It could hardly but he that one or two of the incidents which Milton has supplied, the popular imagination has been unable to homologate. Such an incident is the placing of artillery in the wars in heaven, We reject this suggestion, and find it mars probability. But It would not seam so Improbable to Milton's contemporaries; not only because it was an article of the received poetic tradition (see _Ronsard_ 6, p. 40), but also because fire-arms had not quite ceased to be regarded as a devilish enginery of a new warfare, unfair in the knightly code of honour, a base substitute of mechanism for individual valour. It was gunpowder and not _Don Quixote_ which had destroyed, the age of chivalry, Another of Milton's fictions which has been found too grotesque is the change (_P, L._, x. 508) of the demons into serpents, who hiss their Prince on his return from his embassy. Here it is not, I think, so much the unnatural character of the incident itself, as its gratuitousness which offends. It does not help us to conceive the situation. A suggestion of Chateaubriand may therefore go some way towards reconciling the reader even to this caprice of imagination. It indicates, he says, the degradation of Satan, who, from the superb Intelligence of the early scenes of the poem, is become at its close a hideous reptile. He has not triumphed, but has failed, and is degraded into the old dragon, who haunts among the damned. The braising of his head has already commenced. The bridge, again, which Sin and Death construct (_Paradise Lost_, x. 300), leading from the mouth of hell to the wall of the world, has a chilling effect upon the imagination of a modern reader. It does not assist the conception of the cosmical system which we accept in the earlier books. This clumsy fiction seems more at home in the grotesque and lawless mythology of the Turks, or in the Persian poet Sadi, who is said by Marmontel to have adopted it from the Turk. If Milton's intention were to reproduce Jacob's ladder, he should, like Dante (_Parad_, xxi. 25), have made it the means of communication between heaven and earth.