he handles are drunkenness, excess in eating, freand the like." quent banquets,

991

In George Peele's Old Wives' Tale (pub. 1595), there are two brothers searching for a lost sister who has fallen into the power of an enchanter. The enchanter has learned his magic from his witch mother, and exercises it by means of a potion which induces forgetfulness. Finally the enchantment is broken and the lady liberated. It contains also an echo-song, vaguely suggestive of the first lyric in Comus. There is no reason why Milton may not have read this play, and had one or two of its features in mind when he constructed the plot of his masque, but the method of treatment and the whole atmosphere of the two works are so utterly different that it would be a mistake to regard the Old Wives' Tale as in any important sense the original of Comus.

Even less substantial are the resemblances to Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess. This play, largely imitated from two Italian pastoral dramas, Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Pastor Fido, is entirely different in plot from Comus, and it has no characters which correspond. The resemblances chiefly consist in the fact that the virtue of chastity is the main theme of both, and in a number of small

1 Masson, Poetical Works of John Milton, Lond. and N. Y., 1894, vol. 1, pp. 174-6, abridged from Í. Schmidt's Milton's Comus, Berlin, 1860.

details none of which is important enough to justify any decided statement about Milton's indebtedness.

In the Inner Temple Masque by William Browne (1614), the chief character is Circe, whose attempts to enchant Ulysses bear some likeness to the wiles of Comus. She is surrounded by nymphs and sirens (cf. Comus, vv. 252-257) and has a following of men in beasts' shapes who dance an antimasque (cf. Comus, v. 144). It is probable that Milton derived suggestions from this production.

Other sources of detail in Comus, such as the Circe episode from the Odyssey, are pointed out in the notes.

The dialogue of Comus is written in the blank verse of ten syllables with five accents, which was the usual metre of the English drama. One passage (vv. 495-512) is rhymed in couplets. There are besides two long lyrical passages (vv. 93-144 and 902-1023) in the same octosyllabic metre as the greater part of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. The songs are made up of a variety of lines, variously rhymed.

V. LYCIDAS

Lycidas was written in 1637, and published in the following year as the last of a collection of poems by various hands, lamenting the death of Edward King, a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. In August, 1637, King had set out to

visit relatives in Ireland; but the vessel in which he was crossing the Irish Sea foundered and was lost. Milton and he had been at Christ's at the same time, and though the intimacy between them was not of such warmth as that existing between Milton and Charles Diodati, for whom he wrote his Latin elegy, (the Epitaphium Damonis), he yet seems to have known King well, and to have had a sincere admiration for both his character and his ability.

The poem is a pastoral elegy following the tradition begun by Theocritus. In works of this type, the scene is laid in a fanciful Sicily or Arcadia, whose inhabitants are figured as shepherds, spending their days watching their sheep and playing on their pipes of straw. The example of the Sicilian School had been followed by Vergil and other classical writers, and with the Renaissance there had come a great revival of the pastoral throughout western Europe. The idea had been used not only in elegy but also in prose romance and in the drama; and Milton had English examples in such works as Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and The Faithful Shepherdess of John Fletcher. He had already employed the pastoral fiction in Arcades and in parts of Comus, and throughout the present poem the setting and imagery are of this nature.

The poem opens with a statement of the occasion (vv. 1-14), and this is followed by the conventional invocation of the Muses (vv. 15-22).

The pastoral proper begins with v. 23, where he images the life of King and himself while students at Cambridge, following the same studies and alike experimenting in poetry, as that of two young shepherds, born on the same hillside, herding their flocks together, and piping on the oaten flute. This figure is kept up throughout the poem, except in the digressions.

The first of these (vv. 64-84) deals with Poetry and Fame, and is very significant of the spirit in which Milton devoted himself to a poetical career. In it he rises from the lower view of Fame as mere worldly reputation to a conception of it as the stamp of divine approval.

The lament is then resumed (v. 85) in an attempt to fix the blame for the disaster, and at v. 108 St. Peter is introduced as the guardian of the church he founded, lamenting the death of so promising a youth at a time when the ministry was crowded with hirelings. In this digression on the state of the English Church, the service of which King had intended to enter, we have a splendid burst of indignation against those abuses which from Milton's point of view were bringing the Church into deeper and deeper degradation.1

1 See Section I of this Introduction.

His hope that a short and effective remedy was at hand is expressed in vv. 130, 1.

The elegy proper is then taken up again (vv. 165-185), and he rises from the tone of regret that has prevailed hitherto to a triumphant assertion of his friend's immortality. In these lines he leaves the classical and pagan allusions which, following the tradition of the pastoral, he had freely introduced in the earlier pages, and adopts the language of the New Testament.

In the last eight lines we have a kind of epilogue in which Milton separates himself from the speaker in the foregoing lament, tells of the close of the shepherd's lay, and refers symbolically to his own approaching change of occupation.

The metre of Lycidas consists mainly of tensyllabled lines, with the accents on the even syllables. It is rhymed irregularly, but with the most subtly musical effect; and it is varied by the occasional introduction of a blank verse line and of a shorter line of three accents.' So successfully has Milton used this freedom that the poem ranks as one of the most varied and best sustained pieces of rhythm in the language.

1 For examples of blank verse lines, see vv. 1, 22, 39, 51, 82, 91, 161; of lines of three accents, see vv. 4, 19, 21, 33, 41, 43, 48, 56, 79, 88, 90, 95, 108, 145.