And even these epics possessed little merit until they underwent their final transformation into the forms in which we know them, just as the first streaks of a new dawn were beginning to relieve the night of the Dark Ages. At the same time or a little later, the Devil too began to show some improvement. In Dante we see little of him. But where he does appear at the close of the "Inferno," he is no longer the spiteful imp of human or even less than human size, going about the earth to play practical jokes and catch the souls of the unwary. He is now a super-human monster, vague, mysterious and terrible.

But another step remained to be taken in the evolution of the Devil. In Dante the Devil is still powerless against the Almighty. He is chained up in the lowest circle of hell. It was in Milton that the Devil became truly grand. Here he is represented as comparatively free, warring against the Almighty, detiant even when conquered by superior force. I am far from joining in the general admiration for "Paradise Lost." The poem, except the part which deals with Satan, seems to me exceedingly formal and wanting in true inspiration. God and the whole heavenly council talk like the divines of the Westminster Assembly. Adam and Eve are a typical Puritan and his wife. The heavenly and infernal hosts fight a sort of celestial Marston Moor or Naseby, which is finally won for the Parliament and Calvinism by a dashing charge of the celestial Ironsides led by Christinstead of Cromwell. But the character of Satan is truly grand. Like all great literary creations, he is really the embodiment of the ideals, the aspirations, and the passions, of the time and country in which he was created. We see in him the struggle of a powerful and independent mind against an iron despotism. He feels that he is intellectually equal to his tyrant; that his true place is as a leader, not as a follower. He sees that, although physical force may be on the other side, the government ought to be for the benefit of the people and not merely for the glory of the autocrat, and that it is his privilege to stand up for these principles, to fight for them, to suffer for them, like Cromwell or Sir John Eliot. He is the impersonation of the noble side of Puritanism; he lacks only its religious bigotry. He is the true hero of the poem even in Milton's mind, shocked as the poet would have been at such a thought. He carries our sympathy with him, and we wish for his success even though he be the very Devil himself.

After Milton comes the classical age, and the Christian mythology ceases to inspire poetry. The classical poets return to the dead and formal use of the personifications and abstractions of the heathen mythology. We have the Devil of De Foe's matter-of-fact "History;" but here the Devil is the old popular Devil with the horns, tail, and cloven foot, which he acquired in the Middle Ages period of his evolution, His principal occupation is to play the devil with old women and other simple people, and we find little new in him. This same Devil has appeared from time to time ever since the Middle Ages. It is he who buys Faust's soul in the 16th century. It is he who, a little earlier in the same century, aimed at higher game than the poor astrologer and alchemist, and, had he not been frightened off by a well aimed inkstand, might have succeeded in his very natural desire to nip the Reformation in the bud by carrying off Luther himself. Later on, about the end of the 18th century, the same Devil appeared to have become such a very active mover in the world, that he inspired a number of very similar poems among English poets. Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley all wrote short satires on English society founded on the same idea, that of the Devil visiting "his nice little farm the earth to see how his stock gets on," in which it is taken for granted that the earth, especially England, and still more especially the individual objects of the writer's personal dislike, belong to the Devil without any kind of doubt. He is also found in other poems of this age. He appears in Byron's "Vision of Judgment," he carries off Shelley's "Peter Bell," and makes himself other-wise useful. But he shows little originality in his deviltry.

The greatest Devil of all, from a literary point of view, seems to me to be Goethe's Mephistopheles. He has little in common with Milton's Satan. There is none of the grandeur, indomitable will, and unconquerable love of independence and power, which mark the creation of the great Puritan poet. This is the modern Devil. He has seen through this great humbug which men call the world. He has no desire to get himself into trouble by trying to overturn the powers that be. Of course they are all wrong, but then he likes to make an occasional morning call in heaven to chat with the Almighty, and there is no use in getting excited about it. He knows man to be "a poor devil" in every way, and would like to prove this by carrying him off; and if he does not succeed, he will have a chance at least of doing a little miscellaneous mischief by the way-ruining a peasant girl, or the emperor's finances. When the attempt finally fails, he turns the laugh against the other side, which has been so earnest to prevent him, by showing how little he cares for what they make such a fuss about. "The holy ones triumph, but the evil one-whistles."

Joined to this cynicism and contempt for what the world calls good, we find the modern spirit of questioning. There is nothing so sacred but it must be doubted. His is that same scientific "spirit of negation" which "turns back the strata, concluding coldly with: 'Here's Law! Where's God?'"

It seems now very much as if the vein of the Devil had been worked as far as it can be, and the Satan of Milton and the Mephistopheles of Goe the were to remain forever the completes and most perfect literary embodiments of the conception of the Spirit of Evil. The Devil is unique in that although other Christian ideals have inspired the painter, the architect, and the sculptor, the Devil alone has made a permanent place for himself in the very first rank of literary master-pieces.

FREDERIC COGGESHALL, '86.