They dare not enter the city: and, as they speculate on what this great
event can be, a Hebrew spectator of the catastrophe comes up and, after
some brief exchange of question and answer exactly in the manner of the
Greek tragedians, tells the whole story at length. The end has come.
Samson is dead, but death is swallowed up in victory: what has happened
is the last and most tremendous {239} triumph of the divinely chosen
hero whose death is more fatal to his country's enemies than even his
life had been. There is nothing left to do but to close the drama, as
most Greek tragedies close, with a brief choral song of submission to
the divine governance of the world:

"All is best, though we oft doubt
What the unsearchable dispose
Of Highest Wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
Oft He seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns,
And to his faithful champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns,
And all that band them to resist
His uncontrollable intent.
His servants He, with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent."

Such is Milton's drama: a thing worth dwelling on as entirely unique in
any modern language. Some good judges have thought it the finest of
his works. That will not be admitted if poetry is to be judged either
by universality of appeal or by extent and variety of range.
_L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ will always have far more readers: and
_Paradise Lost_ embraces an immeasurably {240} greater span of human
life. But, if not the greatest, _Samson_ is probably for its own
audience the most moving of Milton's works. It is not everybody who
has in him the grave emotions to which it appeals: but whoever has will
find them stirred by Samson as few other books in all the literature of
the world can stir them.

It is curious to think of Milton composing such a drama in the midst of
the theatrical revival of the Restoration. Did ever poet set himself
in such opposition to the literary current of his day? Dryden's
unbounded admiration for him is well known: but he understood the
genius of _Paradise Lost_ so little as to make an opera out of it, and
he must have understood even less of Samson. The drama was then so
much the most fashionable form of literature that he may have felt that
in writing _The State of Innocence_ and its preface he