at would have been approved by the image-breakers of the
Commonwealth:--

To teach thee that God attributes to place
No sanctity, if none be thither brought
By men who there frequent, or therein dwell.

The palace of Pandemonium is built by Satan's host in an hour, whence men
may

Learn how their greatest monuments of fame,
And strength, and art, are easily outdone
By spirits reprobate;

--a perfectly sound moral, well illustrating Mr. Swinburne's remark that
Puritanism has nothing to do with Art, and that the great Puritans and
the great artists have never confused them.

Milton must also have been drawn to the theme of _Paradise Lost_ by the
scope it promised for scenes of quiet natural beauty:--

All that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring
And bloom profuse and cedar arches.

His imagination was so susceptible to a touch of beauty that even in the
bare sketch he has left for a drama dealing with the story of Lot and his
escape from Sodom we see how likely he was, here also, to fall into the
error of _Comus_. As Lot entertains the angels at supper, "the Gallantry
of the town passe by in Procession, with musick and song, to the temple
of Venus Urania." The opening Chorus is to relate the course of the city,
"each evening every one with mistresse, or Ganymed, gitterning along the
streets, or solacing on the banks of Jordan, or down the stream." But in
the story of the Garden of Eden the beauty was, for once, on the side of
the morality; innocence and purity might be depicted, not, as in a fallen
world, clad in complete steel, but at ease in their native haunts,
surrounded by all the inexhaustible bounty of an unsubdued and
uncorrupted Nature.

The chief dramatic interest of the poem, however, comes in with the great
outcast angel, stirred up by his passions of envy and revenge to assault
the new-created inhabitants of the Garden. It seems likely that Milton
was drawn to this part of his theme by chains of interest and sympathy
stronger than he confessed or knew. He was an epic poet, striving to
describe great events worthily, but the dramatic situation betrayed him.
He knew only that he could draw a rebel leader, noble in bearing,
superbly outlined, a worthy adversary of the Most High. But it happened
to him, as it has happened to others who have found themselves in a
position where Satan could do them a service; before long, as if by some
mediaeval compact, the