The whole passage is too long for quotation. Indeed, as we have already had occasion to notice, it is one of the difficulties of discussing Milton that quotation is almost always compelled to do him an injury by giving less than the whole of any one of those long-sustained flights of music in which he rises and falls, turns to the left hand or the right, as his imagination leads him, but always on unflagging wings of undoubted and easy security. But enough has been quoted here to illustrate the poet's direct challenge of Homer and Virgil in this matter of subject. He was perfectly well aware that he was making an entirely new departure, not only from the subject of the ancients but also, as is shown by his detailed condemnation of "tilting furniture, emblazoned shields" and the rest, from those of such poets as Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. He did it deliberately, with open eyes. And there is no doubt that he was at least partly right. To this day he and Dante, in their different ways, enjoy a common advantage {154} over Homer, and still more over a poet mainly of fancy like Tasso, in the fact that their subject, that of the meaning and destiny of human life, is one in itself of profound and absorbing interest to all thinking men and women. Even if their treatment of it be in some parts and for some people unsatisfying or irritating they at least have started with that advantage. A dangerous advantage because, as we have seen in Milton's case and might also see in Dante's, tempting them to go outside the pure business of their art; but still in itself an advantage. Milton was probably also right in feeling that the fighting element in the old poets had been greatly overdone. The most interesting parts of the _Iliad_ for us to-day are not battles, but such things as the parting of Hector and Andromache and the scene between Priam and Achilles. Where the fighting still moves us, as in the case of Hector and Achilles, or Virgil's Turrus and Pallas, it is mainly for the sake of an accompanying human and moral interest altogether above its own. The miscellaneous details of weapons and wounds which evidently once gave so much pleasure are now equally tedious to us whether it is Homer or Malory or Morris who narrates them. They can no longer give interest; they can only receive it {155} from such intrinsic interest as may belong to the combatants.