's noon-tide air."

Yet Milton's consciousness of the situation as it really would be is
such that Beelzebub does not dare to revive Moloch's defeated policy of
war. To talk of fighting to cowed rebels who have just been taught the
too pleasant lesson of the folly of further resistance would have been
useless. So he begins by telling them that the ease promised to them
is a delusion: they may submit, but submission {173} will never win
them peace, or deliver them from their victorious enemy. Peace, then,
they cannot have; and must have war: but it need not be open or
dangerous: craft has its weapons as well as force: "what if we find
Some easier enterprise" than the perilous folly of assaulting heaven?

Such a sketch may just serve to show that the great debate is a living
thing in which we feel the temper of the audience submitting to the
successive orators and in its turn reacting upon them. Another proof
of the actuality of Milton's oratory is the way in which it can be
quoted.

"I give not Heaven for lost;"

"Which, if not victory, is yet revenge:"

"What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome:"

"what peace can we return
But, to our power, hostility and hate?"

"This would surpass
Common revenge, and interrupt his joy
In our confusion:"

{174}

"Advise if this be worth
Attempting, or to sit in darkness here
Hatching vain empires:"

"What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from despair:"

"on whom we send
The weight of all and our last hope relies:"

"This enterprise
None shall partake with me."

All these have been or could well be hurled by contending
Parliamentarians across the table of the House of Commons, often with a
fine irony, the Miltonic magnificence emphasizing the pettiness of the
ordinary political squabbles. But, of course, the theological
questions which are at the root of Milton's debate make many of the
arguments inapplicable to politics: indeed, what is probably the most
remembered passage in all the speeches has nothing to do with social or
political activities but draws its poignant interest from the secret
thoughts that visit the hearts of men when they are most alone--

"And that must end us; that must be our cure,
To be