John Milton entered Christ's College, Cambridge, where he read for his BA and MA from 1625 to 1632, before commencing his regimen of private study in Hammersmith and Horton. George Herbert's Cambridge career began more man a decade before Milton matriculated there in 1625: Herbert was Minor Fellow in 1614, Major Fellow and Sublector quartae classis in 1617, and Praelector in Rhetoric in 1618. Herbert was distinguished as University Orator in 1620, an office he maintained until 1628, nearly three years into Milton's residence, after which time Herbert assumed the Bemerton rectorship. Milton would have had opportunities to hear Herbert speak as University Orator and would undoubtedly have been aware of the posthumous publication of Herbert's popular The Temple (1633), which went through thirteen printings before 1680.
    In Paradise Regain 'd, Satan's second temptation of Jesus comprises an enticement to an extravagant banquet (Milton 2.260-486).(FN1) Milton's banquet scene could be read as an antisacrament or a Satanic parody of the principles behind participation in Communion. Another appropriation and travesty of the Communion rite in early modern literature, a literary precedent that would have been accessible to Milton and Herbert, is the disrupted, devilish banquet scene of Shakespeare's Macbeth (4.3). King and Queen Macbeth, having usurped the throne and borne the bloodguilt for the murders of Duncan and Banquo, are thwarted in their efforts to unite their divided realm. The royal host and hostess's many requests to their court to sit and eat are repeatedly upset by their past misdeeds, which rise to haunt them, symbolically dissolving the frail ceremonial order and specious show of solidarity of the Scottish state. Barbara Lewalski notes that in Milton's banquet scene--his own travesty of Communion--the grove's vaulted roofs, majestic "walks," and "alleys brown" (2.293-94) that open out into the splendors of the banquet table evoke the procession along the nave of "an idolatrous Catholic cathedral" and up to its high altar (Lewalski 217). Thus the sumptuous spread "alludes to superstitious and idolatrous worship, especially the Roman Catholic mass" (Lewalski 217). George McLoone argues that Satan's debauched banquet recommends "the unholy alliance between courtly decadence and a wrongheaded eucha-ristic discipline" (97). Lewalski and McLoone's insights posit a principal discrepancy between the ostentatious entertainment Satan tenders and the kind of reception Jesus deems appropriate for Israel's messiah or king. The banquet's lavish furnishings, its " [t]able richly spred, in regal mode" (2.340), contradicts the definition of kingship with which Jesus closes both the banquet scene and Paradise Regain' d's second book, when Jesus informs Satan that it behooves a true king that "on his shoulders each mans burden lies" (2.462). The banquet's sybaritic outlay is too exorbitant to be accommodated to Jesus's altruistic idea of a servant-king for whom "to lay down [is] / Par more magnanimous, then to assume" (2.482-83).
    Jesus rebukes Satan, "I can at will, doubt not, as soon as thou, / Command a Table in this Wilderness" (2.383-84). This allusion to Psalm 78, which Louis Martz calls "a brief suggestion of the communion table" (257), indicates the wilderness wanderings of Israel's weary Exodus generation, who grumbled for manna and "tempted God in their heart, by asking meat for their lust" (Ps. 78.18-19). Jesus's allusion operates, not to suggest some similarity between the hungry Hebrews who challenge their maker and Jesus, but rather to associate Jesus, humanity's messiah and sustainer, with Israel's God, the sole provider of grace. With its unrestrained pomp and circumstance, Satan's banquet contradicts Jesus's messianic understanding of himself as a king destined to relieve human abjection and sorrow by freely participating in his subjects' suffering. Because Jesus's idea of kingship is predicated on selflessly serving others and not selfishly assuming advantages, he rejects Satan's superfluous offer. Through allusion to George Herbert's poetry, Milton emphasizes the travesty of true kingship that Jesus's sitting and eating at Satan's banquet would necessarily entail.
    Herbert's "Love (III)," arranged into three sixaines of alternating iambic pentameters and trimeters, is an important lyric in The Temple, if we are to judge by its key, climactic position in the collection's central and major section, The Church. "Love (IH)" belongs among that cluster of lyrics, including "The Invitation" and "The Banquet," which closes The Church and which involves eucharistic images of eating, banqueting, and dining. Their shared sacramental topic seals off a thematic circle that returns the reader to the initial poem of The Church, "The Altar," the sacred stage for the rite of Communion. Among these lyrics, "Love (III)" presents a scene of hospitality, much as Milton's banquet does, in which a dialogue occurs between a host, Herbert's allegory of "Love," and his guest.
