautiful in solemn rhythm ; as weighty 
 with thought, as grand in style, as it is vivid in its 
 painting ; too slow in movement here and there to be 
 called Greek, but steeped in love of Greece ; having 
 through it some of the subtle semi-paganism of the 
 Renaissance and its sweetness and grace, but subdued 
 by the Hebrew element of Milton's Puritanism. I know 
 no passage in which all these elements appear more 
 clearly, though they are mingled and run in and out of 
 one another like colours in an oriental web. The style 
 changes to a grave, somewhat unrhythmical one, in the 
 answer of Christ to Satan. All ornament is gone, and 
 it is the stern Puritanism of Milton that speaks, that 
 
iv.J PARADISE REGAINED. 157 
 
 sterner form of it which condemned all amusement and 
 set aside all literature but the Bible. It is strange to 
 step out of the enchanted verse of the Renaissance 
 into the unadorned virtue of the Puritan ; but it is con- 
 trasts of this kind which give half their interest, apart 
 from poetry, to the work and life of Milton. The 
 heart of the firmest and best Puritanism is expressed 
 in the lines 286-290. The rest is an attack on Greek 
 philosophy. It is curious to find the youth who 
 honoured Plato saying in old age — "The next to 
 fabling fell and smooth conceits." It is bolder still 
 to say that all Greek philosophy was little else than 
 dreams, and that Hebrew poetry is higher than the 
 Greek. But Milton put only one side of his mind 
 into the mouth of Christ ; the other side we have had 
 already in the mouth of Satan. 
 
 The answer confounds the Tempter, who in his 
 baffled wrath asks — Since wealth and glory, and the 
 empire of the world, and arms and arts delight thee 
 not, what dost thou in the world ? the wilderness for 
 thee is fittest place. I found thee there, and thither 
 will return thee. Then comes that noble passage 
 where all that is sublime in storm is followed by all 
 that is soft in morning peace, in one of those strong 
 contrasts that Milton loved to make, 410-438. It is 
 Milton's fine poetic way of putting the result of the 
 whole temptation into the mouth of Nature. The 
 storm is the rage of force and subtle intellect — the 
 kingly powers which Christ rejected — against him ; the 
 morning and its peace is the image of his victory, and 
 of the gentle love wherewith he gained it. 
 
 The tempest is then made the ground of another 
 trial, the trial of fear of ill. " The storm presages 
 thy fate, let it warn thee " — a warning sternly thrown 
 back by Christ. The last temptation is then finely 
 introduced. It seems to be suddenly conceived by 
 Satan, who doubts whether Christ be the Son of 
 God — I am also God's son, all men are ; thou more 
 perhaps, but that I will now prove — and he places 
 Christ on the highest pinnacle of the temple. 
 
158 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 " Now show thy progeny; if not to stand, 
 Cast thyself down ; safely if Son of God." 
 
 And Christ 
 
 " Tempt not the Lord thy God. He said, and stood ; 
 But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell." 
 
 This is cleverly put, but it is theatrical. As in the 
 case of the first temptation, so here Milton is driven 
 into sensationalism because he did not understand 
 his subject. The additions he makes to the story 
 in the Gospel violate the meaning of the story. Even 
 with the additions, he could find no ideas on which 
 his imagination could truly employ itself in this 
 temptation, and he only glances over it. He gives 
 it thirty lines. He gives 900 lines to the second, 
 the idea of which he did understand. The fulness 
 with which the one, and the slightness with which the 
 other is treated is a curious instance of the difference 
 which a clear or a vague conception of a subject 
 makes in the work of a poet. 
 
 The end has now come — angels bear the Saviour 
 away and feed him from the Tree of Life. They sing 
 the triumph of Paradise Regained, and Christ 
 
 " Home to his mother's house private returned." 
 
 Samson Agonistes (the wrestler), written, it is 
 most likely, after 1667, was published in 1671. In 
 the MS. notes of 1640 there are many subjects drawn 
 from the life of Samson — Samson Pursophorus or 
 Hybristes or Samson Marrying or Pamath-Lechi, 
 and lastly Dagonalia. A Preface was put to the 
 Agonistes, in which Milton, knowing that his party 
 abhorred the stage, apologises for his use of the 
 dramatic form by dwelling on the nobleness of 
 Tragedy among the Greeks, and distinguishes his 
 drama from the stage plays of the day. The Ago- 
 nistes is built then on the Greek model, and is more 
 in the manner of Euripides than of Sophocles. It 
 has the didactiveness of Euripides, and his long 
 
rv.J SAMSON AGONISTES. 159 
 
 movement, and his want of dramatic talk and play 
 — the dialogues are debates — and his want of vivid 
 characterisation. It has less of tearful human pathos 
 than Euripides had, but it has more of heroic pathos. 
 
