Demonology and devil-lore . s Feil 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 ; SA TANS PUNISHMENT. 125 Then cometh ere dawn The eastern wind, Frost bitter-cold, Ever fire or dart; Some hard torment They must have, It was wrought for them in punis
Demonology and devil-lore . s Feil 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 ; SA TANS PUNISHMENT. 125 Then cometh ere dawn The eastern wind, Frost bitter-cold, Ever fire or dart; Some hard torment They must have, It was wrought for them in punishment, Their world was changed : For their sinful course He filled hell With the apostates. Whether this spirited description was written by Caed-raon, and whether it is of his century, are questions unim-portant to the present inquiry. The poem represents amediaeval notion which long prevailed, and which charac-terised the Mysteries, that Satan and his comrades werehumiliated from the highest angelic rank to a hell already. Fig. 3.—Satan Punished. prepared and peopled with devils, and were there, and bythose devils, severely punished. One of the illuminationsof the Caedmon manuscript, preserved in the BodleianLibrary, shows Satan undergoing his torment (Fig. 3). 126 MILTONS VERSION. He is bound over something like a gridiron, and fourdevils are torturing him, the largest using a scourge withsix prongs. His face manifests great suffering. His formis mainly human, but his bushy tail and animal feet indi-cate that he has been transformed to a devil similar tothose who chastise him. On Caedmons foundation Milton built his gorgeousedifice. His Satan is an ambitious and very English lord,in whom are reflected the whole aristocracy of England intheir hatred and contempt of the holy Puritan Common-wealth, the Church of Christ as he deemed it. The ageshad brought round a similar situation to that which con-fronted the Jews at Babylon, the early christians of Rome,and their missionari
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