surprised that he did not take the Crucifixion or the
Resurrection. And it is obvious that the first, with the Tree of
Calvary pointing back to the Tree in the Garden, would have afforded a
natural sequence to _Paradise Lost_. Others have wondered that he did
not use the Descent into Hell in which the liberation of Satan's
captives would have followed on the story of how they fell into his
power. And it is obvious that there were great poetic, and especially
Miltonic, possibilities in the theme of the victorious Son of God
entering the very kingdom in which the Satan of _Paradise Lost_ had
exercised such splendid rule, and setting free the saints and prophets
and kings of the Old Testament. But it is possible, as Sir Walter
Raleigh has suggested, that Milton was no longer in the vein for
grandiose themes of external majesty and might such as this story would
have afforded. "His interest was now centred rather in the sayings of
the wise than in the deeds of the mighty." That {199} may be so:
though his _Samson_ which was yet to come is certainly not without its
mighty deeds. But, whatever were his reasons for putting aside such
subjects as the Descent into Hell, it is not difficult to discover
several which he probably found decisive in inducing him to prefer the
Temptation to the Passion. To begin with, he must have been conscious
of the immensely greater difficulty of handling the story of the
Passion in such a way that Christian readers could bear to read it.
Then, even more certainly operative on his mind was the fact that the
Passion is related to us in great detail, the Temptation in a few words
of mysterious import; so that the one leaves almost no freedom of
invention to the poet, while the other scarcely binds him at all. Then
again there is the close parallelism between the temptation in the
Garden and the temptation in the Wilderness; and finally, most
important of all, the fact that the Temptation is the only event in the
life of Christ in which Satan plays a visible and important part. A
poem that was to be a second part of _Paradise Lost_ could not do
without Satan; and in fact he is even more prominent in _Paradise
Regained_, where he is present throughout, than in its predecessor of
which there are several books which scarcely so {200} much as mention
him. This was no doubt decisive.

So Milton chose the Temptation in the Wilderness as his subject, with
Satan once more as one of the two princip