The Sorcerer, awed, but still persevering, prays the Lady only to taste, when her Brothers rush in with drawn swords, wrest the glass from his hand, and dash it to pieces. Comus and his crew resist slightly, but are driven away and dispersed. Thyrsis then, coming in after the Brothers, finds that unfortunately they have not attended to his instruction to seize the enchanter's wand. The Lady is still marble-bound to her chair, from which the motion of the wand might have freed her. To effect this, Thyrsis proposes a new device. It is to invoke Sabrina, the nymph of the adjacent and far-famed Severn river. Who so likely to succour distressed maidenhood as she, that daughter of Locrine, the son of Brutus, who, as ancient British legends told, had flung herself, to preserve her honour, into the stream which had since borne her name? By way of invocation of Sabrina, Thyrsis (i.e. Lawes) sings what is now the second song in the masque, but is the third in Lawes's arrangement,-the exquisite song beginning "Sabrina fair." Obeying the invocation, Sabrina rises, attended by water-nymphs, and sings the song By the rushy-fringed bank,”—the third song in Milton's arrangement, the fourth in Lawes's. She then performs the expected office of releasing the Lady by sprinkling drops of pure water upon her and touching thrice her lips and finger-tips. Sabrina descends, and the Lady rises from her seat. But, though she is now free from the spell of Comus in his enchanted wood, it remains to convey her and her brothers safely to their father's residence, where their arrival is waited for. Accordingly, after an ode of thanks to Sabrina for her good service, with blessings on the stream that bears her name, the supposed Thyrsis continues :

"Come, Lady; while Heaven lends us grace,
Let us fly this cursed place,
Lest the Sorcerer us entice
With some other new device.
Not a waste or needless sound
Till we come to holier ground.
I shall be your faithful guide
Through the gloomy covert wide;
And not many furlongs thence

66

All the swains that there abide

With jigs and rural dance resort.
We shall catch them at their sport
And our sudden coming there

Will double all their mirth and cheer.

Come, let us haste! the stars grow high,

But Night sits monarch yet in the mid sky."

Thyrsis, the Lady, and the two Brothers, here leave the stage, and are supposed to be gradually wending their way through the wood, while it is still night, or very early morning, towards Ludlow Castle. While the spectators are imagining this, the journey of some furlongs is actually achieved; for straightway "the scene changes, presenting Ludlow Town and the President's Castle: then come in country dancers; after them the Attendant Spirit, with the two Brothers and the Lady.' In this stage-direction it seems to be implied that the spectators now looked on some canvas at the back of the stage, representing Ludlow Town, and the exterior of the very castle they were sitting in, all bright on a sunshiny morning, and that, as they looked, there came in first a bevy of rustic lads and lasses, or representatives of such, dancing and making merry, till their clodhopping rounds were interrupted by the appearance among them of the guardian Thyrsis and the three graceful young This is confirmed by what Thyrsis says to the dancers in the song which stands fourth in the printed masque, but must have been the fifth in the actual performance :

ones.

"Back, shepherds, back! Enough your play
Till next sunshine holiday."

So dismissed, the clodhoppers vanish; and there remain on the stage, facing the Earl and Countess and the audience, only (we may drop the disguise now, as doubtless the audience did in their cheering) the musician Lawes, the Lady Alice, and her brothers Viscount Brackley and Master Thomas Egerton. Advancing towards the Earl and Countess, Lawes presents to them his charge, with this continuation of his last song :

"Noble Lord and Lady bright,
I have brought ye new delight.
Here behold so goodly grown

Three fair branches of your own," etc.

There seems still to have been a dance at this point, to show off the courtly grace of the young people after the thumping energy of the clodhoppers; for at the end of Lawes's song there comes this last stage-direction, "The dances ended, the Spirit epiloguizes." That is to say, Lawes, relapsing into his character of the Attendant Spirit, who had descended from Heaven at the beginning of the piece, and had acted so beneficially through it in the guise of the shepherd Thyrsis, winds up the whole by a final speech or song as he slowly recedes or reascends. In our printed copies the Epilogue is a longish speech; but part of that speech, as we have seen, had been transferred, in the actual performance, to the beginning of the masque, as the Spirit's opening song. Therefore in the actual performance the closing lines of the Epilogue as we now have it served as the Spirit's song of reascent or departure, in two stanzas :

"Now my task is smoothly done:

I can fly, or I can run,

Quickly to the green Earth's end,

Where the bowed welkin slow doth bend,
And from thence can soar as soon

To the corners of the moon.

