| Nine times the space that measures day and night To mortal men. |
Cædmon describes the Deity having cast the evil angel into that “House of perdition, down on that new bed; after, gave him a name that the highest (of the devils which they had now become) should be called Satan thenceforwards.” Milton has preserved the same notice of the origin of the name, thus—
| To whom the Arch-Enemy, And thence in heaven called Satan— |
Satan in Hebrew signifying “the Enemy,” or “the Adversary.”
The harangue of Satan to his legions by the Saxon monk cannot fail to remind us of the first grand scene in the “Paradise Lost,” however these creations of the two poets be distinct. “The swart hell—a land void of light, and full of flame,” is like Milton’s—
| ——yet from these flames No light, but rather darkness visible. |
The locality is not unlike, “There they have at even, immeasurably long, each of all the fiends a renewal of fire, with sulphur charged; but cometh ere dawn the eastern wind frost, bitter-cold, ever fire or dart.” This torment we find in the hell of Milton—
| The bitter change Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce, From beds of raging fire to starve in ice. The parching air Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire.[6] |
The “Inferno” of Dante has also “its eternal darkness for the dwellers in fierce heat and in ice.”[7] It is evident that the Saxon, the Italian, and the Briton had drawn from the same source. The Satan of Cædmon in “the torture-house” is represented as in “the dungeon of perdition.” He lies in chains, his feet bound, his hands manacled, his neck fastened by iron bonds; Satan and his crew the monk has degraded into Saxon convicts. Milton indeed has his
Adamantine chains and penal fire,