_Moloch_. Changed as we are, we're yet from homage free; We have, by hell, at least gained liberty: That's worth our fall; thus low though we are driven. Better to rule in hell, than serve in heaven. _Lucifer_. There spoke the better half of Lucifer! _Asmoday_. 'Tis fit in frequent senate we confer, And then determine how to steer our course; To wage new war by fraud, or open force. The doom's now past, submission were in vain. _Mol_. And were it not, such baseness I disdain; I would not stoop, to purchase all above, And should contemn a power, whom prayer could move, As one unworthy to have conquered me. _Beelzebub_. Moloch, in that all are resolved, like thee The means are unproposed; but 'tis not fit Our dark divan in public view should sit; Or what we plot against the Thunderer, The ignoble crowd of vulgar devils hear. _Lucif._ A golden palace let be raised on high; To imitate? No, to outshine the sky! All mines are ours, and gold above the rest: Let this be done; and quick as 'twas exprest. I fancy the reader is now nearly satisfied with Dryden's improvements on Milton. Yet some of his alterations have such peculiar reference to the taste and manners of his age, that I cannot avoid pointing them out. Eve is somewhat of a coquette even in the state of innocence. She exclaims: "from each tree The feathered kind press down to look on me; The beasts, with up-cast eyes, forsake their shade, And gaze, as if I were to be obeyed. Sure, I am somewhat which they wish to be, And cannot,--I myself am proud of me." Upon receiving Adam's addresses, she expresses, rather unreasonably in the circumstances, some apprehensions of his infidelity; and, upon the whole, she is considerably too knowing for the primitive state. The same may be said of Adam, whose knowledge in school divinity, and use of syllogistic argument, Dryden, though he found it in the original, was under no necessity to have retained. The "State of Innocence," as it could not be designed for the stage, seems to have been originally intended as a mere poetical prolusion; for Dryden, who was above affecting such a circumstance, tells us, that it was only made public, because, in consequence of several hundred copies, every one gathering new faults, having been dispersed without his knowledge, it became at length a libel on the author, who was forced to print a correct edition in his own defence. As the incidents and language were ready composed by Milton, we are not surprised when informed, that the composition and revision were completed in a single month. The critics having assailed the poem even before publication, the author has prefixed an "Essay upon Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence;" in which he treats chiefly of the use of metaphors, and of the legitimacy of machinery.