hen it is not possible to help
looking coolly on his delineations. Probably in our boyhood we can
recollect a period when any solemn description of celestial events
would have commanded our respect; we should not have dared to read it
intelligently, to canvass its details and see what it meant: it was a
religious book; it sounded reverential, and that would have sufficed.
Something like this was the state of mind of the seventeenth century.
Even Milton probably shared in a vague reverence for religious
language; he hardly felt the moral effect of the pictures he was
drawing. His artistic instinct, too, often hurries him away. His
Satan was to him, as to us, the hero of his poem: having commenced by
making him resist on an occasion which in an earthly kingdom would have
been excusable and proper, he probably a little sympathized with him,
just as his readers do.

The interest of Satan's character is at its height in the first two
books. Coleridge justly compared it to that of Napoleon. There is the
same pride, the same Satanic ability, the same will, the same egotism.
His character seems to grow with his position. He is far finer after
his fall, in misery and suffering, with scarcely any resource except in
himself, than he was originally in heaven; at least, if Raphael's
description of him can be trusted. No portrait which imagination or
history has drawn of a revolutionary anarch is nearly so perfect; there
is all the grandeur of the greatest human mind, and a certain
infinitude in his circumstances which humanity must ever want. Few
Englishmen feel a profound reverence for Napoleon I.; there was no
French alliance in his time; we have most of us some tradition of
antipathy to him. Yet hardly any Englishman can read the account of
the campaign of 1814 without feeling his interest in the Emperor to be
strong, and without perhaps being conscious of a latent wish that he
may succeed. Our opinion is against him, our serious wish is of course
for England; but the imagination has a sympathy of its own, and will
not give place. We read about the great general,--never greater than
in that last emergency,--showing resources of genius that seem almost
infinite, and that assuredly have never been surpassed, yet vanquished,
yielding to the power of circumstances, to the combined force of
adversaries each of whom singly he outmatches in strength, and all of
whom together he surpasses in majesty and in mind. Something of