e to choose only Christians for his characters. But that
poem, too, broke off in the middle.

In France the question had been as zealously discussed, and had been
illustrated by experiments no less elaborate. In 1657, a year after the
appearance of Cowley's _Davideis_, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin brought out
his sacred poem of _Clovis_, with a great flourish of trumpets, and a
long prose demonstration that its theme was the grandest a French poet
could choose. The real supernatural of the Christian religion, so he
argued, is a subject much nobler for poetry than the pagan mythology, as
the sunlight is brighter than the shadow. The controversy dragged on till
1673, when Boileau, in the third book of his _Poetic_, settled the
question for the nonce, and fixed the opinion of the succeeding
generation of critics. He casts an equal ridicule upon _Clovis_ and upon
the theory which it was designed to illustrate:--

The arts of fiction give the air of lies
Even to the most unquestioned verities;
And what a pious entertainment, too,
The yells of Satan and his damned crew,
When, proud to assail your Hero's matchless might,
With God himself they wage a doubtful fight.

So the burial of _Clovis_ was hastened by ridicule. Yet every one of the
arguments brought against that poem by Boileau holds equally good against
_Paradise Lost_, which Milton, knowing as little of Boileau as Boileau
knew of him, had published some six years earlier. _Paradise Lost_, it
might almost be said, is superior to _Clovis_ in nothing, except the
style. By the force of his genius and the magic of his style, Milton
succeeded in an attempt thought hopeless by the best critical judges of
his century, and won his way through a ravine that was strewn with the
corpses of his epic predecessors.

His courage and originality are witnessed also by the metre that he chose
for his poem. To us blank verse seems the natural metre for a long
serious poem. Before Milton's day, except in the drama, it had only once
been so employed--in an Elizabethan poem of no mark or likelihood, called
_A Tale of Two Swannes_. While Milton was writing _Paradise Lost_ the
critics of his time were discussing whether the rhymed couplet or some
form of stanza was fitter for narrative poetry, and whether the couplet
or blank verse better suited the needs of drama. As no one, before
Milton, had maintained in argument that blank verse was the best English
measure for narrative poe