arrival in the
newly-created universe, would possess great merit did they not
unfortunately remind us of the majestic simplicity of Milton." Oh, heavens
and earth! the veritable Satan's soliloquy on Niphate's top!

"O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the God
Of this new world; at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminish'd heads, to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, _and add thy name_,
O SUN! to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in heaven against heaven's matchless king!"

And so on for nearly a hundred lines, in many a changeful strain,
arch-angelical all, of heaven-remembering passion, while ever, as thus he
spoke,

"Each passion dimm'd his face,
Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy, and despair;
Which marr'd his borrow'd visage, and betray'd
Him counterfeit, if any eye beheld;
For heavenly minds, from such distempers foul
Are ever clear."

The soliloquy of Dryden's Lucifer consists of twenty lines, taken almost
at hap-hazard from that of Milton's, jumbled together without
consideration, and mangled from the most multitudinous blank verse ever
written, into rhymes much beneath the average merit of one who, at times,
could indeed command "the long-majestic march and energy divine."

Adam and Eve fare little better than the angels under his reforming
fingers. Milton, you remember, makes Adam tell Raphael the story of his
birth, in language charmful to affable arch-angel's ear, albeit tuned to
harmonies in heaven. Dryden burlesques that revelation into the following
soliloquy, supposed to have been _the first words spoken by human lips_.
Adam at once opens his mouth in the style of the age of refinement. After
the fall, how degenerate kept growing on our father tongue, till it
reached its acme in the barbarous lingo of Shakspeare! And how suited,
here, the thought to the speech! How natural the natural theology of both!
He anticipates Descartes.

"_Adam._ What am I? or from whence? _For that I am_ (rising)
_I know, because I think_; but whence I come,
Or how this frame of mine began to be,
What other being can disclose to me?
I move, and see, and speak, discourse, and know;
Though now I am, I was not always so.
Then that from which I was, must be before,
Whom, as my s