vine Man. Now, obviously, no passage in the life of Christ illustrates in such naked contrast the struggle between the powers of good and of evil as the assault made upon the virtue of Christ himself by the arch-enemy. Victory in such a contest as that must be ultimate victory. This, therefore, naturally from Milton's point of view became the subject of "Paradise Regained."

from admiration, the attraction, not of identical but of complementary qualities. The novel delight of surrender to à charm, the charm of a being weaker and fairer than himself, had been enough, and he had not provided for the difficulties of accommodating this new self-surrender to the self-maintenance which was his natural and his habitual temper. Ere long the discovery was made of feminine frailty. The Lady of "Comus" had been created out In treating the history of the temptation of elements which belonged to his own in the wilderness, the genius of the poet character. Eve was created out of all that moved under peculiar advantages. Milton he was not and could not be. The Lady was never dramatic in the high sense of is admirable; Eve is supremely desirable. that word. Varying, vital movement of If the Lady had been seduced by the fraud thought and passion he was unable to exof Comus, and had fallen, we should leave hibit. The mystery and obscurity of life her among the monsters, and despair of do not belong to the characters created by goodness; but Eve, when she has eaten him. Each of them is perfectly intelligithe apple, is hardly less loveable than be- ble. But Milton excelled in the represenfore, and we know that hardly any fall is tation of characters in position, and more fatal to a character like hers, which has no particularly in the discussion of a "topic inexorable virtue; it bends, but is not by two characters who occupy fixed and broken. "Eve is a kind of abstract wo-opposing points of view. This was not man; essentially a typical being; an dialogue; there is no giving and taking of official mother of all living." She is the Miltonic conception of the "eternal feminine (das Ewigweibliche) in natnre.

ideas, no shifting of positions, no fluctuant moods, no mobility of thought. It was rather debate, a forensic pleading, with counsel on this side and on that. It was a duel, not with rapiers gleaming under and over one another, and in a moment's irregular strife changing hands - not such a duel, but one much more deliberate, the antagonists alternately letting off their heavy charges of argument, and alternately awaiting the formidable reply. "Paradise Regained" is a series of such debates, which remind us of the scene between Comus and the Lady in Milton's early poem, where already the Miltonic manner appears fully formed.

What passage in the life of Christ would Milton select for treatment as the subject of his second epic? Paradise had been forfeited by the disobedience of Adam; by the perfect obedience of the Son of God it was recovered. The supreme act of submission to his Father's will was surely his obedience unto death, "even the death of the cross." O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me except I drink it, thy will be done." The contrast is absolute between such obedient fidelity as this, and the wilfulness and disloyalty of the first Adam. And when Christ had By obedience Christ regains Paradise. suffered death, and despoiled hell, and Loyalty to God, fidelity to the righteous risen again, then Paradise was truly and Father, is the supreme excellence of his completely regained. Yet it is not the character; its strength is not Pagan selfpassion, the death, and the triumphant dependence, but Hebrew self-devotion to resurrection of the Saviour which Milton the Eternal One. The consciousness of determined to render into song. Does the filial virtue, of the union of his will with reader not feel a certain incongruity in the that of the Father, supports him through appropriating of this name Paradise Re-every trial. At the same time this obedigained" to a poem which leaves Christ at the outset of his earthly career, with his crown of thorns yet to wear, and his cross to be borne to Calvary? Not so did Milton feel. To him the first complete victory over Satan was equivalent to the final overthrow of the kingdom of darkness, and the restoration of the reign of all goodness. The great warfare was then brought to an issue then, for the first time and that issue was decisive. Satan had found one mightier than he in the Di

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ence, unlike that claimed from Adam, does not lie in the passive accepting of an arbitrary rule. The Saviour is a champion of God. He is filled, like the ancient heroes of the Jewish race, with active zeal for the glory of God, and his people's service:

"Victorious deeds

Flamed in my heart, heroic acts; one while
To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke;
Then to subdue and quell, o'er all the earth,
Brute violence and proud tyrannic pov'r,
Till truth were freed, and equity restored."

