I

In the Cambridge "Vacation Exercise " we get the first trace of the epic ambition forming in Milton's mind, where the young poet longs to sing

"Of kings and queens and heroes old,

Such as the wise Demodocus once told In solemn songs at king Alcinoüs feast." In the Latin verses, In Quintum Novembris, also, Professor Masson detects some embryons of Paradise Lost in those passages which have to do with the "personality and agency of Satan, and the physical connection between Hell and Man's world." Milton's naïve confession to Diodati, at Horton, that he was "pluming his wings for a flight," meant doubtless some effort of a much more sustained sort than Lycidas, which immediately followed. But it was the unstinted praise which he received at the hands of the Italian academies, together with his reading of Tasso, Ariosto, and Boiardo, which first set him seriously thinking of a poem of heroic dimensions.

The first subject to which he gave much thought was the legendary history of King Arthur, as he explicitly states in the Latin poem to Manso, his Neapolitan host, and in the Epitaphium Damonis. The latter, written shortly after his return from abroad, informs us that he had decided to write in English, and that he had, indeed, already begun. One portion of this passage arouses interesting conjecture. He says,

Whether the "new reeds " meant a new stanza, a new verse-line, the untried epic form, or the English language put to novel uses, it is certain that when burst they were thrown aside forever, so far as this particular poem was concerned.

Without definitely casting aside the subject of King Arthur, Milton undertook, during the comparatively unemployed time between 1639-1642, a systematic course of reading in the Bible, in the chroniclehistories of Holinshed and Speed, and in the older chronicles of Bede, Geoffry of Monmouth, and William of Malmesbury, with the design of setting down all the hopeful subjects which occurred to him in perusal. These jottings have been preserved to us among the Milton manuscripts in Trinity College, Cambridge. They consist of ninety-nine subjects, of which two thirds are from old and new testament Scripture, and the remainder from British history. For the most part the subjects are barely indicated, but in some cases pains have been taken to elaborate a little outline of treatment. Among these last, the subject of the fall of Adam stands out conspicuously; there are two outlines and two elaborated drafts of it, occupying in all nearly a page and a half of the seven pages of notes. All the drafts are for dramas; the possibility of epic treatment is not suggested. The first presents merely a list of dramatis personæ, chief among which, after the human pair, are Michael and Lucifer: there is a chorus of angels and a number of allegorical figures, Heavenly Love, Conscience, Death, etc., introduced as "mutes." In the second draft Moses takes the place of Michael. The third is elaborated to show the course of the action and

"ADAM UNPARADISED: The Angel Gabriel, either descending or entering - showing, since the globe is created, his frequency as much on Earth as in Heaven- describes Paradise. Next the Chorus, showing the reason of his coming to keep his watch, after Lucifer's rebellion, by the command of God - and withal expressing his desire to see and know more concerning this excellent and new creature, Man. The Angel Gabriel, as by his name signifying a Prince of Power, passes by the station of the Chorus, and, desired by them, relates what he knew of Man, as the creation of Eve, with their love and marriage. After this, Lucifer appears, after his overthrow; bemoans himself; seeks revenge upon Man. The Chorus prepares resistance at his first approach. At last, after discourse of enmity on either side, he departs; whereat the Chorus sing of the battle and victory in Heaven against him and his accomplices, as before, after the first Act, was sung a hymn of the Creation. Here again may appear Lucifer, relating and consulting on what he had done to the destruction of Man. Man next and Eve, having been by this time seduced by the Serpent, appear confusedly, covered with leaves. Conscience, in a shape, accuses him; Justice cites him to the place whither Jehovah called for him. In the meantime the Chorus entertains the stage and is informed by some Angel of the manner of the Fall. Here the Chorus bewails Adam's fall. Adam and Eve return and accuse one another; but especially Adam lays the blame to his wife -is stubborn in his offence. Justice appears, reasons with him, convinces him. The Chorus admonishes Adam, and bids him beware Lucifer's example of impenitence. - The Angel is sent to banish them out of Paradise; but, before, causes to pass before his eyes, in shapes, a masque of all the evils of this life and world. He is humbled, relents, despairs. At last appears Mercy, comforts him, promises him the Messiah; then calls in Faith, Hope, Charity; instructs him. He repents, gives God the glory, submits to his penalty. The Chorus briefly concludes. Compare this with the former Draft."

As will appear below, not only the idea of the dramatic form, but the specific handling here indicated, were beyond reasonable doubt suggested to Milton in Italy, where several dramas treating of the fall

of Man, notably the Adamo of Andreini, can hardly have failed to fall under his notice. Though temporarily fascinated by these showy productions, he could not abandon the epic form without long debate. The following passage from the Reason of Church Government, published in 1641, while this course of reading and pondering was still in progress, is interesting, aside from the nobility of its diction, as showing his hesitation:

"Time serves not now. . . to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuit of her musings, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attemptingwhether that Epic form whereof the two poems of Homer and those other two of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model; . . . or whether those Dramatic constitutions wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a nation.”

