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 existing, poetry; and the marvellous passage in which the 'Dread Commander' presents himself to his comrades enthrals the imagination and casts into utter oblivion the irrelevant question as to the accidental goodness or badness of his cause. He is not only himself the embodiment of heroic endurance, but obviously deserves the absolute confidence of his followers. He preserves his grandeur even when he is detected in stratagems, and rises to meet overpowering enemies

Like Teneriff or Atlas unremov'd.

We have, in short, to put aside our theological and philosophical prepossessions; to be content without forcing Milton's imagery into too close a contact with fact or asking too curiously who are the personages and what their motives. We must accept the transcendent grandeur of the actors, and admit in general that the grandeur is somehow the outcome of Milton's own character. His poetry is like the 'spectre of the Brocken'—a gigantic shape which is really a reflection of himself.

Yet Milton's conviction that he is in some sense writing true history has important results, admirably explained by Professor Raleigh. Mil-