did not commend us, we were not handsome! Now you must know
that they could not commend one, if one was not handsome. Beauty the
lover's gift!--Lord, what is a lover, that it can give? ... One no more
owes one's beauty to a lover than one's wit to an echo."

Like most men of an impressionable temperament and a strong will, Milton
was not sympathetic, nor curious to place himself where he might see the
world from a point of view other than his own. Besieged by their
sensations and impressions, concerned above all things with maintaining
their opinions and enforcing their beliefs on others, such men find
enough to do within the citadel of their own personality. To judge from
some passages of his works, one half of the human race was to Milton an
illusion to which the other half was subject. One who is in love with his
own ideas cannot but be disappointed alike with existing institutions and
with the tissue of surprises that is a person. Milton's disappointment,
which had inspired the early Divorce pamphlets, finds renewed expression
in Adam's prophecy of unhappy marriages--a notable parallel to the
similar prophecy in _Venus and Adonis_--

For either
He never shall find out fit mate, but such
As some misfortune brings him, or mistake;
Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain,
Through her perverseness, but shall see her gained
By a far worse; or, if she love, withheld
By parents; or his happiest choice too late
Shall meet, already linked and wedlock-bound
To a fell adversary, his hate or shame.

But, with all this, of our two grand parents Eve is the better drawn and
the more human. Milton did not intend that it should be so, but he could
not help it. One consequence of the doctrine--

He for God only, she for God in him--

is that Adam's single impulse of unselfishness, whereby he elects to
share the offence and punishment of Eve, is a vice in him, a "bad
compliance." Self-abnegation, the duty of Eve, is hardly within the right
of Adam; and Dr. Johnson expressed a half-truth in violently paradoxical
terms when he said that Milton "thought woman made only for obedience and
man only for rebellion." It would be truer, and weaker, to say that
Milton thought woman made for the exercise of private, and man for the
exercise of public, virtues. Hence in their mutual relations Eve carries
off all the honours, for her duty towards Adam coincides with her
inclination, while in his c