Such is Milton's drama: a thing worth dwelling on as entirely unique in any modern language. Some good judges have thought it the finest of his works. That will not be admitted if poetry is to be judged either by universality of appeal or by extent and variety of range. _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ will always have far more readers: and _Paradise Lost_ embraces an immeasurably {240} greater span of human life. But, if not the greatest, _Samson_ is probably for its own audience the most moving of Milton's works. It is not everybody who has in him the grave emotions to which it appeals: but whoever has will find them stirred by Samson as few other books in all the literature of the world can stir them. It is curious to think of Milton composing such a drama in the midst of the theatrical revival of the Restoration. Did ever poet set himself in such opposition to the literary current of his day? Dryden's unbounded admiration for him is well known: but he understood the genius of _Paradise Lost_ so little as to make an opera out of it, and he must have understood even less of Samson. The drama was then so much the most fashionable form of literature that he may have felt that in writing _The State of Innocence_ and its preface he was taking the best means of directing public attention to _Paradise Lost_. But he would scarcely have tried to do the same for _Samson_. He had wished, perhaps, as Mr. Verrall has suggested, to write an epic and had failed to do so: hence his profound reverence for the man who had not failed. But he had written many dramas and here he had succeeded: he had pleased both his {241} contemporaries and himself. He would feel no need there to take lessons from Milton. Nor is he to be blamed. He and his fellow dramatists are justly criticized for many things, but there is nothing to complain of in their unlikeness to Milton. They wrote for the stage. He avowedly did not. They wrote in the spirit of the theatre of their day, with the object of providing themselves with a little money and "the town" with a few hours of more or less intellectual amusement. He wrote out of his own mind and soul, not for the entertainment of the idle folk of his own or any other day, but for men who in all times and countries should prove capable of knowing a great work when they saw it. Besides, his contemporary dramatists followed, quite legitimately, the theatrical traditions of England or France: he the very different dramatic system of the Greeks. His drama is what Greek tragedies were, an act of religion. It could take its place quite naturally, as they did, as part of a great national religious festival performed on a holy day. It is like them in the solemn music of its utterance: in its deep sense of the gravity of the issues on which human life hangs. It is like them also in technical points such as the use of a Chorus to give expression to the {242}