Is all afraid to govern thee near him;
But, he away, 'tis noble;"[338:D]
and in Macbeth the same imagery is repeated—
—————— "near him,
My genius is rebuk'd; as, it is said,
Mark Antony's was by Cæsar's."[338:E]
These lines from Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth, which are founded on a passage in North's Plutarch, where the soothsayer says to Antony, "thy Demon, (that is to say, the good angell and spirit that keepeth thee) is affraied of his," sufficiently prove that the Roman Catholic doctrine of a good and evil angel is immediately drawn from the belief of Pagan antiquity in the agency of good and evil genii, a dogma to which we know their greatest philosophers were addicted, as is apparent from the Demon of Socrates.
Of the general, and as it may be termed, the patriarchal, doctrine of the ministry of angels, no poet has made so admirable an use as Milton, who tells us, in his Paradise Lost, that
"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep,