But Carlyle's interest in "virtue" did not make him a republican. He could have learned from his Puritan forebears, just as well as from Machiavelli and Harrington, that virtue had always been associated with courage and manly vigor, with vitality in general, and more broadly still with life-giving creative force. A close reading of Paradise Lost, for example—reading more to Carlyle's taste than Oceana or The Discourses—would have introduced him to a rich conception of virtue that often came close to his own conception of heroism. In the mouth of Milton's Satan, the term retains its republican associations with glory, overarching ambition, and dauntless courage. Exhorting his host of fallen angels to storm the gates of heaven, Satan repeatedly addresses them as "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers." He tempts Eve by dwelling on the godlike powers conferred by the "virtue" inherent in the apple and falsely predicts that God will praise her "dauntless virtue" if she dares to eat it. Since the "power that dwelt therein," as Eve in turn tells Adam in her tribute to the apple's "virtues," includes not only the "virtue to make wise" but to confer speech on a snake, it is more than merely human vitality that Adam and Eve hope to acquire from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit of this "sovereign, virtuous, precious" tree, as Eve calls it, will "make them Gods who taste."

Milton's description of God's own "virtue," which reveals itself in the creation of the world, strengthens the association of virtue with superhuman powers. "Darkness profound / Covered the abyss but on the watery calm / His brooding wings the spirit of God outspread, / And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth...." When God sends his son to disperse Satan's rebel horde, he counts on Christ's "virtue" to carry the day. "Into thee such virtue and grace / Immense I have transfused, that all may know / In Heaven and Hell thy power above compare...." Something of the same force, with its implications of life-giving warmth, resides in the sun's "virtue," according to Milton. The sun's warmth as well as its gravity, its "attractive virtue," testifies to the way in which superabundant vitality sheds its glory on anything that comes into its orbit. Milton assigns to Eve the same "virtue" he assigns to the sun; his description of the

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