And we think of Milton among the triumphant royalists when we read of the Seraph Abdiel “faithful found among the faithless.”

  Nor number nor example with him wrought
  To swerve from truth or change his constant mind,
  Though single.  From amidst them forth he passed,
  Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained
  Superior, nor of violence feared aught: 
  And with retorted scorn his back he turned
  On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.

Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published in 1671.  The first of these treated in four books Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, a subject that had already been handled in the Spenserian allegorical manner by Giles Fletcher, a brother of the Purple Islander, in his Christ’s Victory and Triumph, 1610.  The superiority of Paradise Lost to its sequel is not without significance.  The Puritans were Old Testament men.  Their God was the Hebrew Jehovah, whose single divinity the Catholic mythology had overlaid with the figures of the Son, the Virgin Mary, and the saints.  They identified themselves in thought with his chosen people, with the militant theocracy of the Jews.  Their sword was the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.  “To your tents, O Israel,” was the cry of the London mob when the bishops were committed to the Tower.  And when the fog lifted, on the morning of the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell exclaimed, “Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered:  like as the sun riseth, so shalt thou drive them away.”

Samson Agonistes, though Hebrew in theme and spirit, was in form a Greek tragedy.  It has chorus and semi-chorus, and preserved the so-called dramatic unities; that is, the scene was unchanged, and there were no intervals of time between the acts.  In accordance with the rules of the Greek theater, but two speakers appeared upon the stage at once, and there was no violent action.  The death of Samson is related by a messenger.  Milton’s reason for the choice of this subject is obvious.  He himself was Samson, shorn of his strength, blind, and alone among enemies; given over

      to the unjust tribunals, under change of times,
  And condemnation of the ungrateful multitude.

As Milton grew older he discarded more and more the graces of poetry, and relied purely upon the structure and the thought.  In Paradise Lost, although there is little resemblance to Elizabethan work—­such as one notices in Comus and the Christmas hymn—­yet the style is rich, especially in the earlier books.  But in Paradise Regained it is severe to bareness, and in Samson, even to ruggedness.  Like Michelangelo, with whose genius he had much in common, Milton became impatient of finish or of mere beauty.  He blocked out his work in masses, left rough places and surfaces not filled in, and inclined to express his meaning by a symbol, rather than work it out in detail.  It was a part of his austerity, his increasing preference for structural over decorative methods, to give up rime for blank verse.  His latest poem, Samson Agonistes, is a metrical study of the highest interest.