marriage of Adam and Eve suggests that Adam is attracted as much by her natural force as by Eve's "innocence and virgin modesty."

The association of virtue with life-giving force and vitality persists in the memorable scene in which Adam and Eve, having fallen into a lustful embrace after eating the forbidden fruit, awake from their exhausted sleep to find themselves, like Samson, "destitute and bare of all their virtue." ^* When Adam speaks of himself and Eve as "despoiled of all our good," goodness itself is endowed with qualities similar to those elsewhere associated with virtue. Milton conceives of goodness as a grateful and obedient disposition of the human will but also as abundance, plenitude, and fullness of being, gifts bestowed by a beneficent creator—the loss of which, accordingly, awaits those who refuse to acknowledge them as such (and thereby to acknowledge their dependence on a higher power) and who aspire instead to godlike powers and knowledge of their own.

In the republican tradition, virtue and grace stood sharply opposed: virtue enabled men to challenge fate in the absence of faith. In Milton's version of Puritanism, virtue and grace became closely entangled, since it was in the fullness of God's being—in consequence of his virtue, in the richest of the word's many overlapping meanings—that men and women were graciously endowed with all the goods that were theirs to enjoy, including the supreme gift of life itself. The same entangling association of "virtues," "gifts," and "graces" informed Carlyle's concept of hero worship, so easily misunderstood, if its Puritan background is overlooked, as a crude cult of authoritarian leadership.

In Heroes and Hero-Woship, Carlyle distinguished several types of heroism, only one of them political—the common denominator consisting of a certain "vital Force" and vigor of insight found only in extraordinary individuals and properly regarded not as attainments of their own but as

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The comparison with Samson, shorn of his "virtue" by Delilah, makes Milton's meaning clear. In Samson Agonistes, Milton uses the same language in describing the return of Samson's power, by means of which he pulls down the temple of the Philistines. He compares Samson's "virtue, given for lost," to a phoenix, whose "fame survives" during "ages of lives," "though her body die." This passage not only identifies virtue with strength, resolution, and courage but preserves the word's republican associations with fame and glory.

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