relations are reversed, and the poet is in the
service of the Devil. He can hardly have foreseen this chance; although
there are not wanting signs in the poem itself that, before it was half
completed, he became uneasily conscious of what was happening, and
attempted, too late, to remedy it. When he chose his subject he doubtless
intended that the centre of interest should be fixed in the Garden of
Eden, and did not perceive how of necessity it must tend to sink lower,
to that realm in the shadow of darkness, innumerably more populous,
inhabited by beings of a nobler origin, of greater (and more human)
passions, with a longer and more distinguished history, and with this
further claim upon the sympathy of the reader, that they are doomed to an
eternity of suffering.

It is worth our while as critics to try to put ourselves in Milton's
place at the time when he had made his choice, that we may realise not
only the attractions but also the difficulties of the theme. An Italian
poet of the early seventeenth century, Giovanni Battista Andreini, from
whose drama, entitled _Adamo_, Milton is alleged to have borrowed some
trifles, has made a very full and satisfactory statement of these
difficulties in the preface to his play. He mentions, for instance, the
unpromising monotony of Adam's life during the time spent in the earthly
paradise, and the difficulty of giving verisimilitude to the conversation
between the woman and the snake. But he waxes most eloquent on the last
and greatest difficulty--"since the composition must remain deprived of
those poetic ornaments so dear to the Muses; deprived of the power to
draw comparisons from implements of art introduced in the course of
years, since in the time of the first man there was no such thing;
deprived also of naming (at least while Adam speaks or discourse is held
with him), for example, bows, arrows, hatchets, urns, knives, swords,
spears, trumpets, drums, trophies, banners, lists, hammers, torches,
bellows, funeral piles, theatres, exchequers, infinite things of a like
nature, introduced by the necessities of sin;... deprived moreover of
introducing points of history, sacred or profane, of relating fictions of
fabulous deities, of rehearsing loves, furies, sports of hunting or
fishing, triumphs, shipwrecks, conflagrations, enchantments, and things
of a like nature, that are in truth the ornament and the soul of poetry."

All these difficulties for Andreini's drama were diff