But there was no liberty left for Anglicans, Catholics, or Presbyterians in Scotland, who were turned out of their court of General Assembly.
After rejecting many topics which had occurred to him as possible subjects for his life-long purpose to write a great Epic, Milton returned to the inspiration of the Heavenly Muse, and settled (1655-1667) on "Paradise Lost". He did wisely, for a human epic like the others, the "Iliad," the "Odyssey," and all the Greek, Roman, Italian, and French imitations of these, demands a pell-mell of human characters, noble, treacherous, and humorous. In creating human characters Milton had little skill, and, in "Paradise Lost" there are but two, Adam and Eve. In Genesis they are extremely human, but Milton had to make them at first perfect, and place them in a situation where no other human beings ever were. For the rest, he had the magnificent Satan, fallen through a pride and independence of character with which the poet was in sympathy; while Belial and Abdiel are also, each in his own way, heroic. The heavenly angels are less clearly marked and discriminated.
In Athens, Milton would have rivalled Æschylus; with Euripides he does not pair. He has the greatest of stages, the universe, chaos, heaven and hell. His theme is the mystery of human fortunes; man, what he might be, what he is. He uses a non-Biblical poetic legend, the war in heaven, which had been treated, we saw, by an Anglo-Saxon poet, and has a parallel in the mythology of the Kaitish, a savage tribe of Central Australia. There too the great self-created Atnatu of the highest heaven hurls his disobedient children down to earth. It was inevitable that Satan, not Adam, should become the Hero, as Mephistopheles, not Faust, is the hero of Goethe's play—is the interesting character. Milton in his Puritan way describes himself as "Not sedulous by nature to indite wars," hitherto "alone heroic deemed," while modest domestic patience and heroic martyrdom are unsung, or as in the case of Jeanne d'Arc, have proved too lofty a theme for any poet. But Milton being a poet is subject to inevitable poetic limitations. The patience which Eve displayed in everyday domestic life, after her expulsion from Paradise, would not be a theme for the epic; and Milton "never stoops his wing" when he sings of the Raising of the Banner of Satan, and "the banner cry of Hell".
In the true spirit of epics, his poem ends with no clash of arms, no blare of trumpets, but with "a dying fall";
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way;
in such manner, too, ceases the "Iliad,"
Thus held they funeral for knightly Hector.
Milton's blank verse is the stateliest, most variously tuneful, and most relieved by varieties of pause, most sonorous with the mysterious music of ancient names. All in this is perfect. The verse-paragraphs—the opening paragraph is of thirty lines—could only be arrayed by Milton. We do not often meet what seems to us a bathos, as when Satan, fallen from heaven, "views the dismal situation". After viewing the dismal situation Satan is himself again:—
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome,
That glory never shall His wrath or might
Extort from me.
Milton is not pedantic, but as Homer has his catalogue of ships and heroes, Milton outdoes him with his catalogue of fallen angels, gods of the nations, Moloch, Chemosh, Ashtoreth, Dagon, Osiris, Isis, Horns, "the Ionian gods of Javan's issue," and they