of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.' That is a difficult attitude of mind to preserve. The truth, I think, is indicated by Professor Raleigh in a striking remark. The more we study Paradise Lost the more we see the hand of the author. 'The epic poem, which in its natural form is a kind of cathedral for the ideas of a nation, is by him transformed into a chapel-of-ease for his own mind, a monument to his own genius and to his own habits of thought.' As the tombs of the Medici suggest—not Lorenzo or Giovanni, but—Michel Angelo, Paradise Lost suggests Milton; and 'the same dull convention that calls Paradise Lost a religious poem might call them Christian statues.' The denial that Paradise Lost is a religious poem would have startled Milton and many modern disciples. It should perhaps be qualified by saying that it represents Milton's religion, and is one product of very genuine convictions of the day which had varying outcomes in the faiths of Cromwell and Baxter and George Fox, and again in that of the more narrow and bigoted Puritans. To define its essential nature would be a very difficult and very interesting problem. The inference, however, remains. To read Paradise Lost without a shock,
