enemy; proud also of having licked him 'into Almighty smash;' this was sufficient; or if an impertinent moralist sought for something more, doubtless the moral must have lain in the booty. A peach is the moral of a peach, and moral enough; but if a man _will_ have something better--a moral within a moral--why, there is the peach-stone, and its kernel, out of which he may make ratafia, which seems to be the ultimate morality that _can_ be extracted from a peach. Mr. Archdeacon Williams, indeed, of the Edinburgh Academy, has published an _octavo_ opinion upon the case, which asserts that the moral of the Trojan war was (to borrow a phrase from children) _tit for tat_. It was a case of retaliation for crimes against Hellas, committed by Troy in an earlier generation. It may be so; Nemesis knows best. But this moral, if it concerns the total expedition to the Troad, cannot concern the 'Iliad,' which does not take up matters from so early a period, nor go on to the final catastrophe of Ilium. Now, as to the 'Paradise Lost,' it happens that there is--whether there ought to be or not--a pure golden moral, distinctly announced, separately contemplated, and the very weightiest ever uttered by man or realized by fable. It is a moral rather for the drama of a world than for a human poem. And this moral is made the more prominent and memorable by the grandeur of its annunciation. The jewel is not more splendid in itself than in its setting. Excepting the well-known passage on Athenian oratory in the 'Paradise Regained,' there is none even in Milton where the metrical pomp is made so effectually to aid the pomp of the sentiment. Hearken to the way in which a roll of dactyles is made to settle, like the swell of the advancing tide, into the long thunder of billows breaking for leagues against the shore: 'That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal Providence.'-- Hear what a motion, what a tumult, is given by the dactylic close to each of the introductory lines! And how massily is the whole locked up into the peace of heaven, as the aerial arch of a viaduct is locked up into tranquil stability by its key-stone, through the deep spondaic close, 'And justify the ways of God to man.' That is the moral of the Miltonic epos; and as much grander than any other moral _formally_ illustrated by poets, as heaven is higher than earth.