poet cannot be vague and general in his opinions of the Deity. He must declare for one or the other dogina; without well defined outlines and bold relief his figures would be lifeless shadows. Thus, Milton was unavoidably led by poetical necessity to Arianism. This cannot fail to repel a large number of readers, though so little prominence is given to that dogma, that before the discovery of Milton's treatise on Christian Doctrine, (in 1823,) perhaps few readers suspected its existence. In this rigid generation such heterodoxy as this cannot fail to operate powerfully against the continued popularity of the poem, and it is asserted, that already its sale has been impaired since that fatal discovery.

If Milton has tried to avoid shocking orthodox Christians by his Arianism, which the necessity of poetical anthropomorphism perhaps imperiously demanded, he was on the other hand led astray, (and again by the peculiarity of his subject,) to indulge his natural taste for dogmatic and controversial theology, by giving us his own views on the nature and attributes of spiritual beings, and to give to these views advisedly, and quite unnecessarily, a provoking distinctness. refer only to one instance—the elaborate demonstration that angels require food, (Par. Lost, V. 404.) mixed up with the crudest notions on physical science that could disfigure a noble poem (Par. Lost, V. 407):— "And food alike those pure

Intelligential substances require,

As doeth your rational; and both contain

Within them every lower faculty

Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste;
Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate,

And corporeal to incorporeal turn.

For know, whatever was created, needs

To be sustained and fed; of elements

The grosser feeds the purer, earth the sea,
Earth and the sea feed air, and air those fires

Ethereal, and as lowest first the Moon;
Whence in her visage round those spots, unpurged
Vapours not yet into her substance turned.
Nor does the Moon no nourishment exhale
From her moist continent to higher orbs.
The Sun, that light imparts to all, receives
From all his alimental recompense

In humid exhalations, and at even

Sups with the Ocean.-Though in Heaven the trees

Of life ambrosial fruitage bear, and vines

Yield nectar; though from off the boughs each morn
We brush mellifluous dews, and find the ground
Covered with pearly grain: yet God hath here
Varied his bounty so with new delights,

As may compare with Heaven; and to taste
Think not, I shall be nice. So down they sat
And to their viands fell, nor seemingly

The Angel, nor in mist, the common gloss
Of Theologians, but with keen despatch

Of real hunger and concoctive heat

To transubstantiate what redounds, transpires
Through Spirits with ease; nor wonder, if by fire

Of sooty coal the empiric alchemist

Can turn, or holds it possible to turn

Metals of drossiest ore to perfect gold."

The subject of "Paradise Lost" has been found to contain elements, that make it in some degree intractable material for an epic poem. Let us now examine, if this defect is perhaps compensated by an abundance of other qualities, which may deserve the high praise bestowed upon it by Mr. Hallam and other critics. This leads us to inquire, what are the qualities of a subject matter, or to use a technical term, a fable, which are the most favourable for the successful exercise of the epic poet's genius. The answer seems to be simple. The fable must abound in opportunities for exhibiting the moral, intellectual and physical qualities of men in their contact with one another, with nature and God in as great a variety as possible, and in such situations, as will create the sympathy of joy or sorrow in the reader's heart, and will tend to raise and ennoble his sentiments. The persons introduced by the epic poet must be varied to avoid monotony and dullness, they must be such, that we can put ourselves in their places; their actions, their trials, misfortunes, or joys, must be akin to those which agitate our own hearts. How are these postulates complied with by the fable of "Paradise Lost?" In the first place the agents are few in number, and this necessarily sets a limit to great variety. The Deity is not prominent, and perhaps too prominent, as it is. Then there are the angels, the fallen spirits, Adam and Eve; five characters to fill up a poem of such length.*

I anticipate and I shall answer the objection, that there are many angels, acting different parts, and demons likewise. This is true arithmetically, but not poetically. If we count up the seraphs and the various spirits of hell, who are mentioned by name,† or take a part in

* If we reckon Sin, Death, Chaos, and Night, we obtain a few more actors; but they are extraneous to the progress of the action; they are not dramatis persone, but symbolical decorations of the scenes. They will be spoken of below.