    Critics recognize how the poem's "guest-host framework" and "courtesy contest" abound with sacramental connotations (Strier 74, 82). "The Parson in Sacraments," the twenty-second chapter to Herbert's A Priest to the Temple (1652), directs the communicant, like the guest of "Love (HI)," to kneel and not to sit before the Eucharist: "The Feast indeed requires sitting, because it is a Feast; but man's unpreparednesse asks kneeling. Hee that comes to the Sacrament, hath the confidence of a Guest, and hee that kneels, confesseth himself an unworthy one, and therefore differs from other Feasters" (Herbert 259). Herbert's distinction has prompted critics to find "an adumbration of a celestial banquet" (Williams 22), an eschatological event transcending the commemorative practice of Communion, but Helen Wilcox advises that Herbert's lyric "is not just about a heavenly banquet but also the Eucharist and its repeated pattern of liturgical contact on earth" (138). Joseph Summers notes that the poem "has been generally interpreted as picturing the soul's welcome to the Communion or to salvation on earth" (88), and Arnold Stein asserts that the speaker "Love is the perfect Host and becomes the body of Christ in the Eucharist" (194). The perceived unworthiness of the guest/fallen soul, "Guilty of dust and sin," and the guest's contrition as an "ungrateful" or graceless prodigal rehearses the humble communicant's posture before the sacrament commemorating Christ's sacrifice.
    Herbert's Love, who may be interpreted as an allegorization of God's redeeming son, participates in human suffering through his incarnation and so may receive his guest, in a pun, as one not "unkinde"--that is, not ungenerous or, Christologically speaking, not of an entirely dissimilar nature to his own divine humanity. Herbert's loving host consoles his human interlocutor and bids the guest enjoy his meal, safe in the knowledge that his reputation has earned a saving grace because the host "bore the blame," an expression thinly veiling the son's undertaking of the cross's burden. When the guest attempts to correct the seeming breach of etiquette by proposing to reverse the perceived disgrace of an inferior being served by a better, Herbert's host concisely replies, "'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.'" Herbert's pun hinges on the nature of the "meat" as either the choice cuts of meat on the table or Love/Christ's self-sacrifice of his person. The "meat" Herbert's host offers his guest may be construed symbolically as the host's body and blood, the twin elements of bread and wine at the Communion table. There may also be a reference to the Lukan parable of the eschatological messianic banquet where, when the lord of the house returns home to discover his servants dutifully watching over his goods, like Herbert's host "he shall gird himself and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them" (Luke 12.37; emphasis added).(FN2) At the poem's powerful conclusion, the guest's explanatory iambic trimeter, delivered in six terse monosyllables, "So I did sit and eat," narrates the guest's concession to his superior's treatment of him as a dignitary by his superior, a paradox situationally similar to the conduct of the Johannine Jesus when, despite the apostle Peter's protestations, he washes his disciples' feet during the Last Supper (John 13.3-20). The Temple reproduces this trimeter elsewhere, again in a eucharistic context. In a liberal translation of "The 23rd Psalme," Herbert's psalmist gives thanks to God because "thou dost make me sit and dine" (17). Richard Strier poignantly summarizes the guest's ultimate acquiescence to the host's gracious act of service: "In the courtesy framework, the graciousness of grace is one with its irresistibility" (83).
    There are clear resemblances between the circumstances of Herbert's lyric and Milton's banquet Both dramatizations involve a guest and a host, and in each case, the host expresses a wish to entertain a reluctant guest Milton's adaptation, however, is a devilish burlesque of its Herbertian original. Milton's fiendish host displays a false graciousness that mendaciously seeks to undermine rather than sustain his guest. Milton's guest, far from being, like the guest of Herbert's verse, unworthy and guilty of sin, is the Savior and arch-host through whom, in the Protestant discourse of justification by faith, righteousness is imputed to bankrupt sinners. With the crude, reductive literalism that is the badge of Milton's Satan, the delicious feast with which Satan tantalizes Jesus is subordinated to that simpler meal of bread and wine that Herbert's poem elicits, a humble fare that points beyond its literal significance to the salvation its host guarantees to those who gratefully sit, eat, and commemorate.
