of literature lay far more in common sense and in a profound insight into human life than in any real turn for poetry. Of that nearly every one who to-day gives much time to reading poetry will probably have as much as he. Such people are sometimes mistakenly content with a single reading of _Paradise Lost_. They remember a few of its glories and the rest of the poem they acquiesce in forgetting. Let them put it to the test to which lovers of music {195} put the Symphonies of Beethoven and lovers of sculpture the remains of the Parthenon and the temple of the Ephesian Artemis. Let them give the little time required to read it through every year, or every second year. They will find more in it the second time than they did the first, and much more the fifth or the tenth time. It will issue triumphantly from the trial: and before they reach middle age they will know by their own personal experience, what the best authorities have always told them, that this is one of those rare works of human genius whose power and beauty may in sober truth be called inexhaustible. {196} CHAPTER V _PARADISE REGAINED_ AND _SAMSON AGONISTES_ _Paradise Regained_, like the _Odyssey_, the _Aeneid_ and the second part of _Faust_, has been an inevitable victim of the human taste for comparison. It cannot fail to be compared with _Paradise Lost_ and cannot fail to suffer by it. The poets and critics have indeed been kinder to it than the public. Johnson said that if it had not been written by Milton "it would receive universal praise." Wordsworth thought it "the most perfect in execution of anything written by Milton." But the great body of readers finds an epic with only two main actors in it, and hardly anything that can be called a story, too severe a demand upon its poetic taste. And when unprofessional opinion remains constant for several generations, as it has in this case, it is never wise to ignore or defy it. _Paradise Regained_ is a very bare poem. It has none of the splendours of its predecessor: no {197} scenes in which we hear the full voice of that Milton "Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean Rings to the roar of an angel onset;" nor yet any of those others which delighted Tennyson even more, the scenes of Adam's "bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches." It has no love, no sin, no quarrel, no reconciliation, no central moment of tragic suspense, indeed no human action at all. And Milton has refrained almost absolutely from adorning it with the similes which are among the chief glories of _Paradise Lost_. It is, in fact, as Mark Pattison has said, "probably the most unadorned poem extant in any language."