The prophetess who foretels it is an hungry harpy, as the person who discovers it is young Ascanius.

Heus etiam mensas consumimus, inquit Iulus.

Such an observation, which is beautiful in the mouth of a boy, would have been ridiculous from any other in the company. I am apt to think, that the changing of the Trojan fleet into water-nymphs,' which is the most violent machine in the whole Eneid, and has given offence to several critics, may be accounted for the same way. Virgil himself, before he begins that relation, premises, that what he was going to tell appeared incredible, but that it was justified by tradition. What further confirms me that this change of the fleet was a celebrated circumstance in the history of Æneas, is, that Ovid has given a place to the same metamorphosis in his account of the heathen mythology.

None of the critics I have met with having considered the fable of the Eneid in this light, and taken notice how the tradition on which it was founded, authorizes those parts in it which appear the most exceptionable, I hope the length of this reflection will not make it unacceptable to the curious part of my readers.

The history which was the basis of Milton's poem, is still shorter than either that of the Iliad or Æneid. The poet has likewise taken care to insert every circumstance of it in the body of his fable. The ninth book, which we are here to consider, is raised upon that brief account of scripture, wherein we are told that the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field, that he tempted the woman to eat of the forbidden fruit, that she was overcome by this temptation, and that Adam followed her example. From these few particulars Milton has formed one of the most entertaining fables that invention ever produced. He has disposed of these several circumstances among so many agreeable and

natural fictions of his own, that his whole story looks only like a comment upon sacred writ, or ra ther seems to be a full and complete relation of what the other is only an epitome. I have insisted the longer on this consideration, as I look upon the disposition and contrivance of the fable, to be the prin cipal beauty of the ninth book, which has more story in it, and is fuller of incidents, than any other in the whole poem. Satan's traversing the globe, and still keeping within the shadow of the night, as fearing to be discovered by the angel of the sun, who had before detected him, is one of those beautiful imaginations with which he introduces this his second series of adventures. Having examined the nature of every creature, and found out one which was the most proper for his purpose, he again returns to Paradise; and, to avoid discovery, sinks by night with a river that ran under the garden, and up again through a fountain that issued from

rises tree of life. The poet, who, as we have

it by the

before taken notice, speaks as little as possible in his own person, and, after the example of Homer, fills every part of his work with manners and characters, introduces a soliloquy of this infernal agent, who was thus restless in the destruction of man.

He is

then described as gliding through the garden under the resemblance of a mist, in order to find out that creature in which he designed to tempt our first pa-: rents. This description has something in it very poetical and surprising.

So saying, through each thicket dank or dry,
Like a black mist, low creeping, he held on
His midnight search, where soonest he might find
The serpent: him fast sleeping soon he found
In labyrinth of many a round self-roll'd,

His head the midst, well stor'd with subtle wiles.

The author afterwards gives us a description of the morning, which is wonderfully suitable to a

divine poem, and peculiar to that first season of nature he represents the earth, before it was curst, as a great altar, breathing out its incense from all parts, and sending up a pleasant savour to the nostrils of its Creator; to which he adds a noble idea of Adam and Eve, as offering their morning worship, and filling up the universal concert of praise and adoration.

Now when as sacred light began to dawn

In Eden, on the humid flow'rs, that breathe
Their morning incense, when all things that breathe
From th' earth's great altar send up silent praise
To the Creator, and his nostrils fill

With grateful smell, forth came the human pair,
And join'd their vocal worship to the quire
Of creatures wanting voice.

The dispute which follows between our two first parents is represented with great art: it proceeds from a difference of judgment, not of passion, and is managed with reason, not with heat: it is such a dispute as we may suppose might have happened in Paradise, had man continued happy and innocent. There is great delicacy in the moralities which are interspersed in Adam's discourse, and which the most ordinary reader cannot but take notice of. The force of love which the father of mankind so finely describes in the eighth book, and which is inserted in the foregoing paper, shews itself here in many fine instances; as in those fond regards he casts towards Eve at her parting from him:

Her long with ardent look his eye pursu'd
Delighted, but desiring more her stay:
Oft he to her his charge of quick return
Repeated; she to him as oft engag'd
To be return'd by noon amid the bow'r.

In his impatience and amusement during her ab

sence:

Adam the while

Waiting desirous her return, had wove
Of choicest flow'rs a garland, to adorn
Her tresses, and her rural labors crown,
As reapers oft are wont their harvest queen i
Great joy he promis'd to his thoughts, and new
Solace in her return, so long delay'd.

But particularly in that passionate speech, where, seeing her irrecoverably lost, he resolves to perish with her, rather than to live without her.

-Some cursed fraud

Or enemy hath beguil'd thee, yet unknown,
And me with thee hath ruin'd, for with thee
Certain my resolution is to die.

How can I live without thee, how forego
Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly join'd,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee

Would never from my heart; no, no, I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of my flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.

The beginning of this speech, and the preparation to it, are animated with the same spirit as the conclusion, which I have here quoted.

The several wiles which are put in practice by the tempter, when he found Eve separated from her husband, the many pleasing images of nature which are intermixed in this part of the story, with its gradual and regular progress to the fatal catastrophe, are so very remarkable, that it would be superfluous to point out their respective beauties.

I have avoided mentioning any particular similitudes in my remarks on this great work, because I have given a general account of them in my paper on the first book. There is one, however, in this part of the poem which I shall here quote, as it is not only very beautiful, but the closest of any in the whole poem; I mean that where the serpent is

described as rolling forward in all his pride, animated by the evil spirit, and conducting Eve to her destruction, while Adam was at too great a distance from her to give her his assistance. These several particulars are all of them wrought into the following similitude:

Hope elevates, and joy

Brightens his crest; as when a wand'ring fire
Compact of unctuous vapor, which the night
Condenses, and the cold environs round,
Kindled through agitation to a flame,

(Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends,)
Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
Misleads th' amaz'd night-wand'rer from his way
To bogs and mires, and oft thro' pond or pool,
There swallow'd up and lost, from succour far.

That secret intoxication of pleasure, with all those transient flushings of guilt and joy, which the poet represents in our first parents upon their eating the forbidden fruit, to those flaggings of spirit, damps of sorrow, and mutual accusations, which succeed it, are conceived with a wonderful imagination, and described in very natural sentiments.

When Dido, in the fourth Eneid, yielded to that fatal temptation which ruined her, Virgil. tells us the earth trembled, the heavens were filled with flashes of lightning, and the nymphs howled upon the mountain tops. Milton, in the same poetical spirit, has described all nature as disturbed upon Eve's eating the forbidden fruit.

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour

Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck'd, she eat:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost-

Upon Adam's falling into the same guilt, the whole creation appears a second time in convulsions.