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, Troil, 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 outer

most 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 66 '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 or the Copernican, was

the true one, or perhaps beginning to be persuaded of the higher probability of the Copernican, but yet retaining the Ptolemaic for poetical purposes. For Milton's life (16081674) 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 Shakespeare died. Here, for example, is what everybody was reading during Milton's youth in that favourite book, Sylvester's Translation of Du Bartas :

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"As the ague-sick upon his shivering pallet
Delays his health oft to delight his palate,
When wilfully his tasteless 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."

In

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. 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 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 diagram-and 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 middleage 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