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PREFACE.

Education being of the first importance to society, no apology appears necessary for offering the following work to the notice of the rising generation; its necessity must be acknowledged and felt by guardians, to whom the precepts of wisdom and morality are very naturally supposed to be inculcated, and particularly so in those who have the instruction of youth. Learning has shed abroad, upon all nations, its divine influence, and softened even the manners of savages. Cadmus, king of Thebes, by the introduction of letters into Greece, and Palamedes, have both immortalized their names by the invention of letters; although it is said, by some writers, that Rhadamanthus brought them into Assyria, and Memnon into Egypt; and by others, that the Phoenicians and Ethiopians taught the first use of letters; but sacred history informs us, that Moses originally taught the art to the Jews, and that the Phoenicians learned them from the Jews, and the Grecians from the Phoenicians. Nothing can be more interesting than to trace,

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from the earliest ages, down to the present time, the rise and progress of knowledge, did not the limits of a Preface prevent the possibility of doing the subject that justice it so eminently deserves. In this Scriptural and Allegorical Glossary of Milton's Paradise Lost, I have endeavoured to illustrate the mythological parts of that divine poem, in which the author so prolifically abounds with scriptural phrases and quotations, applicable to the work. Whether the object has been attained, those who are most conversant with polite literature, will be the best able to judge. Of a poem so celebrated as Paradise Lost, who would not feel proud to comment upon? The happy spot, who will not be happy to find? In the fourth book of which, it should seem, Milton consulted the fathers, "as to the easterly situation of this garden:" St. Athanasius has a fancy thereupon, extraordinarily poetical, expressive of its riches and its pleasures: that from hence, about the oriental parts of India, there were every where such fragrant scents, and that the spices receive their odours, as if from that happy place;" and hear what the author himself says:

Now gentle gales,

Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense

Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils."

As the origin of Paradise Lost may not be

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