patience “Paradise Regained” “censured to be much inferior” to “Paradise Lost.”  “The most judicious,” he adds, agreed with him, while allowing that “the subject might not afford such variety of invention,” which was probably all that the injudicious meant.  There is no external evidence of the date of his next and last poem, “Samson Agonistes,” but its development of Miltonic mannerisms would incline us to assign it to the latest period possible.  The poems were licensed by Milton’s old friend, Thomas Tomkyns, July 2, 1670, but did not appear until 1671.  They were published in the same volume, but with distinct title-pages and paginations; the publisher was John Starkey; the printer an anonymous “J.M.,” who was far from equalling Symmons in elegance and correctness.

“Paradise Regained” is in one point of view the confutation of a celebrated but eccentric definition of poetry as a “criticism of life.”  If this were true it would be a greater work than “Paradise Lost,” which must be violently strained to admit a definition not wholly inapplicable to the minor poem.  If, again, Wordsworth and Coleridge are right in pronouncing “Paradise Regained” the most perfect of Milton’s works in point of execution, the proof is afforded that perfect execution is not the chief test of poetic excellence.  Whatever these great men may have propounded in theory, it cannot be believed that they would not have rather written the first two books of “Paradise Lost” than ten such poems as “Paradise Regained,” and yet they affirm that Milton’s power is even more advantageously exhibited in the latter work than in the other.  There can be no solution except that greatness in poetry depends mainly upon the subject, and that the subject of “Paradise Lost” is infinitely the finer.  Perhaps this should not be.  Perhaps to “the visual nerve purged with euphrasy and rue” the spectacle of the human soul successfully resisting supernatural temptation would be more impressive than the material sublimities of “Paradise Lost,” but ordinary vision sees otherwise.  Satan “floating many a rood” on the sulphurous lake, or “up to the fiery concave towering high,” or confronting Death at the gate of Hell, kindles the imagination with quite other fire than the sage circumspection and the meek fortitude of the Son of God.  “The reason,” says Blake, “why Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”  The passages in “Paradise Regained” which most nearly approach the magnificence of “Paradise Lost,” are those least closely connected with the proper action of the poem, the episodes with which Milton’s consummate art and opulent fancy have veiled the bareness of his subject.  The description of the Parthian military expedition; the picture, equally gorgeous and accurate, of the Roman Empire at the zenith of its greatness; the condensation into a single speech of all that