ABSTRACT
Milton's portrait of God the Father is autobiographical. When God enjoys a good laugh at the futile ingenuity of the fallen angels, we see a glimpse of the Milton who, in private life, loved nothing so much as a joke at the expense of a slow-witted person. Milton belonged to the first generation of fully-qualified, card-carrying classical scholars, as Housman did to the last; he had the literary tastes and interests of that powerful enclave who dominated Western European education unbrokenly from his day to ours. Milton is with Racine, rather than with Shakespeare. One of his great powers is the power of sustaining a homogeneous style. The household in which Milton was reared must have been like a more refined, bookish version of that which so impressed Gide; and all of us can remember old people who seemed to preserve something of that old Protestant simplicity and dignity.
