or, in other words, to embody his theological system in verse.  This gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the Paradise Lost, which injure its effect as a poem.  His “God the father turns a school divine:”  his Christ, as has been wittily said, is “God’s good boy:”  the discourses of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures:  Adam himself is too sophisticated for the state of innocence, and Eve is somewhat insipid.  The real protagonist of the poem is Satan, upon whose mighty figure Milton unconsciously bestowed something of his own nature, and whose words of defiance might almost have come from some Republican leader when the Good Old Cause went down.

       What though the field be lost? 
  All is not lost; the unconquerable will
  And study of revenge, immortal hate,
  And courage never to submit or yield.

But when all has been said that can be said in disparagement or qualification, Paradise Lost remains the foremost of English poems and the sublimest of all epics.  Even in those parts where theology encroaches most upon poetry, the diction, though often heavy, is never languid.  Milton’s blank verse in itself is enough to bear up the most prosaic theme, and so is his epic English, a style more massive and splendid than Shakspere’s, and comparable, like Tertullian’s Latin, to a river of molten gold.  Of the countless single beauties that sow his page

  Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
  In Valombrosa,

there is no room to speak, nor of the astonishing fullness of substance and multitude of thoughts which have caused the Paradise Lost to be called the book of universal knowledge.  “The heat of Milton’s mind,” said Dr. Johnson, “might be said to sublimate his learning and throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts.”  The truth of this remark is clearly seen upon a comparison of Milton’s description of the creation, for example, with corresponding passages in Sylvester’s Divine Weeks and Works (translated from the Huguenot poet, Du Bartas), which was, in some sense, his original.  But the most heroic thing in Milton’s heroic poem is Milton.  There are no strains in Paradise Lost so absorbing as those in which the poet breaks the strict epic bounds and speaks directly of himself, as in the majestic lament over his own blindness, and in the invocation to Urania, which open the third and seventh books.  Every-where, too, one reads between the lines.  We think of the dissolute cavaliers, as Milton himself undoubtedly was thinking of them, when we read of “the sons of Belial flown with insolence and wine,” or when the Puritan turns among the sweet landscapes of Eden, to denounce

                                   court amours
  Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
  Or serenade which the starved lover sings
  To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.