CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGE.—­And here it is particularly to our purpose to observe, that in this very boldness of entrance into the holy of holies—­in this attempted grasp with finite hands of infinite things, Milton was but a sublimated type of his age, and of the Commonwealth, when man, struggling for political freedom, went, as in the later age of the French Illuminati, too far in the regions of spirit and of faith.  As Dante, with a powerful satire, filled his poem with the personages of the day, assigning his enemies to the girone of the Inferno, so Milton vents his gentler spleen by placing cowls and hood and habits in the limbo of vanity and paradise of fools: 

             ... all these upwhirled aloft
    Fly o’er the backside of the world far off,
    Into a limbo large and broad, since called
    The paradise of fools.

It was a setting forth of that spirit which, when the Cavaliers were many of them formalists, and the Puritans many of them fanatics, led to the rise of many sects, and caused rude soldiers to bellow their own riotous fancies from the pulpit.  In the suddenness of change, when the earthly throne had been destroyed, men misconceived what was due to the heavenly; the fancy which had been before curbed by an awe for authority, and was too ignorant to move without it, now revelled unrebuked among the mysteries which are not revealed to angelic vision, and thus “fools rushed in where angels fear to tread.”

The book could not fail to bring him immense fame, but personally he received very little for it in money—­less than L20.

PARADISE REGAINED.—­It was Thomas Ellwood, Milton’s Quaker friend, who, after reading the Paradise Lost, suggested the Paradise Regained.  This poem will bear no comparison with its great companion.  It may, without irreverence, be called “The gospel according to John Milton.”  Beauties it does contain; but the very foundation of it is false.  Milton makes man regain Paradise by the success of Christ in withstanding the Devil’s temptations in the wilderness; a new presentation of his Arian theology, which is quite transcendental; whereas, in our opinion, the gate of Paradise was opened only “by His precious death and burial; His glorious resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost.”  But if it is immeasurably inferior in its conception and treatment, it is quite equal to the Paradise Lost in its execution.

A few words as to Milton’s vocabulary and style must close our notice of this greatest of English poets.  With regard to the first, the Latin element, which is so manifest in his prose works, largely predominates in his poems, but accords better with the poetic license.  In a list of authors which Mr. Marsh has prepared, down to Milton’s time, which includes an analysis of the sixth book of the Paradise Lost, he is found to employ only eighty per cent. of Anglo-Saxon words—­less than any up to that day.  But his words are chosen with a delicacy of taste and ear which astonishes and delights; his works are full of an adaptive harmony, the suiting of sound to sense.  His rhythm is perfect.  We have not space for extended illustrations, but the reader will notice this in the lady’s song in Comus—­the address to