Care must be taken not to misinterpret this passage.

Even Addison misin

terpreted it. He speaks of Satan's distant discovery "of the Earth that hung close by the Moon' as one of the most "wonderfully beautiful and poetical passages of the poem. But it is more wonderfully beautiful and poetical than Addison thought. For, as even a correct reading of the passage by itself would have shown, the "pendent World" which Satan here sees is not the Earth at all, but the entire Starry Universe, or Mundane Sphere, hung droplike by a golden touch from the Empyrean above it. In proportion to this Empyrean, at the distance whence Satan gazes, even the Starry Universe pendent from it is but as a star of smallest magnitude seen on the edge of the full or crescent moon.

At length (III. 418–422) Satan alights on the opaque outside, or convex shell, of the new Universe. As he had approached it, what seemed at first but as a star had taken the dimensions of a globe; and, when he had alighted, and begun to walk on it, this globe had become, as it seemed, a boundless continent of firm land, exposed, dark and starless, to the stormy Chaos blustering round like an inclement sky. Only on the upper convex of the shell, in its angles towards the zenith, some reflection of light was gained from the wall of Heaven. Apparently it was on this upper convex of the outside of the New World, and not at its nadir, or the point nearest Hell, that Satan first alighted and walked (compare 11. 1034-1053, III. 418–430, X. 312—349). At all events he had to reach the zenith before he could begin the real business of his errand. For only at this point-only at the point of attachment or suspension of the new Universe to the Empyrean-was there an opening into the interior of the Universe. All the outer shell, save at that point, was hard, compact and not even transpicuous to the light within, as the spherical glass round a lamp is, but totally opaque, or only glistering faintly on its upper side with the reflected light of Heaven. Accordingly. after wandering on this dark outside of the Universe long enough to allow Milton that extraordinary digression (III. 440-497) in which he finds one of the most magnificently grotesque uses for the outside of the Universe that it could have entered into the imagination of any poet to conceive the Fiend is attracted in the right direction to the opening at the zenith. What attracts him thither is a gleam of light from the mysterious structure or staircase (III. 501 et seq.) which there serves the Angels in their descents from Heaven's gate into the Human Universe, and again in their ascents from the Universe to Heaven's gate. Sometimes these stairs are drawn up to Heaven and invisible; but at the moment when Satan reached the spot they were let down, so that, standing on the lower stair, and gazing down through the opening right underneath, he He could suddenly behold the whole interior of the Starry Universe at once. can behold it in all directions-both in the direction of latitude, or depth from the pole where he stands to the opposite pole or nadir; and also longitudinally,

"from eastern point

Of Libra to the fleecy star that bears
Andromeda far off Atlantic seas
Beyond the horizon."

At this point, and before following the Fiend in his flight down into the interior of our Astronomical Universe, it is necessary to describe the system or constitution of that interior as it is conceived by Milton and assumed throughout the poem. Let us attend, therefore, more particularly now to that small

central circle of our last diagram, hanging drop-like from the Empyrean, which we have as yet described no farther than by saying that, small as it is, it represents our vast Starry Universe in Milton's total scheme of Infinitude. Although a great part of the action of the poem takes place in the Empyrean, in Chaos, and in Hell, much of it also takes place within the bounds of this Starry Universe; so that, if there is any peculiarity in Milton's conception of the interior arrangements of this Universe, that peculiarity must be understood before many parts of the poem are intelligible. Such a peculiarity there is, and a distinct exposition of it is nearly all that is farther desirable in this Introduction to the Poem.

Milton's Astronomy, or, at least, the astronomical system which he thought proper to employ in his Paradise Lost, is not our present Copernican system -which, in his time, was not generally or popularly accepted. It is the older Astronomical System, now usually called "the Ptolemaic," because it had been set forth in its main features by the astronomer Ptolemy of Alexandria, who lived in the second century.

