would have provoked the kindly smile of Shakespeare. It is singular to find the inevitable flaw of Paradise Lost prefigured here, and the wicked enchanter made the real hero of the piece. These defects are interesting, because they represent the nature of Milton as it was then, noble and disinterested to the height of imagination, but self-assertive, unmellowed, angular. They disappear entirely when he expatiates in the regions of exalted fancy, as in the introductory discourse of the Spirit, and the invocation to Sabrina. They recur when he moralizes; and his morality is too interwoven with the texture of his piece to be other than obtrusive. What glorious morality it is no one need be told; nor is there any poem in the language where beauties of thought, diction, and description spring up more thickly than in Comus... It is, indeed, true that many of these jewels are fetched from the mines of other poets: great as Milton's obligations to Nature were, his obligations to books were greater. But he has made all his own by the alchemy of his genius, and borrows little but to improve."

[DOWDEN: TRANSCRIPTS AND STUDIES.]

"Comus is the work of a youthful spirit, enamoured of its ideals of beauty and of virtue, zealous to exhibit the identity of moral loveliness with moral severity. The real incident from which the mask is said to have originated disengages itself, in the imagination of Milton, from the world of actual occurrences, and becomes an occasion for the dramatic play of his own poetical abstractions. The young English gentlemen cast off their identity and individuality, and appear in the elementary shapes of 'First Brother' and 'Second Brother.' The Lady Alice rises into an ideal impersonation of virgin strength and virtue. The scene is earth; a wild wood; but earth, as in all the poems of Milton, with the heavens arching over it—a dim spot, in which men 'strive to keep up a frail and feverish being' set below the 'starry threshold of Love's Court.'... From its first scene to the last the drama is a representation of the trials, difficulties, and dangers to which moral purity is exposed in this

1 Referring to the popular but very doubtful tradition as to the genesis of Comus; see the Introduction.

world, and of the victory of the better principle in the soul, gained by strenuous human endeavour aided by the grace of God. In this spiritual warfare the powers of good and evil are arrayed against one another; upon this side the Lady, her brothers (types of human helpfulness weak in itself, and liable to go astray), and the supernatural powers auxiliar to virtue in heaven and in earth-the Attendant Spirit and the nymph Sabrina.

The enchanter Comus is son of Bacchus and Circe, and inheritor of twofold vice. If Milton had pictured the life of innocent mirth in L'Allegro, here was a picture to set beside the other, a vision of the genius of sensual indulgence. Yet Comus is inwardly, not outwardly foul; no grim monster like that which the medieval imagination conjured up to terrify the spirit and disgust the senses. The attempt of sin upon the soul as conceived by Milton is not the open and violent obsession of a brute power, but involves a cheat, an imposture. The soul is put upon its trial through the seduction of the senses and the lower parts of our nature. Flattering lies entice the ears of Eve1; Christ is tried by false visions of power and glory, and beneficent rule; Samson is defrauded of his strength by deceitful blandishment. And in like manner Comus must needs possess a beauty of his own, such beauty as ensnares the eye untrained in the severe school of moral perfection....He is sensitive to rich forms and sweet sounds, graceful in oratory, possessed, like Satan, of high intellect, but intellect in the service of the senses; he surrounds himself with a world of art which lulls the soul into forgetfulness of its higher instincts and of duty; his palace is stately, and 'set out with all manner of deliciousness.'

Over against this potent enchanter stands the virginal figure of the Lady, who is stronger than he... Something of weakness belongs to the Lady, because she is a woman, accustomed to the protection of others, tenderly nurtured; but when the hour of trial comes she shows herself strong in powers of judgment and of reasoning, strong in her spiritual nature, in her tenacity of moral truth, in her indignation against sin. Although alone, and encompassed by evil and danger, she is fearless, and so

1 Paradise Lost, IX. 532-732.

2 Paradise Regained, III. IV. 8 Samson Agonistes, 392—411,

clear-sighted that the juggling practice of her antagonist is wholly ineffectual against her. There is much in the Lady which resembles the youthful Milton himself, and we may well believe that the great debate concerning temperance was not altogether dramatic (where, indeed, is Milton truly dramatic?), but was in part a record of passages in the poet's own spiritual history. Milton admired the Lady as he admired the ideal which he projected before him of himself."

