music for its own sake. Cf. L'Allegro, ll. 136-144, Il Penseroso, l. 161-166, and Paradise Lost, I, 550-559 (in which he describes martial music). No one but a musician could have written so fully and so technically. Lines 139-144 of L'Allegro exactly describe the elaborations of the seventeenth century songs. Milton played both the bass viol and the organ. Observe also the prominence he ascribes to music in his scheme of education, p. 209.

Metrically, each poem begins with a ten-line introduction in alternate short and long lines, and then drops into the regular beat of the eightsyllabled iambic couplet. There is, however, a great difference in effect caused by the omission in more than a third of the lines of L'Allegro of the unaccented first syllable, which gives a tripping trochaic movement (cf., for example, II. 25-34, and ll. 69-70, which are actually trochaic). In Il Penseroso this unaccented syllable is kept in more than seven-eighths of the lines and gives a slower, more regular movement (cf., for example, ll. 155176).

L'Allegro

ll. 33-68. One long, loosely constructed sentence, the effect of which is to give a hurried, almost breathless movement. to come (1. 45) is parallel with singing (1. 42) and begin (1. 41), though it can scarcely be said to depend upon hear (1. 41); while To hear and listening (1. 53) and walking (1. 57) are parallel and refer to the poet.

P. 193. 1. 83. Corydon and Thyrsis, neighbors, as in Vergil, Eclogues, VII (where they are called "Arcades ambo"). Phillis (1. 86), regularly associated with the former in pastoral verse and praised by both in the Eclogue just cited, is waiting on them. Thestylis here is apparently a woman's name, as in Theocritus, Idyls, II, and Vergil, Eclogues, II.

1. 102. fairy Mab. See Drayton's Nymphidia, p. 150, and the note on it.

1. 104. Apparently a confusion of will o' the wisp ("ignis fatuus") which appeared outdoors, and Friar Rush, a demonic apparition that haunted houses; the drudging goblin is Puck or Robin Goodfellow. See A Midsummer Night's Dream, II, i, 16-57.

1. 136. soft Lydian airs, voluptuous music.

Il. 145-150. Orpheus by his music persuaded Pluto, the god of Hades, to give him back his wife Eurydice, from the dead. But he broke Pluto's condition that he should not look back at her until they had left Hades, and so lost her again. Cf. Gayley's Classic Myths, pp. 185-188, Ovid, Meta

morphoses, X, 1-77, and Vergil, Georgics, IV, 453506.

Il Penseroso

The germ of this poem is in Fletcher's Sweetest Melancholy, p. 173 (cf. note on that poem).

P. 194. ll. 83-84. The bellman was a night watchman who passed through the streets ringing a bell and calling out the hours and the weather. He also pronounced a blessing on the sleeping city. 1. 88. thrice-great Hermes. Hermes Trismegistus, the Greek god Hermes (Roman Mercury) who came to be identified with the Egyptian Thoth, and was the reputed author of magical, alchemical, and astrological works.

Il. 99-100. The three great subjects of the classical drama, of which Milton was a devoted admirer. That he cared less for the Elizabethan drama appears from ll. 101-102.

11. 109-115. Chaucer. The persons named are in the unfinished Squire's Tale, to which Milton refers perhaps as a type of pure romance.

P. 195. ll. 116-120. Probably The Faerie Queene which Milton admired and imitated.

Il. 156-160. The characteristic features of Gothic architecture: the cloister, which is always attached to a cathedral, the vaulted roof, pillars massive and strong, and stained-glass windows. But on this point Milton was not in accord with the taste of the times. About thirty years after he wrote these lines, Sir Christopher Wren rebuilt many of the churches destroyed by the Great Fire of London, in a very different style of architecture; and it was not until a century later that a liking for the Gothic was revived.

LYCIDAS

Contributed for the memorial volume of Latin poems published by the friends of Edward King, whose death is referred to in the note at the beginning of the poem. Milton had been five years away from Cambridge, with which King was still connected at the time of his death. There is no evidence, external or internal, of any special friendship between the men; and almost half the poem is given to Milton's own ideas and affairs (ll. 19-22 and 64-84), a lament over the corruption of the church (Il. 114-131), and elaborate embellishments in imitation both of classical elegiasts and of Spenser.

The framework of Lycidas, following the general conventions of the Greek pastoral, is as follows:

came and hurled into the sea off the Cornish coast. The name Bellerus, used here instead of Corineus, seems to be coined from Bellerium, the Roman name of Land's End. St. Michael is supposed to have appeared in a vision, seated on a crag of the rocky island now called St. Michael's Mount. Milton conceives him as still sitting there and looking toward Spain (Namancos and Bayona, near Cape Finisterre). In 1. 163, Milton bids him look back towards England and sympathize.

1. 189. Doric, i.e., pastoral. Applied to the Sicilian poets, who were of Dorian extraction, and characterizing their affectation of simplicity.

1. 190. Perhaps an elaboration of what Vergil says of the shadows of the hills in Eclogues, I, 84, and II, 67, with a reminiscence of Hamlet's expression in Hamlet II, ii, 270.

1. 191. western bay, perhaps Chester Bay, from which King had sailed.

SONNETS

P. 198. Milton's sonnets return to the Italian form, but in matter they are, for the most part, absolutely original, and a direct expression of strong personal feeling. On Milton's relation to the earlier sonneteers, cf. Wordsworth's Scorn Not the Sonnet, p. 396.

WHEN THE ASSAULT WAS INTENDED TO THE CITY

Written in November, 1642, when an attack on London by the Royalist forces was expected. As Milton was an ardent Parliamentarian pamphleteer, his house, just outside one of the city gates, was in danger. The original title read: "On his dore when ye city expected an assault," as if the sonnet had been really intended as a defence.

