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THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



in an epic poem ; and this is achieved mainly by making Satan 

 and his subordinate spirits the central figures of the poem. 

 After a few lines of introduction, the first book opens with the 

 , scene in hell, immediately after the expulsion of the rebel 

 angels from their heavenly home, and we see how Satan, 



" With his horrid crew 

 Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf, 

 Confounded, though immortal;" 

 where 



" A dungeon horrible on all sides round 

 As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames 

 No light, but rather darkness visible, 

 Served only to discover sights of woe, 

 Regions o sorrow, doleful shades, where peace 

 And rest can never dwell, hope never comes 

 That comes to all. " 



Satan, raising himself from the lake of fire, awakes his pros- 

 trate companions, who, at his words, start up with renewed 

 energy and hope. The several leaders of the host, all the evil 

 spirits and false gods whose names are known in history or 

 legend, sacred or profane, are brought before us in passages of 

 wonderful power. They set themselves to make the best of 

 their new and dismal abode. The great city and palace of Pan- 

 demonium under their hands "rises like an' exhalation;" and 

 an assembly is summoned to decide upon their future course. 

 In the second book the infernal council is described, and its pro- 

 ceedings related. At last it is decided, in accordance with the 

 advice of Satan, that the new-created world, with its inhabitant 

 man, of which rumours had been rife in heaven before the fall, 

 should be the point at which they should seek revenge upon 

 their Almighty "Victor, by counteracting his beneficent designs, 

 and marring his creation. In pursuance of this purpose, Satan 

 himself undertakes the task of searching out this new world, 

 and he starts upon this errand. Reaching the gates of hell, he 

 finds them guarded by two awful shapes, Sin and Death. And 

 here we meet, in the allegorical conception of these two beings, 

 one of the most sublime passages in all Milton's works. Satan 

 having passed hell-gates, and made his way through the vast 

 expanse of chaos, comes at last within view of " the opal 

 towera and battlements" of heaven : 



" And hard by, hanging in a golden chain, 

 This pendant world, iu bigness as a star 

 Of smallest magnitude, close by the moon." 



And so the second book closes. It must be observed that by 

 the world, in this and other passages, Milton means, not the 

 earth, but the globe which he supposed to embrace the whole 

 solar and stellar systems, for his astronomy was that of Ptolemy, 

 not of Copernicus. In the third book the scene changes to 

 heaven. God the Father and the Son, in a marvellous dialogue, 

 discourse of the state of man and the enterprise of Satan ; the 

 approaching fall of man, and the Divine purposes of mercy to 

 be fulfilled in his ultimate redemption, are disclosed to us. 

 The poet then again returns to Satan, and traces his wander- 

 ings till he lands at last on this earth upon the top of Mount 

 Niphates. In the fourth book Satan, wandering over our globe, 

 comes upon the Garden of Eden, and sees our first parents in 

 their state of innocence and bliss. And their angelic guardians, 

 warned of the presence of the evil spirit, discover him in the 

 bower where 'Adam and Eve lie asleep, and he is for the time 

 driven from Paradise. Of the following four books the scene 

 is, strictly speaking, on this our earth. Raphael, " the affable 

 archangel," sent by God to warn man of his approaching 

 danger, relates to Adam the great events which had preceded 

 the point of time at which the action of the poem commenced 

 in the first book ; the revolt of Satan and his fellows ; the war 

 in the heaven, with its varying fortunes ; the intervention and 

 triumph of the Messiah himself, with the rout of his foes, and 

 their fall from the battlements of heaven to the hell prepared 

 to receive them ; the creation of the world, and of man as its 

 inhabitant and ruler ; and Adam in his turn relates the result of 

 his short experience of life. And the eighth book ends with a 

 solemn warning of the archangel. In the ninth book is told the 

 temptation and fall, first of Eve, and then of Adam. In the 

 tenth book the doom of man is pronounced, but not without an 

 obscure promise of future redemption. Again we meet with 

 those two awful shapes, Sin and Death, no longer guardians of 

 the ciosed gates of hell, but hurrying to this earth, there to find 

 the prey won for them by Satan, and leaving in their track a 



firm and easy road between earth and hell. Satan in the mean- 

 time returns to relate triumphantly in hell his success on earth : 

 and he and his associates begin to feel the first-fruits of the 

 curse by finding themselves transformed into serpents. In the 

 eleventh book the repentance of Adam and Eve is accepted in 

 heaven ; but the archangel Michael is sent to expel the guilty 

 pair from Paradise. In this and the twelfth book the arch- 

 angel, leading Adam to the summit of a hill, shows him in 

 vision the history of his posterity, ending in the final redemp- 

 tion of mankind through Christ. The book and the poem end 

 with the actual departure of Adam and Eve from Eden. 



