trinsically, therefore, the literary value of the Hymn, as the direct predecessor of Milton's masterpiece, is greater than that of any other of the earlier poems, unless indeed Mr. Pattison is right when he asserts that Milton's poetry reached its high-water mark in the Lycidas, and that the promise with which the Lycidas concludes was never fulfilled.

(4) It is (to my mind at least) wholly inexplicable how the poet of the Hymn on the Nativity could have, shortly afterwards, produced the stanzas on the Passion, in which, if we did not know that Milton wrote them, we should surely not imagine that we could detect the slightest trace of Miltonic music or Miltonic imagination. The fact that Milton left the thing unfinished, "nothing satisfied with what was begun", does not explain how he could have written, and printed, these stanzas-especially the last two. The pieces upon the Circumcision and on Time, written in the same year (1630), contain some fine lines and thoughts, and the Epitaph on Shakespeare, except for the dissonance of its concluding "conceit", is dignified and beautiful. Grander and more full of true Miltonic harmonies1 is the piece entitled At a Solemn Music. In rhythm and language it somewhat resembles certain passages in the Lycidas, but the strain is of a higher mood. There is nothing in the Lycidas so fine as the well-known lines

"Where the bright seraphim in burning row
Their loud up-lifted angel-trumpets blow,
And the cherubic host in thousand choirs

Touch their immortal harps of golden wires".

imaginative sublimity; and there are others, presumably competent judges, who seem quite sincerely to prefer Milton's earlier poems; as there are persons who prefer Raphael's Madonnas to his Frescoes or the Tapestries. Quot homines, tot sententiae. I am, however, puzzled by Mr. Pattison's assertion that Milton's earlier poems 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". Shakespeare died when Milton was a child of about seven years of age.

1 The only thing that seems to me to "jar against the chime" is the rather pedantic allusion to the Pythagorean theory of harmony contained in the ugly word "disproportioned".

(5) Omitting without comment two epitaphs and the Song on May Morning, apparently the sole products of the year 1631, we come to the Arcades, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso, which were probably written in 1633. By this time Milton had left Cambridge, and for the first time was living amidst country scenes and the beauties of nature. Though unable to discard those student-spectacles through which (as Dryden justly remarks) he ever regarded nature, he found in these scenes a new poetic motive.

From its position in the Cambridge MSS. it seems likely that the Arcades was written very soon after Milton had left the University—perhaps before. In it there is no trace of the new motive. We are still in "famous Arcady "—the Arcady of the student of Theocritus and Virgil.1 The piece formed part of a mask "presented to the Countess Dowager of Derby, at Harefield", the scene of the mask being the elmavenue called the Queen's Walk, "a memorial of the visit of Elizabeth, during which she had heard Burbidge's players first play Othello"? In the speech of the Genius there is a passage of great beauty on one of Milton's favourite themes -the music of the spheres; otherwise the poem is of little interest.

In L'Allegro we meet for the first time in Milton's poems pictures sketched directly from nature. Instead of calling up visions in our mind by the "intimation" of some picturesque epithet, or by some "suggestion" of scenes described by other poets, he sketches with a few graphic touches the actual scene, as he himself saw it--which was as such things are seen by a clever water-colourist rather than as they are seen by a poet of nature. Such little pictures he occasionally introduced in the Paradise, though they occur less frequently than in Dante's poem, where they fulfil quite another function. In these graceful idylls they are subordinated to no

1 Even through "spectacles of books" Milton might have discerned that no such poet as Theocritus or Virgil would speak of the elm as "star-proof" or emphasize the sandiness of a river when speaking of its "lilied banks". 2 Stopford Brooke.

imaginative idea. They are merely skilfully arranged in two groups representing aspects which the external world presents to the light-hearted and to the pensive man. Although the scenes chosen for these studies in light and shade are in no case identical there is a very perceptible resemblance in the order of their arrangement, the Allegro being, as Mr. Stopford Brooke expresses it, "parallel thought by thought, scene by scene, with the Penseroso". As the external universe is the resultant of opposing forces, so these two poems together form a poetic unity, reminding one of Thorwaldsen's celebrated relief of "Day and Night". Whether Milton in these two poems "represents Nature, and Man, and Art, as they appear to a man filled with an imaginative joy and an imaginative sadness", or whether his "theme is man, in two contrasted moods, the shifting scenery ministering to the varying mood ", is a question that the reader may decide for himself, if he thinks it worth deciding. And whether Milton in these idylls has "recorded a day of twenty-four hours", or has not bound himself by any such dramatic unity

a point on which critics are much at variance-is not worth discussion. My conviction is that whatever other and greater attraction the critic may find in them, the unmetaphysical reader is attracted to them not by any "portraiture of a mind in two contrasted moods", but by their exquisitely drawn and coloured (if sometimes rather "made up") pictures of the external world, by the delicate play of poetic fancy, the felicity of the diction, and the dainty grace of the light fantastic rhythm.

