ut public reasons compel him to do what
otherwise he would abhor:--

So spake the Fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds.

But no imputation is cast on the sincerity of the plea, and we are left
to conceive of Satan as of a lover of beauty reluctantly compelled to
shatter it in the pursuit of his high political aims. In the same way,
when he finds Eve alone, on the morning of the temptation, he is disarmed
by her beauty and innocence, and, for a spell, is struck "stupidly good."
Truly, Adam might boast, with Gibbon, that he fell by a noble hand.

It is possible that by the time he had completed the Fourth Book, Milton
became uneasy as to the effect he was producing. Up to that point
magnanimity and courage had been almost the monopoly of Satan. He had
been the Great Dissenter, the undaunted and considerate leader of an
outcast minority. But now, in the description of the war in Heaven, there
came a chance of doing something to right the balance. Milton makes the
most of the episode of Abdiel, who has been led away with the rest of
Satan's followers, upon false pretences, and who, when he discovers the
true purpose of the expedition, makes a lonely stand for the right:--

Among the faithless faithful only he; ...
Nor number nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single.

And Abdiel, when he meets Satan again after the outbreak of the war,
glories in his nonconformity, and hisses out defiance:--

Thou seest
All are not of thy train; there be who faith
Prefer, and piety to God, though then
To thee not visible when I alone
Seemed in thy world erroneous to dissent
From all: my Sect thou seest; now learn too late
How few sometimes may know when thousands err.

In this way Milton attempted to allay his scruples, and to divide the
honours of dissent. Later on, after the Fall, when Satan returns to Hell
with tidings of his exploit, the change of all the devils to serpents,
and of their applause to "a dismal universal hiss" was perhaps devised to
cast a slur upon the success of his mission. Some critics have professed
to discern a certain progressive degradation and shrinkage in Satan as
the poem proceeds. But his original creation lived on in the imagination
and memory of Milton, and was revived, with an added pathos, in _Paradise
Regained_. The most moving of all Satan's speeches is perha