INTRODUCTION. IN Milton's life Paradise Lost may be regarded as the great central point, to which everything else is subordinate. All through his youth and his prime of manhood he was consciously or unconsciously preparing himself to write a great epic poem. Very slowly his great purpose assumed definite shape in his mind. The poems in which he first showed his poetic genius were lyric and dramatic, but early in life he had conceived the idea of rivalling the fame of Homer and Virgil, and becoming the epic representative of his native land and of modern Christendom. At first he meditated a national epic, based upon the legends of prehistoric England. In his youth his mind was attracted by the picturesque pageantry of chivalry and romance. "I betook me," he writes in the Apology for Smectymnus "among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood." The poet's wanderings in the fields of old romance have left their traces distinctly in some of the most gorgeous passages of his epic poetry. At one time they seemed likely to determine his ultimate choice. Milton was inclined to follow the example of Spenser vii D and take the mythical King Arthur as his hero, in which case the 66 Tilting furniture, emblazoned shields, At joust and tournament,' دو instead of being the occasional ornaments of his verse would have been its continual subject matter. However, this project, though seriously entertained for the time, was not of very long continuance. When once the Great Rebellion had broken out under leaders animated by determined hostility against the feudalism of the middle ages, it was not likely that a zealous partisan of Puritanism and Republicanism, such as Milton was, should have devoted his genius to the celebration of the exploits in war or love of fictitious knights. To have done so while the strife was raging, or during the period when the leaders of the republican party were maintaining with difficulty their hard won supremacy, would have appeared frivolous in the extreme, and to have reverted to such a task during the dark days of the Restoration would have been an insult to himself and his fallen party, betokening a callous indifferentism, which was far from being a characteristic of the poet. Indeed, as long as his genius could more directly serve the great cause of political and religious liberty, he seems to have regarded all poetry as a matter of very secondary importance. It was however a great sacrifice to forego the inspirations of his poetical genius, and divert all his literary powers to the uncongenial task of writing despatches and controversial pamphlets on the burning questions of the day, in the composition of which he had to lower himself to the |