Some of Milton's Greek books have been traced; his Aratus, Lycophron, Euripides (the Stephanus of 1602), and his Pindar (the Benedictus of 1620), are still extant, with marginal memoranda, which 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 accused of often seeing an imitation where there is none, no commentary can point out the ever-present infusion of classical flavour, 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 disintered 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 verses are 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 or 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 carly 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 cir Sigonius's Historia Regni Italici. From the thirteenth centveen downwards he proposes to himself to study each Italian state in s separate history. Even before his journey to Italy he read pieces with as much ease as French. He tells us that it was by hisly in the advice that he had acquired these modern languages. Escribed the 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 1 take up with 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 period, 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 over-shadowed 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 favourite 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, Shir"y, Carew, were constrained by the fashion of the time to apply ir invention to gratify this taste for decorative representation. 'ess an artist than Inigo Jones must occasionally stoop to conthe machinery. taste for grotesque pageant in the open air must have gradout 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 splendour 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 Milton worked out of it a strain of poetry such as had never been heard in England before. If any any reader wishes to realise 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 no importuned for copies that, in 1637, he 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'AIlegro and Il Penseroso of uncertain date, but written after 1632, with 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 lust, 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, 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 grove 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 versification enforced as a task, but they are partly due to real defect of natural knowledge. Other objections of the critics on the same score, which may be met with, are easily dismissed. The objector, who can discover no reason why the oak should be styled "monumental," meets with his match in the defender who suggests that it may be rightly so called because monuments in churches are made of oak. I should tremble to have to offer an explanation to critics of Milton so acute as these two. But of less ingenious readers I would ask, if any single word can be found equal to "monumental" in its power of suggesting to the imagination the historic oak of park or chase, up to the knees in fern, which has outlasted ten generations of men; has been the mute witness of the scenes of love, treachery, or violence enacted in the baronial hall which it shadows and protects; and has been so associated with man that it is now rather a column and memorial obelisk than a tree of the forest? These are the humours of criticism. But, apart from these, a naturalist is at once aware that Milton had neither the eye nor the ear of a naturalist. At no time, even before his loss of sight, was he an exact observer of natural objects. It may be that he knew a skylark from a redbreast, and did not confound the dog-rose with the honey-suckle. But I am sure that he had never acquired that interest in nature's things and ways which leads to close and loving watching of them. He had not that sense of outdoor nature, empirical and not scientific, which endows the Angler of his cotemporary Walton with his enduring charm, and which is to be acquired only by living in the open country in childhood. Milton is not a man of the fields, but of books. His life is in his study, and when he steps abroad into the air he carries his study thoughts with him. He does look at nature, but he sees her through books. Natural impressions are received from without, but always in those forms of beautiful speech in which the poets of all ages have clothed them. His epithets are not, like the epithets of the school of Dryden and Pope, culled from the Gradus ad Parnassum; they are expressive of some reality, but it is of a real emotion in the spectator's soul, not of any quality detected by keen insight in the objects themselves. This emotion Milton's art stamps with an epithet which shall convey the added charm of classical reminiscence. When, e. g., he speaks of" the wand'ring moon," the original significance of the epithet comes home to the scholarly reader with the enhanced effect of its association with the "errantum lunam" of Horace. Nor because it is adopted from Horace has the epithet here the second-hand effect of a copy. If Milton sees nature through books, he still sees it. "To behold the wand'ring moon, Through the heaven's wide pathless way, Stooping through a fleecy cloud." No allegation that "wand'ring moon " is borrowed from Horace can hide from us that Milton, though he remembered Horace, had watched the phenomenon with a feeling so intense that he projected |