 Milton returns then, in this piece, to his early pre- 
 ference for the dramatic form. But the whole temper 
 of his genius was now changed. The difference 
 between the Counts and Samson is all the difference 
 between youth and age ; between a young man's 
 ideal philosophy and a grown man's knowledge of the 
 world ; between the writing of one who foresaw, 
 and one who looked back on, a great political and 
 religious struggle in which his world was changed ; 
 between the spirit of the Renaissance, mixed with 
 the spirit of Puritanism, and a Puritanism, the form 
 of which alone was Greek. Virtue, in Comus, is a 
 young girl, the Lady of the Church of England ; 
 it may be the Lady of Purity in Milton's own soul, 
 whom, after a struggle, eternal Righteousness would 
 deliver. Virtue, in Samson, is a fallen, but repentant 
 man, who rests on Divine strength and wins the 
 victory — the Puritanism which now in England could 
 only purify its past by a noble death, and leave, in so 
 dying, its country free. One thing remained un- 
 changed — the basis of the two dramas. In both 
 the battle between good and evil is set in array; 
 in both the good triumphs ; in both it is the sover- 
 eignty of God's righteousness which helps the weak- 
 ness of Man. 
 
 We understand well why Milton chose this subject 
 in his later years. He could, without much danger 
 or offence, express in it, as in an allegory, the 
 personal and political position, the retrospect and 
 the hopes, of himself and his party. Like Samson, 
 both he and Puritanism had been dedicated to God 
 and to a pure and temperate life, and both had 
 smitten the Philistines with mighty blows. Both had 
 been deserted by the army and England at the time 
 when they were fighting hardest, as Samson had been 
 by Israel, 265 — 275. In his own life Milton had 
 11 
 
160 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 married a Philistine woman, and had suffered indigni- 
 ties; and England had been lured away from her 
 republican and Puritan life by the blandishments and 
 splendour of the Dalila of the Restoration. Milton 
 was now blind, compassed round by foes, among 
 strange faces, in a land that seemed strange, — and 
 so was the captive Puritanism of England. The 
 Philistines heaped indignities on him and those he 
 honoured. See the possible allusion to the treatment 
 of Cromwell's body, 368. They mocked the poet 
 and his cause. But Milton had endless faith in 
 that final victory of good over evil which is the burden 
 of all his great poems; and the close of Samson 
 Agonistes is the old warrior's prophecy of the 
 triumph of his cause. Though dying he cried " Be 
 of good courage," and Samson goes forth to death, 
 declaring that God will vindicate His righteousness. 
 
 It is owing to the strong personal and historical 
 element in this drama, and to the solemn feeling with 
 which we cannot but listen to the last words of the 
 greatest Englishman of his time, speaking almost 
 alone in heroic faith, that Samson Agonistes has 
 deserved to gain, even more than by its poetic excel- 
 lence, the reverence and sympathy of Englishmen. 
 
 The Drama. — ' f Tragedy," Milton writes, trans- 
 lating Aristotle, " is of power, by raising pity, and fear, 
 or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like 
 passions ; that is, to temper and reduce them to just 
 measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading 
 or seeing these passions well imitated." It is on the 
 ground of this statement that the Samson Agonistes 
 is to be explained. 
 
 Samson, on whom our eyes are to be fixed through- 
 out, is introduced at once in Milton's deliberate and 
 pictorial manner — 
 
 " A little onward lend thy guiding hand 
 To these dark steps, a little further on." 
 