According to this "Ptolemaic system," the Earth was the fixed centre of the Mundane Universe, and the apparent motions of the other celestial bodies were caused by the real revolutions of successive Heavens, or Spheres of Space, enclosing the central Earth at different distances. First, and nearest to the Earth, were the Spheres or Orbs of the Seven Planets then known, in this order-the Moon (treated as a planet), Mercury, Venus, the Sun (treated as a planet-the "glorious planet Sol," Shakespeare calls it, roil. and Cress. Act I. Scene 3), Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Beyond these, as an Eighth Sphere or Orb, was the Firmament or Heaven of all the fixed stars. These eight Spheres or Heavens had sufficed till Aristotle's time, and beyond it, for all the purposes of astronomical explanation. The outermost or Eighth Sphere was supposed to wheel diurnally, or in twenty-four hours, from East to West, carrying in it all the fixed stars, and carrying with it also all the seven interior Heavens or Spheres-which Spheres, however, had also separate and slower motions of their own, giving rise to those apparent motions of the Moon (months), Mercury, Venus, the Sun (years), Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which could not be accounted for by the revolution of the Starry Sphere alone. But, later observations having discovered irregularities in the phenomena of the heavens which the supposed motions of even the Eight Spheres could not account for, two extra Spheres had been added. To account for the very slow change called "the precession of the equinoxes," the discovery of which was prepared by Hipparchus in the second century B.C., it had been necessary to imagine a Ninth Sphere, called "the Crystalline Sphere," beyond that of the Fixed Stars; and, finally, for farther reasons, it had been necessary to suppose all enclosed in a Tenth Sphere, called "the Primum Mobile," or "first moved. These two outermost spheres, or at least the Tenth Sphere, had been added in the Middle Ages; and, indeed, the Ptolemaic system, so completed up to the final number of Ten Spheres, may be called rather the 'Alphonsine System," as having been adopted and taught by the famous King and astronomer, Alphonso X. of Castille (1252—1284). It need only be added that the Spheres were not necessarily supposed to be actual spheres of solid matter. It was enough if they were conceived as spheres of invisible or transpicuous space. Perhaps only the outermost Sphere, or Primum Mobile,

enclosing the whole Universe from absolute Infinity or Nothingness, had to be thought of as in any sense a material or impenetrable shell.

The utter strangeness of this Ptolemaic system to our present habits of thought causes us to forget how long it lasted. Although it was in 1543 that Copernicus had propounded the other system, and although the views of Copernicus struggled gradually into the belief of subsequent astronomers, and had further demonstration given them by Galileo (1610-1616), the Ptolemaic or Alphonsine system, with its ten Spheres enclosing the stationary Earth at different distances, and wheeling round it in a complex combination of their separate motions, retained its prevalence in the popular mind of Europe, and even in the scientific world, till the end of the seventeenth century. Hence all the literature of England, and of other countries, down to that date, is latently cast in the imaginative mould of that system, and is full of its phraseology and of suggestions from it. When Shakespeare speaks of the "stars starting from their spheres,' he means from the Ptolemaic Spheres; and, similarly, the word "sphere" in our old poetry has generally this meaning. Indeed, it retains this meaning in some of our still current expressions, as "This is not my sphere," "You are out of your sphere," &c. A full examination of our old literature in the light of the principle of criticism here suggested-i.e. with the recollection that it was according to the Ptolemaic conception of the Universe, and not according to the Copernican, that our old poets thought of things and expressed their thoughts-might lead to curious results. We are concerned at present, however, with Milton only.

In Milton's case we are presented with the interesting phenomenon of a mind apparently uncertain to the last which of the two systems, the Ptolemaic on the Copernican, was the true one, or perhaps beginning to be persuaded of the higher probability of the Copernican, but yet retained the Ptolemaic for poetical purposes. For Milton's life (1608-1674) coincides with the period of the struggle between the two systems. In his boyhood and youth he had, doubtless, inherited the general or Ptolemaic belief that in which Shakspeare died. Here, for example, is what everybody was reading during Milton's youth in that favourite book, Sylvester's Translation of Du Bartas :

"As the ague-sick upon his shivering pallet
Delays his health oft to delight his palate,
When wilfully his tastless taste delights
In things unsavoury to sound appetites,
Even so some brain-sicks live there now-a-days
That lose themselves still in contrary ways-
Preposterous wits that cannot row at ease
On the smooth channel of our common seas;
And such are those, in my conceit at least,
Those clerks that think-think how absurd a jest!-
That neither heavens nor stars do turn at all
Nor dance about this great round Earthly Ball,
But the Earth itself, this massy globe of ours,
Turns round about once every twice-twelve hours.

