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same way as Isaiah, when he wrote his great second part, 
seemed to have taken such special delight, intellectual as 
well as spiritual, in sketching the heavenly and spiritual 
kingdom, because the earthly kingdom on which his patriotic 
hopes had been set so long had been broken up, so it seemed 
to have been with Milton. Disappointed of some of his 
patriotic hopes, he directed his mind to those higher hopes 
on which his pious soul was able to rest itself, and in the 
contemplation of which he could find calm and peace. Long 
before this he had said to his intimates that he hoped to 
produce something which posterity would not willingly let 
die. His mind was so full of the best literature, ancient 
and modern, that he brought out of his treasury things new 
and old, probably with utter unconsciousness of the source 
from which he got them. He had been accused of plagiarism, 
but whatever he derived from other sources he transfigured 
by the wonderful power of his own mind, so that as Shakes- 
peare, drawing from other sources, made those stories his 
own by his marvellous genius, so it was with Milton. 
Dr. Pearson described how the poet, in the watches of the 
night, thought out the subject and in the morning dictated 
to an amanuensis the precious words that had suggested 
themselves to him. Sometimes he would compose forty 
lines before he fell asleep, and then in the morning he would 
reduce them to twenty, so as to condense as much as ever 
he could, and get the very essence of the thoughts he was 
dwelling on compressed into the most sharp-cut jewel form. 
What about the wonderful structure and fabric of the poem ? 
The language, though so wonderfully perfect and apt, every 
word fitting the thought it was intended to express, was not 
so full and rich as we might expect. Words repeated them- 
selves. Whilst Shakespeare used 15,000 English words, 
Milton in all his poems used only 8,000. But the subject 
matter of Shakespeare was infinitely more varied than that 
of Milton. If to Shakespeare had fallen but one theme, it 
is questionable if he would have used so rich a vocabulary 
as we find in Milton. Many of the words were almost the 
creation of the poet, and whilst Shakespeare was a marvellous 
creator of imaginative scenes and characters, he was not 
such a consumate word-painter as Milton. 
One of the main characters in “ Paradise Lost ” was Satan, 
but while Milton’s hero was the personification of all that 
was bad, the speech of Satan compared very favourably with 
the Satan of Byron, in “ Cain.” They could not read the 
speeches of the Satan of Byron without resenting the horror 
