Spenser had tried it in _The Fairy Queen_ and failed splendidly.

Where he failed, Milton succeeded, though his poem is not on the origins of England but on the ultimate subject of the origins of mankind.

We know from his notebooks that he turned over in his mind a national subject and that the Arthurian legend for a while appealed to him.

But to Milton's earnest temper nothing that was not true was a fit subject for poetry.

It was inevitable he should lay it aside.