Milton's blank verse is the stateliest, most variously tuneful, and most relieved by varieties of pause, most sonorous with the mysterious music of ancient names. All in this is perfect. The verse-paragraphs--the opening paragraph is of thirty lines--could only be arrayed by Milton. We do not often meet what seems to us a bathos, as when Satan, fallen from heaven, "views the dismal situation". After viewing the dismal situation Satan is himself again:-- 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, That glory never shall His wrath or might Extort from me. Milton is not pedantic, but as Homer has his catalogue of ships and heroes, Milton outdoes him with _his_ catalogue of fallen angels, gods of the nations, Moloch, Chemosh, Ashtoreth, Dagon, Osiris, Isis, Horns, "the Ionian gods of Javan's issue," and they who with Saturn old Fled over Adria to the Hesperian fields, And o'er the Celtic roam'd the utmost isles. Milton's knowledge was equal to every demand, and his were the unconquerable will And courage never to submit or yield. But, magnificent as he is, Milton has always his eye on that Achæan "father of the rest," and he copies Homer's bridal-bed of Zeus and Hera under foot the violet, Crocus and hyacinth with rich inlay Broidered the ground. "And beneath them the divine earth sent forth fresh new grass, and dewy lotus, crocus, and hyacinth." But Milton gives twenty lines where Homer gives four. In comparing the two greatest of epic poets--the first, Homer, with the last, Milton,--we observe that each sums up in himself the whole thought and experience, and the poetic expression of a world that lies behind him. Each "takes his own where he finds it," "makes all men's wit his own," as Ben Jonson said, in an invidious sense, of Shakespeare. Homer has his debts to old nameless poets; Milton displays his debts to Homer, and to Greek, Roman, and Celtic poets and historians, to Anglo-Saxons, Dutch, Italians, to all song and all learning, and all that he takes he transfigures, and rounds into a harmonious whole, the immortal Epic. "Paradise Lost" was published in 1667, four years after Milton's third marriage. It is not apparent that he was in any danger from the Government of the Restoration. Charles II avowed to Clarendon, in a scribbled note now in the Bodleian, his constitutional dislike of hanging men. The book did not sell badly for a Puritan poem produced while the revel of the company of Comus was maddest, and, when Milton died, Dryden, the literary dictator, gave due praise to the greatest of literary epics, the loftiest, the most splendidly adorned; and poets of the eighteenth century adored the style which became ridiculous, or dull, in their imitations.