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124

SATAN'S PRESUMPTION.

All had heard,

That his angel devised

Great presumption

To raise up against his Master,

And spake proud words

Foolishly against his Lord,

Then must he expiate the deed,

Share the work of war,

And for his punishment must have

Of all deadly ills the greatest.

So doth every man

Who against his Lord

Deviseth to war,

With crime against the great Ruler.
Then as the Mighty angry;

The highest Ruler of heaven

Hurled him from the lofty seat;

Hate had he gained at his Lord,

His favour he had lost,

Incensed with him was the Good in his mind,

Therefore must he seek the gulf

Of hard hell-torment,

For that he had warred with heayen's Ruler,

He rejected him then from his favour,

And cast him into hell,

Into the deep parts,

Where he became a devil :

The fiend with all his comrades

Fell then from heaven above,

Through as long as three nights and days,

The angels from heaven into hell;

And them all the Lord transformed to devils,

Because they his deed and word

Would not revere;

Therefore them in a worse light,

Under the earth beneath,

Almighty God

Had placed triumphless

In the swart hell;

There they have at even,

Immeasurably long,
Each of all the fiends,

A renewal of fire;

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Whether this spirited description was written by Cadmon, and whether it is of his century, are questions unimportant to the present inquiry. The poem represents a medieval notion which long prevailed, and which characterised the Mysteries, that Satan and his comrades were humiliated from the highest angelic rank to a hell already

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prepared and peopled with devils, and were there, and by those devils, severely punished. One of the illuminations of the Cadmon manuscript, preserved in the Bodleian Library, shows Satan undergoing his torment (Fig. 3).

126

MILTON'S VERSION.

He is bound over something like a gridiron, and four devils are torturing him, the largest using a scourge with six prongs. His face manifests great suffering. His form is mainly human, but his bushy tail and animal feet indicate that he has been transformed to a devil similar to those who chastise him.

*

On Cædmon's foundation Milton built his gorgeous edifice. His Satan is an ambitious and very English lord, in whom are reflected the whole aristocracy of England in their hatred and contempt of the holy Puritan Commonwealth, the Church of Christ as he deemed it. The ages had brought round a similar situation to that which confronted the Jews at Babylon, the early christians of Rome, and their missionaries among the proud pagan princes of the north. The Church had long allied itself with the earlier Lucifers of the north, and now represented the proud empire of a satanic aristocracy, and the persecuted Nonconformists represented the authority of the King of kings. In the English palace, and in the throne of Canterbury, Milton saw his Beelzebub and his Satan.

Th' infernal serpent; he it was, whose guile,
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from heav'n, with all his host
Of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring

To set himself in glory above his peers

He trusted to have equall'd the Most High,
If he opposed; and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God
Raised impious war in heav'n, and battle proud,
With vain attempt. Him the almighty Power
Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.1

1 Paradise Lost,' i. 40-50.

THE PURITANS AND PRINCE RUPERT. 127

This adaptation of the imagery of Isaiah concerning Lucifer has in it all the thunder hurled by Cromwell against Charles. Even a Puritan poet might not altogether repress admiration for the dash and daring of a Prince Rupert, to which indeed even his prosaic coreligionists paid the compliment of ascribing to it a diabolical source.1 Not amid conflicts that raged in ancient Syria broke forth such lines as

Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav'n.

With rallied arms to try what may be yet
Regain'd in heav'n, or what more lost in hell.

The Bel whom Milton saw was Cromwell, and the Dragon that serpent of English oppression which the Dictator is trampling on in a well-known engraving of his time. In the history of the Reformation the old legend did manifold duty again, as in the picture (Fig. 13) by Luther's friend Lucas Cranach.

It would seem that in the course of time Bel and the Dragon became sufficiently close allies for their wor

1 And foremost rides Prince Rupert, darling of fortune and of war, with his beautiful and thoughtful face of twenty-three, stern and bronzed already, yet beardless and dimpled, his dark and passionate eyes, his long love-locks drooping over costly embroidery, his graceful scarlet cloak, his white-plumed hat, and his tall and stately form. His high-born beauty is preserved to us for ever on the canvas of Vandyck, and as the Italians have named the artist 'Il Pittore Cavalieresco,' so will this subject of his skill remain for ever the ideal of Il Cavaliere Pittoresco. And as he now rides at the head of this brilliant array, his beautiful white dog bounds onward joyously beside him, that quadruped renowned in the pamphlets of the time, whose snowy skin has been stained by many a blood-drop in the desperate forays of his master, but who has thus far escaped so safely that the Puritans believe him a familiar spirit, and try to destroy him 'by poyson and extempore prayer, which yet hurt him no more than the plague plaster did Mr. Pym.' Failing in this, they pronounce the pretty creature to be a divell, not a very downright divell, but some Lapland ladye, once by nature a handsome white ladye, now by art a handsome white dogge.'-A Charge with Prince Rupert. Col. Higginson's 'Atlantic Essays.'

128

A 'MYSTERY' IN MARIONETTES. shippers to feed and defend them both with equal devotion, and for Daniel to explode them both in carrying on the fight of his deity against the gods of Babylon. This story of Bel is apocryphal as to the canon, but highly significant as to the history we are now considering. Although the Jews maintained their struggle against 'principalities and powers' long after it had been a forlorn hope, and never surrendered, nor made alliance with the Dragon, the same cannot be said of those who appropriated their title of the chosen of God,' counterfeited their covenant, and travestied their traditions. alliance of Christianity and the Dragon has not been nominal, but fearfully real. In fulfilling their mission of 'inheriting the earth,' the 'meek' called around them and pressed into their service agents and weapons more diabolical than any with which the Oriental imagination had peopled the abode of devils in the north.

The

At a Fair in Tours (August 1878) I saw two exhibitions which were impressive enough in the light they cast through history. One was a shrunken and sufficiently grotesque production by puppets of the Mediæval 'Mystery' of Hell. Nearly every old scheme and vision of the underworld was represented in the scene. The three Judges sat to hear each case. A devil rang a bell whenever any culprit appeared at the gate. The accused was ushered in by a winged devil-Satan, the Accuser-who, by the show-woman's lips, stated the charges against each with an eager desire to make him or her out as wicked as possible. A devil with pitchfork received the sentenced, and shoved them down into a furnace. There was an array of brilliant dragons around, but they appeared to have nothing to do beyond enjoying the spectacle. But this exhibition which was styled 'Twenty minutes in Hell,' was poor and faint beside the neighbouring exhibition of

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