the time between
their fall and the creation of the man? Here we see the instinct of the
politician; and we may add that De Foe is thoroughly dissatisfied with
Milton's statements upon this point, though admiring his genius; and
goes so far as to write certain verses intended as a correction of, or
interpolation into, 'Paradise Lost.'

Mr. Ruskin, in comparing Milton's Satan with Dante's, somewhere remarks
that the vagueness of Milton, as compared with the accurate measurements
given by Dante, is so far a proof of less activity of the imaginative
faculty. It is easier to leave the devil's stature uncertain than to say
that he was eighteen feet high. Without disputing the proposition as Mr.
Ruskin puts it, we fancy that he would scarcely take De Foe's poetry as
an improvement in dignity upon Milton's. We may, perhaps, guess at its
merits from this fragment of a speech in prose, addressed to Adam by
Eve: 'What ails the sot?' says the new termagant. 'What are you afraid
of?... Take it, you fool, and eat.... Take it, I say, or I will go and
cut down the tree, and you shall never eat any of it at all; and you
shall still be a fool, and be governed by your wife for ever.' This, and
much more gross buffoonery of the same kind, is apparently intended to
recommend certain sound moral aphorisms to the vulgar; but the cool
arithmetical method by which De Foe investigates the history of the
devil, his anxiety to pick up gossip about him, and the view which he
takes of him as a very acute and unscrupulous politician--though
impartially vindicating him from some of Mr. Milton's aspersions--is
exquisitely characteristic.

If we may measure the imaginative power of great poets by the relative
merits of their conceptions of Satan, we might find a humbler gauge for
inferior capacities in the power of summoning awe-inspiring ghosts. The
difficulty of the feat is extreme. Your ghost, as Bottom would have
said, is a very fearful wild-fowl to bring upon the stage. He must be
handled delicately, or he is spoilt. Scott has a good ghost or two; but
Lord Lytton, almost the only writer who has recently dealt with the
supernatural, draws too freely upon our belief, and creates only
melodramatic spiritual beings, with a strong dash of the vulgarising
element of modern 'spiritualism.' They are scarcely more awful beings
than the terrible creations of the raw-head-and-bloody-bones school of
fiction.

Amongst this school we fear that De Foe must, o