lainly saw the danger of arousing a sense of incongruity and
ludicrous disproportion from the contest between these harmless tame
creatures and the great forces of Satan's empire. So he makes man strong
in innocence, and, unlike the fallen angels, exempt from all physical
pain or wound. He even goes so far as to make Satan afraid of Adam, of
his heroic build and intellectual power. This last, it might be said, is
a fear not explained by anything that we are privileged to hear from the
lips of Adam himself; but perhaps, in the case of our great ancestor, we
shall do well to remember Hamlet's advice to the players, "Follow that
lord, and look you mock him not."

There remains a more important person--Eve. And with Eve, since the
beginning of Milton criticism, there enter all those questions concerning
the comparative worthiness and the relative authority of husband and wife
which critics of Milton so often and so gladly step aside to discuss.
Every one knows the line:--

He for God only, she for God in him.

Almost every one knows the lines:--

Nothing lovelier can be found
In woman than to study household good,
And good works in her husband to promote.

Milton certainly shared the views of Knox concerning the "Monstrous
Regiment of Women." It is unnecessary to meet him on his own ground, or
to attempt a theory that shall explain or control Eve, Cleopatra, Joan of
Arc, Catherine of the Medici, Mary Powell, and others of their sex. Such
theories prove only that man is a generalising and rationalising animal.
The poet brought his fate on himself, for since Eve was the mother of
mankind, he thought fit to make her the embodiment of a doctrine. But he
also (a thing of far deeper interest) coloured his account by the
introduction of personal memories and feelings. Of Eve, at least, he
never writes indifferently. When he came to write _Samson Agonistes_, the
intensity of his feelings concerning Dalila caused him to deviate from
the best Greek tradition and to assign inappropriate matter to the
Chorus. And even in his matter-of-fact _History of Britain_, the name of
Boadicea awakens him to a fit of indignation with the Britons who upheld
her rule. There is full scope in _Paradise Lost_ for similar expressions
of indignation. Adam, after the Fall, speaks of his wife as

Not to be trusted--longing to be seen
Though by the Devil himself.

In the Eleventh Book the daughters of men are described as bred on