is divinely commissioned for his discomfiture. It is a
token, not only of Milton's, but of Vondel's, indebtedness, that, with
Ochino as with them, Beelzebub holds the second place in the council,
and even admonishes his leader. "I fear me," he remarks, "lest when
Antichrist shall die, and come down hither to hell, that as he passeth
us in wickedness, so he will be above us in dignity." Prescience worthy
of him who

"In his rising seemed
A pillar of state; deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat, and public care;
And princely counsel in his face yet shone."

Milton's borrowings, nevertheless, nowise impair his greatness. The
obligation is rather theirs, of whose stores he has condescended to
avail himself. He may be compared to his native country, which, fertile
originally in little but enterprise, has made the riches of the earth
her own. He has given her a national epic, inferior to no other, and
unlike most others, founded on no merely local circumstance, but such as
must find access to every nation acquainted with the most
widely-circulated Book in the world. He has further enriched his native
literature with an imperishable monument of majestic diction, an example
potent to counteract that wasting agency of familiar usage by which
language is reduced to vulgarity, as sea-water wears cliffs to shingle.
He has reconciled, as no other poet has ever done, the Hellenic spirit
with the Hebraic, the Bible with the Renaissance. And, finally, as we
began by saying, his poem is the mighty bridge--

"Bound with Gorgonian rigour not to move,"

across which the spirit of ancient poetry has travelled to modern times,
and by which the continuity of great English literature has remained
unbroken.

CHAPTER VIII.

In recording the publication of "Paradise Lost" in 1667, we have passed
over the interval of Milton's life immediately subsequent to the
completion of the poem in 1663. The first incident of any importance is
his migration to Chalfont St. Giles, near Beaconsfield, in
Buckinghamshire, about July, 1665, to escape the plague then devastating
London. Ell wood, whose family lived in the neighbourhood of Chalfont,
had at his request taken for him "a pretty box" in that village; and we
are, says Professor Masson, "to imagine Milton's house in Artillery Walk
shuttered up, and a coach and a large waggon brought to the door, and
the blind man helped in, and the wife and the