great poem for which, between his leaving the University and the outbreak of the Civil War, all his life was a deliberate preparation.  The list is long; the subjects proposed run to no fewer than ninety-nine.  Of these, fifty-three are derived from Old Testament history (with a recurring inclination for the theme of Paradise Lost), eight from the New Testament; thirty-three from the history of Britain (with a leaning towards the Arthurian legend); while five of them are legendary tales of Scotland or North Britain, the last being headed “Macbeth.  Beginning at the arrival of Malcolm at Macduff.  The matter of Duncan may be expressed by the arrival of his ghost.”  Now that Milton (an adorer of Shakespeare’s genius, as everyone knows) should have taken so deep an impression from the play that its theme possessed him and he longed to transfer it to Epic, is credible enough.  That he, with his classical bent, should choose to attempt in Drama an improvement upon the most “classical” of all Shakespeare’s tragedies seems to me scarcely credible.  But if the credibility of this be granted, then I can only conceive Milton’s designing to improve the play by making it yet more “classical,” i.e. by writing it (after the fashion he followed in Samson Agonistes) closely upon the model of Athenian Tragedy.

For my part I always consider Milton’s Macbeth the most fascinating poem—­certainly, if play it were, the most fascinating play—­ever unwritten.  But of this any man may be sure; that (since they were both great poets) one made, as the other would have made, a story of far more value to us than Shakespeare or Milton or any man before or after could have made by a strict biography of Macbeth, the man as he lived.  For any such biography would clog the lesson for us with details which were more the less irrelevant because they really happened.  Here I must quote Aristotle again, and for the last time in this little book:  but no sentences in his treatise hold a deeper import than these:—­

“It is not the function of the Poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen of likelihood or must happen of necessity.  The Poet and the Historian are not different because one writes in verse and the other in prose.  Turn what Herodotus tells into verse, and none the less it will be a sort of history; the metre makes no difference.  The real difference lies in the Historian’s telling what has happened, the Poet’s telling what may happen. Thus Poetry is a more philosophical thing, and a more serious, than History:  for Poetry tells of the Universal, History of the Particular.  Now the business of the Universal is to tell us how it will fall to such and such a person to speak or act in such or such circumstances according to likelihood or necessity:  and it is at this that Poetry aims in giving characters names of its own:  whereas the Particular narrates what Alcibiades did or what happened to him.”