action.  “Arthur,” so much in his mind when he wrote the “Epitaphium Damonis,” does not appear at all.  Two of the drafts of “Paradise Lost” are mere lists of dramatis personae, but the others indicate the shape which the conception had then assumed in Milton’s mind as the nucleus of a religious drama on the pattern of the mediaeval mystery or miracle play.  Could he have had any vague knowledge of the autos of Calderon?  In the second and more complete draft Gabriel speaks the prologue.  Lucifer bemoans his fall and altercates with the Chorus of Angels.  Eve’s temptation apparently takes place off the stage, an arrangement which Milton would probably have reconsidered.  The plan would have given scope for much splendid poetry, especially where, before Adam’s expulsion, “the Angel causes to pass before his eyes a masque of all the evils of this life and world,” a conception traceable in the eleventh book of “Paradise Lost.”  But it is grievously cramped in comparison with the freedom of the epic, as Milton must soon have discovered.  That he worked upon it appears from the extremely interesting fact, preserved by Phillips, that Satan’s address to the Sun is part of a dramatic speech which, according to Milton’s plan in 1642 or 1643, would have formed the exordium of his tragedy.  Of the literary sources which may have originated or enriched the conception of “Paradise Lost” in Milton’s mind we shall speak hereafter.  It must suffice for the present to remark that his purpose had from the first been didactic.  This is particularly visible in the notes of alternative subjects in his manuscripts, many of which palpably allude to the ecclesiastical and political incidents of his time, while one is strikingly prophetic of his own defence of the execution of Charles I.  “The contention between the father of Zimri and Eleazar whether he ought to have slain his son without law; next the ambassadors of the Moabites expostulating about Cosbi, a stranger and a noblewoman, slain by Phineas.  It may be argued about reformation and punishment illegal, and, as it were, by tumult.  After all arguments driven home, then the word of the Lord may be brought, acquitting and approving Phineas.”  It was his earnest aim at all events to compose something “doctrinal and exemplary to a nation.”  “Whatsoever,” he says in 1641, “whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man’s thoughts from within—­all these things with a solid and treatable smoothness to paint out and describe; teaching over the whole book of sanctity and virtue, through all the instances of example, with much delight, to those especially of soft and delicious temper who will not so much as look upon Truth herself unless they see her elegantly drest, that, whereas the paths of honesty and good life appear more rugged and difficult, though they be indeed easy and pleasant, they would then appear to all men easy and pleasant though they were rugged and difficult in deed.”  An easier task than that of “justifying the ways of God to man” by the cosmogony and anthropology of “Paradise Lost.”