gels, thereafter called Satan, draws
off his forces to the north under pretext of preparing a welcome for the
new Commander, who is to make a progress through his domain, promulgating
more new laws. The purpose of the rebels is discerned by the All-Knowing,
who makes this strange speech to the Son:--

Let us advise, and to this hazard draw
With speed what force is left, and all employ
In our defence, lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill.

It is unnecessary to quote more of the speeches in Heaven; they are
tangles of Scriptural phrase, from which there can be extracted neither
good divinity nor good humanity. "The glory of God," says the Wisdom of
Solomon, "is to conceal a thing; the glory of the King is to find it
out." But the glory of Milton's Deity is to explain a thing. The proud
voluble candour of some of these speeches reminds us only of the author
of _A Defence of the People of England_. In some of them there is even a
flavour of uneasy boastfulness, as of one who is anxious not to be
lessened in the estimation of the rebel adversary.

It may be pleaded that the epical necessities of the poem imposed finite
conceptions, of one sort or another, upon Milton; and that, when once he
had begun to define and explain, he was carried further and further along
that perilous way without being fully conscious of whither he was
tending. Yet his persistent accumulation of harsh and dread traits seems
wilful in its nature; he bases his description, no doubt, on hints from
Scripture, but he pays no attention to any that do not fall in with his
own narrow and gloomy conception. Satan is permitted to rise from the
burning lake--

That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation.

When he arrives at the foot of the stairway that joins Heaven and the
World--

The stairs were then let down, whether to dare
The Fiend by easy ascent, or aggravate
His sad exclusion from the doors of bliss.

Astronomy, it is suggested by "the affable Archangel," has perhaps been
made a difficult subject in order to produce the droll fallacies of
astronomers:

He his fabric of the Heavens
Hath left to their disputes--perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide.

And this conjecture is borne out by what happened when the builders of
the tower of Babel were frustrated, for then--

Great laughter was in Heaven,
And looking down