60 The Poets and Nature. 



serpent's lot first misused by the Devil and then punished 

 by God by making it a conscious accomplice of Satan. 

 He commences with saying that when everything else 

 created was innocuous and amiable, it alone was filled with 

 " fatal guile." Then when the Tempter finds it asleep, the 

 poet describes its head as "well stored with subtle wiles;" 

 and subsequently, when Eve hears it begin to talk, she 

 addresses it in amazement thus : 



" Thee, serpent, subtlest beast of all the field 

 I knew, but not with human voice endued." 



So that not only is the snake originally wicked, but Eve, that 

 miracle of heavenly innocence, actually knows it. Surely 

 this idea, that suspicion was present in Paradise, spoils the 

 whole picture. 



That the poet himself seems to recognise his difficulty 

 is, I think, evident; for besides his iteration of the original, 

 native, badness of the serpent (itself significant), he makes 

 Satan, when informing the chiefs of hell of his triumph over 

 man, and the subsequent curse, deride thus : 



" Me also hath He judged, or rather 

 Me not, but the brute serpent ', in whose shape 

 Man I deceived." 



Throughout the latter part of his speech Satan tries, and 

 successfully, to make the Fall ridiculous, for his audience 

 laugh when they hear about the apple ; and then he goes on 

 to deride what seems to him, and to Milton, the vicarious 

 culpation of the serpent. 



However, to continue the poet's splendidly original 

 description of the snake, we find Satan, a " mere serpent in 

 appearance," searching all the favourite haunts of our first 

 parents, and at last, "beyond his hope," he spies Eve all 

 alone tending her flowers. The sight of her beauty strikes 

 him at first "stupidly good," as the poet puts it, but 

 immediately thereafter inflames him with fiercer envy of 



