them in paffive helpleffness, content with calm belief and humble adoration..

Known truths, however, may take a dif ferent appearance, and be conveyed to the mind by a new train of intermediate images. This Milton has undertaken, and performed with pregnancy and vigour of mind peculiar

to himself. Whoever confiders the few radical pofitions which the Scriptures afforded him, will wonder by what energetic operation he expanded them to fuch extent, and ramified them to fo much variety, restrained as he was by religious reverence from licentiousness of fiction.

Here is a full display of the united force of study and genius; of a great accumulation of materials, with judgement to digest, and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature, or from ftory, from an ancient fable, or from modern fcience, whatever could illuftrate or adorn his thoughts. An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind. fermented by ftudy, and exalted by imagination.

It has been therefore faid, without an indecent hyperbole, by one of his encomiafts, that in reading Paradife Loft we read a book of universal knowledge.

But original deficience cannot be fupplied. The want of human intereft is always felt. Paradife Loft is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wifhed it longer than it is. Its perufal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harraffed, and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we defert our master, and feek for companions.

Another inconvenience of Milton's defign is, that it requires the defcription of what cannot be described, the agency of spirits. He saw that immateriality fupplied no images, and that he could not show angels act ing but by inftruments of action; he there fore invested them with form and matter. This, being neceflary, was therefore defenfible; and he fhould have fecured the confiftency of his fyftem, by keeping immateriality VOL. I.

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out of fight, and enticing his reader to drop it from his thoughts. But he has unhappily perplexed his poetry with his philosophy. His infernal and celeftial powers are fometimes pure fpirit, and fometimes animated body. When Satan walks with his lance upon the burning marle, he has a body; when, in his paffage between hell and the new world, he is in danger of finking in the vacuity, and is supported by a gust of rifing vapours, he has a body; when he animates the toad, he feems to be mere fpirit, that can penetrate matter at pleasure; when he ftarts up in his own shape, he has at least a determined form; and when he is brought before Gabriel, he has a spear and a shield, which he had the power of hiding in the toad, though the arms of the contending angels are evidently material.

The vulgar inhabitants of Pandæmonium, being incorporeal spirits, are at large, though without number, in a limited space: yet in the battle, when they were overwhelmed by mountains, their armour hurt them, crushed in upon their fubftance, now grown grofs by finning. This likewife happened to the uncor rupted

rupted angels, who were overthrown the fooner for their arms, for unarmed they might eafily as fpirits have evaded by contraction or remove. Even as fpirits they are hardly fpiritual; for contraction and remove are images of matter; but if they could have escaped without their armour, they might have escaped from it, and left only the empty cover to be battered. Uriel, when he rides on a fun-beam, is material; Satan is material when he is afraid of the prowefs of Adam.

The confufion of spirit and matter, which pervades the whole narration of the war of heaven, fills it with incongruity; and the book, in which it is related, is, I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is increased.

After the operation of immaterial agents, which cannot be explained, may be coufidered that of allegorical perfons, which have no real existence. To exalt caufes into agents, to inveft abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has always been the right of poetry. But fuch airy beings. are, for the most part, fuffered only to do their

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their natural office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale, and Victory hovers over a general, or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do more. To give them any real employment, or afcribe to them any material agency, is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by afcribing effects to non-entity. In the Prometheus of Æfchylus, we fee Violence and Strength, and in the Alceftis of Euripides, we see Death, brought upon the ftage, all as active perfons of the drama; but no precedents can justify abfurdity.

Milton's allegory of Sin and Death is undoubtedly faulty. Sin is indeed the mother of Death, and may be allowed to be the portress of hell; but when they stop the journey of Satan, a journey described as real, and when Death offers him battle, the allegory is broken. That Sin and Death fhould have fhewn the way to hell, might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the pasfage by building a bridge, because the diffi culty of Satan's paffage is defcribed as real and fenfible, and the bridge ought to be only figurative. The hell affigned to the rebel

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