obtained but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit that cau enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the life of whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs; till which in some measure be compast, I refuse not to sustain this expectation." Before the piety of this vow, Dr. Johnson's morosity yields for a moment, and he is forced to exclaim, "From a promise like this, at once fervid, pious, and rational, might be expected the Paradise Lost." Of these years of self-cultivation, of conscious moral architecture, such as Plato enacted in his ideal State, but none but Milton ever had the courage to practise, the biographer would gladly give a minute account. But the means of doing so are wanting. The poet kept no diary of his reading, such as some great students, e.g. Isaac Casaubon, have left. Nor could such a record, had it been attempted, have shown us the secret process by which the scholar's dead learning was transmuted in Milton's mind into living imagery. 'Many studious and contemplative years, altogether spent in the search of religious and civil knowledge," is his own description of the period. You make many inquiries as to what I am about," he writes to Diodati"what am I thinking of? Why, with God's help, of immortality! Forgive the word, I only whisper it in your ear! Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight." This was in 1637, at the end of five years of the Horton probation. The poems, which, rightly read, are strewn with autobiographical hints, are not silent as to the intention of this period. In Paradise Regained (i. 196), Milton reveals himself. And in Comus, written at Horton, the lines 375 and following are charged with the same sentiment,― "" And wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where, with her best nurse, contemplation, She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings, Were all-to ruffled and sometimes impair'd." That at Horton Milton "read all the Greek and Latin writers" is one of Johnson's careless versions of Milton's own words, "enjoyed a complete holiday in turning over Latin and 'Greek authors." Milton read, not as a professional theologian, but as a poet and scholar, and always in the light of his secret purpose. It was not in his way to sit down to read over all the Greek and Latin writers, as Casaubon or Salmasius might do, Milton read with selection, and "meditated," says Aubrey, what he read. His practice conformed to the principle he has himself laid down in the often-quoted lines (Paradise Regained, iv. 322) "Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself." Some of Milton's Greek books have been traced; his Aratus, Lyco-♦ phron, Euripides (the Stephanus of 1602), and his Pindar (the Benedictus of 1620), are still extant, with marginal memoranda, which should seem to evince careful and discerning reading. One critic even thought it worth while to accuse Joshua Barnes of silently appropriating conjectural emendations from Milton's Euripides. But Milton's own poems are the best evidence of his familiarity with all that is most choice in the remains of classic poetry. Though the commentators are often seeing an imitation where there is none, no commentary can point out the ever-present infusion of classical flavor, which bespeaks intimate converse far more than direct adaptation. Milton's classical allusions, says Hartley Coleridge, are amalgamated and consubstantiated with his native thought. A commonplace book of Milton's, after having lurked unsuspected for 200 years in the archives of Netherby, has been disinterred in our own day (1874). It appears to belong partly to the end of the Horton period. It is not by any means an account of all that he is reading, but only an arrangement under certain heads or places of memoranda for future use. These notes are extracted from about eighty different authors, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. Of Greek authors no less than sixteen are quoted. The notes are mostly notes of historical facts, seldom of thoughts, never of mere verbal expression. There is no trace in it of any intention to store up either the imagery or the language of poetry. It may be that such notes were made and entered in another volume; for the book thus accidentally preserved to us seems to refer to other similar volumes of collections. But it is more likely that no such poetical memoranda were ever made, and that Milton trusted entirely to memory for the wealth of classical allusion with which his verse is surcharged. He did not extract from the poets and the great writers whom he was daily turning over, but only from the inferior authors and secondary historians, which he read only once. Most of the material collected in the commonplace book is used in his prose pamphlets. But the facts are worked into the texture of his argument, rather than cited as extraneous witnesses. In reading history it was his aim to get at a conspectus of the general current of affairs rather than to study minutely a special period. He tells Diodati in September, 1637, that he has studied Greek history continuously from the beginning to the fall of Constantinople. When he tells the same friend that he has been long involved in the obscurity of the early middle ages of Italian history down to the time of the Emperor Rudolf, we learn from the commonplace book that he had only been reading the one volume of Sigonius's Historia Regni Italici. From the thirteenth century downwards he proposes to himself to study each Italian state in some separate history. Even before his journey to Italy he read Italian with as much ease as French. He tells us that it was by his father's advice that he had acquired these modern languages. But we can see that they were essential parts of his own scheme of self-education, which included, in another direction, Hebrew, both Biblical and Rabbinical, and even Syriac. The intensity of his nature showed itself in his method of study. He read, not desultorily, a bit here and another there, but "when I take up a thing, I never pause or break it off, nor am drawn away from it by any other interest, till I have arrived at the goal I proposed to myself." He made breaks occasionally in this routine of study by visits to London, to see friends, to buy books, to take lessons in mathematics, to go to the theatre, or to concerts. A love of music was inherited from his father. I have called this peried, 1632-39, one of preparation, and not of production. But though the first volume of poems printed by Milton did not appear till 1645, the most considerable part of its contents was written during the period included in the present chapter. The fame of the author of Paradise Lost has overshadowed that of the author of L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas. Yet had Paradise Lost never been written, these three poems, with Comus, would have sufficed to place their author in a class apart, and above all those who had used the English language for poetical purposes before him. It is incumbent on Milton's biographer to relate the circumstances of the composition of Comus, as it is an incident in