But it is superfluous to give reasons why Voltaire’s epic should not be a great poem. The Henriade itself is there, the most indisputable of arguments. Of poems whose names are known out of literary histories and academic catalogues, it is perhaps the least worth reading in any language by any one but a professional student of letters. It is less worth reading than Lucan’s Pharsalia, because it is more deliberately artificial and gratuitously unspontaneous. Paradise Regained, which it is too ready a fashion among us to pronounce dull, still contains at least three pieces of superb and unsurpassed description, never fails in grave majestic verse, and is at the worst free from all the dreary apparatus of phantom and impersonation and mystic vision, which have never jarred so profoundly with sense of poetic fitness, as when associated with so political and matter-of-fact a hero as Henry the Fourth. The reader has no illusion in such transactions as Saint Lewis taking Henry into heaven and hell, Sleep hearing from her secret caves, the Winds at sight of him falling into Silence, and Dreams, children of Hope, flying to cover the hero with olive and laurel. How can we overcome our repugnance to that strange admixture of real and unreal matter which presents us with a highly-coloured picture of the Temple of Love, where in the forecourt sits Joy, with Mystery, Desire, Complaisance, on the soft turf by her side, while in the inner sanctuary haunt Jealousy, Suspicion, Malice, Fury; while the next canto describes L’église toujours une et partout étendue, Libre, mais sous un chef, adorant en tout lieu, Dans le bonheur des saints, la grandeur de son Dieu. Le Christ, de nos péches victime renaissante, De ses élus chéris nourriture vivante, Descend sur les autels à ses yeux éperdus, Et lui découvre un Dieu sous un pain qui n’est plus.[129]