And so on for nearly a hundred lines, in many a changeful strain, arch-angelical all, of heaven-remembering passion, while ever, as thus he spoke,
"Each passion dimm'd his face, Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy, and despair; Which marr'd his borrow'd visage, and betray'd Him counterfeit, if any eye beheld; For heavenly minds, from such distempers foul Are ever clear."
The soliloquy of Dryden's Lucifer consists of twenty lines, taken almost at hap-hazard from that of Milton's, jumbled together without consideration, and mangled from the most multitudinous blank verse ever written, into rhymes much beneath the average merit of one who, at times, could indeed command "the long-majestic march and energy divine."
Adam and Eve fare little better than the angels under his reforming fingers. Milton, you remember, makes Adam tell Raphael the story of his birth, in language charmful to affable arch-angel's ear, albeit tuned to harmonies in heaven. Dryden burlesques that revelation into the following soliloquy, supposed to have been _the first words spoken by human lips_. Adam at once opens his mouth in the style of the age of refinement. After the fall, how degenerate kept growing on our father tongue, till it reached its acme in the barbarous lingo of Shakspeare! And how suited, here, the thought to the speech! How natural the natural theology of both! He anticipates Descartes.
"_Adam._ What am I? or from whence? _For that I am_ (rising) _I know, because I think_; but whence I come, Or how this frame of mine began to be, What other being can disclose to me? I move, and see, and speak, discourse, and know; Though now I am, I was not always so. Then that from which I was, must be before, Whom, as my spring of being, I adore. How full of ornament is all I view, In all its parts! and seems as beautiful as new: O goodly order'd earth! O Power Divine! Of thee I am, and what I am is thine."
A day or two after, "a cloud descends with six angels in it, and when it is near the ground breaks, and, on each side, discovers six more." Raphael and Gabriel, sent to admonish and warn, discourse with Adam, the ten others standing at a distance. The conversation instantly assumes, and throughout sustains, an intensely controversial character, and Raphael and Gabriel, though two to one, and moreover angel _versus_ man, are hard put to it on predestination and free-will. Adam is equipped with all the weapons of the schools, and uses them defensively, and most offensively, with all the dexterity of a veteran gladiator. But our disgust soon ceases, along with our deception; and we but see and hear John Dryden puzzling a brace of would-be wits at Wills's. The whole reads like a so-so bit of the _Religio Laici_. It ends thus:--