It may be pleaded that the epical necessities of the poem imposed finite conceptions, of one sort or another, upon Milton; and that, when once he had begun to define and explain, he was carried further and further along that perilous way without being fully conscious of whither he was tending. Yet his persistent accumulation of harsh and dread traits seems wilful in its nature; he bases his description, no doubt, on hints from Scripture, but he pays no attention to any that do not fall in with his own narrow and gloomy conception. Satan is permitted to rise from the burning lake-- That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself damnation. When he arrives at the foot of the stairway that joins Heaven and the World-- The stairs were then let down, whether to dare The Fiend by easy ascent, or aggravate His sad exclusion from the doors of bliss. Astronomy, it is suggested by "the affable Archangel," has perhaps been made a difficult subject in order to produce the droll fallacies of astronomers: He his fabric of the Heavens Hath left to their disputes--perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide. And this conjecture is borne out by what happened when the builders of the tower of Babel were frustrated, for then-- Great laughter was in Heaven, And looking down to see the hubbub strange And hear the din. Milton, in short, has hardened the heart of the God that hardened Pharaoh's heart, and has narrowed his love and his power. Some kind of internal blindness must have visited him if he did not perceive what must inevitably be the effect of all this on the sympathies and interest of the reader. And the irony of the thing is that his own sympathies were not proof against the trial that he had devised for them. He lavished all his power, all his skill, and, in spite of himself, the greater part of his sympathy, on the splendid figure of Satan. He avoids calling _Paradise Lost_ "an heroic poem"; when it was printed, in 1667, the title-page ran merely--_Paradise Lost, A Poem in Ten Books_. Had he inserted the word "heroic," the question as to who is the hero would have been broached at once. And to that question, if it be fairly faced, only one answer can be given,--the answer that has already been given by Dryden and Goethe, by Lord Chesterfield and Professor Masson. It was not for nothing that Milton stultified the professed moral of his poem, and emptied it of all spiritual content. He was not fully conscious, it seems, of what he was doing; but he builded better than he knew. A profound poetic instinct taught him to preserve epic truth at all costs. And the epic value of _Paradise Lost_ is centred in the character and achievements of Satan.