He is a worthy leader of mankind in the differed from the aged man who had great warfare against sin and death, warred a good warfare, who had known greater in his virtue than Adam could pos- disappointment and defeat, and now was sibly have been, because the virtue of fallen on evil days, so widely does Samson Christ is generous and aspiring, not mere differ from Milton's first glad ideal. The obedience for obedience' sake. Such an transformation is a strange one, and yet antagonist no power of evil could with- we recognize the one same personality. stand. Satan is not only foiled, but crush- Samson's manner of self-contemplation is ingly defeated. The purpose and the precisely that of Milton. He loves to prepromise of God are fulfilled. As the poem sent to his own imagination the glory of closes we hear the anthems of angelic his strength, the greatness of his past choirs sung for the victory of the right-achievements, and his present afflicted state. This strength which he possesses "Samson Agonistes" remains to be he looks upon as Milton from his early briefly studied. Once again there is the years was accustomed to look upon his antagonism of good and evil. God, the own extraordinary powers- -as something people of God, and their afflicted chieftain | entrusted to him, of which he must render are set over against Dagon, his impious an account. It is his sorrow that such a crew of worshippers, the enchantress Dalila, and the champion of the Philistines, the giant Harapha. It is apparently an unequal warfare. Samson is blind. "Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves "

eous cause.

noble gift should be compelled to base uses, and be made the gaze and scorn of his enemies. But no suffering is so cruel as the memory of his folly. Had Milton ever been betrayed into such weakness as that of Samson (Milton never was), he would have felt precisely as Samson feels. The single fall is fatal and irrecoverable. He is not one of those who, under the influence of time, and the world, and changing action, can slip back into his self-respect. Being despicable once, he must be always despicable. The thought of an honourable death, self-inflicted, yet not

and his nation is likewise in bondage. God's order seems to be reversed. It is the hour of Dagon's triumph. Worst of all it was by the moral weakness of their leader that the people of Israel had fallen. But Adam had sinned and was an exile from Paradise, and yet God's order stood. Christ was in the wilderness in his humili-criminal nor weakly sought, must have ation, cold and hungry, drenched with rain, environed by the powers of hell. The Lady sat enthralled by the spells of her deadly enemy, alone in the midst of a rout of unclean creatures, and yet deliverance had been wrought. And now the chosen nation, God's representative among the peoples, was but tried and afflicted for a time. A sudden and awful victory is achieved on their behalf. And once again the choral song which ends the tragedy is a cohfession of a divine order of things, an assertion of eternal Proviidence:

"All is best, though we oft doubt
What th' unsearchable dispose
Of highest Wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close."

What is Samson? He is the man gifted with divine strength; one who is great by the grace of God, yet a mortal, and therefore liable to fall. As Milton's first important dramatic conception, the Lady, is wrought out of materials supplied from his own character and inner experience, so is this, the last. But as the beautiful youth, a poet more than a fighter, full of noble hopes and unrealized aspirations,

been the one partial assuagement of his grief that ever came to him. In this death which befalls Samson there is something deeper than poetical justice. It brings peace and consolation, and "calm of mind, all passion spent," as nothing else could. It is the witness of God to the faithfulness, through all weakness and folly, of his champion.

Harapha, the Philistine giant, is so unmistakably contrasted with Samson, that it is impossible to miss Milton's intention. Samson is the man gifted with divine strength; Harapha is the type of the fleshly strength of this world, insolent and brutal. He is the force which Christ burned to subdue over all the earth, "Brute violence and proud tyrannic power." It was Harapha after the restoration of Charles who insulted the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton and Bradshaw. It is Harapha who still rules wherever material power is dissociated from moral and spiritual. He is boastful, pitiless, vulgar, and, with all his insolence, in the presence of divine strength he is a coward. Let the Chorus interpret for us the significance of the meeting of the two champions :—

414

"Oh, how comely it is and how reviving
To the spirits of just men long opprest!
When God into the hands of their deliverer
Puts invincible might

on

To quell the mighty of the earth, th' oppress.

or,

The brute and boist'rous force of violent men
Hardy and industrious to support
Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue

The righteous and all such as honour truth;
He all their ammunition

And feats of war defeats,

With plain heroic magnitude of mind
And celestial vigour arm'd."