 However Milton may linger in the action of any of 
 his themes, he enters at the beginning into the 
 
iv.] SAMSON AGONISTES. 161 
 
 midst of his subject. The whole position is given 
 in the first twenty-two lines ; and our pity is imme- 
 diately stirred for Samson's bodily distress and for 
 his mind that had "no ease from restless thoughts, 
 like hornets armed." The Miltonic manner is just as 
 marked in what follows. The retrospection of Sam- 
 son ; the way in which he reasons over, rather than 
 feels over, his past ; his argument with himself in an 
 inward debate ; the justification of God with which 
 the argument ends ; — we have already frequently met 
 in the characters of Paradise Lost. Out of the reason- 
 ing arises, at line 67, an outburst of pathetic and 
 sublime woe ; worthy of a hero, worthy of Milton, 
 whose voice we hear throughout mingling his cries 
 with Samson's, in verse mighty as the man and his 
 grief. We are lifted into the heart of pity ; but the 
 repetition of the same thoughts in an argumentative 
 form, at line 90, lowers, in Milton's too common way, 
 the pitch of passion and pathos. 
 
 The Chorus now come in, treading softly, and their 
 first words, direct and simple as if they were Greeks, 
 deepen pity, and add to it still more by the contrast 
 they draw between Samson's present and his past. 
 Through their song and the conversation which follows, 
 in which the story of his life is told, Samson is 
 made to grow up before us as the Great Wrestler 
 with the Philistines, the irresistible Agonist, but 
 with this image in sharp contrast, the secret misery 
 of the man is revealed, his failure in his divine 
 work, his weakness and shame. The tale of Dalila 
 serves as motive for her after introduction ; and 
 the chorus, dwelling on one of Milton's favourite 
 themes, the justification of God's ways to men, closes 
 this part of the Drama. In it Milton has made 
 Samson's figure fill the canvas, and he has made 
 our pity for him great. But he has also so wrought 
 his work — and this is true of all that comes after 
 — as to expand and dignify the catastrophe. We 
 know beforehand the end, and the poet, supposing that 
 we know it, puts in numberless touches which refer 
 
162 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 to that end, and which, through our knowledge of it, 
 thrill us with pity or terror ; while the sense we have 
 that the actors, not knowing the conclusion, do not 
 understand the weight of their own sayings, increases 
 the excitement with which we anticipate the closing 
 terror. 
 
 The entrance of Manoa is used for the same pur- 
 poses. His sorrow deepens our pity ; his dwelling 
 on his son's weakness, not able now " To save himself 
 against a coward armed," makes us look forward 
 through contrast to the end. As the talk goes on 
 between Manoa and his son, Samson rises out of 
 physical into religious heroism. He defends, even to 
 his own self-blame, God's justice, against Manoa ; 
 even his self-contempt is magnificent, nor less the 
 verse in which it is told. Manoa thinks his son most 
 shamed, in that this feast to Dagon is his doing, a 
 feast whereby God is disglorified. Samson confesses 
 that this is his chief affliction, the anguish of his soul ; 
 but now the contest is no longer between him and 
 Dagon, but between God and Dagon ; and he cries 
 out that God will not delay to vindicate his deity. 
 This is the ground of the old heroism of Israel and 
 of the Puritans ; the ground of all Milton's religious 
 thought, of Comus, and Paradise Lost, and Paradise 
 Regained ; the sublimest of all motives, immeasurable 
 faith in the victory of God. 
 
 " Dagon shall stoop, and shall ere long receive 
 Such a discomfit as shall quite despoil him." 
 
 We hear, as it were, the sound of the great cata- 
 strophe in the air. But the note of the dialogue 
 changes now, lest we should lose pity. Manoa will 
 seek ransom for his son, but Samson will not have 
 it ; his punishment is deserved. Nay, God will par- 
 don, answers Manoa, and restore thee to thy home. 
 His pardon I implore, cries Samson, but as for 
 life, to what end should I seek it ? pride and pleasure 
 have turned me out ridiculous, despoiled. The 
 chorus say that he was temperate. Temperate at 
 
iv.] SAMSON AGONISTES. 163 
 
 one gate, he answers, but not at another. Now 
 "blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonoured, quelled," 
 old age and disease will craze his limbs. Strength, 
 he is told, God's gift, is still with him ; but then 
 the presentiment of death steals over him j he feels 
 his genial spirits droop ; and we are startled by hearing 
 in the midst of Samson's words the piteous but solemn 
 cry of Milton himself, 
 
 " Nature within me seems 
 In all her functions weary of herself; 
 My race of glory run, and race of shame, 
 And I shall shortly be with them at rest." 
 
