To Milton, as to Jerome, Moloch was Mars, and Chemosh
Priapus. Plato knew of hell as Tartarus, and the battle of the giants
in Hesiod is no fiction, but an obscured tradition of the war once
waged in heaven. What has been adverse to Milton's art of illusion is,
that the belief that the gods of the heathen world were the rebellious
angels has ceased to be part of the common creed of Christendom.
Milton was nearly the last of our great writers who was fully
possessed of the doctrine. His readers now no longer share it with
the poet. In Addison's time (1712) some of the imaginary persons in
_Paradise Lost_ were beginning to make greater demands upon the faith
of readers, than those cool rationalistic times could meet.
There is an element of decay and death in poems which we vainly style
immortal. Some of the sources of Milton's power are already in process
of drying up. I do not speak of the ordinary caducity of language, in
virtue of which every effusion of the human spirit is lodged in a body
of death. Milton suffers little as yet from this cause. There are few
lines in his poems which are less intelligible now, than they were
at the time they were written.
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