From Saint Pauls.

Seigneur! preservez-moi, preservez ceux que
j'aime,

Frères, parens, amis, et mes ennemis même,
Dans le mal triomphants,

De jamais voir, seigneur! l'été sans fleurs
vermeilles,

La cage sans oiseaux, la ruche sans abeilles,
La maison sans enfans!"

VICTOR HUGO.

brother, sometimes listening to the soft hissing sound made by the wheat in its descent, sometimes admiring the figureheads of the vessels, or laboriously spelling out the letters of their names.

The brute violence of the flesh has for its appropriate ally the deceitful beauty of the My father's house stood in a quiet flesh, full of vanity, and lust, and cruelty. Such beauty has now lost all its fascina- country town, through which a tidal river tion for Samson. Even Harapha is less flowed. The banks of the river were "Out, out, hy-flanked by wooden wharves, which were intolerable than Dalila was cre- supported on timbers, and projected over æna!" The lady of "Comus " ated out of all that Milton conceived as the water. They had granaries behind admirable; Eve out of all in woman that them, and one of my earliest pleasures is desirable; Dalila out of all that is de- was to watch the gangs of men who at testable. Her feminine curiosity, her fem- high tide towed vessels up the river, where, inine love of dress she comes towards being moored before these granaries, carthe blind prisoner "with all her bravery goes of corn were shot down from the upher fleshly desire, her incapacity per stories into their holds, through for any noble thought, her feigned religion, wooden troughs not unlike fire-escapes. her honeyed words implying the weakness The back of my father's house was on a and fatuity of him whom she addresses, level with the wharves, and overlooked a her wifely treachery and hard-hearted- long reach of the river. Our nursery was ness, make up a personality which, above a low room in the roof, having a large bow all others, must have been hateful to Mil- window, in the old-fashioned seat of which ton. Shakspeare would have smiled, and I spent many a happy hour with my secretly accepted the enchantress as a fruitful subject of study. Milton brings her upon the scene only to expose her, and drive her away with most genuine indignation. The Lady, Eve, Dalila - these When the tide was low there was fresh are the women of Milton; each a great ideal figure, one dedicated to admiration, pleasure. Then we could watch the happy little boys who, with trousers tucked one to love, and the last to loathing. We have now gone the round of Mil-above their knees, used to wade among the A line will recapit- piles, which were all green with sea-grass, ton's poetical works. ulate the substance of this essay. Milton and bristling with barnacles. We could works from the starting-point of an idea, see them picking up empty shells and bits and two such ideas brought into being of drift-wood in the yellowish mud; or what he accomplished as a man and as an sometimes one of them would discover an artist. His prose works, the outcome of old pot or kettle, on which he would drum his life of public action, have for their and play uncouth music. Joyous urchins! ideal centre a conception of human liberty. I was too complete a baby to envy them, His poetical works, the outcome of his in- but I thought how grand a lot was theirs! I had a brother two years older than ner life, his life of artistic contemplation, are various renderings of one dominant myself. Before I could speak, he had idea that the struggle for mastery be-taught me my letters, and I used to pick tween good and evil is the prime fact of life; and that a final victory of the righteous cause is assured by the existence of a divine order of the universe, which Milton knew by the name of " Providence."

