borne flower in ode and masque now gave place to a passion for something higher and holier, and he sought a theme commensurate with his ripened powers. As early as the time of his Italian travels he had contemplated writing an epic of King Arthur. But more and more he was drawn to sacred subjects and finally fixed upon the Fall of Man. The actual composition of the poem seems to have begun about 1658, and tradition has fondly pictured the sightless poet dictating the successive portions to his daughters. Though still young for such service, it is not impossible that they gave some of the assistance, both in reading and writing, which was constantly required. The first draft of the poem may have been finished by 1663 or 1665, but publication was delayed by the Great Plague, the Great Fire, and the difficulties of licensing. In 1667 it was issued, in ten books, and the author received for it just ten pounds. A second edition, arranged in twelve books as at present, was printed in the last year of his life. Meanwhile, in 1671, together with Samson Agonistes, appeared the four books of Paradise Regained. This sequel, however, which recounts Christ's resistance to the temptation in the wilderness, is intrinsically of lesser poetic interest, and contains no merit that is not more conspicuous in the larger poem. The verse of both is blank iambic pentameter, which Milton had already used in Comus, and which he employed now in the conviction that rhyme was "the invention of a barbaric age,” of no true musical delight. Perhaps he felt, too, that his subject demanded larger freedom. He certainly made a virtually new instrument for his needs. He shunned the extreme license of the dramatists, keeping his lines always well girt, yet distributing accents and pauses with consummate cunning. This, together with the splendor of his diction and the stateliness of his inverted and involved style, yields a verse which in its own quality remains unexcelled, and which, though technically the same as the dramatic blank verse, we must forever distinguish as "epic" or "Miltonic"-the verse of the "mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies," the "God-gifted organ-voice of England."

The majesty of the invocation which announces the theme of Paradise Lost is remarkably sustained through the ten thousand and more lines that follow:

"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos."

The scene of the epic, or drama, as one is constantly tempted to call it, is the Universe at the time of the creation,-Heaven, Hell, and the Eden of the new-made Earth. Satan and the host of rebel angels, cast out from heaven, plot the downfall of man in revenge for their own overthrow. In pursuit of his purpose, the Tempter makes his way into Paradise; and the poet rehearses, with pomp and circumstance, in his lofty verse, the simple story of the third chapter of Genesis. The supernatural elements are conceived on a colossal scale. The Universal Infinitude is mapped out into The Empyrean, Chaos, and Hell, with The World, or Starry Universe, occupying a small circumscribed and almost central position, as marked out by the golden compasses of the Son:

"One foot he centred, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said, 'Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds;
This be thy just circumference, O World.'”

(VII. 228-231.)

The outcast Angels fall for nine days, and for nine days more lie confounded, "rolling in the fiery gulf" of Hell. The huge council-chamber of Pandemonium rises out of the earth "like an exhalation." When Satan has winged his difficult way again upward through Chaos, he spies, beneath the empyreal Heaven,

"hanging in a golden chain,

This pendent World, in bigness as a star

Of smallest magnitude close by the moon."
(II. 1051-1053.)

Yet in Paradise itself we find the natural world of "lawns, or level downs, and flocks Grazing the tender herb;" of "Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose;" of vernal airs and trembling leaves and murmuring waters; of all kinds of living creatures, and in their midst

"Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,

God-like erect, with native honor clad,
In naked majesty."

(IV. 288-290.)

It will be seen by what means Milton has made an impressive and to many even fascinating poem out of material which, as Dr. Johnson says, is wholly wanting in human interest. He brought to it an imagination equal to the utmost scope of his celestial machinery, so that immeasurable spaces and illimitable æons are in his hands as bricks and mortar in the hands of a builder. He ransacks the forests of Norway, the mines of India, the magnificence of Babylon, for images and comparisons. He tirelessly searches both history and fable and brings spoil of heroic deeds and sounding names from classic and Biblical lore. He measures his syllables, his inverted phrases, his involved sentences, with the ear of one to whom the rarest music is native, and his blank verse marches in bars and slips into cadences that ask no help of rhyme. Yet through all the mazes of music and imagery, such as might well bewilder a less consecrated poet, he keeps before him the stern purpose of his poem, to "justify the ways of God to man.” We follow the story to the end, witness the fall of our First Parents from their happy state, hear their half-vain repentance, listen to the doom of mortality and expulsion from Paradise, and attend in not uncomforted sorrow as the Archangel Michael and the flaming sword lead them without the eastern gate, where

"They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."

(XII. 648, 649.)

As beauty is the dominant quality of Milton's early poetry sublimity is the dominant quality here. It is seen in the spaciousness of the setting, the vastness of the more than planetary abysses that are unfolded, where height and depth and every other creature known to the soaring imagination dwell. It is seen in the imaginative sweep of history and legend. It is felt in the very harmonies of the verse, wherein diphthong and liquid conspire to make music even of otherwise superfluous proper names. But more than all else it is felt in the exalted tone of the poem, the "high seriousness," which, says Matthew Arnold, was beyond the reach of Chaucer, but was given to poets like Homer and Shakespeare, Dante and Milton. In pure moral loftiness indeed, we must account Dante and Milton supreme, the one the poet of medieval Europe, the other of Puritan England.

After the death of Cromwell the Protectorate failed to afford a stable government and was followed in 1660 by the restoration of the Stuarts in the person of Charles II. The history of the succeeding thirty or forty years was in many respects a repetition of what had gone before. The Stuart rule meant tyranny, and also a wavering between the Protestant and Catholic forms of worship, with a leaning toward the latter that bred discontent in the strong Protestant element. When the second James followed the second Charles, the discontent came to a head. James's reign was short. The Revolution of 1688 set William of Orange and Mary (the daughter of James) on the throne, and England, which had already formed a Triple Alliance with The Netherlands and Sweden, now joined in the Great Alliance of the Protestant powers of Europe against France. At the same time the Declaration of Rights accepted by William, guaranteed once more the powers of Parliament and the liberties of the people.