their fall from heaven, the consultation of their chiefs how best to carry on the war with God, and the resolve of Satan to go forth and tempt newly created man to fall. He takes his flight to the earth and finds Eden. Eden is then described, and Adam and Eve in their innocence. The next four books, from the fifth to the eighth, contain the Archangel Raphael's story of the war in heaven, the fall of Satan, and the creation of the world. The last four books describe the temptation and the fall of Man, the vision shown by Michael to Adam of the future and of the redemption of Man by Christ, and the expulsion from Paradise.

The beauty of the poem is rather that of ideal purity, and of sublime thought expressed in language which has the severe loveliness of the best Greek sculpture. The interest collects round the character of Satan at first, but he grows more and more mean as the poem goes on, and seems to fall a second time, to lose all his original brightness, after his temptation of Eve. Indeed this second degradation of Satan after he has not only sinned himself but made innocence sin, and beaten back in himself the last remains of good, is one of the finest motives in the poem. In every part of the poem, in every character in it, as indeed in all his poems, Milton's intense individuality appears. It is a pleasure to find it. The egotism of such a man, said Coleridge, is a revelation of spirit.'

"The first of Englishmen to whom the designation Men of Letters is appropriate, Milton was also the noblest example of the type. He cultivated not letters but himself, and sought to enter into possession of his own mental kingdom not that he might reign there but that he might royally use its resources in building up a work which should bring honor to his country and his native tongue. The style of Paradise Lost is then only the natural expression of a soul thus exquisitely nourished upon the best thoughts and finest words of all ages. It is the language of one who lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of past time. It is inevitable that when such a one speaks, his tones, his accent, the melodies of his rhythm, the inner harmonies of his linked thoughts, the grace

of his allusive touch should escape the common ear. To follow Milton one should at least have tasted the same training through which he put himself. The many cannot see it, and complain that the poet is too learned.

Whatever conclusion may be the true one from the public demand, we cannot be wrong in asserting that from the first, and now as then, Paradise Lost has been more admired than read. The poet's wish and expectation that he should find 'fit audience though few' has been fulfilled. Partly this has been due to his limitation, his unsympathetic disposition, the deficiency of the human element in his imagination, and his presentation of mythical instead of real beings. But it is also, in part, a tribute to his excellence, and it is to be ascribed to the lofty strain which requires more effort to accompany than an average reader is able to make, a majestic demeanor which no parodist has been able to degrade, and a wealth of allusion demanding more literature than is possessed by any but the few whose life is lived with the poets. An appreciation of Milton is the last reward of consummated scholarship."—Mark Pattison.

MILTON'S LATER POEMS.-"It was followed by Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published together in 1671. Paradise Regained opens with the journey of Christ into the wilderness after his baptism, and its four books describe the temptation of Christ by Satan, and the answers and victory of the Redeemer. The speeches in it drown the action, and their learned argument is only relieved by a few descriptions; but these, as in that of Athens, are done with Milton's highest power. The same solemn beauty of a quiet mind and a more severe style than that of Paradise Lost make us feel in it that Milton has grown older.

In Samson Agonistes, the style is still severer, even to the verge of a harshness which the sublimity alone tends to modify. It is a choral drama, after the Greek model. Samson in his blindness is described, is called on to make sport for the Philistines, and overthrows them in the end. Samson represents the fallen Puritan cause, and his victorious death Milton's hopes for its final triumph. The poem has all the grandeur of the last words of a great man in whom there was now 'calm of mind, all passion spent.' He wrote it blind

But in it, as in the others,

No man saw more vividly

and old and fallen on evil days. blindness did not prevent sight. and could say more vividly what he saw. Nor did age make him lose strength. The force of thought and verse in his last poem is only less than in Paradise Lost. Nor did evil days touch his imagination with weakness, or make less the dignity of his art. Till the end it was

'An undisturbéd song of pure concent,
Aye sung before the sapphire-colored throne,
To Him that sits thereon.'

It ended in his death, November, 1674.

HIS WORK. To the greatness of the artist, Milton joined the majesty of a pure and lofty character. His poetic style was as lofty as his character, and proceeded from it. Living at a time when criticism began to purify the verse of England, and being himself well acquainted with the great classical models, his work is free from the false conceits and the intemperance of the Elizabethan writers, and yet is as imaginative as theirs, and as various. He has their grace, naturalness, and intensity, when he chooses, and he adds to it a sublime dignity which they did not possess. All the kinds of poetry which he touched he touched with the ease of great strength, and with so much weight that they became new in his hands. He put a new life into the masque, the sonnet, the elegy, the descriptive lyric, the song, the choral drama; and he created the epic in England. The lighter love poem he never wrote, and he kept satire for prose.