the life of the poet. Milton's musical tastes had brought him the acquaintance of Henry Lawes, at that time the most celebrated composer in England. When the Earl of Bridgewater would give an entertainment at Ludlow Castle to celebrate his entry upon his office as President of Wales and the Marches, it was to Lawes that application was made to furnish the music. Lawes, as naturally, applied to his young poetical acquaintance Milton to write the words. The entertainment was to be of that sort which was fashionable at court, and was called a Mask. In that brilliant period of court life which was inaugurated by Elizabeth and put an end to by the Civil War, a Mask was a frequent and favorite amusement. It was an exhibition in which pageantry and music predominated, but in which dialogue was introduced as accompaniment or explanation. The dramatic Mask of the sixteenth century has been traced by the antiquaries as far back as the time of Edward III. But in its perfected shape it was a genuine offspring of the English Renaissance, a cross between the vernacular mummery, or mystery-play, and the Greek drama. No great court festival was considered complete without such a public show. Many of our great dramatic writers, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Shirley, Carew, were constrained by the fashion of the time to apply their invention to gratify this taste for decorative representation. No iess an artist than Inigo Jones must occasionally stoop to construct the machinery. The taste for grotesque pageant in the open air must have gradually died out before the general advance of refinement. The Mask by a process of evolution would have become the Opera. But it often happens that when a taste or fashion is at the point of death, it undergoes a forced and temporary revival, So it was with the Mask. In 1633, the Puritan hatred to the theatre had blazed out in Prynne's Histriomastix, and, as a natural consequence, the loyal and cavalier portion of society threw themselves into dramatic amusements of every kind, It was an unreal revival of the Mask, stimulated by political passion, in the wane of genuine taste for the fantastic and semi-barbarous pageant, in which the former age had delighted. What the imagination of the spectators was no longer equal to, was to be supplied by costliness of dress and scenery. These last representations of the expiring Mask were the occasions of an extravagant outlay. The Inns of Court and Whitehall vied with each other in the splendor and solemnity with which they brought out-the Lawyers, Shirley's Triumph of Peace the Court, Carew's Calum Britannicum. It was a strange caprice of fortune that made the future poet of the Puritan epic the last composer of a cavalier mask. The slight plot, or story, of Comus was probably suggested to Milton by his recollection of George Peele's Old Wives' Tale, which he may have seen on the stage. The personage of Comus was borrowed from a Latin extravaganza by a Dutch professor, whose Comus was reprinted at Oxford in 1634, the very year in which Milton wrote his Mask. The so-called tradition collected by Oldys, of the young Egertons, who acted in Comus, having lost themselves in Haywood Forest on their way to Ludlow, obviously grew out of Milton's poem. However casual the suggestion, or unpromising the occasion, Milton worked out of it a strain of poetry such as had never been heard in England before. If any reader wishes to realize the immense step upon what had gone before him, which was now made by a young man of twenty-seven, he should turn over some of the most celebrated of the masks of the Jacobean period. We have no information how Comus was received when represented at Ludlow, but it found a public of readers. For Lawes, who had the MS. in his hands, was so importuned for copies that, in 1637, hẹ caused an edition to be printed off. Not surreptitiously; for though Lawes does not say, in the dedication to Lord Brackley, that he had the author's leave to print, we are sure that he had it, only from the motto. On the title page of this edition (1637) is a quotation from Virgil, "Eheu! quid volui misero mihi! floribus austrum The words are Virgil's, but the appropriation of them, and their application in this "second intention," is too exquisite to have been made by any but Milton. To the poems of the Horton period belong also the two pieces L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and Lycidas. He was probably in the early stage of acquiring the language, when he superscribed the two first poems with their Italian titles. For there is no such word as "Penseroso," the adjective formed from "Pensiero" being "pensieroso. Even had the word been written correctly, its signification is not that which Milton intended, viz., thoughtful, or contemplative, but anxious, full of cares, carking. The rapid purification of Milton's taste will be best perceived by comparing L'Allegro and Il Penseroso of uncertain date, but written after 1632, wtih the Ode on the Nativity, written 1629. The Ode, notwithstanding its foretaste of Milton's grandeur, abounds in frigid conceits, from which the two later pieces are free. The Ode is frosty, as written in winter, within the four walls of a college chamber. The two idylls breathe the free air of spring and summer, and of the fields round Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest expression our language has yet found of the fresh charm of country life, not as that life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a young and lettered student, issuing at early dawn, or at sunset, into the fields from his chamber and his books. All rural sights and sounds and smells are here blended in that ineffable combination which once or twice perhaps in our lives has saluted our young senses before their perceptions were blunted by alcohol, by Just, or ambition, or diluted by the social distractions of great cities. The fidelity to nature of the imagery of these poems has been impugned by the critics. "Then to come, in spite of sorrow, And at my window bid good-morrow." The skylark never approaches human habitations in this way, as the redbreast does. Mr. Masson replies that the subject of the verb "to come" is, not the skylark, but L'Allegro, the joyous student. I cannot construe the lines as Mr. Masson does, even though the consequence were to convict Milton, a city-bred youth, of not knowing a skylark from a sparrow when he saw it. A close observer of things around us would not speak of the eglantine as twisted, of the cowslip as wan, of the violet as glowing, or of the reed as balmy Lycidas' laureate hearse is to be strewn at once with primrose and woodbine, daffodil and jasmine. The pine is not "rooted deep as high” (P. R. 4416), but sends its roots along the surface. The elm, one of the thinnest-foliaged trees of the forest, is inappropriately named starproof Arc. 89). Lightning does not singe the top of trees (P. L. i. 613), but either shivers them, or cuts a groove down the stem to the ground. These and other such like inaccuracies must be set down partly to conventional language used without meaning, the vice of Latin versifica |