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hand at the end of my lord Roscommon's Essay on translated Poetry. I shall refer my reader thither for some of the master-strokes of the sixth book of Paradise Lost, though at the same time there are many others which that noble author has not taken notice of.

Milton, notwithstanding the sublime genius he was master of, has in this book drawn to his assistance all the helps he could meet with among the ancient poets. The sword of Michael, which makes so great a havoc among the bad angels, was given him, we are told, out of the armoury of God:

But the sword

Of Michael from the armoury of God

Was giv'n him, temper'd so that neither keen
Nor solid might resist that edge: it met

The sword of Satan, with steep force to smite
Descending, and in half cut sheer

This passage is a copy of that in Virgil, wherein the poet tells, that the sword of Eneas, which was given him by a deity, broke into pieces the sword of Turnus, which came from a mortal forge. As the moral in this place is divine, so by the way we may observe that the bestowing on a man who is favoured by heaven such an allegorical weapon, is very conformable to the old eastern way of thinking. Not only Homer has made use of it, but we find the Jewish hero, in the book of Maccabees, who had fought the battles of the chosen people with so much glory and success, receiving in his dream a sword from the hand of the prophet Jeremiah. The following passage, wherein Satan is described as wounded by the sword of Michael, is in imitation of Homer:

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The girding sword with discontinuous wound
Pass'd thro' him; but th' ethereal substance clos'd,
Not long divisible; and from the gash

A stream of nectarous humour issuing flow'd
Sanguine, (such as celestial spirits may bleed)
And all his armour stain'd-

Homer tells us in the same manner, that upon Diomedes wounding the gods, there flowed from the wound an ichor, or pure kind of blood, which was not bred from mortal viands; and that, though the pain was exquisitely great, the wound soon closed up and healed in those beings who are vested with immortality.

I question not but Milton, in his description of his furious Moloch flying from the battle, and bellowing with the wound he had received, had his eye on Mars in the Iliad; who, upon his being wounded, is represented as retiring out of the fight, and making an outcry louder than that of a whole army when it begins the charge. Homer adds, that the Greeks and Trojans, who were engaged in a general battle, were terrified on each side with the bellowing of this wounded deity. The reader will easily observe how Milton has kept all the horror of this image without running into the ridicule of it:

-Where the might of Gabriel fought,
And with fierce ensigns pierc'd the deep array
Of Moloch, furious king! who him defy'd,
And at his chariot wheels to drag him bound
Threaten'd; nor from the Holy One of heav'n
Refrain'd his tongue blasphemous: but anon,
Down cloven to the waist, with shatter'd arms
And uncouth pain fled bellowing-

Milton has likewise raised his description in this book with many images taken out of the poetical parts of Scripture. The Messiah's chariot, as I have before taken notice, is formed upon a vision of Ezekiel, who, as Grotius observes, has very much in him of Homer's spirit in the poetical parts of his prophecy.

The following lines, in that glorious commission which is given the Messiah to extirpate the host of rebel angels, is drawn from a sublime passage in the Psalms:

'Go then, thou mightiest, in thy Father's might!
Ascend my chariot, guide the rapid wheels

That shake heav'n's basis; bring forth all my war,
My bow, my thunder, my almighty arms,

Gird on thy sword on thy puissant thigh.'

The reader will easily discover many other strokes of the same nature.

There is no question but Milton had heated his inagination with the sight of the gods in Homer before he entered into this engagement of the angels. Homer there gives us a scene of men, heroes, and gods, mixed together in battle. Mars animates the contending armies, and lifts up his voice in such a manner that it is heard distinctly amidst all the shouts and confusion of the fight. Jupiter at the same time thunders over their heads; while Neptune raises such a tempest that the whole field of battle and all the tops of the mountains shake about them. The poet tells us that Pluto himself, whose habitation was in the very centre of the earth, was so affrighted at the shock that he leaped from his throne. Homer afterwards describes Vulcan as pouring down a storm of fire upon the river Xanthus,

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trivial. Those who look into Homer are surprised to find his battles still rising one above another, and improving in horror to the conclusion of the Iliad. Milton's fight of angels is wrought up with the same beauty. It is ushered in with such signs of wrath as are suitable to Olamipotence incensed. The first engagement is carried on under a cope of fire, occasioned by the flights of innumerable burning darts and arrows which are discharged from either host. The second onset is still more terrible; as it is filled with those artificial thunders, which seem to make the victory doubtful, and produce a kind of consternation even in the good angels. This is followed by the tearing up of mountains and promontories; till in the last place Messiah comes forth in the fullness of majesty and terror. The pomp of his appearance, amidst the roarings of his thunders, the flashes of his lightnings, and the noise of his chariot-wheels, is described with the utmost flights of human imagination.

There is nothing in the first and last day's engagement which does not appear natural, and agreeable enough to the ideas most readers would conceive of a fight between two armies of anods.

The second day's engagement is apt to startle an imagination which has not been ra'd and qualified for such a description by the reading of the ancient pocts, and of Homer in particular. It was certainly a very bold thought in our author, to a cribe the first use of artillery to the rebel angels. But as such a pernicious invention may be well supposed to have proceeded from such authors, so it enters very properly into the thoughts of that being who is all along described as aspiring to the majesty of his Maker. Such engines were the only instruments he could have

made

made use of to imitate those thunders that in all poetry, both sacred and profane, are represented as the arms of the Almighty. The tearing up the hills was not altogether so daring a thought as the former. We are, in some measure, prepared for such an incident by the description of the giants' war which we meet with among the ancient poets. What still made this circumstance the more proper for the poet's use, is the opinion of many learned men, that the fable of the giants' war, which makes so great a noise in antiquity, and gave birth to the sublimest description in Hesiod's works, was an allegory founded upon this very tradition of a fight between the good and bad angels.

It may, perhaps, be worth while to consider with what judgment Milton, in this narration, has avoided every thing that is mean and trivial in the descriptions of the Latin and Greek poets; and at the same time improved every great hint which he met with in their works upon this subject. Homer, in that passage which Longinus has celebrated for its sublineness, and which Virgil and Ovid have copied after him, tells us, that the giant threw Ossa upon Olympus, and Pelion upon Ossa. He adds an epithet to Pelion ("avoσipuaλ0), which very much swells the idea, by bringing up to the reader's imagination all the woods that grew upon it. There is further a greater beauty in his singling out by names these three remarkable mountains so well known to the Greeks. This last is such a beauty as the scene of Milton's war could not possibly furnish him with. Claudian, in his fragment upon the giants' war, has given full scope to that wildness of imagination which was natural to him. He tells us that the giants tore up

whole

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