ions that this theme, once hit on, exercised on Milton's mind
may easily be guessed. In the first place, it was a sacred subject: an
opportunity for leading poetry back to its divine allegiance; and, by the
creation of a new species of epic, an escape from a danger which must
have been very present to his mind--the danger of too close an imitation
of the ancients. More specific reasons concurred in recommending it. In
the Garden of Eden he might present to an age which was overrun with a
corrupt religion and governed by a decadent court the picture of a
religion without a church, of life in its primitive simplicity, and of
patriarchal worship without the noisome accretions of later ceremonial.
His attitude to the Laudian movement is eloquently expressed, at this
same time, in the treatise _Of Reformation in England_, where he
describes how the religious teachers of his own and preceding ages "began
to draw down all the divine intercourse betwixt God and the soul, yea,
the very shape of God himself into an exterior and bodily form, urgently
pretending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal
reverence and worship circumscribed; they hallowed it, they fumed it,
they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, not in robes of pure innocency, but
of pure linen, with other deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and
mitres, gold, and gewgaws fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe or the
flamen's vestry: then was the priest set to con his motions and his
postures, his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul by this means of
over-bodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing
apace downward: and finding the ease she had from her visible and
sensuous colleague, the body, in performance of religious duties, her
pinions now broken and flagging, shifted off from herself the labour of
high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and
droiling carcase to plod on in the old road and drudging trade of outward
conformity."

But Adam and Eve, Milton is careful to explain, were not ritualists. They
recite their evening hymn of praise as they stand at the entrance to
their shady lodge:--

This said unanimous, and other rites
Observing none, but adoration pure
Which God likes best, into their inmost bower
Handed they went.

The traits of Milton's Puritanism peep out at unexpected places in the
poem. The happy Garden, Adam is told, will be destroyed after the Flood,
for a reason th