He balances, too, the idea of a national historical Epic over against that of a drama or pastoral play drawn from Holy Writ:

...

"As Tasso gave to the prince of Italy his choice whether he would command him to write of Godfrey's expedition against the infidels . . . or Charlemagne against the Lombards, if to the instinct of nature and the emboldening of art aught may be trusted... it haply would be no rashness, from an equal diligence and inclination, [for me] to present the like offer in our ancient stories. . . . The Scripture also affords us a divine Pastoral Drama in the song of Solomon . . . and the Apocalypse of St. John is the majestic image of a high and stately Tragedy, shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and barping symphonies."

Whatever should be the subject and form selected, the selection was to be made from the point of view of the moral teacher. Milton is already determined to be the assertor of Eternal providence:—

"Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave ... with a solemn and treatable smoothness to paint out and describe; teaching over the whole book of sanctity and virtue, through all the instances of example, with such delight... that, whereas the paths of honesty and good life appear now rugged and difficult, though they be indeed easy and pleasant, they would then appear to all men both easy and pleasant, though they were rugged and difficult indeed."

There is plainly apparent here the temper which would ultimately have decided Milton against a purely romantic theme, and in favor of that one among those drawn from the Bible, which was most instinct with ethical and religious doctrine, even if national circumstances had not thrown him more and more inevitably upon the subject of Satan's rebellion and revenge. Just when his decision was finally made, either as to subject or form, it is impossible to say. We do know, on the authority of Edward Phillips, that as early as 1642 Milton made a tentative beginning upon a drama such as had been indicated in his notes. Several verses which now form part of Satan's speech as he stands for the first time on earth and beholds the splendor of the sun in Heaven (Book IV, 32-37) formed the opening lines of this incipient drama. The suppression of stage plays and closing of the theatres by Parliament in 1642, and the great distrust of the drama felt by all Puritans, may have been instrumental in diverting Milton's intention. The next positive information concerning the growth of Paradise Lost is Phillips's statement that his uncle began the composition of it in its present form "about two years before the king came in," i. e., about 1658, while he was still Cromwell's secretary. Its further progress, until it was shown to young Ellwood at Chalfont in 1665, has been traced, conjecturally, in the introductory biography.

Two editions of Paradise Lost appeared

in Milton's lifetime. In the first edition, 1667, the poem appears in ten books; in the second, 1674, this number is increased to twelve by a division of the seventh and tenth books into two each. A third edition appeared in 1678.

II

It has been shown that the subject of Paradise Lost took tolerably definite shape in Milton's mind as early as 1641-2. During the twenty odd years between this date and the completion of the poem, the theme lay in the background of his consciousness, accreting to itself a rich alluvium, slowly deposited from reading and reflection. A portion of the patience with which he bore the delay of his project was undoubtedly due to the necessity he felt for a long preparation. His poem was not one, he says in the Reason of Church Government, “to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapors of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit which can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out His Seraphim with the hallowed fire of His altars, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases. To this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly arts and affairs." The underscored words are significant. During those years of preparation Milton travelled through an immense cycle of reading, constantly selecting and assimilating. The question of the " origins" of Paradise Lost is therefore a very complicated one, leading in a hundred unexpected directions, traversing indeed, in one form or another, nearly the whole area of European literature. Of the thirty or forty works which have been cited by commentators, many, such as the Divine Weeks and Works of

Du Bartas, the Adamus Exul of Grotius, the Scena Tragica d' Adamo ed Eva of Lancetta, the Bellum Angelicum of Taubmann, and the Sospetto d' Herode of Crashaw, we may put aside as exhibiting vague, slight, or merely verbal resemblances. A few books, however, remain, which are so closely connected with Milton's work that some consideration of them is imperative. They are taken up here in the order in which Milton probably encountered them.

1. In 1627, while Milton was still at Cambridge, there was published a long poem in Latin entitled Locuste, and an English version of the same under the title of The Apollyonists. The author was Phineas Fletcher, a Cambridge man, better known as the author of The Purple Island. He was already a poet of considerable fame, especially in academic quarters, and his book could hardly have escaped falling into Milton's hands at once; nor can it have failed to make a strong impression, both because of its vigor and of its timely subject. It deals with the origin and culmination of the Gunpowder Plot, tracing the conspiracy to the newly-founded order of Jesuits, who are represented as urged on by infernal powers. The opening cantos narrate the gathering of the fallen angels in council, and their deliberations. The description of the gathering, and the arguments put forth by the various chiefs in the course of debate, the final selection of Apollyon to be sent forth on the errand of guile, and the breaking up of the Satanic parliament, all bear remarkable resemblance to well-known passages in the opening books of Paradise Lost. The earlier picture placed beside the later is like some odd laborious German woodcut beside an altar-piece of Tintoretto; but the curious similarity of the main traits in each compels the belief that the impression made by Fletcher's poem upon Milton's mind at its most sensitive period emerged as a determining force in his imagination thirty

years later, when he began to write his epic. The belief is strengthened by a similar correspondence between Paradise Regained and the Christ's Victory of Phineas Fletcher's brother Giles. The relations traceable between Paradise Lost and the Sospetto d' Herode of another Cambridge poet, Richard Crashaw, are, compared with those just mentioned, insignificant.

