There
might very likely have been a Henry VIII, and he might have been such
as he is described, but at any rate he was dead and gone, while Satan
still lived and walked the earth, the identical Satan who had deceived
Eve.
Nor was it only to the poetic public that his personages were real,
true, and living beings. The poet himself believed as entirely in
their existence as did his readers. I insist upon this point, because
one of the first of living critics has declared of _Paradise Lost_
that it is a poem in which every artifice of invention, is consciously
employed, not a single fact being, for an instant, conceived as
tenable by any living faith. (Ruskin, _Sesame and Lilies_, p. 138). On
the contrary, we shall not rightly apprehend either the poetry or the
character of the poet until we feel that throughout _Paradise Lost_,
as in _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson_, Milton felt himself to he
standing on the sure ground of fact and reality. It was not in
Milton's nature to be a showman, parading before an audience a
phantasmagoria of spirits, which he himself knew to be puppets tricked
up for the entertainment of an idle hour.
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