The catalogue of the second book has this defect, that it contains many names which are not further referred to in the story. Homer's catalogue (Iliad, II. Book,) enumerates the heroes who really take a part in the war. But Milton's Satanic host only passes review in the second book. Few of them are even mentioned in the sixth; for the rest of the poem they do not exist. Hallam's Lit. of Europe, IV. 3, 32.

the action, we shall indeed obtain a larger number of acting persons; but the characters of these spiritual agents are necessarily so devoid of individuality, that nothing attributed to any of them could not have been equally performed by any of the rest. It is the same person acting under different names. The archangel Raphael relates to Adam the fall of Lucifer; Michael draws the veil from future ages; Abdiel returns faithful from the rebellious spirits. What is there in the peculiarity of Raphael, that would make him less fit to relate the murder of Abel than the battle of the spiritual hosts, or to prove his fidelity to God like Abdiel; he cannot be thought either less prophetic or less faithful than his fellow angels. On the other hand-is not Satan the whole Satanic host? What are Beelzebub and Moloch and Belial in the Pandemoniac council, but the expression of some slight shade of thought? Their harangues might have been embodied in a lengthened monologue of Satan; there would be no inconsistency if the hesitation of Belial was put into the mouth of Satan as a momentary doubt. And granted that in the council there is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference of sentiment, is there not perfect uniformity of action? In the battle the exploits of one might as well have been ascribed to another, there is a variety of names but no variety of individual character.

What is the cause of this defect? Is the poet to blame or the subject? No doubt Milton might have varied the monotonous unanimity of hell by introducing discord, angry feelings, distrust, treason, mutual accusation and recrimination, and other varieties of evil passions among the followers of Satan. On the other hand he was debarred by the nature of his subject from making these beings really interesting to man by an admixture of virtues.f

*Not so monologue-like is the debate in the council of the Greeks (Iliad, II. Book.) The parts of Agamemnon and Thersites are different in every respect.

+He has preferred representing them in perfect concord, (II. 496—“ Devil with devil damned firm concord holds,") perhaps to preserve conformity with Scripture. To introduce a variety of other evil passions was very difficult. Milton hardly attempted it, and where he did, he failed.

This concord is no virtue, as Milton would have it appear, but conspiracy.-The poet says of Belial, II., 115:—

"His thoughts were low,

To vice industrious, yet to nobler deeds

Timorous and slothful."

What "noble deeds" can be attributed to a fallen angel? Not surely the war with the Almighty, which Belial dissuaded. Yet it would almost appear so, for (verse 227) he is said to have "counselled ignoble ease and peaceful sloth." We cannot justify the poet for calling the rebellion of the evil spirits a noble deed. It is a blemish of a different kind, though flowing from the same source, to make Mammon, (I. 679,)

"The least erected spirit that fell From Heaven; for e'en in Heaven his looks and thoughts

The shapes of the fallen angels are not discernible in the gloom of hell by the lurid gleam of those flames "from which no light but rather darkness visible serves only to discover sights of woe." But without light and shade no picture has roundness of form, or life-like plasticity. Unqualified and unrelieved depravity does not interest, it is not one of the things we feel to be real or possible; it is an abstraction and an idea, not a thing, that we can perfectly realise in truth.

It is a great mistake to say, that Satan appears in too favourable a light, and that he is the real hero of the poem. He has, in truth, no qualities, which are good in themselves, but only such, which may be sanctified by serving a good end, as fortitude, endurance, courage. Who can admire them, unless he admires the end for which they are called into play? The virtue of courage is the offspring of righteousness. It steels the sinews of the man who feels justice on his side; it forsakes him, who is inwardly conscious of wrong, and leaves him exposed to the irresistible strength and divine fortitude of justice and of truth.

As the fallen spirits are necessarily represented as totally alienated from God, and all that is acceptable in his sight, so on the other hand,

Were always downward bent, admiring more

The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy."

