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their association; and from others we shrink with horror, or admit them only as salutary inflictions, as counterpoises to our interests and passions. Such images rather obstruct the career of fancy than incite it.

Pleasure and terror are indeed the genuine sources of poetry; but poetical pleasure must be such as human imagination can at least conceive, and poetical terrors such as human strength and fortitude may combat. The good and evil of eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind Io sinks under them in passive helplessness, content with calm belief and humble adoration.

Known truths, however, may take a different appearance, and be conveyed to the mind by a new train of intermediate images. This Milton has undertaken and performed with 15 pregnancy and vigour of mind peculiar to himself. Whoever considers the few radical positions which the Scriptures afforded him, will wonder by what energetic operation he expanded them to such extent, and ramified them to so much variety, restrained as he was by religious reverence from 20 licentiousness of fiction.

Here is a full display of the united force of study and genius-of a great accumulation of materials, with judgment to digest and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature or from story, from an ancient fable or 25 from modern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his thoughts. An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fermented by study and exalted by imagination.

It has been therefore said, without an indecent hyperbole, by one of his encomiasts, that in reading 'Paradise Lost' we 30 read a book of universal knowledge.

But original deficiency cannot be supplied. The want of human interest is always felt. 'Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets

to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.

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Another inconvenience of Milton's design is, that it requires the description of what cannot be described, the agency of spirits. He saw that immateriality supplied no images, and that he could not show angels acting but by instruments of action; he therefore invested them with form and matter. 10 This, being necessary, was therefore defensible; and he should have secured the consistency of his system, by keeping immateriality out of sight, and enticing his reader to drop it from his thoughts. But he has unhappily perplexed his poetry with his philosophy. His infernal and celestial powers 15 are sometimes pure spirit, and sometimes animated body. When Satan walks with his lance upon the burning marl,' he has a body; when, in his passage between hell and the new world, he is in danger of sinking in the vacuity, and is supported by a gust of rising vapours, he has a body; when 20 he animates the toad, he seems to be mere spirit, that can penetrate matter at pleasure; when he 'starts up in his own shape,' he has at least a determined form; and when he is brought before Gabriel, he has a spear and a shield,' which he had the power of hiding in the toad, though the arms of 25 the contending angels are evidently material.

The vulgar inhabitants of Pandaemonium, being 'incorporeal spirits,' are 'at large, though without number,' in a limited space: yet in the battle, when they were overwhelmed by mountains, their armour hurt them, ' crushed in upon their 30 substance, now grown gross by sinning.' This likewise happened to the uncorrupted angels, who were overthrown the 'sooner for their arms, for unarmed they might easily as

spirits have evaded by contraction or remove.'

Even as spirits they are hardly spiritual: for 'contraction' and 'remove' are images of matter; but if they could have escaped without their armour, they might have escaped from it, and 5 left only the empty cover to be battered. Uriel, when he rides on a sunbeam, is material; Satan is material when he is afraid of the prowess of Adam.

1 The confusion of spirit and matter, which pervades the whole narration of the war of heaven, fills it with incongruity; 10 and the book in which it is related is, I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is increased.

After the operation of immaterial agents, which cannot be explained, may be considered that of allegorical persons which have no real existence. To exalt causes into agents, 15 to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings are, for the most part, suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale, and Victory hovers over a general, or perches on a standard; but Fame 20 and Victory can do no more. To give them any real employment, or ascribe to them any material agency, is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to nonentity. In the 'Prometheus' of Aeschylus, we see Violence and Strength, and in the Alcestis' of Euripides 25 we see Death, brought upon the stage, all as active persons of the drama; but no precedents can justify absurdity.

Milton's allegory of Sin and Death is undoubtedly faulty. Sin is indeed the mother of Death, and may be allowed to be the portress of hell; but when they stop the journey of 30 Satan, a journey described as real, and when Death offers him battle, the allegory is broken. That Sin and Death should have shown the way to hell, might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the passage by building a bridge,

because the difficulty of Satan's passage is described as real and sensible, and the bridge ought to be only figurative. The hell assigned to the rebellious spirits is described as not less local than the residence of man. It is placed in some distant part of space, separated from the regions of harmony 5 and order by a chaotic waste and an unoccupied vacuity; but Sin and Death worked up a 'mole of aggregated soil cemented with asphaltus, a work too bulky for ideal architects.

This unskilful allegory appears to me one of the greatest faults of the poem; and to this there was no temptation but 10 the author's opinion of its beauty.

To the conduct of the narrative some objections may be made. Satan is with great expectation brought before Gabriel in Paradise, and is suffered to go away unmolested. The creation of man is represented as the consequence of 15 the vacuity left in heaven by the expulsion of the rebels; yet Satan mentions it as a report 'rife in Heaven' before his departure.

To find sentiments for the state of innocence was very difficult; and something of anticipation perhaps is now and 20 then discovered. Adam's discourse of dreams seems not to be the speculation of a new-created being. I know not whether his answer to the angel's reproof for curiosity does not want something of propriety; it is the speech of a man acquainted with many other men. Some philosophical 25 notions, especially when the philosophy is false, might have been better omitted. The angel, in a comparison, speaks of 'timorous deer,' before deer were yet timorous, and before Adam could understand the comparison.

Dryden remarks, that Milton has some flats among his 30 elevations. This is only to say, that all the parts are not equal. In every work, one part must be for the sake of others; a palace must have passages; a poem must have

transitions. It is no more to be required that wit should always be blazing, than that the sun should always stand at noon. In a great work there is a vicissitude of luminous and opaque parts, as there is in the world a succession of 5 day and night. Milton, when he has expatiated in the sky, may be allowed sometimes to revisit earth; for what other author ever soared so high, or sustained his flight so long?

Milton, being well versed in the Italian poets, appears to have borrowed often from them; and, as every man catches to something from his companions, his desire of imitating Ariosto's levity has disgraced his work with the Paradise of Fools; a fiction not in itself ill-imagined, but too ludicrous for its place.

His play on words, in which he delights too often; his 15 equivocations, which Bentley endeavours to defend by the example of the ancients; his unnecessary and ungraceful use of terms of art; it is not necessary to mention, because they are easily remarked, and generally censured; and at last bear so little proportion to the whole, that they scarcely 20 deserve the attention of a critic.

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Such are the faults of that wonderful performance' Paradise Lost'; which he who can put in balance with its beauties must be considered not as nice but as dull, as less to be censured for want of candour than pitied for want of sensibility.

Of 'Paradise Regained,' the general judgment seems now to be right, that it is in many parts elegant, and everywhere instructive. It was not to be supposed that the writer of 'Paradise Lost' could ever write without great effusions of fancy, and exalted precepts of wisdom. The basis of 'Paradise 30 Regained' is narrow; a dialogue without action can never please like a union of the narrative and dramatic powers. Had this poem been written not by Milton, but by some imitator, it would have claimed and received universal praise.