’Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? 
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And in the lowest depth, a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.’ P.  Lost, B. iv, l. 73.”

          Blair’s Lectures, p. 153; Murray’s Grammar, p. 352.

OBS. 15.—­Milton’s word, in the fourth line above, is deep, and not depth, as these authors here give it:  nor was it very polite in them, to use a phraseology which comes so near to saying, the devil was in the poet.  Alas for grammar! accuracy in its teachers has become the most rare of all qualifications.  As for Murray’s correction above, I see not how it can please any one who chooses to think Hell a place of great depth.  A descent into his “lower deep” and “other deep,” might be a plunge less horrible than two or three successive slides in one of our western caverns!  But Milton supposes the arch-fiend might descend to the lowest imaginable depth of Hell, and there be liable to a still further fall of more tremendous extent.  Fall whither?  Into the horrid and inconceivable profundity of the bottomless pit!  What signifies it, to object to his language as “unintelligible” if it conveys his idea better than any other could?  In no human conception of what is infinite, can there be any real exaggeration.  To amplify beyond the truth, is here impossible.  Nor is there any superlation which can fix a limit to the idea of more and more in infinitude.  Whatever literal absurdity there may be in it, the duplication seems greatly to augment what was even our greatest conception of the thing.  Homer, with a like figure, though expressed in the positive degree, makes Jupiter threaten any rebel god, that he shall be thrown down from Olympus, to suffer the burning pains of the Tartarean gulf; not in the centre, but,

   “As deep beneath th’ infernal centre hurl’d,
    As from that centre to th’ ethereal world.”
        —­Pope’s Iliad, B. viii, l. 19.

REGULAR COMPARISON.

Adjectives are regularly compared, when the comparative degree is expressed by adding er, and the superlative, by adding est to them:  as, Pos., great, Comp., greater, Superl., greatest; Pos., mild, Comp., milder, Superl., mildest.

In the variation of adjectives, final consonants are doubled, final e is omitted, and final y is changed to i, agreeably to the rules for spelling:  as, hot, hotter, hottest; wide, wider, widest; happy, happier, happiest.

The regular method of comparison belongs almost exclusively to monosyllables, with dissyllables ending in w or y, and such others as receive it and still have but one syllable after the accent:  as, fierce, fiercer, fiercest; narrow, narrower, narrowest; gloomy, gloomier, gloomiest; serene, serener, serenest; noble, nobler, noblest; gentle, gentler, gentlest.