1-13. Commentators on the Poem, indeed, have remarked it as somewhat strange that Milton should have given so general a title as "Paradise Regained" to a poem representing only this particular passage of the Gospel History. For the subject of the Poem is thus announced in the opening lines

"I, who erewhile the happy Garden sung

By one man's disobedience lost, now sing
Recovered Paradise to all mankind,

By one man's firm obedience fully tried

Through all temptation, and the Tempter foiled

In all his wiles, defeated and repulsed,

And Eden raised in the waste Wilderness."

On which passage, and on the Poem generally, a commentator (Thyer), representing a general feeling, makes this remark: "It may seem a little odd that Milton should impute the recovery of Para"dise to this short scene of our Saviour's life upon earth, and not "rather extend it to His Agony, Crucifixion, etc. But the reason, no "doubt, was that Paradise regained by our Saviour's resisting the "temptation of Satan might be a better contrast to Paradise lost by "our first parents too easily yielding to the same seducing Spirit." This remark is perfectly just; but it receives elucidation and point from Ellwood's story of the way in which the poem came into existence.

The young Quaker, by his casual observation, in the cottage at Chalfont-St.-Giles, "Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost; but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?" had stirred something in Milton's mind. He made no answer, but "sate some time in a muse," and then talked of something else. But an idea had flashed upon him, the idea of a sequel to Paradise Lost, to be called Paradise Regained. Had he not, in Paradise Lost itself, assumed, and pointed throughout to, the possibility of such a sequel? Thus, even in the opening lines of the poem, defining its scope:

"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse."

Here he had actually limited beforehand the horizon of the poem on

which he was then engaged. He had limited it by the perception of a new event in the distance, retrieving the catastrophe he was about to sing.1 Might not that new event also be made the theme of a poem? And, if so, would it not be fit, as his young Quaker friend had hinted, that he, who had sung the loss of Eden, should treat also this theme of its recovery?

That idea once in Milton's mind, there is no difficulty in seeing how the story of Paradise Regained, as conceived by him, should have concentrated itself in the single passage of the Gospel History known as the Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness, rather than have diffused itself through the entire range of Christ's ministry and passion. By no such diffusion of the story over the range of Christ's recorded ministry and passion could there, in fact, have been a representation of an actual and completely achieved regaining of Paradise, in the sense of a recovery of all that had been lost, all that had been physically and morally wrecked, in the catastrophe of the previous poem. Mankind and the whole world still lay, in Milton's belief, while he himself lived, and would continue to lie, as he believed, for generations yet to follow, immersed in the full consequences of that catastrophe,-sin everywhere, misery everywhere, disease everywhere, death everywhere: the original Paradise on Earth obliterated as ever, and no recovered Paradise anywhere discernible. What had been accomplished by the events in Judæa, as Milton believed, was but the potential recovery of the Lost Paradise of the First Adam -the certainty of perfect redemption for all the chosen by the merits of the Second Adam, and of the final restitution of all things in the glory of the new Heavens and Earth which He would establish when time should be full. Now, though the representation of this recovery might have taken the form of a narrative of the whole series of the events of Christ's life and ministry on Earth, there was no reason why there should not be concentration of the story on some one portion of that life and ministry, selected as specially significant. Of this liberty Milton availed himself. In his hands, at least, the second poem must correspond with the first,-must presuppose that first, and be the artistic antithesis to it. But what had been the theme of

1 It occurs to me as not impossible that Milton, if he had Paradise Regained by him in manuscript before Paradise Lost was printed, may have touched into the text of Paradise Lost here and there such occult pre-advertisements of its successor as that in the opening lines.

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the first poem? The Temptation of Adam and its results. Seeking for the most exact antithesis to this in the life of that "one greater Man" by whom these results were to be retrieved, of what could the poet think so readily as of the Temptation to which He was subjected with an issue so different? Why not concentrate, poetically or representatively, the whole of Christ's achievement in undoing the effects of the Fall and restoring Paradise on the issue of that Second Temptation which stood out in such contrast with the First? If a single portion of Christ's history were to be taken, it behoved to be this portion, where, more directly than in any other, Christ is brought into contact with the Evil Being who had figured as the hero of the former poem, and had there borne away the victory. The same Satan, the story of whose fortunes from his rebellion in the Empyrean Heaven down to his temptation of Adam, and conquest thereby of Earth and the Universe of Man, forms the thread of events in the former poem, here reappears, in changed guise, after some thousands of years of his diabolic life amid those mundane elements the possession of which he had won for himself and his crew of fellow-demons. He reappears; and, remembering all that we had read of him before, we are called upon to behold him again in action, -to behold him meeting Jesus, the Second Adam, in a deliberate encounter more protracted than that with the first, and feeling himself foiled, and knowing in consequence that the prophesied era of the world's virtual redemption has arrived, and the cessation of his own rule before a stronger force. In order that Satan, who had figured so largely in the first poem, might have his due place in the second, it was necessary to select the Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness as the incident to be dwelt on and developed in the second. Any theological objection that there might be to the seeming imputation thereby of the recovery of Paradise to one short scene in Christ's life, and that but preliminary to his main recorded ministry, might be obviated by representing the scene so that it should be typical of the ministry as a whole. It might be impressed on readers that here, at the very beginning of Christ's ministry, Satan, encountering Him, knew that he had met his match, and that all that followed in the whole ministry, to its close, was virtually certain from the date of this initial act of divine superiority.