2. Voltaire, while residing in England in 1727, stated positively, though without giving his authority, that Milton had seen at Florence a comedy called Adamo, by one Andreini, and that "piercing through the absurdity of that performance to the hidden majesty of the subject,” he had taken "from that ridiculous trifle the first hint of the noblest work which human imagination has ever attempted, and which he executed twenty years after." Voltaire could not have read the play in question, for it is neither a comedy nor a ridiculous trifle, but a sacred drama of no little dignity, in spite of some minor lapses in taste. It goes over the whole ground covered by Paradise Lost except the fall of the Angels and the creation of the world, which events have already taken place when the action opens. Two circumstances lend weight to the theory of Milton's indebtedness to Andreini: the first is that after his return from Italy, when Andreini's play would have been still fresh in his mind, he proposed to treat the subject of Adam's fall in dramatic form, though he had thought only of the epic form for the Arthurian legends; the second is that in the early drafts of the proposed drama various allegorical personages appear, corresponding in some cases precisely to those profusely employed by Andreini, and so long before abandoned by serious dramatists in England that their presence in Milton's sketch points forcibly to an outside influence.

3. The indebtedness of Milton to the Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel was in 1885 investigated by Mr. George Edmundson, whose conclusions are somewhat start

ling. He points out the close acquaintance with the public affairs and even with some of the private gossip of the Low Countries, exhibited in Milton's pamphlets against Morus. He proves also that Milton was taught the Dutch language by Roger Williams, during the visit of the latter to England in 1651-54. He then attempts to show by copious excerpts "not only that the language and imagery of the Lucifer" (the only work of Vondel referred to by previous critics) "exercised a powerful and abiding influence on the mind of Milton, and have left indelible traces upon the pages of Paradise Lost, but that other writings of Vondel have affected in no less degree all the great poems of Milton's later life." These other writings are John the Baptist, published in 1661, believed by Mr. Edmundson to have influenced both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained; Adam in Banishment, published in 1664, and offering "remarkable coincidences with the ninth and tenth books, which were probably written after its appearance;" Reflections on God and Religion, a didactico-religious poem, published in 1661, passages from which are "almost reproduced in portions of the eighth book of Paradise Lost ;" and Samson, a drama published in 1660, which "exhibits all the features" of Samson Agonistes "which have been regarded as most peculiar." A good deal must be deducted from all this on the score of pioneer enthusiasm, but after all deductions are made, the bulk of evidence remains considerable.

Professor Masson discredits all investigation into the origins of Milton's poetry as futile, and "for the most part laborious nonsense." Surely, however, some good has been achieved in the process. In the first place we have arrived thereby at a far truer understanding of the texture of Milton's mind and of its workings than would otherwise have been possible. It was perhaps the most extraordinarily assimilative mind in the history of poetry. In its ear

liest as well as its latest phases, it shows the same sensitiveness to literary impression. Its richness is made up of a hundred borrowed dyes. As Shakespeare's mind held, as in a magic mirror, all the faces and forms of the world of men, Milton's held those of the world of books. The cases noted above are the chief ones in which an influence upon the large outlines of his work can be traced, but on every page, almost in every line, there is an echo of some earlier singer. In one sense Milton is the least original of poets. Over against his haughty independence as a man, we find in him as a poet a supple yielding to the fascination of voice or gesture in those to whom he listened. This is doubtless the case with all poets in youth; Milton is unique in having preserved to old age this instinct of eager assimilation.

But if we left the case here, we should leave unstated the essential element of his power, a mysterious element, which it is possible only to suggest by saying that with him the assimilation is complete. The borrowed particle is transmuted not only into a different thing, but always into a Miltonic thing; and after such transmutation, it takes its place in the whole poetic structure, not as something added but as something organic. So that Paradise Lost, in spite of its immense freight of erudition, has a clean-limbed athletic movement very different-to go to the drama for a comparison - from that of the Sejanus of Ben Jonson, in whose work a similar vastness of learning is scarcely assimilated at all.

A second worthy outcome of investigation into the sources of Paradise Lost has been to reveal the fact that the subject had for a long time lain upon the imaginations of poets throughout Europe with a kind of obsession. In the first half of the seventeenth century at least a score of serious efforts were made, in Italy, Spain, France, the Low Countries, and even in Germany, to grapple in verse with the problem of the origin of evil as set forth in