Milton was conscious of the dilemma, in which he was placed by the nature of his fable. On the one side he attributes to the fallen angels, on philosophical grounds, "semblance of worth, not substance," (I. 529); and on the other, he is, by aesthetic motives, compelled to admit (II. 432,) “that neither do the spirits damned lose all their virtue." As regards the poem, the latter admission is theoretical, the former practical; that is to say, the poet acts upon the former conviction throughout his work, and the latter thesis is inserted like a mental reservation, to keep open a back door in an argument. This element of contradiction is not confined to the just-mentioned case. It is found also in those passages which treat of fate. In all of them, with one exception, fate is represented like the fatum of the ancients, as a fixed all-ruling power, even beyond that of the Deity. This offensive doctrine cannot be considered as practically set aside in the poem, by that one passage, in which God says: "What I will, is fate." In a work of fiction we cannot proceed as systematically as in a scientific treatise. We cannot expect, that a definition given in one part of the work, should be rigidly applied everywhere. Persons and things must appear, what they are, from the mode in which they generally act and are spoken of; they must not require, that the true light should be thrown upon them only from one passage. Suppose that passage lost, everything else should remain discernible. To illustrate my meaning,--if Homer had wished to represent Penelope as a second Helen, it would have been nothing to the purpose, had he said in a line or two, that she was false to her husband. Our impression is the result of what we see her do; we could not form a different opinion of her even on the authority of the poet, unless he made her act differently. If we saw the name of Athene under a statue of Aphrodite, we should not be convinced that it was the Goddess of Arts, even should the sculptor himself have chiselled the letters. Thus, to return to the point, from which we started, the spirits of Milton's hell are thoroughly wicked, because they act willingly in direct opposition to God, nor can we invest them with any good qualities, although the poet may say, that they had some left.

the angels stand at the opposite extreme of unalloyed purity; they are all lost to our vision in a dazzling brilliancy of resplendent light. They are without sin and even without weakness appreciable to us; they are consequently all not only of one mould, but of one so superhuman, that we look at their actions without ever venturing to identify ourselves with them; they may command our admiration but they cannot gain human sympathy.*

I come now to speak of the human beings which the fable of · Paradise Lost" furnishes. There are indeed two human beings, but alas, they are hardly human. Adam is not like one of ourselves; he cannot feel and think and act as men do in human society. He is placed under conditions such as no other human being ever was since; he is of his own kind, incapable of experiencing the thousand-fold variety of human feelings and passions to which his descendants owe so much of misery and of bliss. He has only Eve to associate with; both are virtuous and happy; they are provided with every want, they can gratify every wish, they know neither pain, nor denial, nor hostility, nor anything to make them truly moral agents; there is but one fault that they can be guilty of. In the one act of disobedience is summed up their sinfulness. On this subject the remarks of Dr. Johnson are so just and concise, that I cannot do better than transcribe them, p. 166,"Such is the original formation of this poem, that as it admits no human manners till the fall, it can give little assistance to human conduct," p. 171, "The plan of 'Paradise Lost' has this inconvenience, that it comprises neither human actions nor human manners," p. 173, "The want of human interest is always felt."

What a difference is presented by the fables of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey!" Gods and men in an infinite variety of age, of station, of sex, of rank, of power and influence; from the majesty of Zeus, who shakes heaven and earth with the nod of his head, to the low scurrility of Irus the beggar parasite, and the petulance of Thersites the hunchback what is there of human beauty or deformity, what of magnanimity or of vice, which does not furnish its vigorous colours to the adornment of those grandest and most truthful of pictures? Here we

* All that Johnson can say on this topic is this, (p. 163,) "Among the angels the virtue of Raphael is mild and placid, of easy condescension and free communication; that of Michael is regal and lofty, and, as may seem, attentive to the dignity of his own nature. Abdiel and Gabriel appear occasionally and act as every incident requires. The solitary fidelity of Abdiel is very amiably painted." After descanting on Satan he says, (ibid) "The other chiefs of the celestial rebellion are very judiciously discriminated in the first and second books; and the ferocious character of Moloch appears both in the battle and the council with exact consistency."