when it is found. Among the flocks, &c., appear the heathen deities, Jove, &c. He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no honour.' Again'With these trifling fictions are mingled the most awful and sacred truths. The shepherd is now a feeder of sheep, and afterwards a superintendent of a Christian flockan approach to impiety of which, however, I believe the writer not to have been conscious. No man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure had he not known the author.' It should in the first place be understood that in Milton's day English poetry had not been brought under the kind of criticism to which it has since been subjected, and that therefore we must view the Lycidas in relation to its age. But whatever incongruities a harsh and prosaic test may elicit, other critics even of Dr. Johnson's own time have held very different opinions respecting the melody, tenderness, and grandeur of this charming poem.1 Thyer (1785) observes that 'what gives the greatest grace to the whole poem is the natural and agreeable wildness and irregularity which runs through it, than which nothing could be better suited to express the affection which Milton had for his friend. Grief is eloquent, but not formal.' Hurd, though he sees 'no extraordinary wildness and irregularity in the conduct of this little poem,' remarks, 'There is a very original air in it, owing not to disorder in the plan, but to the variety of the metre. Milton's ear was a good second to his imagination.' On Johnson's comparison of Lycidas with Cowley's Elegy, Scott (Critical Essays, 1785) says, 'Cowley speaks of Hervey in propria persona; Milton is pro tem. a rustic poet.' Hence the images of the one are drawn from the study, those of the other from the field. Whatever pathos there is in either results from the recollection of friendship terminated by death.' The comparison of Milton with Cowley is about as unfortunate as any that could have been made, either as regards true feeling or true poetry. The reader may judge for himself by contrasting the following extract from the elegy on the Death of Hervey with any corresponding passage in Lycidas he may choose to select:

Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say,
Have ye not seen us walking every day ?
Was there a tree about, which did not know
The love betwixt us two?

Henceforth, ye gentle trees, for ever fade,
Or your sad branches thicker join,
And into darksome shades combine,
Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid.

Or again

Wondrous young man, why wert thou made so good
To be snatched hence, ere better understood? &c. &c.

But enough of this. We know that Dr. Johnson had no genuine appreciation of poetry; yet his shrewd intelligence and the soundness of his judgment on most literary points might have enabled him to write a fairer critique of Milton's early poems, had not the marked opposition of his religious and political principles to those of our author prejudiced his mind against the man, and thus prevented his forming an impartial estimate of the poet, even where the conflict of their respective opinions was not concerned. Hallam notes it as remarkable that Johnson had before 'selected Virgil's 10th Eclogue for peculiar praise, which belongs to the same class of allegory and requires the same sacrifice of reasoning.' As to the second objection, it may be urged that though Milton has brought together in the same poem heathen and Christian images, he has not grouped them confusedly together, nor united them in action, but dealt with them in proper succession. The passage which treats of the corruption of the clergy in Lycidas is as completely isolated as that about the Syrian shepherdess in the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester. So in the Nativity Hymn the epithet 'Great Pan' is applied to the new-born child, just as our Lord is spoken of as 'Pan,' in Spenser's 5th and 7th eclogues-the sense in which the early Church loved to express such words as those of St. John x. 11, when on the walls of the catacombs the first Christians pictured the Good Shepherd. The mingling of sacred and profane allusions appears in a more glaring form in such passages as Spenser, F. Q. 1. x. 53, where Mount Sinai and the Mount of Olives are placed with Mount Parnassus; or in Surrey's Translation of Æneid IV., where we have 'holy water stocks' in Dido's temple, and 'nun' commonly used of a pagan priestess (cf. Drayton, Ecl. 5, 'Diana's nuns'); and Shakspere's Midsummer Night's Dream, i. 1, where 'nun' and 'cloister' are mentioned along with Diana, Venus, &c. 'Church' is used of heathen temples (cf. Acts xix. 37), e.g. 'Church of Jove' in Marlowe's Lucan, and 'Church of Pallas' in Chaucer, who also calls Amphiaraus, priest of Apollo, a 'bishop.' It is therefore unfair to say that Milton is alone and conspicuous in these irregularities. The early Italian poetry also affords frequent instances of the intrusion of strictures on the clergy; the introduction of St. Peter in company with Triton and Neptune reminds us of Dante's making Cato Uticensis porter of Purgatory, and the excuse which has been offered for the one poet may fairly enough be urged for the other-' Per verità è un gran capriccio, ma in ciò segue suo stile.'1