    Providing a stronger internal connection at the level of verbal allusion, Milton's Satan unconsciously subjects to parody the iambic trimeter with which Herbert rounds off "Love (HI)": "Sol did sit and eat." On three occasions Satan rallies to lure Jesus to partake of the banquet, and three times, in epistrophe, Satan presses the son to enjoy the feast with the familiar imperative Herbert's Love uses to invite the communicant to "sit and eat." Herbert's reconciled "I did sit and eat" resounds throughout Satan's three successive exhortations, although the phrase's purpose is drastically altered from its original source, Satan's tone building in hostility each time he adapts Herbert's phrase. Satan begins with a courteous invitation, "onely deign to sit and eat" (2.336). This welcome suits Satan's "fair speech" and courtly demeanor, appareled "As one in City, or Court, or Palace bred" (2.300-01). Snubbed, Satan's initially polite request next tenses into a slightly piqued rhetorical question, "What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat?" (2.368). Finally, Satan's more urgent entreaty degenerates into a third impatient statement of disbelief, this time converted from an interrogative into a peremptory imperative that is roughly combined with the preposition down to read, "What doubt'st thou Son of God? sit down and eat" (2.377). The feast's opulence, fit for an indulgent king, that Satan claims would give Jesus a satisfyingly "sweet restorative delight" (2.373), is a banquet of excess at which all creatures would slave under Jesus with no promise of restoration or Christian liberty. Yet, as Satan's three echoes of Herbert's grateful guest, sitting and eating, would intimate, the banquet's decadence is worlds apart from the sweet restoration of humankind Milton's Son purposes as their suffering servant-king. Milton's Jesus and Herbert's Love both intend to provide a spiritual rather than a physical restoration, of which the guest enjoys the benefits. The love feast of Herbert's lyric and the diabolic banquet of Milton's brief epic gesture to the Protestant rite of Communion, where the elements of bread and wine traditionally signify the host/Christ's atoning sacrifice and the guest/communicant faithfully sits, eats, and partakes.
ADDED MATERIAL
    RUSSELL M. HILLIER, Cambridge University Copyright © 2007 Heldref Publications

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
 Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
 From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
 If Ilack'dany thing.
A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:
Love said, you shall be he.
"I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare,
 I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
 Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
 Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
 My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
 So I did sit and eat.

KEYWORDS
    Communion, George Herbert, "Love (III)," John Milton, Paradise Regain'd, Satan

FOOTNOTES
1. Milton citations derive from The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Oxford UP, 1958); Herbert quotations derive from The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941).
2. Sitting down to meat is an idiom peculiar to the King James Version and absent from New Testament Greek. Luke's Gospel describes the Lord of the house "dressing himself [{Begin Greek}perix{End Greek}´{Begin Greek}qsetai{End Greek}]", bidding his servants "relax [´{Begin Greek}anakline{End Greek}~iota]," and then, personally, "coming to serve them [{Begin Greek}parelj{End Greek}´{Begin Greek}qn diakon{End Greek}´{Begin Greek}hsei{End Greek}]."

WORKS CITED
    Herbert, George. The Works of George Herbert. Ed. F. E. Hutchinson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1941. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained. Providence: Brown UP, 1966.
    Martz, Louis L. Milton: Poet of Exile. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.
    McLoone, George H. Milton's Poetry of Independence: Five Studies. London: Associated UP, 1999.
    Milton, John. The Poetical Works of John Milton. Ed. Helen Darbshire. London: Oxford UP, 1958.
    Stein, Arnold. George Herbert's Lyrics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968. Strier, Richard. Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
    Summers, Joseph H. George Herbert: His Religion and Art. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1981.
    Wilcox, Helen. "'All Things Are Big with Jest': Irony in Herbert's Temple!" George Herbert: Sacred and Profane. Ed. Helen Wilcox and Richard Todd. Amsterdam: VU UP, 1995. 127-40.
    Williams, Anne. "Gracious Accommodations: Herbert's 'Love III.'" Modem Philology 82.1 (1984): 13-22.