The contest proceeds, and it is one between Truth and Falsehood, Light and Darkness, Principle and Profligacy, the Powers Supreme, and the Infernal Crew. The germ of one portion of Paradise Lost is here. Those conflicts between mighty opposing Powers, which constitute so much of the sublime interest of that great EPIC, are here typified and foreshadowed. Some poets would have invested this incantation of virgin purity with the “armor of tears,” the resistless eloquence of entreaty, disarming the sturdiest foe. But no such tender, melting scenes seem to have been embraced within the design of the poet. His heroine belongs to a severer order of the chaste sisterhood. There is a sternness in her purity, before which even the Enchanter with his wand is compelled to cower. He plies her with his enchantments, presses her with arguments worthy of the father of lies, with sophistry becoming the most subtle and accomplished deceiver, with flattery that would turn an ordinary brain. To all this she replies with all the energy of indignant virtue: “False traitor,” and charges home the guilt of his incantations, spurning the offer of all his delicacies and luxuries: —None But such as are good men can give good things, And that which is not good, is not delicious To a well-governed and wise appetite. Comus affects to despise the philosophy that is taught from the cynic tub of Diogenes, and ranges over all Nature for proof that men were intended to revel on her bounties, to “live while they live;” in fact to do what those Epicurean philosophers taught, who said, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” Nay, he dares to asperse the purity, and insult the majesty of Beauty itself: Beauty is nature’s coin, must not be hoarded, But must be current; and the good thereof Consists in mutual and partaken bliss—