Here we obviously go outside the dramatic probabilities: it is no longer Belial who is speaking: it is the voice of a highly cultivated and intellectual human being with all Greek thought behind him; it is, in short, Milton himself. The whole poem is full of such autobiographical confessional passages, either indirect like this or open and undisguised like the great introductions to the first, third, seventh and ninth books. This constant intervention of the poet in his epic is one of the originalities of _Paradise Lost_, and certainly not the least successful. The passages which are due to it have been criticized as irregularities or superfluities, but, as Johnson justly asked, "superfluities so beautiful who would take away?" Homer may be said never to allow us to do more than guess obscurely at what he himself was or thought or felt: so leaving room for the follies of the criticism which supposes him to be a kind of limited company of poets. Virgil spoke directly to his readers at least once in the _Aeneid_, in the most magnificent, and {176} most magnificently fulfilled, of all the poetic promises of eternal fame-- "Fortunati ambo! Si quid mea carmina possunt Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet aevo Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum Accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit." But it is less in such a direct intervention as this than in the whole tone and temper of his poem that he reveals to us his delicate and beautiful nature. Milton confesses himself in both ways. His high seriousness, his proud and resolute will, his grave sadness at the folly of mankind, are interwoven in the whole of his story. Then in the speeches he will often, as in this of Belial, forget altogether who is speaking and where and when, forget Satan and Adam, Eden and Hell, and make his human escape to his own time and country and to himself. The extreme limitations of his subject made something of this kind almost necessary. When all had been done that simile and prophecy could do to bring in the life of men and women as Milton's readers knew it there still remained the difficulty that Adam and his angel visitors must talk, and that before the Fall there was almost {177} nothing for them to talk about. So they constantly talk as if they had all history behind them and the world's processes were to them, as to us, old and familiar things. "War seemed a civil game To this uproar," says Raphael, as if he were fresh from reading Livy or Gibbon and had all the wars of Europe and Asia in his memory. Often Milton calls attention, as it were, to his own inconsistencies, putting in an apology like that of Michael when he talks to Adam about Hamath and Hermon-- "Things by their names I call though yet unnamed;"