h, and set him without the city"
(Genesis xix. 16).

The gravity and density of the style of _Paradise Lost_ would have been
beyond the power of youth, even of the youth of Milton; but the action of
the poem, with all its vividness and vigour, could perhaps hardly have
been first conceived in mature age. The composition was long deferred, so
that in the decade which witnessed the production of all three great
poems we see a strangely rapid development, or change rather, of manner.
In _Paradise Lost_ Milton at last delivered himself of the work that had
been brooding over him "with mighty wings outspread" during all the years
of his manhood. But his imagination could not easily emancipate itself
from that overmastering presence; and when he took up with a fresh task
he gladly chose a theme closely related to the theme of _Paradise Lost_,
and an opportunity of re-introducing some of the ancient figures. A
kind-hearted, simple-minded, pig-headed young Quaker, called Thomas
Ellwood, takes to himself credit for having suggested a sequel to the
story of the Fall. "Thou hast said much here," he remarked to Milton, "of
_Paradise Lost_; but what hast thou to say of _Paradise Found_?" The
words, as it seemed to Ellwood, sank deep, and did their work. "He made
me no answer, but sate some time in a muse, then brake off that discourse
and fell upon another subject." Perhaps while he sat in a muse Milton was
attempting to sound, with the plummet of conjecture, the abyss of human
folly, "dark, wasteful, wild." So early as in the fourth line of
_Paradise Lost_, and already very fully in the Third Book, he had treated
of _Paradise Found_ as an integral part of his subject. The episode of
the Eleventh and Twelfth Books was wholly concerned with it. It seems not
unlikely, however, that he caught at the suggestion as an excuse for a
new and independent work. One of the commonest kinds of critical
stupidity is the kind that discovers something "unfinished" in a great
work of art, and suggests desirable trimmings and additions. Milton knew
that _Paradise Lost_ was finished, in every sense. But room had not been
found in it for all that now held the chief place in his matured thought.
When he chose the theme of his great work, the actual temptation of man
probably bulked much larger in his design than it does in the completed
poem. His epic creatures, from being the machinery of the poem, usurped a
share of the control. With all Milton's care