[Footnote 1: Table Talk, vol. ii. p. 264.]


[Footnote 2: Here Mr. C. notes: "Not perhaps here, but towards, or as,
the conclusion, to chastise the fashionable notion that poetry is a
relaxation or amusement, one of the superfluous toys and luxuries of the
intellect! To contrast the permanence of poems with the transiency and
fleeting moral effects of empires, and what are called, great events."
Ed.]



NOTES ON MILTON. 1807. [1]


(Hayley quotes the following passage:--)

"Time serves not now, and, perhaps, I might seem too profuse to give
any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits
of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest
hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form, whereof the two
poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a
diffuse, and the Book of Job' a brief, model," p. 69.

These latter words deserve particular notice. I do not doubt that Milton
intended his 'Paradise Lost' as an epic of the first class, and that the
poetic dialogue of the 'Book of Job' was his model for the general scheme
of his 'Paradise Regained'. Readers would not be disappointed in this
latter poem, if they proceeded to a perusal of it with a proper