some passage, which would tempt me to stop, I propose to consider,
1st, the general plan and arrangement of the work;
2ndly, the subject with its difficulties and advantages;
3rdly, the poet's object, the spirit in the letter, the [Greek
(transliterated): enthumion en muthps], the true school-divinity;
and lastly, the characteristic excellencies of the poem, in what they
consist, and by what means they were produced.

1. As to the plan and ordonnance of the Poem.

Compare it with the 'Iliad', many of the books of which might change
places without any injury to the thread of the story. Indeed, I doubt
the original existence of the 'Iliad' as one poem; it seems more probable
that it was put together about the time of the Pisistratidae. The
'Iliad'--and, more or less, all epic poems, the subjects of which are
taken from history--have no rounded conclusion; they remain, after all,
but single chapters from the volume of history, although they are
ornamental chapters. Consider the exquisite simplicity of the Paradise
Lost. It and it alone really possesses a beginning, a middle, and an
end; it has the totality of the poem as distinguished from the 'ab
ovo' birth and parentage, or straight line, of history.

2. As to the subject.

In Homer, the supposed importance of the subject, as the first effort of
confederated Greece, is an after-thought of the critics; and the
interest, such as it is, derived from the events themselves, as
distinguished from the manner of representing them, is very languid to
all but Greeks. It is a Greek poem. The superiority of the 'Paradise Lost'
is obvious in this respect, that the interest transcends the limits of a