 These are the motives of the dialogue, and we do not 
 see at first how fine it is ; how it purifies our minds — 
 first, through the deepening of pity, and then through 
 awe, when beyond Samson's desire of death and his 
 humiliation we discern the terror of his triumph. The 
 choric song m which he beseeches now for the repose 
 of death, makes us glad that he is going to die, and our 
 minds are further purified by the satisfaction of pity. 
 The chorus, dwelling on the misfortunes and changes 
 of human life, enlarges the same feelings. We hear 
 Milton's voice again in it, concerning himself in a 
 beautiful passage, 660-666 } concerning his party, 
 and their fall, and their sorrows, throughout the rest 
 of the lines. It is nobly, but austerely written, and 
 the verse is rude, even to displeasure. At the end, 
 the sudden change in the movement of the rhythm, 
 which becomes almost gay, when the chorus paints 
 vividly Dalila's approach, contrasts finely, as Dalila 
 herself does, with the rude verse and the rude suffer- 
 ings which have been described. 
 
 Two episodes, if I may use the term, now interrupt 
 the main action, the episodes of Dalila and of Harapha. 
 Both serve to heighten the image and character of 
 Samson, and to intensify, through hatred of his enemies, 
 our pity and the terror in the catastrophe. In the 
 first he triumphs over the glozing lies and wiles of 
 Dalila. He is no longer seen as weakened by passion 
 and its slave. In the second he triumphs by the 
 
164 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 moral power of courage and faith over the brute force 
 and proud tyranny of Harapha. He is shown as the 
 image of divine strength in contrast with base power. 
 His position (in idea) is the same as Christ's when 
 the Tempter offers him the tyranny. 
 
 Dalila is drawn with laborious judgment. All the 
 effects are carefully studied. The dialogue is not so 
 much dialogue as a violent debate between two ideas 
 in Milton's mind. She is Milton's portrait of a base 
 and hateful woman, treacherous, lying, having the lust 
 and the beauty of the flesh, vilely curious, falsely jealous, 
 cunning, a hypocrite in love and in patriotism and in 
 religion, deceiving through the sorcery of beauty, foul 
 within, a manifest serpent. The chorus, rough alike 
 in verse and expression, is Milton's most determined, 
 most ferocious assault on evil womanhood. 
 
 The episode of Harapha follows. Harapha is 
 the semblance of mindless force and its vain boast- 
 fulness ; the tongue -doughty giant ; the Moloch of 
 Paradise Lost in another form. The chorus work 
 out this idea more fully. They praise God because 
 he puts invincible might into men, 
 
 " To quell the mighty of the earth, the oppressor, 
 The brute and boisterous force of violent men, 
 Hardy and industrious to support 
 Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue 
 The righteous, and all such as honour truth ! " 
 
 The sole importance of the scene is that it exalts 
 Samson in our eyes and gives occasion to a chorus 
 which has all the grandeur, the solemnity, and the 
 simple motives of a Psalm of David's. The pathos 
 of the personal touch at the end is very beautiful. 
 
 " But sight bereaved 
 May chance to number thee with those 
 Whom patience finally must crown." 
 
 In the next scene, when the " officer " demands 
 Samson's presence at the games, and the demand is 
 refused, the interest of the audience, because they 
 know the end, is intended to be further stimulated by 
 
iv.] SAMSON AGONISTES. 165 
 
 the delay. This is another instance of Milton's love of 
 lingering for the sake of increasing expectation. It is 
 also fitting that Samson, lest we lose honour for him, 
 should at first refuse. But when Samson's indignation 
 is at the last point, and he is to be dragged with 
 violence to the games, and so degraded by this that 
 he would lose the heroic position in our eyes ; the 
 poet's art makes a presage come to him, a rousing 
 motion of some great act which will outdo all others 
 in his life, and in the light of this prophetic hope 
 he goes forth quiet, resolved, and high, uplifted 
 to the full image of tragic heroism. The short choric 
 song deepens this impression by recalling Samson's 
 past glory and dwelling on his strength as the gift of 
 God. 
 
 At his departure Manoa again appears, and his 
 hopes of ransoming Samson are a new call on our 
 pity, while his sketch of the Philistine court is perhaps 
 Milton's satire on. the treatment of the Puritans by the 
 Court. Then comes in the element of the terror of 
 the catastrophe to which we have so long looked 
 forward. The great shout which tears the sky, heard 
 from far, when the people see their foe, serves to exalt 
 still higher our image of Samson, and to excite us with 
 the imagination of the coming horror ; and the picture 
 Manoa draws of his son at home resting at last in 
 peace, tended by his father, is made, by contrast, to 
 increase our apprehension. For in the very midst of 
 this homely picture of quiet life — 
 
 " O, what noise ! 
 Mercy of Heaven ! what hideous noise was that ? 
 Horribly loud, unlike the former shout. 
 Chor. Noise call you it, or universal groan, 
 
 As if the whole inhabitation perished ? 
 
