Back to the gates of heaven. The sulphurous hail,
Shot after us in storm, o'erblown, hath laid
The fiery surge, that from the precipice

Of heaven receiv'd us falling: and the thunder,
Wing'd with red lightning and impetuous rage,
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless deep."

There are several other very sublime images on the same subject in the first book, as also in the second:

"What! when we fled amain, pursued and struck
With heaven's afflicting thunder, and besought
The deep to shelter us; this hell then seem'd

A refuge from those wounds

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In short, the poet never mentions anything of this battle, but in such images of greatness and terror as are suitable to the subject. Among several others I cannot forbear quoting that passage, where the Power, who is described as presiding over the chaos, speaks in the second book:

"Thus Satan; and him thus the Anarch old,
With faltering speech and visage incompos'd,
Answer'd I know thee, stranger, who thou art ;
That mighty leading angel, who of late

Made head against heaven's King, tho' overthrown.
I saw and heard; for such a numerous host
Fled not in silence through the frighted deep,
With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout,

Confusion worse confounded; and Heaven-gates
Pour'd out by millions her victorious bands
Pursuing

It required great pregnancy of invention and strength of imagination to fill this battle with such circumstances as should raise and astonish the mind of the reader; and at the same time an exactness of judgment to avoid everything that might appear light or trivial. Those who look into Homer are surprised to find his battles still rising one above another, and improving in horror to the conclusion of the Iliad. Milton's fight of angels is wrought up with the same beauty. It is ushered in with such signs of wrath as are suitable to Omnipotence incensed. The first engagement is carried on under a cope of fire, occasioned by

the flights of innumerable burning darts and arrows which are discharged from either host. The second onset is still more terrible; as it is filled with those artificial thunders, which seem to make the victory doubtful, and produce a kind of consternation even in the good angels. This is followed by the tearing up of mountains and promontories; till in the last place Messiah comes forth in the fulness of majesty and terror. The pomp of his appearance, amidst the roarings of his thunders, the flashes of his lightnings, and the noise of his chariot-wheels, is described with the utmost flights of human imagination.

There is nothing in the first and last day's engagement which does not appear natural, and agreeable enough to the ideas most readers would conceive of a fight between two armies of angels.

The second day's engagement is apt to startle an imagination which has not been raised and qualified for such a description by the reading of the ancient poets, and of Homer in particular. It was certainly a very bold thought in our author, to ascribe the first use of artillery to the rebel angels. But as such a pernicious invention may be well supposed to have proceeded from such authors, so it enters very properly into the thoughts of that being who is all along described as aspiring to the majesty of his Maker. Such engines were the only instruments he could have made use of to imitate those thunders that in all poetry, both sacred and profane, are represented as the arms of the Almighty. The tearing up the hills was not altogether so daring a thought as the former. We are, in some measure, prepared for such an incident by the description of the giants' war which we meet with among the ancient poets. What still made this circumstance the more proper for the poet's use, is the opinion of many learned men, that the fable of the giants' war, which makes so great a noise in antiquity, and gave birth to the sublimest description in Hesiod's works, was an allegory founded upon this very tradition of a fight between the good and bad angels.

It may, perhaps, be worth while to consider with what judgment Milton, in this narration, has avoided everything

that is mean and trivial in the descriptions of the Latin and Greek poets; and at the same time improved every great hint which he met with in their works upon this subject. Homer, in that passage which Longinus has celebrated for its sublimeness, and which Virgil and Ovid have copied after him, tells us, that the giant threw Ossa upon Olympus, and Pelion upon Ossa. He adds an epithet to Pelion (ewoodvλλov), which very much swells the idea, by bringing up to the reader's imagination all the woods. that grew upon it. There is further a greater beauty in his singling out by names these three remarkable mountains so well known to the Greeks. This last is such a beauty as the scene of Milton's war could not possibly furnish him with. Claudian, in his fragment upon the giants' war, has given full scope to that wildness of imagination which was natural to him. He tells us that the giants tore up whole islands by the roots, and threw them at the Gods. He describes one of them in particular taking up Lemnos in his arms and whirling it to the skies, with all Vulcan's shop in the midst of it. Another tears up mount Ida, with the river Enipeus which ran down the sides of it; but the poet, not content to describe him with this mountain upon his shoulders, tells us that the river flowed down his back as he held it up in that posture. It is visible to every judicious reader, that such ideas savour more of the burlesque than of the sublime. They proceed from a wantonness of imagination, and rather divert the mind than astonish it. Milton has taken everything that is sublime in these several passages, and composes out of them the following great image:

