24). But it is
the gloss, and not the text of Moses, which is in possession of
our minds, and who has done most to lodge it there, Milton or the
commentators?
Again, it is Milton and not Moses who makes the serpent pluck and eat
the first apple from the tree. But Bp. Wilson comments upon the words
of Genesis (iii, 6) as though they contained this purely Miltonic
circumstance,
It could hardly but he that one or two of the incidents which Milton
has supplied, the popular imagination has been unable to homologate.
Such an incident is the placing of artillery in the wars in heaven, We
reject this suggestion, and find it mars probability. But It would not
seam so Improbable to Milton's contemporaries; not only because it was
an article of the received poetic tradition (see _Ronsard_ 6, p. 40),
but also because fire-arms had not quite ceased to be regarded as a
devilish enginery of a new warfare, unfair in the knightly code of
honour, a base substitute of mechanism for individual valour. It
was gunpowder and not _Don Quixote_ which had destroyed, the age of
chivalry,
Another of Milton's fictions which has been found too grotesque is the
change (_P, L.
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