“Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve,
    Assaying by his devilish art to reach
    The organs of her fancy, and with them forge
    Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams.”

If anything more infatuated can be imagined, it is the simplicity of the All-Wise Himself in entrusting the wardership of the gate of Hell, and consequently the charge of keeping Satan in, to the beings in the universe most interested in letting him out.  The sole but sufficient excuse is that these faults are inherent in the subject.  If Milton had not thought that he could justify the ways of Jehovah to man he would not have written at all; common sense on the part of the angels would have paralysed the action of the poem; we should, if conscious of our loss, have lamented the irrefragable criticism that should have stifled the magnificent allegory of Sin and Death.  Another critical thrust is equally impossible to parry.  It is true that the Evil One is the hero of the epic.  Attempts have been made to invest Adam with this character.  He is, indeed, a great figure to contemplate, and such as might represent the ideal of humanity till summoned to act and suffer.  When, indeed, he partakes of the forbidden fruit in disobedience to his Maker, but in compassion to his mate, he does seem for a moment to fulfil the canon which decrees that the hero shall not always be faultless, but always shall be noble.  The moment, however, that he begins to wrangle with Eve about their respective shares of blame, he forfeits his estate of heroism more irretrievably than his estate of holiness—­a fact of which Milton cannot have been unaware, but he had no liberty to forsake the Scripture narrative.  Satan remains, therefore, the only possible hero, and it is one of the inevitable blemishes of the poem that he should disappear almost entirely from the latter books.

These defects, and many more which might be adduced, are abundantly compensated by the poet’s vital relation to the religion of his age.  No poet whose fame is co-extensive with the civilised world, except Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever been greatly in advance of his times.  Had Milton been so, he might have avoided many faults, but he would not have been a representative poet; nor could Shelley have classed him with Homer and Dante, and above Virgil, as “the third epic poet; that is, the third poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their development.”  Hence it is that in the “Adonais,” Shelley calls Milton “the third among the sons of light.”