which decrees that the hero shall not always be faultless, but always
shall be noble. The moment, however, that he begins to wrangle with Eve
about their respective shares of blame, he forfeits his estate of
heroism more irretrievably than his estate of holiness--a fact of which
Milton cannot have been unaware, but he had no liberty to forsake the
Scripture narrative. Satan remains, therefore, the only possible hero,
and it is one of the inevitable blemishes of the poem that he should
disappear almost entirely from the latter books.

These defects, and many more which might be adduced, are abundantly
compensated by the poet's vital relation to the religion of his age. No
poet whose fame is co-extensive with the civilised world, except
Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever been greatly in advance of his times.
Had Milton been so, he might have avoided many faults, but he would not
have been a representative poet; nor could Shelley have classed him with
Homer and Dante, and above Virgil, as "the third epic poet; that is, the
third poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible
relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which
he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in
correspondence with their development." Hence it is that in the
"Adonais," Shelley calls Milton "the third among the sons of light."

A clear conception of the universe as Milton's inner eye beheld it, and
of his religious and philosophical opinions in so far as they appear in
the poem, is indispensable for a correct understanding of "Paradise
Lost." The best service to be rendered to the reader within such limits
as ours is to direct him to Professor Masson's discussion of Milton's
cosmology in his "Life of Milton," and also in his edition of the
Poetical Works. Generally speaking, it may be said that Milton's
conception of the universe is Ptolemaic, that for him sun and moon and
planets revolve around the central earth, rapt by the revolution of the
crystal spheres in which, sphere enveloping sphere, they are
successively located. But the light which had broken in upon him from
the discoveries of Galileo has led him to introduce features not
irreconcilable with the solar centre and ethereal infinity of
Copernicus; so that "the poet would expect the effective permanence of
his work in the imagination of the world, whether Ptolemy or Copernicus
should prevail." So Professor Masson, who finely and