his Epistle to Manso he expressly names his hero, Prince Arthur, and his theme, the triumphs of the British patriot over the pagan Saxons. Had he prosecuted this subject, we should, indeed, have had-what is yet a desideratum— a national epic, but the great poem which we have, and of the glory of which time cannot rob us while we are a nation, would verily have been Paradise Lost to our literature, and never to be Regained, for it could never have existed. It was a happy escape for the poet himself, as well as for his country, that his discretion ran not aground on the shoals, nor split on the rocks of the former obscure and dangerous channel, with its alternate shallows, and whirlpools, and fathomless depths, utterly unnavigable by vessels of such burthen as that which bore Milton and his fortunes to the haven of immortality in song. His "heaven-born Muse," which "had angelic wings, and fed on manna," could neither have condescended to the frivolities, nor run riot in the extravagances of romance. He could neither have followed the volatile and fantastic Ariosto, the graceful and voluptuous Tasso, nor the exuberant and imaginative Spenser; though, like Cowley and Pope, he caught early inspiration from the perusal of the Faerie Queene, whose author has, probably, helped to make more poets than any other of our countrymen. Gothic poetry, such as that in which Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table require to be celebrated, must resemble Gothic architecture. To magnificence of dimension must be added multiplicity of detail, and to grandeur of outline efflorescence of embellishment; the minutest appendages to the mightiest proportions, yet the little in nowise diminishing the effect of the great, nor the intricate complexity of parts the august and awful spectacle of the whole. But, after all, the perfection of manual art, the consummation of architectural glory, exemplified in the Parthenon of Athens, was a structure far different; at once simple n form, in symmetry so exquisite, and so sublime in eleva tion, that it appeared intellectually grand; and, even through the eye, filling the mind, rather than beguiling the sense, with silent, gradual, soul-expanding admiration. The powers of Phidias would have been as uncongenially employed in constructing a cathedral of the twelfth century, as those of Milton on an epic poem from the legends of romance; how rich, abundant, and pliable soever for the purposes of heroic song these might be. In Paradise Lost, Milton has realised the dreams of his youth, the meditations of long years in mature life, while he was far otherwise occupied, and the revelations of his old age, when, "though fallen on evil days and evil tongues"-"in darkness, and with dangers compass'd round, and solitude," he yet was visited "nightly" by the "heavenly Muse," or "when morn purpled the east," and was thus emboldened "to celebrate, in glorious and lofty hymns, the throne and equipage of God's almightiness” (to use his own words,) "and what He works and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in the church :" -"teaching over the whole book of sanctity and virtue, through all the instances of example, with such delight to those especially of soft and delicious temper, who will not so much as look on Truth herself, unless she be elegantly drest." The plan of Paradise Lost is so comprehensive as to include all that can, from obscure allusions in Sacred Writ, be conjectured respecting what came to pass in heaven and in hell before time began, the creation of all things visible, man's primeval state of innocence, and his fall from it by disobedience, as revelation has recorded these ; -the history of the world, downward from Adam, who lost Paradise, to Christ the Redeemer, who more than restored it, when He "brought life and immortality to light by the Gospel; with which are involved whatever prophecy had foreshown, or but dimly shadows forth, respecting subsequent revolutions of empire on the face of the globe and among its inhabitants, till the consummation of all things, when "the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and (the living) shall be changed." How he has handled these themes all the world of readers may be presumed to know. How he prepared himself for the task he has left on record, while the project was yet but in embryo.-"I do not think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that, for some few years yet, I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted (an heroic poem,) as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher-fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by the invocation of dame Memory and her syren daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all knowledge and utterance, and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs; till which, in some measure, be compassed, at mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as many as are not loath to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges that I can give." With what dignity of modesty are these pledges offered, and with what magnificence of execution were they redeemed! But to the judgment of each individual, among his readers, it must be left, to determine for himself, how far, in the course of his "adventurous song," the poet's prayer for divine illumination has been answered in the sequel. The theology of the poem, in various passages of the deepest interest, may be seriously questioned, but shall here be left with one remark only (not affecting its doctrinal points,) namely, that he would be a bold critic who, as a believer in the Christian faith, should venture to justify the extent to which the author has employed the doubtful, though, hitherto, undisputed licence of fiction in the supernatural agency of his poem. At the same time, far be it from the present writer to arraign the poet, either of wilful or negligent impiety. It need not be mooted here, whether he considered himself fully authorized to exercise such perilous freedom, but, assuredly, he was mistaken. Tasso, Marini, Camoens, and other epic poets, have likewise intermeddled with "things that were too high for them," and these have all egregiously miscarried, their spiritual agents having been uniformly the most indifferent, and the least effective personages in their stories. Milton far transcends all his predecessors in the use of such preternatural machinery, while none, that have come after, have been able to approach the power and ability with which he has wielded it. His angels and his demons are of the highest class of human creation of ideal beings, and there is admirable diversity and consistency of conduct in the exhibition of individuals of either species. But when he "presumes," not only "into the heaven of heavens" "an earthly guest" and "draws empyreal air," but into the very presence of Deity, and affects to disclose the "secret things that belong to God" alone, he has failed lamentably, and, in some places, cannot be acquitted of irreverence; for example, in Book V., when the Eternal Father, in the night of the conspiracy, while Satan and his malcontent legions are meditating treason in the north, thus speaks to the Son, whom, on the previous day, he had proclaimed as his anointed king, and commanded all the angels to worship him : "Son, thou in whom my glory I behold In full resplendence, heir of all my might, The Son replies in a less offensive vein of irony. Again, in Book X., the Almighty, on occasion of the operations of Sin and Death following the track of Satan from hell gates to the new world, and forming a bridge across the desolate abyss, addresses his Son in language of human passion, too gross to be read without horror, and, therefore, not necessary to be quoted here. In other discourses between the two divine personages, while there is godlike authority in the speeches of the Father, and a majesty of meekness, most beautifully characteristic of the Redeemer, in the replies of the Son, it may be allowed to the adventurous poet, that what man could do, he has done; and if even there he fell short of "the height of (his) great argument," he stopped only where "The force of nature could no further go." In describing the glories and felicities of heaven, and recording the songs of the angels, he has exceeded, both in splendour and sanctity of thought and utterance, all precedents of forerunners and imitations of successors on similar themes. In Book III., after the long and abstruse colloquy, in the presence of all the hierarchies around the throne, wherein the Father foretels the fall of man, and the Son offers himself as a sacrifice for the sinner, in the scene that follows, Milton transcends himself, and seems only to lack inspiration to stamp authenticity on the record: "No sooner had the Almighty ceased, but all |