"From their foundations loosening to and fro,
They pluck'd the seated hills with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and, by the shaggy tops
Uplifting, bore them in their hands."

We have the full majesty of Homer in this short description, improved by the imagination of Claudian without its puerilities.

I need not point out the description of the fallen angels

seeing the promontories hanging over their heads in such a dreadful manner, with the other numberless beauties in this book, which are so conspicuous that they cannot escape the notice of the most ordinary reader.

There are indeed so many wonderful strokes of poetry in this book, and such a variety of sublime ideas, that it would have been impossible to have given them a place within the bounds of this paper; besides that I find it in a great measure done to my hand at the end of my Lord Roscommon's Essay on translated Poetry. I shall refer my reader thither for some of the master-strokes of the sixth book of Paradise Lost, though at the same time there are many others which that noble author has not taken notice of.

Milton, notwithstanding the sublime genius he was master of, has in this book drawn to his assistance all the helps he could meet with among the ancient poets. The sword of Michael, which makes so great a havoc among the bad angels, was given him, we are told, out of the armoury of God:

This passage is a copy of that in Virgil, wherein the poet tells, that the sword of Æneas, which was given him by a deity, broke into pieces the sword of Turnus, which came from a mortal forge. As the moral in this place is divine, so by the way we may observe that the bestowing on a man who is favoured by heaven such an allegorical weapon, is very conformable to the old eastern way of thinking. Not only Homer has made use of it, but we find the Jewish hero, in the book of Maccabees, who had fought the battles of the chosen people with so much glory and success, receiving in his dream a sword from the hand of the Prophet Jeremiah. The following passage, wherein Satan is described as wounded by the sword of Michael, is in imitation of Homer:

"The griding sword with discontinuous wound

Pass'd thro' him; but the ethereal substance closed,
Not long divisible; and from the gash

A stream of nectarous humour issuing flow'd
Sanguine, (such as celestial spirits may bleed)
And all his armour stain'd

Homer tells us in the same manner, that upon Diomedes wounding the gods, there flowed from the wound an ichor, or pure kind of blood, which was not bred from mortal viands; and that, though the pain was exquisitely great, the wound soon closed up and healed in those beings who are vested with immortality.

I question not but Milton, in his description of his furious Moloch flying from the battle, and bellowing with the wound he had received, had his eye on Mars in the Iliad; who, upon his being wounded, is represented as retiring out of the fight, and making an outcry louder than that of a whole army when it begins the charge. Homer adds, that the Greeks and Trojans, who were engaged in a general battle, were terrified on each side with the bellowing of this wounded deity. The reader will easily observe how Milton has kept all the horror of this image without running into the ridicule of it:

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-Where the might of Gabriel fought,
And with fierce ensigns pierced the deep array
Of Moloch, furious king! who him defied,
And at his chariot-wheels to drag him bound
Threaten'd; nor from the Holy One of heaven
Refrain'd his tongue blasphemous: but anon,
Down cloven to the waist, with shatter'd arms
And uncouth pain fled bellowing-

Milton has likewise raised his description in this book with many images taken out of the poetical parts of Scripture. The Messiah's chariot, as I have before taken notice, is formed upon a vision of Ezekiel, who, as Grotius observes, much in him of Homer's spirit in the poetical parts of his prophecy.

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The following lines, in that glorious commission which is given the Messiah to extirpate the host of rebel angels, is drawn from a sublime passage in the Psalms: