This Speech is, I think, the finest that is ascribed to Satan in the whole Poem. The Evil Spirit afterwards proceeds to make his Discoveries concerning our first Parents, and to learn after what manner they may be best attacked. His bounding over the Walls of Paradise; his sitting in the Shape of a Cormorant upon the Tree of Life, which stood in the Center of it, and overtopped all the other Trees of the Garden, his alighting among the Herd of Animals, which are so beautifully represented as playing about Adam and Eve, together with his transforming himself into different Shapes, in order to hear their Conversation,
Circumstances that give an agreeable Surprize to the Reader, and are devised with great Art, to connect that Series of Adventures in which the Poet has engaged
this
Artificer of Fraud.
The Thought of
Satan's
Transformation into a Cormorant, and placing himself on the Tree of Life, seems raised upon that Passage in the
Iliad