We, if abruptly called upon in that summary fashion to convey a _commensurate_ idea of Milton, one which might at once correspond to his pretensions, and yet be readily intelligible to the savage, should answer perhaps thus:--Milton is not an author amongst authors, not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers; and the _Paradise Lost_ is not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces. Let us explain. There is this great distinction amongst books; some, though possibly the best in their class, are still no more than books--not indispensable, not incapable of supplementary representation by other books. If they had never been--if their place had continued for ages unfilled--not the less, upon a sufficient excitement arising, there would always have been found the ability, either directly to fill up the vacancy, or at least to meet the same passion virtually, though by a work differing in form. Thus, supposing Butler to have died in youth, and the _Hudibras_ to have been intercepted by his premature death, still the ludicrous aspects of the Parliamentary war, and its fighting saints, were too striking to have perished. If not in a narrative form, the case would have come forward in the drama. Puritanical sanctity, in collision with the ordinary interests of life, and with its militant propensities, offered too striking a field for the Satiric Muse, in any case, to have passed in total neglect. The impulse was too strong for repression--it was a volcanic agency, that, by some opening or, other, must have worked a way for itself to the upper air. Yet Butler was a most original poet, and a creator within his own province. But, like many another original mind, there is little doubt that he quelled and repressed, by his own excellence, other minds of the same cast. Mere despair of excelling him, so far as not, after all, to seem imitators, drove back others who would have pressed into that arena, if not already brilliantly filled. Butler failing, there would have been another Butler, either in the same or in some analogous form. But, with regard to Milton and the Miltonic power, the case is far otherwise. If the man had failed, the power would have failed. In that mode of power which he wielded, the function was exhausted in the man--species was identified with the individual--the poetry was incarnated in the poet.