 Blood, death, and deathful deeds, are in that noise, 
 
 Ruin, destruction at the utmost point." 
 
 The action is now hurried, being at the very point of 
 excitement. The hopes and fears, the wild patriotism 
 of Manoa and his friends, the father and the Israelite 
 commingling in grief and exultation ; the rushing in of 
 
166 MILTON. [chap. 
 
 the messenger ; the swift statement of the death ; the 
 iron joy of the father, his great cry — " What glorious 
 hand gave Samson his death-wound ? " — all, all is 
 admirable. Nor does the almost epic narration of 
 the messenger, which after all the storm brings us into 
 quiet — quiet fitted for the solemn telling of a great 
 deed — lower, but dignify the close. The Chorus and 
 Semi-chorus sing the praise of the dearly-bought 
 revenge. There is a wild clashing, like that of cymbals, 
 in their words, but the song is not quite on a level 
 with Milton's power. The true close is the speech of 
 Manoa, a pure and noble and lovely piece of work ; 
 fixing our minds on the heroic life and death ; on 
 the revenge which has purified Samson's weakness; 
 on the honour and freedom left to Israel ; on God 
 with his son in death — 
 
 " Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail 
 Or knock the breast ; no weakness, no contempt, 
 Dispraise or blame ; nothing but well and fair, 
 And what may quiet us in a death so noble." 
 
 And the final picture of his grave leads us, after all 
 this pity and terror, into a world of still and solemn 
 poetry. The chorus says the last word. It is Milton's 
 last word on Samson and his cause, on himself 
 and Puritanism. With " peace and consolation " God 
 had dismissed his servant from the storms of life, 
 with " calm of mind, all passion spent." 
 
 But Samson Agonistes has more than a personal or a 
 party interest. Its literary position is unique. Written 
 in blank verse, in the old English spirit, in the old 
 classic manner, it is a stranger among the dramas of 
 the Restoration, which were written in rhyme, in the 
 new French spirit, in a form which wore the garments 
 but had not the heart of the classic plays. On the 
 other hand, written in 1674, it is an unexpected resur- 
 rection of that great Elizabethan Drama which began 
 its mighty youth in Tamburlaine and had died before 
 the Restoration. It is divided from both Dramas by 
 its religion, its ideal morality, and its republicanism — 
 
iv.] SAMSON AGONISTES. 167 
 
 in one word, by its Puritanism. But by race and 
 descent, by dramatic seriousness and literary manner, 
 by the imaginative force with which it is conceived, 
 by the peculiarity of the classical colouring and the 
 metrical forms, by the English and the construction 
 of the English, by its allegorical turn, by the spirit 
 which fills its poetry, and above all, by its note of 
 passion, however grave that passion be, Samson Ago- 
 nistes is the last expression, born out of due time, of 
 the Elizabethan Tragedy. In its relation, alike to the 
 Drama that preceded and surrounded it, it resembles 
 one of those fortress-rocks which, the expiring effort of 
 the energy of the Alpine chain, stands apart in the 
 plain of Lombardy, and frowns upon a world in which 
 it is a stranger. Like it, too, Milton and his work 
 remain apart in lonely grandeur. In one aspect, he 
 had no predecessor and no follower. And we, who 
 attempt, at so vast a distance, to look up to the height 
 on which he sits with Homer and Dante, feel we may 
 paint the life, but hardly dare to analyse the work, 
 of the great Singer and Maker whose name shines 
 only less brightly than Shakspere's on the long and 
 splendid roll of the poets of England. 
 
 MILTON ! THOU SHOULDST EE LIVING AT THIS HOUR ; 
 
 ENGLAND HATH NEED OF THEE '. SHE IS A FEN 
 
 OF STAGNANT WATERS ! ALTAR, SWORD, AND PEN, 
 
 FIRESIDE, THE HEROIC WEALTH OF HALL AND BOWER, 
 
 HAVE FORFEITED THEIR ANCIENT ENGLISH DOWER 
 
 OF INWARD HAPPINESS. WE ARE SELFISH MEN : 
 
 OH ! RAISE US UP, RETURN TO US AGAIN ; 
 
 AND GIVE US MANNERS, FREEDOM, VIRTUE, POWER. 
 
