er troubled by the obstinate questionings of invisible things which
haunted the imagination of Shakspere. We look in vain for any AEschylean
background of the vast unknown. "Man's disobedience" and the scheme for
man's redemption are laid down as clearly and with just as little
mystery as in a Puritan discourse. On topics such as these, even God the
Father (to borrow Pope's sneer) "turns a school divine." As in his
earlier poems he had ordered and arranged nature, so in the "Paradise
Lost" Milton orders and arranges Heaven and Hell. His mightiest
figures, Angel or Archangel, Satan or Belial, stand out colossal but
distinct. There is just as little of the wide sympathy with all that is
human which is so lovable in Chaucer and Shakspere. On the contrary the
Puritan individuality is nowhere so overpowering as in Milton. He leaves
the stamp of himself deeply graven on all he creates. We hear his voice
in every line of his poem. The cold, severe conception of moral virtue
which reigns throughout it, the intellectual way in which he paints and
regards beauty (for the beauty of Eve is a beauty which no mortal man
may love) are Milton's own. We feel his inmost temper in the stoical
self-repression which gives its dignity to his figures. Adam utters no
cry of agony when he is driven from Paradise. Satan suffers in a defiant
silence. It is to this intense self-concentration that we must attribute
the strange deficiency of humour which the poet shared with the Puritans
generally, and which here and there breaks the sublimity of the poem
with strange slips into the grotesque. But it is above all to this
Puritan deficiency in human sympathy that we must attribute Milton's
wonderful want of dramatic genius. Of the power which creates a thousand
different characters, which endows each with its appropriate act and
word, which loses itself in its own creations, no great poet ever had
less.

[Sidenote: The Naval War.]

While Milton was busy with his verse events were moving fast in favour
of the cause which he saw trodden under foot. Defeat had only spurred
the Dutch to fresh efforts. Their best seaman, De Ruyter, had
reorganized their fleet, and appeared off the North Foreland in May
1666, with eighty-eight vessels, stronger and better armed than those of
Opdam. The English fleet was almost as strong; but a squadron had been
detached under Prince Rupert to meet a French force reported to be at
Belleisle, and it was with but sixty ships