"Mortals that would follow me,

Love Virtue! She alone is free :
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or, if Virtue feeble were,

Heaven itself would stoop to her."

The

And So, "with these sounds left on the ear, and a final glow of angelic light on the eye, the performance ends, and the audience rises and disperses through the Castle. Castle is now a crumbling ruin, along the ivy-clad walls and through the dark passages of which the visitor clambers or gropes his way, disturbing the crows and the martlets in their recesses: but one can stand yet in the doorway through which the parting guests of that night descended into the inner court; and one can see where the stage was, on which the sister was lost by her brothers, and Comus revelled with his crew, and the Lady was fixed as marble by enchantment, and the swains danced in welcome of the Earl, and the Spirit ascended gloriously to his native

heaven. More mystic still it is to leave the ruins, and, descending one of the winding streets of Ludlow that lead from the Castle to the valley of the Teme, to look upwards to Castle and Town seen as one picture, and, marking more expressly the three long pointed windows that gracefully slit the chief face of the wall towards the north, to realise that it was from that ruin and from those windows in the ruin, that the verse of Comus was first shaken into the air of England."- -So I wrote a good many years ago, when the impressions of a visit I had made to Ludlow were fresh and vivid; and as I copy the words now, they bring back, as it were in a dream, the pleasant memory of one bygone day. I remember my first sight of the hilly town as I walked into it early on a summer's morning, when not a soul was astir, and the clean streets were all silent and shuttered; then my ramble at my own will for an hour or so over the Castle ruins and the green knoll they crown, undisturbed by guide or any figure of fellow-tourist; then my descent again, past and round the great church and its tombs, into the steep town streets, now beginning their bustle for a marketday; and, finally, the lazy circuit I made round the green outskirts of the town, through I know not what glens and up their sloping sides, the ruined Castle always finely distinct close at hand, and in the distance, wherever the eye could range unopposed, a fairy horizon of dim blue mountains.

There is no evidence that Milton himself had taken the journey of 150 miles from London or Horton in order to be present at the performance. It is possible that he had done so; but it is just as possible that he had not, and even that the authorship of the masque was kept a secret at the time of its performance, known only to Lawes, or to Lawes and the Earl's family. But the Earl of Bridgewater's masque began to be talked of beyond Ludlow; as time passed, and the rumour of it spread, and perhaps the songs in it were carried vocally into London society by Lawes and his pupils of the Bridgewater family, it was still more talked of; and there came to be inquiries respecting its authorship, and requests for copies of it, and especially of the songs. All this we learn from Lawes. His loyalty to his friend Milton in the whole affair was admirable; and he appears to have been more proud, in his own heart, of his concern with the comparatively

quiet Bridgewater masque than with his more blazoned and well-paid co-operation in the London masques of the same year. There were many friends of his, it appears, who were not satisfied with copies of the songs and their music only, but wanted complete copies of the masque. To relieve himself from the trouble so occasioned, Lawes resolved at length to print the masque. He did so in 1637 in a small, and now very rare, quarto of forty pages, with this title. page :

"A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, on Michaelmasse Night, before the Right Honourable John, Earle of Bridgewater, Viscount Brackley, Lord President of Wales, and one of His Majesties most honourable Privy Counsell.

'Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus Austrum

Perditus

London: Printed for Humphrey Robinson, at the signe of the Three Pidgeons in Paul's Churchyard, 1637."

We

The volume was dedicated by Lawes to the Earl's son and heir, young Viscount Brackley, who had acted the part of Elder Brother in the masque. The Dedication complete will be found prefixed to Comus in the present edition. learn from it that the proposal of publication was Lawes's own, and that Milton still preferred the shelter of the anonymous. That Lawes had Milton's consent, however, is proved by the motto on the title-page. It is from Virgil's Second Eclogue, and must certainly have been supplied by Milton. "Alas! what have I chosen for my wretched self; thus on my flowers, infatuated that I am, letting in the rude wind!" So says the shepherd in Virgil's Eclogue; and Milton, in borrowing the words, hints his fear that he may have done ill in letting his Comus be published. Though he was now twenty-eight years of age, it was, with hardly an exception, his first public venture in print. "Comus," says

He had no reason to regret the venture. Hallam, "was sufficient to convince any one of taste and feeling that a great poet had arisen in England, and one partly formed in a different school from his contemporaries.” Such a strong judgment is easily formed now; but there may have been some in England capable of forming it when it was a merit to form it, i.e. in 1637 (the year of Ben Jonson's death), when modest copies of Lawes's edition, without the