 THY SOUL WAS LIKE A STAR AND DWELT APART : 
 
 THOU HADST A VOICE WHOSE SOUND WAS LIKE THE SEA, 
 
 PURE AS THE NAKED HEAVENS, MAJESTIC, FREE, 
 
 SO DIDST THOU TRAVEL ON LIFE'S COMMON WAY 
 
 IN CHEERFUL GODLINESS ; AND YET THY HEART 
 
 THE LOWLIEST DUTIES ON HERSELF DID LAY. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 
 
 1608. Milton born, Dec. 9. 
 1620. To St. Paul's School. 
 
 1625. To Cambridge. 
 James I. died. 
 
 1626. On a Fair Infant. 
 
 1628. Vacation Exercise. 
 
 1629. B.A. Nativity Ode. 
 
 1630. The Circumcision ; The 
 
 Passion ; On Time ; 
 At a Solemn Music ; 
 Epitaph on Shakspere. 
 
 1 63 1. Ep. on Hobson and on 
 
 MSS. of Winchester ; 
 May Morning. 
 
 1632. M.A. Cambridge, Son- 
 
 net I. ; Retires to 
 Horton, Sonnet II. 
 
 1633. Arcades ; V Allegro; 11 
 
 Penseroso ? 
 
 1634. Comus acted. 
 
 1635. M.A. Oxford. 
 
 1637. Lycidas. 
 
 1638. Continental Journey ; 
 
 Italian Sonnets. 
 
 1639. Epitaphium Damonis. 
 
 1640. Long Parliament. 
 
 1 64 1. Of Reformation in 
 
 England : Prelatical 
 Episcopacy ; Reason 
 of Church Govern- 
 ment ; A ni?nadver- 
 sions; Grand Remon- 
 strance. 
 
 1642. Apology for Smeclym- 
 
 nuus ; Civil War ; 
 Battle of Edgehill. 
 
 1643. Marries Mary Powell ; 
 
 Battles of Chalgrove 
 and Newbury; Deaths 
 of Hampden and Pym. 
 
 1644. Marston Moor ; Edu- 
 
 cation Tract ; Areo- 
 pagitica; Two Divorce 
 Tracts. 
 
 1645. Last Two Divorce 
 
 Tracts ; Battle of 
 Naseby. 
 
 1646. Publication of Poems. 
 1648. Second Civil War ; 
 
 Ps. LXXX. — VII. 
 
 1649. 
 
 1651. 
 1653. 
 
 1654. 
 
 1655. 
 1656. 
 
 1657. 
 1658. 
 
 1659. 
 
 1660. 
 
 1664. 
 
 1667. 
 1669. 
 1671. 
 
 1672. 
 1673. 
 
 1674. 
 
 Charles I. executed ; 
 Tenure of Kings and 
 Magistrates; On Or- 
 mondes Peace ; Eikono- 
 clastes ; Latin Secre- 
 tary. 
 
 Defensio pro poptdo 
 Anglicano ; Battle of 
 Worcester. 
 
 Long Parliament dis- 
 solved; Ps. I. — VIII. ; 
 Death of Milton's 
 first wife ; Protecto- 
 rate. 
 
 Defensio secunda. 
 
 Pro se Defensio. 
 
 Marries Catherine 
 
 Woodcock. 
 
 Cromwell installed as 
 Protector. 
 
 Death of Milton's second 
 Wife ; Raleigh's 
 
 Cabinet Council ; 
 
 Death of Cromwell. 
 
 Civil Potver in Eccles. 
 Causes ; Way to Re- 
 move Hirelings ; De- 
 claration of Free 
 Commonwealth ; R. 
 Cromwell resigns. 
 
 Ready and Easy Way to 
 Establish Free Com- 
 monwealth : The 
 
 Restoration. 
 
 Milton marries Eliz. 
 Minshull. 
 
 Paradise lost. 
 
 History of England. 
 
 Paradise Regained ; 
 Samson Agonistes. 
 
 Artis logica. 
 
 Of 7 rue Religion ; 
 Heresy and Schism ; 
 Early Poems repub- 
 lished. 
 
 Paradise Lost, 2nd 
 Edition ; Epist. Fam- 
 iliares ; Academic Ex- 
 ercises ; I >eath, Nov. 
 8 ; Burial, Nov. 12. 
 
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