his fall, any of his purely angelic or intellectual gifts. He forfeited, it is true, the Beatific Vision, i.e., the beatific view of the immediate Presence of the Deity. He was a rebel, and all that term implies morally and spiritually. But he was still a colossal being, with a transcendent intellect, an indomitable will, full of gigantic schemes, and possessed of untiring energy. He was the same Archangel as of old, but the foe, and no longer the beloved one, of Heaven: His form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared The delineation of the change in character from the Archangel of Cadmon, and the Lucifer of Milton, to the Angel of Presumption and the Satan, is one of the most telling features in the Anglo-Saxon poem, as it is in Paradise Lost. In each case, Satan, at the very outset of his demon career, formulates the leading postulate of his future life; and by so doing, has the bad distinction of devising the dark, though gigantic scheme of becoming a Devil. Cadmon's Angel of Presumption tells his followers: Naught now remains But to devise a scheme by which to thwart The Victor's known intent and deftly strive To share our bitter torment and become Our vassal slaves. Here then lies Our only hope of adequate revenge ;— Similarly, in Paradise Lost, from the first dialogue that takes place between Satan and Beëlzebub, on their awakening from stupor, it is evident that thus early in his new career, Satan had decided what his exact function was to be for the future, and how he proposed to accomplish his idea : "Of this be sure— To do aught good never will be our task, As being the contrary to His high will And subsequently, in the Garden, after he has recovered from his momentary spasm of feeling stupidly good," the devil in him reasserts itself, and he exclaims: "So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear, In neither Cadmon nor Milton, does it appear that the bare fact of the Archangel being ruined, necessitated his being a Devil. On the contrary, during the debate in Pandemonium, the leading Spirits, such as Beëlzebub, could see in the future nothing but the prospect of continued suffering; while others, like Mammon, suggest various means by which to retrieve their fallen condition. The idea of forgetting suffering in revengeful action was Satan's. Having thus marked out for himself his future course of life as a Devil, he at once began to fall to his own ideal of badness. To reach it at once was impossible. There was too much of the nobility of the Archangel still clinging to him to allow of this. It took six thousand years for Satan to develop into a Mephistopheles. The Archangel, newly ruined and but just starting out on his self-chosen career, had not as yet reached the insensibility of the hardened criminal. He could still feel remorse; he had a sympathetic knowledge of good; he adopts evil as his profession, but he has sublime moral conceptions; he is often "inly racked," or racked with deep despair; he has compunctions of conscience; and, at times, seems to be on the verge even of contrition. He is no longer an Archangel, but he is not as yet a Devil. But the first step in his endless descent had been taken. The unendurableness of the Beatific Vision, which is the unfailing precursor of apostasy, had been reached. "Is this the region, this the soil, the clime," Said then the lost Archangel, "this the seat That we must change for Heaven ?—this mournful gloom For that celestial light? Be it so, since He Who now is sovran can dispose and bid What shall be right: farthest from Him is best." Apart from this, he had not reached any of the further depths of devildom. Cadmon tells us that, deep remorse and envious thought the Angelic host Who fell not from their love, still held far off The empyreal battlements of Heaven. This, then perceived the traitorous fiends in Hell, This idea of remorse, so foreign to the currently accepted notion of devil-life, is only one of the delicate artistic touches that we find in both Cadmon and Milton, in their delineation of the early history of the Satan. We find the same idea in Paradise Lost. Satan shows, Signs of remorse and passion, to behold The fellows of his crime, the followers rather This is not the devil-mood. It is the Archangel on the first step of his fearful descent; not yet a Devil, but bound erelong to become one. So, shortly after, when the ruined Archangel attempts to address his followers for the first time since their expulsion from the Empyrean, Cædmon's simple line, Then Satan sorrowing spake : is beautifully expanded in the epic, when Satan throws around, his baleful eyes, That witnessed huge affliction and dismay, Thrice he assayed, and thrice, in spite of scorn, |