The Lycidas may therefore be described as an allegoric pastoral representing College life and friendship, and is cast mainly in the form of Greek and Latin pastorals, though the scenery is transferred to the British isles. Nowhere is the student brought in as such; nor is the pastoral disguise ever dropped, except in the digression upon Fame and in the isolated passage about the clergy where another kind of shepherd appears upon the scene. Virgil's 10th Eclogue is in most points similar, even including those few lines (44-49) in which he describes Gallus as an actual soldier of the camp in Italy.

1 See Neve's Cursory Remarks on some English Poets (1789).

There is really the same confusion in Lycidas, though its circumstances are not quite so incongruous. Lycidas, as a shepherd, had no more to do with a shipwreck than Gallus, as a shepherd, with the army; but in the former instance the pastoral fiction passes more easily into the actual circumstances of King's death than in the case of Gallus. The allegory proper extends only to King's life and to Milton's connection with him, while the catastrophe is given as it actually occurred. So in Virgil Lycoris is not represented as an actual shepherdess, but is supposed to have literally gone away to the Alps with a rival. What gives Milton more license in his treatment is the fact that Lycidas is not an avowed pastoral, forming one of a series of the same kind; whereas Virgil's 10th Eclogue does occur in such a connection and cannot well be separated from the rest. Virgil was ostensibly engaged in pastoral compositions and introduced the story of Gallus among them; Milton however not being previously thus occupied, but starting with a desire to celebrate his lost friend's memory, availed himself of a form of poetry which was at the time most in vogue. The opening lines show that Milton had not meant to write verse again until he had attained the full maturity of that poetic power which he had long felt within him; yet the tribute due to his deceased friend overcame this resolution, and thus the expression of his grief is the pervading thought of the whole. It may even be that the fact of King's having been intended for holy orders was the starting point whence sprang those well-known lines on the English clergy which eventually became the most significant part of the poem, and the heading added in 1645 is an express intimation that Milton intended to give special prominence to lines which were originally suggested by his immediate subject, and in fact only came in by way of digression.

There are two such digressions in Lycidas (see notes on Il. 85 and 132)-one on Fame, the other on the corruptions of the clergy. Touching the first, the consideration of a life

1 See note on 'Once more,' l. I.

of youthful promise, so suddenly cut short, leads to the reflection that after all there may be no use in human labour and striving after same; but he turns from all this to the lofty truth, that the power of faultless discernment and the final meed of fame are in the hands of an all-wise and supreme Judge. Here Milton has lighted upon a grand fact of humanity which cannot be better expressed than in the words of a recent writer in the Contemporary Review (April 1872):- 'The desire for fame is the craving to be judged fairly universal instinct of mankind. Man has a right to a just judgment, which is to be welcomed as a privilege.

an

Real reputation is the reflection of the glory of God upon the lives of men; but when men feel they are not appreciated, they make their appeal to another life, and claim to stand before the eternal judgment-seat.'

The second digression is probably his first definite expression of feeling on Church matters, not as yet decidedly anti-episcopalian. He simply laments the state of things existing; but it was not till 1641 that he directly ascribed it to the influence of prelacy (Reason of Church Government). The papists ceased to be troublesome after the death of Mary of Scotland (1587), and the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588); but now the ultra-Protestant party1 began to desire an advanced reformation, having already (1563) attacked the vestments and ceremonies of the Reformed Church. Episcopacy was struck at on the ground of not being expressly ordered in Scripture, while government by elders was held to be divinely appointed.2 In 1593 an Act was passed against Romanists and Puritans equally, for non-acceptance of the Liturgy was made equivalent to

Walton (Life of Hooker) notices three parties then in England: 'the active Romanists, the restless Nonconformists, and the passive, peaceable Protestants.' The first lost power after the death of Mary; and the second he charges with 'an innate restless pride and malice-opposition

to the government and especially to the bishops.'

2 On this point see remarks of Mr. M. Arnold, in the Cornhill Magazine for Feb. 1870, on the difference between the Puritan theory and that of the Established Churches upon Church Government.