-

EDWARD DOWDEN.

them up and present them to him as he called for them. Of course he was a tiny child at the time, but to me he appeared very large. Nothing has changed to me since babyhood, so much as opinions concerning size and height. Truly "there were giants

their holes, and sit in a row pecking and wrangling, these were sights indeed! When shall pleasures for grown-up folks be found to match them?

in the earth in those days." All grown-up with wriggling worms in their mouths; people appeared to me to be nearly of a to see the little starlings creep out of size; my father was a giant, my mother was a giantess, my brother was large, knowing, old, and never sufficiently to be respected; rose-trees were trees indeed, and no bushes then! I pulled the roses down to smell them, and I put up my finger into the flowers of the tall tiger lilies as I stood on tiptoe under them, and regarded the dark dust that came off upon it as something remarkable, procured from a higher sphere. When my nurse took me up in her arms, oh what pleasure to see the things on the table to look down on that distant place the floor, and see my little sister creeping there!

My brother was the hero of my history and the being whom I imitated to the utmost of my power. He was a very remarkable child, and had such a retentive memory, that as soon as he could speak he could learn by heart anything that was repeated slowly to him, whether he understood it or not.

Our father, perceiving his extraordinary precocity, was very proud of him, and taught him several scenes from ShakeA report reached me one day (not, how-speare, which he used to let him act, makever, from a trustworthy source, for it was ing him stamp, frown, and use all kinds our little housemaid who brought it to of appropriate gestures, and exciting him me) a report to the effect that once I had been a little baby like her! That must have been a long time ago, I thought. I pordered on it, but it seemed unlikely, and I did not believe it.

But as the rich go from their town houses to their country seats, and as the Vicar of Wakefield and Mrs. Primrose migrated from the blue bed to the brown, so we had our periodical changes. Life in the nursery was well enough, but life in the best bedroom smacked of the sublime.

The nursery being in the roof, and facing south, became glowing hot towards af ternoon; but in the front of the house was a large delightful room with closed shutters, into which, on our promise to be quiet, our nurse would often take us, and, folding back one of the shutters, allow us to admire the chintz curtains, all gay with apple-boughs and goldfinches flying with spread wings. Then she would let us climb on to the window-seat, and there we enjoyed hours of contemplation and hours of talk unintelligible to any but ourselves.

What a world those windows opened out to us! They looked into the minsteryard. It was smooth and paved with flag-stones, and in its midst rose the great brown minster, the old minster, that was full of little holes, and had a bird's head peeping out of each.

by praises and rewards. He little knew the mischief that he was doing by forcing such a brain. On the contrary, he thought education could not begin too early, and, not content with the progress his child made at home, he sent him at four years old to a lady, who engaged to “bring him forward." Under her teaching he mastered reading very quickly, and, reading ouce learned, vain would have been the attempt to keep him back in other things. He loved best a large old edition of Shakespeare, and our nurse used to let him carry it up into the nursery, because poring over it kept him so quiet.

Every scene that he liked he learned

fighting and slaying scenes were his favourites, and when he knew them by heart he would shut up the folio, stand upon it, and begin to act, while I, being the audience, sat on the floor, and stared admiringly. He would pretend to cry, would hold out his little hand with a menacing air, then fall down on the floor with a solemn face and a deep sigh, which gave me to understand that he was dead, and that his enemies had killed him.

All this my brother did, and learned over and above what he was taught by the lady to whom he was sent for instruction, and my mother never discovered it, otherwise, I believe, she would have found some less dangerous amusement for him. But she was very delicate, and we seldom saw her; for she could not endure the least noise, and constantly suffered from headache.

Oh, to see the rooks and starlings poised on the swaying weather-cocks, to hear the great clock give warning, to listen to the bells, and shout to each other while their clashing voices hummed and buzzed around At last, one day "Snap "-for that was us and over us; to see the clergymen the only name by which I knew him, this walking in to prayers, and all the bluecoat sound having been the first my baby lips boys and girls trooping after them; to had uttered in their apprenticeship to the watch the father-rooks as they flew home art of talking-Snap was seen by me

lying on his little bed, the doctor standing on one side and my mother on the other.

