To Satan only like both crime and doom. Thus Adam to himself lamented loud 845 850 855 Sat in their sad discourse, and va. rious plaint, Thence gather'd his own doom; and the next morning, while the sun in Aries rose, ver. 329. he met Sin and Death in their way to earth; they discourse together, and it was after Sin and Death were arrived in Paradise, that the Almighty_made that speech from ver. 616, to ver. 641. and after that the angels are ordered to make the changes in nature: so that this, we conceive, must be some other night than that immediately after the fall. 854. why comes not death,— But death comes not at call,] Sophocles Philoctetes, 793. Ω θανατε, θανατι, πως αει καλυμενος Justice divine not hasten to be just? But death comes not at call, justice divine Mends not her slowest pace for pray'rs or cries. O woods, O fountains, hillocs, dales, and bowers, 860 To answer, and resound far other song. 859. her slowest pace] Pede pœna claudo. Hor. Od. iii. ii. 32. The most beautiful passages commonly want the fewest notes and for the beauties of this passage, we are sure, the reader must not only perceive them, but must really feel them, if he has any feeling at all. Nothing in all the ancient tragedies is more moving and pathetic. 860. O woods, O fountains, hillocs, dales, and bowers, Witness if I be silent, morn or even, shade had now gained the dominion over him. The following passage, wherein she is described as renewing her addresses to him, with the whole speech that follows it, have something in them exquisitely moving and pathetic : He added not, and from her turn'd; but Eve &c. Adam's reconcilement to her is worked up in the same spirit of tenderness. Eve afterwards proposes to her husband, in the blindness of her despair, that to prevent their guilt from descending upon posterity they should resolve to live childless; or if that could not be done, they should seek their own deaths by violent methods. As those sentiments naturally engage the reader to regard the mother of mankind with more than ordinary commiseration, they likewise contain a very fine moral. The resolution of dying to end our miseries, does not show such a degree of magnanimity as a resolution to bear them, and submit to the dispensations of Providence. Our author has therefore, with great delicacy, represented Eve as entertaining this thought, and Adam as dis Desolate where she sat, approaching nigh, Out of my sight, thou serpent; that name best Though by the Dev'il himself, him overweening 872. lest that too heav'nly form, pretended To hellish falsehood,snare them.] Pretended to signifies here, as in the Latin tongue, held or placed before: so we have in Virgil's Georg. i. 270. segeti prætendere sepem; and in Æn. vi. 60. prætentaque Syrtibus arva. So Pliny in his Epistles, lib. i. ep. 16. says, nec desidiæ nostræ prætendamus alienam. Pearce. Pretended to, held before. So 865 870 875 680 885 Milton himself explains this phrase, p. 809. Tol. Edit. -but ecclesiastical is ever pretended to political. Thus Quintil. Pref. to 1. i. Vultum et tristitiam et dissentientem a cæteris habitum pessimis moribus prætendebant, speaking of the false philosophers. Richardson. 883. And understood not] The construction is, I was fooled and beguiled by thee, and understood not &c. More to the part sinister, from me drawn, 888. To my just number found.] The just number of ribs in a man is twenty-four, twelve on each side, though sometimes there have been found those who have had thirteen, as Galen says, and very rarely some who have had but eleven, as Tho. Bartholinus, a famous physician, observed, in a lusty strong man whom he dissected in the year 1657, who had but eleven on one side, and a small appearance of a twelfth on the other. Hist. Anatom. et Medic. Centur. 5. c. 1. But some writers have been of opinion, that Adam had thirteen ribs on the left side, and that out of the thirteenth rib God formed Eve: and it is to this opinion that Milton here alludes, and makes Adam say, It was well if this rib was thrown out, as supernumerary to his just number. 888. O why did God, &c.] This thought was originally of Euripides. who makes Hippolytus in like manner expostulate with Jupiter for not creating man without women, See Hippol. 616. Ω Ζευ, τι δε κιβδηλον ανθρωποις κακον, And Jason is made to talk in the same strain in the Medea, 573. χρην γας αλλοθεν ποθήν βροτες Παίδας τεκνεσθαι, θηλυ δ' εκ ειναι γένος, Ούτω δ' αν εκ ην είδεν ανθρωποις κακον. Without your help, that man of man might come, And one be grafted on another's side, As are the apples with the pear and plome ? Harrington, st. 97. Nor are similar examples wanting among our English authors. Sir Thomas Brown, in the second part of his Religio Medici, sect. 9. has something very curious to this purpose, which no doubt Milton had read, that work having been first published in the year 1642, about twentyfive years before Paradise Lost. Shakespeare makes Posthumus cry out in resentment of Imogen's behaviour, Cymbeline, act ii. which we are sure that our author had read, Is there no way for men to be, but women Must be half-workers? And the complaints which Adam makes of the disasters of love may be compared with what Shakespeare's Lysander says in the Midsummer Night's Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven Of nature, and not fill the world at once Mankind? this mischief had not then befall'n, By parents; or his happiest choice too late To human life, and household peace confound. 890 895 900 905 speech had not ended where these lines begin. The sense is quite complete without them; and they seem much fitter for a digressional observation of the author's, such as his panegyric on marriage, &c. than to be put into the mouth of Adam, who could not very naturally be supposed at that time to foresee so very circumstantially the inconveniences attending our strait conjunction with this sex, as he expresses it. Thyer. |