genius whose power and beauty may in sober truth be
called inexhaustible.

{196}

CHAPTER V

_PARADISE REGAINED_ AND _SAMSON AGONISTES_

_Paradise Regained_, like the _Odyssey_, the _Aeneid_ and the second
part of _Faust_, has been an inevitable victim of the human taste for
comparison. It cannot fail to be compared with _Paradise Lost_ and
cannot fail to suffer by it. The poets and critics have indeed been
kinder to it than the public. Johnson said that if it had not been
written by Milton "it would receive universal praise." Wordsworth
thought it "the most perfect in execution of anything written by
Milton." But the great body of readers finds an epic with only two
main actors in it, and hardly anything that can be called a story, too
severe a demand upon its poetic taste. And when unprofessional opinion
remains constant for several generations, as it has in this case, it is
never wise to ignore or defy it. _Paradise Regained_ is a very bare
poem. It has none of the splendours of its predecessor: no {197}
scenes in which we hear the full voice of that Milton

"Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset;"

nor yet any of those others which delighted Tennyson even more, the
scenes of Adam's

"bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches."

It has no love, no sin, no quarrel, no reconciliation, no central
moment of tragic suspense, indeed no human action at all. And Milton
has refrained almost absolutely from adorning it with the similes which
are among the chief glories of _Paradise Lost_. It is, in fact, as
Mark Pattison has said, "probably the most unadorned poem extant in any
language."

At the very beginning of _Paradise Lost_ Milton had cast his eye on to
that second chapter in the Christian history of man without which the
first is a mere picture of despair. His subject was to be man's first
disobedience and its results; death, woe and loss of Eden

"till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat."

{198} Whether he then had any thought of attempting to deal with that
restoration we do not know. Nor do we know what motives induced him to
choose the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness as the action in
which the new order of things was to be manifested. Some critics have
been