Du Bartas had been a French Protestant, and his English translator, Sylvester, was a Puritan. It was not, therefore, only to the Roman Inquisition or to Roman Catholics that Galileo must have seemed a "brain-sick" and "a preposterous wit" when he advocated the Copernican theory. In 1638 Milton had himself conversed with Galileo, then old and blind, near Florence There it was, ," he wrote in 1644 (Areopag.), "that I found and visited the

"famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in "Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." And yet, despite this passage, and other passages showing how strongly the character and history of Galileo had fascinated him, it may be doubted whether Milton even then felt himself entitled to reject the system which Galileo had impugned. His friends and literary associates, the Smectymnuans, at all events, in their answer to Bishop Hall's "Humble Remonstrance (1641) had cited the Copernican doctrine as an unquestionable instance of a supreme absurdity. "There is no more truth in this assertion," they say of one of Bishop Hall's statements, "than if he had said, with Anaxagoras, "Snow is black,' or with Copernicus, The Earth moves, and the Heavens "stand still."" There cannot be a more distinct proof than this incidental passage affords, of the utter repulsiveness of the Copernican theory to even the o educated English intellect as late as the middle of the seventeenth century. Milton was probably even then, if we may judge from the above-quoted reference to Galileo, in advance of his contemporaries on this question; and in the interval between that time and the completion of his Paradise Lost his Copernicanism may have become decided. There are, at any rate, two passages in Paradise Lost where he shows his perfect acquaintance with the Copernican theory, and with the arguments in its behalf. The one (IV. 592-597) is an incidental passage; in the other and much longer passage (VIII. 15-178) he makes the question a subject of express conversation between Raphael and Adam. In this last passage Adam is represented as arriving by intuition at the Copernican theory, or at least as perceiving its superior simplicity over the Ptolemaic; and, though the drift of the Angel's reply is that the question is an abstruse one, and that it is of no great consequence for man's real duty in the world which system is the true one, yet the balance of the Angel's remarks is also Copernican. There is no doubt that these two passages were inserted by Milton to relieve his own mind on the subject, and by way of caution to the reader that the scheme of the physical Universe adopted in the construction of the poem is not to be taken as more than a hypothesis for the imagination.

That scheme is, undoubtedly, the Ptolemaic or Alphonsine. Accordingly the little central circle, hung drop-like from the Empyrean in our last diagramand there representing the dimensions of the total Creation of the six days, or, in other words, of our Starry Universe--may be exhibited now on a magnified scale, by simply reproducing one of the diagrams of the Heavens which were given in all the old books of Astronomy. The following is a copy (a little neater than the original, but otherwise exact) from a woodcut which we find in an edition, in 1610, of the Sphæra of the celebrated middle-age astronomer, Joannes a Sacrobosco, or John Holywood. This treatise, originally written in the thirteenth century, and amended or added to by subsequent writers, was the favourite manual of astronomy throughout Europe down to Milton's time. He himself used it as a text-book, as we learn from his nephew Phillips. The cut, the reader ought to understand, represents the interior of the Mundane System in equatorial section as looked down into from the pole of the ecliptic. It is, in short, a view down from the opening at the pole in the preceding cut. This, literally this, so far as mere diagram can represent it, is the World or Mundane Universe, as Milton keeps it in his mind's eye throughout the poem. It is an enormous azure round of space scooped or carved out of Chaos, and communicating aloft with the Empyrean, but consisting within itself of ten Orbs or hollow Spheres in succession, wheeling one within the other, down to

the stationary nest of our small Earth at the centre, with the elements of water, air, and fire, that are immediately around it. It is according to this scheme that Milton virtually describes the process of creation in the first, the second, and the fourth of the six days of Genesis (VII. 232-275 and 339386)-the only deviation being that the word "Firmament is not there applied specifically to the eighth or Starry Sphere, but is used for the whole continuous depth of all the heavens as far as the Primum Mobile. As if to

prevent any mistake, however, there is one passage in which the Ten Spheres are actually enumerated. It is that (III. 481-483) where the attempted ascent of ambitious souls from Earth to the Empyrean by their own effort is described. In order to reach the opening into the Empyrean at the World's zenith, what are the successive stages of their flight?

"They pass the Planets Seven, and pass the Fixed,
And that Crystalline Sphere whose balance weighs

The trepidation talked, and that First Moved."