Snap's illness, they came in when we were in very high spirits, chasing one another round the nursery, and the physician said to nurse, with a displeased countenance, "How now, my good woman - is this the sort of order you keep here?"

How can I help their playing about, sir?" she answered coldly.

"Their playing about I do not so much object to," he replied; "but I must protest against the boy's spouting Shakespeare so noisily all the time."

I was not distinctly sorry for Snap, as, not understanding why he was to be pitied he was not crying-consequently I did not think he could be hurt; but I wanted to kiss him. Therefore I crept up to his bed and patted his face; but he did not wake. Something nice was brought to him to eat; but as he would not have it they gave it to me, and I ate it for him. A long time after this Snap got up again; his hair was very short, and he could not walk, but used to creep on his hands and knees like our little sister. I thought this very droll, and tried to imitate him; but he soon learned to walk again, and then we thought it very strange when nurse told us that he was not to go to school any more for a long time, not to have Shake-cited too," he said on this occasion. "I speare, and not to learn anything at all. hope her brain is not forced by over-teaching."

Snap cried when the great Shakespeare was carried out of the nursery, and he often wearied of looking out of the windows at the ships and at the minster. At last, having absolute need of something to do, he bethought himself, as I suppose, that it would be a desirable thing to make an occupation of me, and every day he taught me scenes and songs, making me a willing little slave, and being kind to me on the whole, though he felt a natural disgust at my not being able to speak plainly; for I lisped, after the fashion of very young children, and sometimes wished to lie down on the floor and go to sleep in the middle of his lesson.

Every day after we had dined our dear mamma would come into the nursery and inquire whether we were good, putting her white hand to her brow, and saying, wearily, "I hope my boy is quiet, nurse, and not doing anything particular? 66 Bless me, no, ma'am," the answer would be. The children are at play together." Then she would go down again, and Snap would begin his daily lesson to

me.

66

Every alternate day the old physician would appear with mamma, and call Snap to come and stand before him. He seldom looked satisfied, and often said, "I hope this child has not been excited."

This good doctor had a strong northcountry accent, but I do not think I should have remembered him and his speeches so well, if my brother had not been in the habit of acting over what he had said, and imitating his accent when he retired.

"And the little girl looks very much ex

She has never been taught anything in her life," said my mother. "She is in a state of complete ignorance." "She could not be in a better state, ma'am, at her tender age."

"No," observed nurse, "missy has had no book learning; but ma'am, did you know that she could do that play-acting nearly as well as Master Graham?"

I remember that my mother looked aghast on hearing this, and that Snap performed a dance of triumph about her chair.

"Could I do acting?" asked the physician.

"Oh, yes," I replied, and I began to pucker up my little face into one of Snap's favourite tragic frowns, and to stamp about the nursery.

The doctor laughed and said, “Pooh.” I was very much surprised, for I had been told that it was rude to say pooh.

But while I wondered at him and his great red cheeks and his glossy shoes, Snap said, "Missy can say Brutus and Cassius, can't you, missy? I taught her, mamma. I make her say it every day."

Yes, I can say Bruty and Cassy," I replied, with smiling pride in the fact. That was a dagger to my mother's heart.

"Well, well, let us hear it, then," said "I cannot do more to prevent excite- the doctor; and after a short altercation ment," our mother would reply. "I never between me and Snap, during which I inlet him learn anything. I never have him sisted that I must have my pinafore taken down stairs with me. I quite debar my-off, and put on the paper cap which he self the pleasure of my children's society." called a helmet, I was placed upon the "Quite right, ma'am," the old physician used to answer; "keep him quiet, and he will be a man yet."

At last one day, about six months after

table, while my brother, shuffling in a manner which was intended to represent the footsteps of the Roman citizens, exclaimed, "The noble Brutus is ascended