It is impossible to answer such criticism; the organs of human speech are too frail. Let Bentley be left to contemplate with delight the hideous gash that his chopper has inflicted on the Miltonic rhythm of the last line. If Addison, for his part, had been less concerned with the opinions of M. Bossu, and the enumeration of the books of the _AEneid_, he might have found leisure to notice that the two later poems, _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_, are each brought to a close which exactly resembles the close of _Paradise Lost_. After the splendours in the last book of _Paradise Regained_--the fall of Satan, "smitten with amazement," from the pinnacle of the Temple, the elaborate classical comparisons of Antaeus and the Sphinx, and the triumphal chorus of Angels who bear the Son of God aloft with anthems of victory--the poem ends with the same exquisite lull:-- He, unobserved, Home to his mother's house private returned. And _Samson Agonistes_ brings as glorious a triumph to no less peaceful a close:-- And calm of mind, all passion spent. The dying fall is the same in all three, and is the form of ending preferred by the musical and poetic genius of Milton. Passages of a crowded and ostentatious magnificence are more frequent in _Paradise Lost_ than in either of the two later poems. In _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_ the enhanced severity of a style which rejects almost all ornament was due in part, no doubt, to a gradual change in Milton's temper and attitude. It is not so much that his power of imagination waned, as that his interest veered, turning more to thought and reflection, less to action and picture. In these two poems, at the last, he celebrated that better fortitude Of patience and heroic martyrdom which he had professed to sing in _Paradise Lost_. We are told by his nephew that he "could not bear with patience any such thing related to him" as that _Paradise Regained_ was inferior to _Paradise Lost_. He was right; its merits and beauties are of a different and more sombre kind, yet of a kind perhaps further out of the reach of any other poet than even the constellated glories of _Paradise Lost_ itself. It should be remembered that _Paradise Lost_, although it was written by Milton between the fiftieth and the fifty-seventh years of his age, was conceived by him, in its main outlines, not later than his thirty-fourth year. Two of the passages noticed above, where Satan addresses himself to the Sun and where the Angel leads Adam and Eve out of Paradise, embody situations which had appealed to his younger imagination. Some of the very words of Satan's address were written, we learn from Phillips, about 1642. And the expulsion of Adam and Eve seems to contain a reminiscence of the time when Milton was considering the history of Lot as a possible subject for an epic. The lines-- In either hand the hastening Angel caught Our lingering parents--