Yet he can use his similes, as we said, to introduce the life of his own day and still generally carry his classical manner with him. So in the following simile he begins with the Homeric wolf and ends with the Roman and Laudian clergy. Satan has leapt over the wall of Paradise: and the simile begins-- "As when a prowling wolf, Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey, Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve In hurdled cotes amid the field secure, Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold: Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cash Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors, Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault, In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles: So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold: So since into his Church lewd hirelings climb." The last line smacks perhaps more of the angry pamphleteer than fits with classical sanity: but how admirably the London citizen's house gives vivid reality to the beautiful remoteness of the wolf which English shepherds had long forgotten to fear; how the recollection, present to every reader's {166} mind, of that very same simile in the Gospel of St. John, prepares the way for its religious application here: how the attention is seized by that magnificent line of arresting mono-syllables, each heavy with the sense of fate-- "So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold!" It used to be said that Milton uses mono-syllables to express slowness of action. But that is notably not the case here. And in the main it seems that he uses them, as Shakspeare often did, for expressing the solemnity of grave crisis, or for deep emotion, when anything fanciful, ornate or verbose would be fatal to the simplicity, akin to silence, which all men find fitting at great moments. So Shakspeare makes Kent say at Lear's death-- "Vex not his ghost; O let him pass! he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer." And so Milton uses these tremendous mono-syllables, like a bell tolling into the silence of midnight, to force our attention on the doom of all the world that took its beginning when Satan entered Paradise-- {167} "So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold." So again, with less solemnity as befitting a less awful person but still with arresting and delaying emphasis, he records the actual eating of the fatal apple-- "she plucked, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe, That all was lost." So he suspends the flow of the richest and most elaborate of his similes by the slow-moving monosyllables of "which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world:" So he strikes the deepest note, beyond all politics, of his debate in hell: "And that must end us; that must be our cure-- To be no more:" So again he closes the first Act of _Paradise Regained_ with a verse of solitary awe--