Only by firmly remembering that it was as a sequel to Paradise Lost that Paradise Regained grew into shape in Milton's mind will

the second poem be rightly understood. The commentators, indeed, as they have sought the "origin of Paradise Lost," or hints for its origin, in all sorts of previous poems, Italian, Latin, and Dutch, on the same subject (see our Introduction to the Poem), have, though less laboriously, searched for previous poems from which Milton may have taken hints for his Paradise Regained. Todd, in his preliminary observations entitled "Origin of Paradise Regained," refers to the following pieces as possibly in Milton's recollection while he was writing the Poem:-Bale's Brefe Comedy or Enterlude concernynge the Temptacyon of our Lorde and Saver Jesus Christ by Sathan in the Desart (1538); Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victorie and Triumph (1611), a poem in four parts, the second of which, entitled "Christ's Triumph on Earth," describes the Temptation; also La Humanità del Figlivolo di Dio, a poem in ten books, by Theofilo Folengo of Mantua (1533), La Vita et Passione di Christo, a poem by Antonio Cornozano (1518), and one or two other Italian poems cited at random for their titles and not from knowledge. More recently, the Dutch poet Vondel, respecting Milton's possible indebtedness to whom in Paradise Lost there has been so much argument, has been brought forward as having presumably also aided Milton more or less by hints for his Paradise Regained. It is indeed the express speculation of Mr. George Edmundson, the latest champion of Vondel's claims in the Miltonic connexion, that there may be detected in Paradise Regained the spillings-over, if we may so express it, of such borrowed matter from Vondel's Lucifer, his Joannes Boetgezant, etc., as Milton had not been able, with all his dexterity, to use up wholly in his Paradise Lost. Instances are given by Mr. Edmundson in the shape of what he regards as obvious parallelisms in Paradise Regained, as well as in Paradise Lost, with passages in the Dutchman's poems. No need, however, after all that has been said in our Introduction to the larger Epic by way of examination and discussion of Mr. Edmundson's peculiar Vondelian theory (ante, pp. 145-164), to readvert to that theory in Mr. Edmundson's attempted extension of it to the smaller Epic in particular. If what has been said at so much length already in review of Mr. Edmundson's theory of Milton's indebtedness to Vondel in Paradise Lost, and in review also of all the prior forms, back through Todd to Lauder and Voltaire, of the same essential hypothesis of Milton's indebtedness in that poem to this predecessor and that predecessor, and to scores of forgotten nobodies together,

and to everybody in fact but his own self,-if what has been so said already has had any sufficient effect, the reader ought by this time, I fancy, to be heartily sick of the whole of that silly subject. Of Todd's references, as above cited, the only one, I may add, that seems to me worth anything whatever is that to Giles Fletcher's religious poem. Giles Fletcher, who died in 1623, and his brother Phineas Fletcher, who outlived him more than twenty-five years, were among the truest poets in the interval between Spenser and Milton, and the highest in that Spenserian faculty which Milton possessed and admired. He must have known the works of both brothers well, and not least the really fine poem of Giles Fletcher to which Todd refers. But recollection of it can have had no effect on the scheme of his own Paradise Regained. That was determined simply by the poet's own meditations on those passages of the Evangelists which narrate the Temptation in the Wilderness, especially the eleven verses in Matt. iv. and the thirteen in Luke iv.,—with a view to construct therefrom an imagination of the whole scene which, while it should be true to the scriptural text, should fit as a sequel to Paradise Lost. The result was the poem as we now have it,—a poem in which the brief scriptural narrative of the Temptation is expanded into four books, and yet the additions and filling-in are consistent with the texts which have suggested them.

So distinctly is Paradise Regained a sequel to Paradise Lost that acquaintance with Paradise Lost is all but presupposed in the reader ere he begins the shorter poem. Such acquaintance, indeed, is not absolutely necessary; but it conduces to a more exact understanding of the meaning of the total poem, and of not a few individual passages in it. Indeed, even that diagram of Universal Space or Physical Infinitude which was before the poet's mind, as we have seen, throughout Paradise Lost (see Introduction to that Poem), is still present to his mind, though more dimly, in Paradise Regained.

The result of Satan's triumph in Paradise Lost, it is to be remembered, was that he and his crew of Fallen Angels had succeeded in adding the "orbicular World" of Man, i.e. the whole Starry Universe with the Earth at its centre, to that infernal Empire of Hell to which they had been driven down on their expulsion from Heaven or the Empyrean. At the close of the real action of the great epic this is what we find Satan and Sin congratulating themselves upon (Book X. 350-409), that Man's World has now been wrested from the Empire