the dazzling magnificence of Pandemonium; the ineffable welter of Chaos; proudly eminent over all like a tower, the colossal personality of Satan. The description of Paradise and the story of Creation, if making less demand on the poet's creative power, required greater resources of knowledge, and more consummate skill in combination. Nature must yield up her treasures, whatever of fair and stately the animal and vegetable kingdoms can afford must be brought together, blended in gorgeous masses or marshalled in infinite procession. Here Milton is as profuse as he has hitherto been severe, and with good cause; it is possible to make Hell too repulsive for art, it is not possible to make Eden too enchanting. In his descriptions of the former the effect is produced by a perpetual succession of isolated images of awful majesty; in his Paradise and Creation the universal landscape is bathed in a general atmosphere of lustrous splendour. This portion of his work is accordingly less great in detached passages, but is little inferior in general greatness. No less an authority than Tennyson, indeed, expresses a preference for the "bowery loneliness" of Eden over the "Titan angels" of the "deep-domed Empyrean." If this only means that Milton's Eden is finer than his war in heaven, we must concur; but if a wider application be intended, it does seem to us that his Pandemonium exalts him to a greater height above every other poet than his Paradise exalts him above his predecessor, and in some measure, his exemplar, Spenser. To remain at such an elevation was impossible. Milton compares unfavourably with Homer in this; his epic begins at its zenith, and after a while visibly and continually declines. His genius is unimpaired, but his skill transcends his stuff. The fall of man and its consequences could not by any device be made as interesting as the fall of Satan, of which it is itself but a consequence. It was, moreover, absolutely inevitable that Adam's fall, the proper catastrophe of the poem, should occur some time before the conclusion, otherwise there would have been no space for the unfolding of the scheme of Redemption, equally essential from the point of view of orthodoxy and of art. The effect is the same as in the case of Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar," which, having proceeded with matchless vigour up to the flight of the conspirators after Antony's speech, becomes comparatively tame and languid, and cannot be revived even by such a masterpiece as the contention between Brutus and Cassius. It is to be regretted that Milton's extreme devotion to the letter of Scripture has not permitted him to enrich his latter books with any corresponding episode. It is not until the very end that he is again truly himself--