but to Raphael is committed the
story of the war in Heaven and its amazing sequel,--a story containing
passages so brilliant, and so little necessary to be narrated at length,
that there is some flavour of inconsistency in Milton's apology for his
theme, prefixed to the Ninth Book, where he describes himself as--

Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroic deemed, chief mastery to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabled knights
In battles feigned (the better fortitude
Of patience and heroic martyrdom
Unsung), or to describe races and games
Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields,
Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,
Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights
At joust and tournament; then marshalled feast
Served up in hall with sewers and seneshals:
The skill of artifice and office mean;
Not that which justly gives heroic name
To person or to poem! Me, of these
Nor skilled nor studious, higher argument
Remains, sufficient of itself to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or years, damp my intended wing
Depressed; and much they may if all be mine,
Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear.

To depreciate war as a subject for the heroic Muse was ungrateful in
Milton, who had devoted the whole of his Sixth Book to a description of
the "wild work in Heaven" caused by the great rebellion, and had indulged
his imagination with some most extravagant fantasies; such as the digging
in the soil of Heaven for sulphur and nitre (where the soil of Hell, it
may be remarked, yielded gold to the miner), the invention of artillery,
and the use of mountains as missiles,

Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire.

He had, moreover, attained to the height of the sublime in that terrific
closing scene where the Son, riding forth in single majesty, drives the
rebel host over the crystal bounds of Heaven into the wasteful abyss.
Wars, in short, hold a conspicuous place in the poem,--conflicts and
broils so enormous that--

War seemed a civil game
To this uproar.

Races and athletic sports are among the melancholy diversions of the
dwellers in Hell during their forced leisure. Even tilts and tournaments
are not absent from _Paradise Lost_, but they are introduced by the
second of the devices which enable Milton to extend the scope of his
poem; the free and frequent use, namely, of illustrative and decorative
compa