Among the jottings which Milton made in 1640-41 of possible subjects for poems, were several from the life of Christ, such as Christ Born, Christ Bound, Christ Crucified, and Christ Risen. He contemplated also a drama dealing with the agony in the garden, under the title Christus Patiens, suggested by Hugo Grotius's drama of the same name. Although the subject of Paradise Regained, the temptation in the Wilderness, was suggested by Ellwood's chance remark in returning the manuscript of Paradise Lost, the lesser poem was doubtless a result of a long period of thought, though of a less conscious and centred kind than evolved Paradise Lost. Milton's long brooding, during the composition of Paradise Lost, on the subject of the origin of evil and the fall of man, included by implication much reflection on the final triumph of good and the reinstatement of fallen humanity in its favored station. The very fact that his thought on these subjects was conventional, and straitly bound by scriptural authority, imposed upon him all the more imperatively the need of rounding out the system which Paradise Lost had left incomplete. It is almost safe to say, therefore, that even without the young Quaker's "pleasant" hint, Milton would sooner or later have felt the need of supplementing the story of the first temptation with that of the second, in order to close the circle of his theology.

Paradise Regained is, then, so far as its matter goes, a continuation of Paradise Lost; but in point of manner it is remarkably different, so different, indeed, that there seems some ground for refusing to it the title of epic altogether. In his Reason of Church Government, Milton speaks of

"that Epic form, whereof the two Poems of Homer and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the Book of Job a brief, model," and it has been suggested that in Paradise Regained he essayed the "brief" epic, modelling it more or less consciously upon the precedent of Job. Certainly the form of the English and the Hebrew poem is similar. In the latter, after a short narrative introduction Job begins a series of colloquies with his friends and with the Lord which occupy the entire remainder of the poem except the short narrative conclusion. So in Paradise Regained, the body of the poem is dialogue, with narrative introduction and conclusion, and with narrative interludes between the various stages of the temptation. Strictly speaking, therefore, both poems are disguised dramas, the epic element being little else than expanded stage directions. In both, too, the drama is a spiritual one; the scene of conflict is in the hearts and minds of the protagonists, and the external world exists only as picturesque accessory and illustration.

The parallel is a damaging one for Milton, for it throws into relief his fatal fault in dealing with biblical material, — lack of simplicity. His account of the Creation in the seventh book of Paradise Lost shows this fault most glaringly. Milton's Creation is an elaborate function, the inauguration of a great celestial show; it has none of the simple awe, the lonely majesty, of Genesis, whereby we are made to feel the vague stirring of the Abyss pregnant with mortal shapes and passions. The touching anthropomorphism of the Hebrew God and the Hebrew Heaven too often becomes grotesque under his elaborating hand. Like