Now we confess that, as to Michael Angelo, we do not pretend to assign the precise key to the practice which he adopted. And to our feelings, after all that might be said in apology, there still remains an impression of incongruity in the visual exhibition and direct juxtaposition of the two orders of supernatural existence so potently repelling each other. But, as regards Milton, the justification is complete; it rests upon the following principle: In all other parts of Christianity, the two orders of superior beings, the Christian heaven and the Pagan pantheon, are felt to be incongruous--not as the pure opposed to the impure, (for, if that were the reason, then the Christian fiends should be incongruous with the angels, which they are not,)--but as the unreal opposed to the real. In all the hands of other poets, we feel that Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, Diana, are not merely impure conceptions, but that they are baseless conceptions, phantoms of air, nonentities; and there is much the same objection, in point of just taste, to the combination of such fabulous beings in the same groups with glorified saints and angels, as there is to the combination, by a painter or a sculptor, of real flesh-and-blood creatures with allegoric abstractions. This is the objection to such combination in all other poets. But this objection does not apply to Milton: it glances past him; and for the following reason: Milton has himself laid an early foundation for his introduction of the Pagan pantheon into Christian groups:--_the false gods of the heathen world were, according to Milton, the fallen angels_. They are not false, therefore, in the sense of being unreal, baseless, and having a merely fantastical existence, like our European fairies, but as having drawn aside mankind from a pure worship. As ruined angels under other names, they are no less real than the faithful and loyal angels of the Christian heavens. And in that one difference of the Miltonic creed, which the poet has brought pointedly and elaborately under his reader's notice by his matchless catalogue of the rebellious angels, and of _their Pagan transformations_ in the very first book of the _Paradise Lost_, is laid beforehand the amplest foundation for his subsequent practice; and at the same time, therefore, the amplest answer to the charge preferred against him by Dr. Johnson, and by so many other critics, who had not sufficiently penetrated the latent theory on which he acted. CHARLEMAGNE. [FOOTNOTE: The History of Charlemagne; with a Sketch, and History of France from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Rise of the Carlovingian Dynasty. By G.P.R. JAMES, Esq. VOL. II.] [1832.]