In a work of such magnitude it is hardly necessary to say 

 that even Milton has been by no means uniformly successful in 

 all parts of it. The scenes in heaven are the least satisfac- 

 tory. In pursuing his purpose "to justify the ways of God 

 to man," Milton has sometimes placed iir the mouth of the 

 Almighty arguments and explanations which scarcely tend to 

 exalt our idea of the Divine character. And the scenes which 

 present to us our first parents in their state of innocence, 

 though always full of purity and beauty, have certainly some- 

 thing of monotony, if not of dulness, about them. Action 

 there could, of course, from the nature of the case, be none in 

 such scenes, and the unchanging round of life seems tedious to 

 fallen humanity. It is in the other world that Milton's success 

 has been supreme. The true action of this epic is with the 

 fallen spirits ; the real interest of the poem centres in the 

 character and achievements of Satan. It is a trite remark that 

 poets whose genius is not of a dramatic character are apt in 

 portraying their heroes to show us themselves under various 

 disguises ; and in the majestic portrait of the rebel Satan it is 

 not difficult to trace some of the features of the rebel Milton. 

 For Satan is no devil of the vulgar, no mere spirit of evil, com- 

 pounded of baseness and malignity. He is an " archangel 

 ruined ; " a form and countenance of celestial beauty, though 

 marred by sin and deformed by wounds and flame ; a character 

 of which the basis is a lofty courage which no adversity can 

 shake, a "courage never to submit or yield;" a stern deter- 

 mination and fixity of purpose, though these noble qualities 

 are perverted by " pride and worse ambition." He is still 

 capable of a magnanimous devotion, and a tender pity for those 

 whom his example has brought to ruin. Even for his victims, 

 Adam and Eve, when he first sees them, he is not without com- 

 punctious visitiugs. He can still " feel how awful goodness is," 

 and stand silent and abashed in its presence. Upon this stupen- 

 dous figure, one of the greatest that any poet has ever painted, 

 and upon his exploits, Milton has exercised all the highest 

 quality of his genius, and with a result entirely successful. 



The metre of " Paradise Lost" deserves careful attention. 

 Blank verse, as we have already seen, had been known in 

 England from the time of Lord Surrey, and had been habitually 

 used by the great dramatists. But when Milton wrote, this 

 metre had been long disused for any poetry other than dramatic. 

 Milton deliberately adopted it, as being more suited to the dignity 

 of his subject, and because he held that rhyme fettered the free- 

 dom of the poet, and was " of itself, to all judicious ears, 

 trivial, and of no true musical delight ; which consists only in 

 apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously 

 drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound 

 of like endings." But Milton's blank verse is distinguished 

 from all other by its infinite variety in rhythm, and in the mode 

 of drawing out of the sense from verse to verse. 



When Milton wrote "Paradise Lost" he does not seem to 

 have at all contemplated a companion poem. The idea of 

 " Paradise Regained" was suggested to him by a friend, to whom 

 he had shown the finished manuscript of the earlier poem ; but 

 Milton at once adopted the suggestion, and in four years after 

 the publication of "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained" 

 appeared. It is a much shorter poem, consisting of only four 

 books, as against the twelve of " Paradise Lost." It has always 

 enjoyed much less popularity than the earlier poem, not from any 

 poetical inferiority, but from the nature of its subject, which is 

 didactic rather than epic. It is essentially a companion piece. 

 As the climax of the action of " Paradise Lost" was the tempta- 

 tion and the fall of Adam, the subject of " Paradise Regained " 

 is the temptation and victory o2 Christ : 

 " Recovered Paradise to all mankind, 

 By one man's firm obedience fully tried 

 Through all temptation, and the tempter foiled 