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For the student of Milton's life and works there is another point of interest which must not be passed over. Even in L'Allegro there is, as Dr. Johnson says, Some melancholy in the mirth". The solitary figure of the cheerful man is depressing; his jollity seems a little forced; one suspects that he will be right glad to get back to his books and lamp, as Faust was after his Easter-Sunday experiences of nature and humanity. In Il Penseroso, on the contrary (which, by

the way, was probably written before L'Allegro), melancholy has no tendency whatever to mirth. Milton describes con amore the delights of thoughtful sadness.1 Mirth may have amused a holiday, but it is "divinest Melancholy" who is to be his lifelong companion. "For the old age of Cheerfulness", Dr. Johnson acutely remarks, “he makes no provision, but Melancholy he conducts with great dignity to the close of life".

There is already no doubt on which side Milton will range himself. But there is as yet none of the moral indignation that we hear in the Comus, far less any such fierce personal denunciation as that of the Lycidas; in silent ecstasy though with gloomy brow the Penseroso still paces the dim cathedral.

(6) The original title of the Comus (which name was given to it after Milton's death) was "A Mask presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, before the Earl of Bridgewater, Lord President of Wales". It “had the honour", as Dr. Johnson expresses it, of being acted by the earl's sons and daughter. The music of the mask was composed by Henry Lawes,2 who three years later published the poem with Milton's permission.

I have already spoken of the Comus in the biographical sketch. Every reader of the poem who has contracted and not outlived the habit of classifying such things will best judge for himself whether he agrees with Dr. Johnson, who calls it "the greatest of Milton's juvenile performances”, and who, while condemning it as a drama, extols it as 1 Penseroso is an old Italian word meaning "thoughtful", as anyone can discover by reference to such dictionaries as Michaelis or Il Grande. Mr. Pattison's assertion that Milton miswrote it for pensieroso (which means anxious") is wrong, as I have pointed out in my notes to Macaulay's Essay.

2 See Milton's sonnet addressed to him. He was the best-known English composer of the day, and doubtless acquainted professionally with Milton's father. It was he who received the earl's commission to supply a musical mask (his music being of course the thing of first importance), and he applied to Milton for a libretto. From his dedicatory epistle affixed to the published poem we learn that he acted the part of Thyrsis in the mask, and also that he had the modesty and generosity to allow that Milton's libretto was likely to live without the aid of his music.

'poetry". In passing it may be amusing, if not edifying, to observe what Dr. Johnson means by "poetry". His conception of it may be seen pretty clearly from the following:"A work more truly poetical (than the Comus) is rarely found; allusions, images, and descriptive epithets embellish almost every period with lavish decoration. As a series of lines, therefore, it may be considered as worthy of all the admiration with which the votaries have received it."

Perhaps not apart from the value of Comus as poetry, the fact is of interest that it is the first of Milton's poems in which his true self found genuine and distinct utterance. Hitherto we have had intellectual and æsthetic preferences; we have had scholarship, taste, imagination, and the music of words; we have had not only theology but also lofty sentiment; but there has been very little sign of what Tolstoi calls poetry, namely, "imaginative expression of deep religious consciousness". Rightly understood, Tolstoi's definition is probably far nearer the truth than all that is dreamed of in the philosophy of "art for art's sake". But however that may be, and granted that Milton had already expressed lofty moral sentiment not only by his life but also in words (as, for instance, in his second sonnet and his conception1 of the true poet), the fact remains that in the Comus he gives us for the first time in any distinctly imaginative form an expression of what Tolstoi means by religious consciousness -of that true self, which (to use Wordsworth's metaphor) is the very pulse of the machine of sense and intellect.

...

"The Milton of Comus is not the Milton of the Penseroso, still less of the Allegro. . . . Milton is driven away from the Allegro point of view. In Comus the wild licence of court society is set over against the grave and temperate virtue of a Puritan life. The unchastity, the glozing lies, the glistering

1"I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things." These words were written in 1642, but describe his early convictions.