enjoying was simply the pleasure of reading their own beliefs expressed in magnificent verse. In the same way many {150} religious people imagine that they enjoy early Italian art when they in fact enjoy nothing but its religious sentiment. But neither art nor poetry can live permanently on these extraneous supports. So when less interest came to be felt in Adam and Eve there were fewer readers for _Paradise Lost_. But the readers who were lost were not those that matter. For it is a complete mistake to say, as is sometimes said, that the fact that the story of _Paradise Lost_ was once believed and now is so no longer is fatal to the interest of the poem. That is not so for the right reader: or at least, so far as it is so, it is Milton's fault and not that of his subject. The _Aeneid_ loses no more by our disbelief in the historical reality of Aeneas or Dido than _Othello_ loses by our ignorance whether such a person ever existed. The difficulty, so far as there is one, is not that many readers disbelieve the story of Milton's poem: it is that he himself passionately believed it. If he had been content with offering us his poem as an imaginative creation, if he had not again and again insisted on its historical truth and theological importance, no changes in the views of his readers, no merely intellectual or historical criticism, could have touched him more than they can Virgil. As a poet he is {151} perfectly invulnerable by any such attacks: it is only so far as he deserted poetry for the pseudo-scientific matter-of-fact world of prose that he fails and irritates us. All the poetry of _Paradise Lost_ is as true to-day as when it was first written: it is only the science and logic and philosophy, in a word the prose, which has proved liable to decay. There is always that difference between the works of the imagination and those of the intellect. A hundred theories about the Greek legends of the Centaurs or the Amazons may establish themselves, have a vogue, undergo criticism and finally be exploded as absurdities: that is the common fate of intellectual products after they have done their work. But the Centaurs of the Parthenon and the Amazons of the Mausoleum are immortally independent of all changes of opinion.