1. 13. A chorus from the Electra of Euripides, recited by a ministrel before the conquerors of Athens, caused them to spare the city.

TO THE LORD GENERAL CROMWELL, MAY, 1652

Cromwell had completed a series of victories over the Royalists on the river Darwen, and at Dunbar and Worcester, as a result of which Charles II was driven into exile. Meanwhile, the committee named in the subtitle was proposing religious reconstruction. Milton feared that the Presbyterians would establish a state system simi

The thorough fusion in Milton of the spirit of the Renaissance, the love of classical themes and treatment, and the spirit of Puritanism, the struggle towards a higher ethical plane by means of a revival of Hebraism, is unique in English literature. His avowed purpose to write "Things unattempted yet in prose or rime" (l. 16), in order to "justify the ways of God to men" (1. 26), is equalled in its daring only by the plan of Dante's Divina Commedia. His poetical achievement, however, is quite apart from his theological purpose, and lies in his marvellous power of reproducing in sound and rhythm the visions that came to his imagination, and in the tremendous swing and wonderful flexibility of his blank verse. Note how he gets variety by inverting his sentence order, as, for instance, in ll. 44-47, and by varying the number of stressed syllables in a line, as, for example, in ll. 209-215. Cf. Gray's appreciation of Milton in The Progress of Poesy, ll. 95-102, p. 318.

Milton's classical training and his many years of handling official correspondence in Latin made him so familiar with that language that he continually uses words derived from the Latin in a sense fully warranted by their origin but uncommon in English. For example, in 1. 2, mortal

Of Education

Milton's essay on Education is a small tract of eight pages. It was published in 1644 in response to a request for his views from his friend Samuel Hartlib, a man of a good Polish family who had come to England about 1628 and amid all the civil strife of the time had devoted himself to scientific studies for the improvement of education, agriculture, and manufactures. Milton's plan of study, as set forth in his tractate, is too ambitious for all but students of extraordinary abilities, but it is noteworthy that, like Hartlib's, his conception of education was distinctly modern. Although himself a great classical scholar and linguist, he treats of the languages as tools, instruments for helping the student to a knowledge of things, and suggests that most of them can be learned incidentally in odd moments of leisure. He emphasizes the study of the sciences and of the arts (particularly music); and he lays great stress upon training students as men who are to bear a responsible part in the life and government of the nation. The section on Exercise shows that, although he makes little provision for play, aside from the recreation of music, he believed in the cultivation of the body as well as of the mind. But in this he was in harmony with the generál ideals of the Renais

sance.

Areopagitica

Pp. 210 ff. June 14, 1643, Parliament appointed various committees to control the licensing of books. This restriction of the freedom of the press was due partly to the desire of the Presbyterians in power to prevent such publications as Milton's own pamphlet on divorce, for example, and partly to the effort of the Stationers' Company (the organization of printers and publishers) to protect their copyrights. Milton was called to account in 1644 for disregarding the new regulations, and November 24 of that year he published the Areopagitica, itself unlicensed. The title means: matters befitting the high court of the Areopagus, the famous Athenian tribunal, here, of course, referring to Parliament. It is easy to see that the theme was one after Milton's own heart.

P. 210 a. Cadmus sowed, at Athene's command, the teeth of a dragon that he had slain and so obtained a crop of armed men to help him with the building of Thebes. Cf. Ovid's Metamorphoses, III, 1-137. A similar story is told of Jason.

P. 210 b. those confused seeds which were im

posed on Psyche. Psyche had fallen into the hands of Venus, who punished her, for having won the love of Cupid, by making her separate seeds of wheat, millet, poppy, vetches, lentils, and beans, mixed all together. She was to place each kind of seed in a separate heap and to finish the task by evening. As Psyche sat in despair, an ant took pity on her and summoning the whole tribe of ants, accomplished the work within the time set. The story of Cupid and Psyche is told in The Golden Ass of Apuleius, Bks. IV-VI.

P. 212 a. the old philosophy of this island. There was a theory that the Pythagorean and Zoroastrian doctrines were derived from the wisdom of the Druids, the priesthood of the early Britons. as far as the mountainous borders of Russia and beyond the Hercynian wilderness. The mountains bordering Transylvania are a part of the Carpathians. The Hercynian wilderness was a mountainous tract of forest land in southern and central Germany (the name survives in Hars and Erzgebirge), many miles to the northeast of Transylvania. But Milton's geography is vague and rhetorical; he cared more for the sonority and associations of a geographical name than for its exact significance.

P. 212 b. muing her mighty youth, etc. Renewing her youth as an eagle renews its feathers by moulting. In medieval bird-fable the eagle's keen sight was supposed to be actually kindled and her youth renewed by flying up near to the sun, as Milton says. See the Middle English "Bestiary" in Emerson's Middle English Reader, or in Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English. In Milton's figure the sun is truth; in the Middle English poem the sun is God and the eagle is the soul.

P. 213 a. Ye cannot make us, etc. You cannot make us again as we were before you gave us liberty. We, with our finer ideals, are the result of your own high ideals in the past, and to undo your good work now would be like a reversion to that barbarous ancient law which permitted parents to kill their own children. If you did, who would stand up for you and urge others to do so? Not such patriots as rose against illegal taxation.

Coat and conduct, the clothing and conveyance of troops. On this ground taxes were unjustly levied.

his four nobles of Danegelt, ship-money. Danegelt means literally Dane-money, and in Saxon times was a tax levied to protect England against the invasions of the Danes. It is not clear why Milton should have specified four nobles (268. Sd.).