"I do acknowledge and confess That I this honour, I this pomp have brought To Dagon, and advanced his praises high Among the heathen round; to God have brought Dishonour, obloquy, and oped the mouths Of idolists and atheists; have brought scandal To Israel, diffidence of God, and doubt In feeble hearts, propense enough before To waver, to fall off, and join with idols; Which is my chief affliction, shame, and sorrow, The anguish of my soul, that suffers not My eye to harbour sleep, or thoughts to rest." Milton might reproach himself for having taken a Philistine wife, but not with having suffered her to shear him. But the same could not be said of the English nation, which had in his view most foully apostatized from its pure creed, and most perfidiously betrayed the high commission it had received from Heaven. "This extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed, to fall back, or rather to creep back, so poorly as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship! To be ourselves the slanderers of our own just and religious deeds! To verify all the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies, who will now think they wisely discerned and justly censured us and all our actions as rash, rebellious, hypocritical, and impious!" These things, which Milton refused to contemplate as possible when he wrote his "Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth," had actually come to pass. The English nation is to him the enslaved and erring Samson--a Samson, however, yet to burst his bonds, and bring down ruin upon Philistia. "Samson Agonistes" is thus a prophetic drama, the English counterpart of the world-drama of "Prometheus Bound."