In some points he was untrue to his descent from the Elizabethans, for he had no dramatic faculty and he had no humor. He summed up in himself all the higher influences of the Renaissance, and, when they had died in England, revived and handed them to us. His taste was as severe, his verse as polished, his method and language as strict as those of the school of Dryden and Pope that grew up when he was

old. A literary past and present thus met in him, and, like all the greatest men, he did not fail to make a cast into the future. He began that pure poetry of natural description which has no higher examples to show in Wordsworth or Scott or Keats than his L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. Lastly, he did not represent in any way the England that followed the tyranny, the coarseness, the sensuality, the falseness, or the irreligion of the Stuarts, but he did represent Puritan England, and the whole career of Puritanism from its cradle to its grave.

THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.-With Milton the great Elizabethan age of imaginative poetry and the spirit of the New Learning said their last word. We might say that Puritanism also said its last great words with him, were it not that its spirit lasted in English life, were it not also that four years after his death, in 1678, JOHN BUNYAN, who had previously written much, published the Pilgrim's Progress. It is the journey of Christian, the Pilgrim, from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. The second part was published in 1684, and in 1682 the allegory of the Holy War.

I class the Pilgrim's Progress here, because, in its imaginative fervor and poetry and in its quality of naturalness, it belongs to the spirit of the Elizabethan times. It belongs also to that time in this, that its simple and clear form grew up out of passionate feeling and not out of self-conscious art. It is the people's book and not the book of a literary class, and yet it lives in literature, because it first revealed the poetry which fervent belief in a spiritual world can kindle in the rudest hearts. In doing this, and in painting the various changes and feelings of the pilgrim's progress towards God, the book touched the deepest human interests, and set on foot a new and plentiful literature. Its language is the language of the Bible. It is a prose allegory conceived as an epic poem. As such it admits the vivid dramatic dialogue, the episodes, the descriptions, and the clear drawing of types of character which

give a different, but an equal, pleasure to a peasant boy and to an intellect like Lord Macaulay's.'

'Scholars of wide and critical acquaintance with literature are often unable to acquire an acceptably good, not to say an admirable, style; and, on the other hand, men who can read only their own language, and who have received little instruction even in that, often write and speak in a style that wins or commands attention, and in itself gives pleasure. Of these men John Bunyan is, perhaps, the most marked example. Better English there could hardly be, or a style more admirable for every excellence, than appears throughout the writings of that tinker. No person who has read The Pilgrim's Progress can have forgotten the fight of Christian with Apollyon, which, for vividness of description and dramatic interest, puts to shame all the combats with knights and giants and men and dragons that can be found elsewhere in romance or poetry; but there are probably many who do not remember, and not a few, perhaps, who, in the very enjoyment of it, did not notice, the clearness, the spirit, the strength, and the simple beauty of the style in which that passage is written. For example, take the sentence which tells of the beginning of the fight:

Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter; prepare thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal Den that thou shalt go no further: here will I spill thy soul.'

A man cannot be taught to write like that, nor can he by any study learn the mystery of such a style."-R. G. White.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. MILTON.-D. Masson's Life of: English Men of Letters Series; W. E. Channing's Char. and Writings of; De Quincey's Essays; S. Johnson's Lives of Eng. Poets; R. W. Emerson in Characteristics of Men of Gen.; Macaulay's Essays; Brydges' Imaginative Biography; P. Bayne's Essays; W. Hazlitt's Sonnets of; F. D. Maurice's Friendship of Books; J. R. Seeley's Politics and Poetry of, in his Rom. Imperialism; Addison's Essays in Spectator, published in pamphlet; Ward's Anthology; Lowell's Among my Books, 2d Ser.; Ecl. Mag., Nov., 1849; Apr., 1852; and Nov., 1853.

BUNYAN.-Eng. Men of Let. Series; J. Tulloch's Eng. Puritanism and its Leaders; Macaulay's Essays: J. Baillie's Life Studies; Ecl. Mag., July, 1851; and May, 1852.