Heaven and the scarcely subordinate power of Hell magnifies him.
Johnson, whose judgment on Milton is unsatisfactory because he will not
deliver himself sufficiently to beauty which he must have recognised,
nevertheless says of the Paradise Lost, that "its end is to raise the
thoughts above sublunary cares," and this is true. The other great epic
poems worthy to be compared with Milton's, the Iliad, Odyssey, AEneid,
and Divine Comedy, all agree in representing man as an object of the
deepest solicitude to the gods or God. Milton's conception of God is
higher than Homer's, Virgil's, or Dante's, but the care of the Miltonic
God for his offspring is greater, and the profound truth unaffected by
Copernican discoveries and common to all these poets is therefore more
impressive in Milton than in the others.

There is nothing which the most gifted of men can create that is not
mixed up with earth, and Milton, too, works it up with his gold. The
weakness of the Paradise Lost is not, as Johnson affirms, its lack of
human interest, for the Prometheus Bound has just as little, nor is
Johnson's objection worth anything that the angels are sometimes
corporeal and at other times independent of material laws. Spirits
could not be represented to a human mind unless they were in a measure
subject to the conditions of time and space. The principal defect in
Paradise Lost is the justification which the Almighty gives of the
creation of man with a liability to fall. It would have been better if
Milton had contented himself with telling the story of the Satanic
insurrection, of its suppression, of its author's revenge, of the
expulsion from Paradise, and the promise of a Redeemer. But he wanted
to "justify the ways of God to man," and in order to do this he thought
it was necessary to show that man must be endowed with freedom of will,
and consequently could not be directly preserved from yielding to the
assaults of Satan.