N° 363. SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 1712. -Crudelis ubique Luctus, ubique pavor, et plurima mortis imago. VIRG. Æn. ii. 368. All parts resound with tumults, plaints, and fears, DRYDEN. MILTON has shown a wonderful art in describing that variety of passions which arise in our first parents upon the breach of the commandment that had been given them. We see them gradually passing from the triumph of their guilt, through remorse, shame, despair, contrition, prayer and hope, to a perfect and complete repentance. At the end of the tenth book they are represented as prostrating themselves upon the ground, and watering the earth with their tears to which the poet joins this beautiful circumstance, that they offered up their penitential prayers on the very place where their judge appeared to them when he pronounced their sentence: They forthwith to the place Repairing where he judg'd them, prostrate fell Humbly their faults, and pardon begg'd, with tears * There is a beauty of the same kind in a tragedy of Sophocles, where Edipus, after having put out his own eyes, instead of breaking his neck from the *This paragraph was not in the original paper in folio; it was added on the republication of the papers in volumes, when palace battlements, (which furnishes so elegant an entertainment for our English audience) desires that he may be conducted to Mount Citharon, in order to end his life in that very place where he was exposed in his infancy, and where he should then have died, had the will of his parents been executed. As the author never fails to give a poetical turn to his sentiments, he describes in the beginning of this book the acceptance which these their prayers met with, in a short allegory formed upon that beautiful passage in holy writ, And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer ; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar, which was before the throne: and the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God *. To heaven their prayer Flew up, nor miss'd the way, by envious winds We have the same thought expressed a second time in the intercession of the Messiah, which is conceived in very emphatical sentiments and expressions. Among the poetical parts of Scripture, which Milton has so finely wrought into this part of his narration, I must not omit that wherein Ezekiel, speak Lost consists, seem to have been carefully revised by their author, and to have undergone various and considerable alterations in consequence of his revisal, *Rev. viii. 3, 4. ing of the angels who appeared to him in a vision, adds, that every one had four faces, and that their whole bodies, and their back's, and their hands, and their wings, were full of eyes round about: The assembling of all the angels of heaven, to hear the solemn decree passed upon man, is represented in very lively ideas. The Almighty is here described as remembering mercy in the midst of judgment, and commanding Michael to deliver his message in the mildest terms, lest the spirit of man, which was already broken with the sense of his guilt and misery, should fail before him: The conference of Adam and Eve is full of moving sentiments. Upon their going abroad, after the melancholy night which they had passed together, they discover the lion and the eagle, each of them pursuing their prey towards the eastern gates of Paradise. There is a double beauty in this incident, not only as it presents great and just omens, which are always agreeable in poetry, but as it expresses that enmity which was now produced in the animal creation. The poet, to show the like changes in nature, as well as to grace his fable with a noble prodigy, represents the sun in an eclipse. This paricular incident has likewise a fine effect upon the imagination of the reader, in regard to what follows; for at the same time that the sun is under an eclipse, a bright cloud descends in the western quarter of the heavens, filled with an host of angels, and more luminous than the sun itself. The whole theatre of nature is darkened, that this glorious machine may appear with all its lustre and magnificence: Darkness ere day's mid-course? and morning light O'er the blue firmament a radiant white, And slow descends with something heavenly fraught? In Paradise, and on a hill made halt ; A glorious apparition' I need not observe how properly this author, who always suits his parts to the actors whom he introduces, has employed Michael in the expulsion of our first parents from Paradise. The archangel on this occasion neither appears in his proper shape, nor in the familiar manner with which Raphael the sociable spirit entertained the father of mankind before the fall. His person, his port, and behaviour, are suitable to a spirit of the highest rank, and exquisitely described in the following passage: -Th' archangel soon drew nigh, Satan's dire dread, and in his hand the spear. Eve's complaint, upon hearing that she was to be removed from the garden of Paradise, is wonderfully beautiful. The sentiments are not only proper to the subject, but have something in them particularly soft and womanish: • Must I then leave thee, Paradise? Thus leave At even, which I bred up with tender hand And wild? How shall we breathe in other air Adam's speech abounds with thoughts which are equally moving, but of a more masculine and elevated turn. Nothing can be conceived more sublime and poetical than the following passage in it: This most afflicts me, that departing hence |