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF MILTON'S EARLY POEMS.

[STOPFORD BROOKE: "CLASSICAL WRITERS," MILTON.J

"Puritanism, when Milton began to write, was not universally apart from literature and the fine arts. In its staid and pure religion Milton's work had its foundation, but the temple he had begun to build upon it was quarried from the ancient and modern arts and letters of Greece and Italy and England. And filling the temple rose the peculiar incense of the Renaissance. The breath of that spirit is felt in the classicalism of the Ode to the Nativity, in the love proclaimed for Shakespeare, in the graceful fancy of the Epitaph to Lady Winchester, and in the gaiety of the Ode to a May Morning. But a new element, other than any the Renaissance could produce, is here; the element that filled the Psalms of David, the deep, personal, passionate religion of the Puritan, possessing, and possessed by, God. Over against the Renaissance music is set the high and devout strain of the first sonnet and of the Odes to Time and A Solemn Musick. Even while at Cambridge, the double being in Milton makes itself felt, the struggle between the two spirits of the time is reflected in his work. These contrasted spirits in him became defined as the political and social war deepened around his life. The second sonnet still is gay, fresh with the morn of love, Petrarca might have written it; the Allegro does not disdain the love of nature,

the rustic sports, the pomp of courts, the playhouse and the land of faery, nor does the Penseroso refuse to haunt the dim cathedral. But yet, in these two poems more than in the Cambridge poems, the deepening of the struggle is felt. Milton seems to presage in them that the time would come when the gaiety of England would cease to be shared in by serious men; when the mirth of the Cavalier would shut out the pleasures derived from lofty Melancholy, because they shut out the devil; as the Puritan pensiveness would be driven to shut out the pleasures of Mirth, because they shut out God. While he gives full weight in the Allegro to unreproved pleasures free,' he makes it plain in the Penseroso that he prefers the sage and holy pleasures of thoughtful sadness. These best befitted the solemn aspect of the time.

A few years later and the presage had come true. Milton is driven away from even the Allegro point of view. In Comus the wild licence of the Court society is set over against the grave and temperate virtue of a Puritan life. The unchastity, the glozing lies, the glistering apparel that hid moral deformity, the sloth and drunkenness, the light fantastic round of the enchanter's character and court, are (it seems likely) Milton's allegory of the Court society of his time. The stately philosophy of the Brothers which had its root in subduing passion and its top in the love of God; the virginal chastity of the Lady, and at the end the releasing power of Sabrina's purity, exalt and fill up inore sternly the idea of the Penseroso and symbolise that noble Puritanism which loved learning and beauty only when they were pure, but holiness far more than either. It may be, as Mr Browne supports, that there is a second allegory within the first, of Laud and his party as the Sorcerer commending the cup of Rome by wile and threat to the lips of the Church and enforcing it by fine and imprisonment; paralysing in stony fetters the Lady of the Church. It may be that Milton called in this poem on the few who, having resisted like the Brothers, but failed to set the Church free, ought now to employ a new force, the force of Purity; but this aspect of the struggle is at least not so clear in Comus as in Lycidas.

In Lycidas Milton has thrown away the last shreds of Church and State and is Presbyterian. The strife now at hand starts into prominence, and not to the bettering of the poem as a piece of art. It is brought in-and the fault is one which

frequently startles us in Milton-without any regard to the unity of feeling in the poem. The passage on the hireling Church looks like an after-thought, and Milton draws attention to it in the argument. The author...by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy then in their height.' But he does not leave Laud and his policy nor the old Church tenderly. When he felt strongly, he wrote fiercely. The passage is a splendid and a fierce cry of wrath, and the rough trumpet note, warlike and unsparing, which it sounds against the unfaithful herdsmen who are sped and the 'grim wolf with privy paw,' was to ring louder and louder through the prose works, and finally to clash in the ears of those very Presbyterians whom he now supported.

There is then a steady progress of thought and of change in the poems. The Milton of Lycidas is not the Milton of Comus. The Milton of Comus is not the Milton of the Penseroso, less still of the Allegro. The Milton of the Penseroso is not the Milton of the Ode to the Nativity. Nothing of the Renaissance is left now but its learning and its art."

CAMBRIDGE:

PRINTED BY J. B. PEACE, M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.