doubt, upon their power of divining what is quite unintelligible to mere mortals: 'Meanwhile, inhabit lax, ye powers of heaven!' 'A learned angel, who gives Adam the history of the creation, illustrates his meaning by such terms as _quadrate_, _cycle_, and _epicycle_, _centric_ and _eccentric_, nocturnal and diurnal _rhomb_, etc.; and the same personage is so unacquainted with the language of this earth as to form such nouns and adjectives as _hosting_, _battalions_, _aspect_, _solstitial_, _vacuous_, _opacous_, etc. 'We have a proper sense of the obligation our language has to Mr. MILTON for these splendid additions; our only fear is that it will _sink_ under them. Mr. MILTON was some time at the University, and there, perhaps, became so enamored of the ancients. Had his college residence not been so _abruptly_ terminated, perhaps he might have learned that the language of poetry, in order to be delightful, should be intelligible, and that HOMER and VIRGIL never attempted to engraft foreign words upon the languages which were spoken and understood in the age and country in which their immortal poems were written.' After a querulous consideration of his preface, and an examination of what MILTON calls 'English heroic verse without rhyme,' GIFFORD enters upon the work: The first book opens with a description of hell, of which the flames give 'no light, but darkness visible;' and then follows a dialogue between Satan and Beelzebub, on their fall from heaven, in the course of which Satan thus speaks: 'Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, doing or suffering; but of this be sure, to do aught good will never be our task, but ever to do ill our sole delight, as being the contrary to His high will we resist. If then His Providence out of our evil seek to bring forth good, our labor must be to prevent that end, and out of good still to find means of evil, which ofttimes may succeed, so as, perhaps, shall grieve him.' 'This speech, though printed in the poem as verse, we have reduced to its proper state of prose for the purpose of exemplifying Mr. MILTON's notions of musical delight,' his 'apt numbers,' and 'the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another.' 'We have next a biographical catalogue of devils, imitated from HOMER's catalogue of ships. How much finer the imitation is than the original may be seen from the following specimen: 'Next, Chemos, the obscene dread of Moab's sons, From Aroer to Nebo, and the wild Of southmost Abarim; in Hesebon And Horonaim, Seon's realm, beyond The flowery dale of Sibma, clad with vines, And Eleale to the Asphaltic pool. Peor his other name, when he enticed Israel in Sittim,' etc.