"Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount, Westward, much nearer by south-west; behold City or suburban, studious walks and shades. Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long; Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls His whisp'ring stream. Within the walls then view Lyceum there, and painted Stoa next; There shalt Thou hear and learn the secret pow'r Of Harmony, in tones and numbers hit By voice or hand; and various measured verse, And his who gave them breath, but higher sung, Of moral prudence, with delight received Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence Shook th' arsenal, and fulmined over Greece To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne: To sage Philosophy next lend Thine ear, Whom well inspired the oracle pronounced These here revolve, or, as Thou lik'st, at home, Here we are in the full spirit of the Renaissance, with its love of Greek philosophy, poetry, art; and it is noteworthy that this love is now presented as a temptation, and is expressed through Satan's mouth. And what does the Saviour reply? He says: "Think not but that I know these things; or think A third sort doubted all things, though plain sense ; But virtue joined with riches and long life ; In corporal pleasure he, and careless ease; The Stoic last in philosophic pride, By him called virtue; and his virtuous man, Of subtle shifts conviction to evade. Alas! What can they teach and not mislead, Of mortal things. Who therefore seeks in these A sp'rit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek ? Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep versed in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore. Or, if I would delight My private hours As in our native language can I find That solace ? All our Law and story strewed With hymns, our psalms with artful terms inscribed, Our Hebrew songs and harps, in Babylon The vices of their deities, and their own, In fable, hymn, or song, so pers'nating Their gods ridiculous, and themselves past shame. (Such are from God inspired, not such from thee), In their majestic unaffected style, Than all the orat'ry of Greece and Rome. Here is the stern and uncompromising answer of the Puritan to all the seductions of pagan beauty and lore. It is strange indeed to find the great scholar-poet in this mood of recantation his attack upon the classical literature which he had once loved so passionately, and which had done so much to fashion his own art-his denunciation of the Greek philosophy which he had once so justly honoured—his protest in favour of extreme narrowness in intellectual interests: these have a curious and even a pathetic significance. Mr. Stopford Brooke says that in this speech "Milton put only one side of his mind into the mouth of Christ; the other side we have had already in the mouth of Satan." Possibly so. But such a division of the argument is surely a striking evidence of the supremacy of the Puritan in him at the time. The volume in which "Paradise Regained appeared in 1671 contained another production of great importance" Samson Agonistes "' (that is, "Samson the Wrestler"). In this Milton returned to the dramatic form which he had abandoned in favour of the epic in the writing of "Paradise Lost" the work being modelled faithfully upon the lines of Greek tragedy. A prefatory note "Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem called Tragedy "-sets forth his apology for experimenting in a kind of literature which the Puritans had always denounced and which the fearful profligacy of the contemporary stage made them now abhor more intensely than ever. Tragedy, as it was anciently composed,' he urges, "hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems"; and again, after certain quotations in support of his position, "This is mentioned |