'A CONSIDERABLE part, of this poem, we understand, was written in gaol; and, though the knowledge of such a fact is by no means likely to prejudice us in favor of the author or his work, we can assure our readers that we have come to the examination of _Paradise Lost_ without any personal feelings toward Mr. MILTON, though we believe he is the same person who, after canting about liberty, sold his flattery to a tyrant and usurper; that he is the author of various seditious pamphlets, of which we have never read a line, and of a book on divorce, so infamous as to have been deemed by the bench of bishops worthy of being burned by the common hangman. A poem founded on a fact recorded in Scripture by a person notorious for his hatred to the church was of itself sufficiently curious to justify us in taking an early notice of it; but we found it at once so extravagant and so unreadable, that we should not have troubled the public with any account of its demerits, had not the author, in a most affected preface, announced certain new notions about rhyme, and laid claim to the merit of setting an admirable example to the writers of all future epics. The subject of Mr. M.'s poem would appear from the title to be the Fall of Adam; but what will our readers think when we assure them that almost the whole of the poem is made up of the disputes, adventures, battles, and defeats of devils, who make war upon their Creator; a monstrous fiction, founded upon the apocryphal book of Enoch? There is only one book out of the twelve (the ninth) in which there is any thing about the loss of Paradise. Throughout the whole poem the author seems always glad to quit our first parents to get back to the devil, who is by far the most brilliant and interesting character of his pages, and on whose feats, indeed, he reposes with a delight not unworthy of a Manichee. All the lofty enterprises of this amiable personage are related with a feeling of partiality for their hero, which would be amusing were they not told in a singularly involved, obscure, and affected diction. Mr. MILTON's idiom is generally Hebrew or Greek; but, when he condescends to be familiar, the structure of his sentences is modelled upon the Latin. He never condescends to use a plain term when there is a scientific one, an English word when he can find a foreign one, nor an old word when he can coin a new one. _Dry_ with him is _adust_; _a close vest_ is _a habit succinct_; _starry_ is _stellar_; _flag_ is _gonfalon_; _four_ is _quaternion_; _powerful_ is _pleni-potent_; and _mingled_ is _interfused_. To tell us that war is at hand, he says that it is in _precinct_; and, to tell us something else, he makes GOD address this line to the angels, counting, no