fine talents and amiable character, King had a brilliant college career; he became a Fellow of his college when only just out of his undergraduateship; took his Master's degree in 1633; and was presently made a tutor.

On

was at this time busily preparing himself to enter the Church. That he was extremely popular with all who knew him is perfectly clear; nor is it less clear that he impressed friends and strangers alike as a man who was certain to make his mark in the world and to become a leader in the cause of goodness and truth. But as in the case of Arthur Hallam, of whom King inevitably reminds us, fate mysteriously intervened, and the high promises of these early years never found fruition. In the Long Vacation of 1637, with the intention of visiting relatives in Ireland, he set out from Chester Bay in a vessel bound for Dublin. August 10, in absolutely calm weather, the illstarred ship struck a rock on the Welsh coast, and foundered. A few of the passengers were saved. Among those who perished was Edward King. The news of his tragic death came as a sad shock to his college friends and associates, who resolved to enshrine their affection and grief in a book of memorial verses. As a number of writers were asked to contribute, there was some delay in the completion of the work, and the volume did not appear till the following year. It contained twenty-three poems in Greek and Latin and thirteen in English. "Lycidas," which Milton had

finished in November 1637, is the last, as it is the longest, in the English division.

like

In form and method "Lycidas,' "Comus," is directly connected with the Renaissance and its classicism. It belongs to the kind of poetry which we call the pastoral elegy; that is, it is an elegy in the shape of a song sung by a shepherd mourning for a dead companion, and is full of conventional bucolic imagery. For the origin of this particular type of elegy we have to go back to the pastoral poetry of later Greek literature, and especially to the "Lament for Adonis by the Ionian poet Bion, and the "Lament for Bion" by Moschus of Syracuse. At the time of the revival of learning, when the masterpieces of Greek and Latin antiquity became the objects of unbounded and indeed undiscriminating admiration, the pastoral elegy, like all other kinds of classical poetry, passed into modern European literature, and in this as in other cases admiration naturally led to imitation. Thus Spenser's Astrophel, a memorial poem on the death of "the most noble and virtuous knight, Sir Philip Sidney," is conceived and executed upon the strict lines of the Greek pastoral elegy, and in its extreme artificiality may indeed be regarded as a typical example of the courtly-classic taste which prevailed in English non-dramatic literature during the Elizabethan age. These lines Milton again follows in "Lycidas," in which, instead of expressing directly his sorrow for the loss of his friend, he adopts the convention

of a lamenting shepherd, the bucolic tone and manner which had become inseparable from the elegiac tradition, and all the accessory pastoral details of the well-established academic form. It is important to lay stress upon the purely derivative character of Milton's machinery and to refer this to its true sources, as otherwise we shall be very apt to find fault with the poem, as Johnson found fault with it, for its want of nature and truth. Edward King, we may say, was a young college man of seventeenth-century England, and not a shepherd; he had no connection, save in literature, with the fauns and satyrs who are here made his companions; he and Milton never tended sheep together; in a word, the whole setting of the poem is a piece of elaborate and unconvincing make-believe. But we must remember that in this sort of criticism we are expressing the taste of our time and are making no allowance for that of Milton's age, and that to him and to his classically trained readers what seems to us so artificial appeared perfectly natural and fitting. Moreover, while Milton reproduces all the stereotyped Arcadian externals of his models, he does none the less contrive to keep very close to actuality. "Through the guise of all the pastoral circumstances and imagery," as Masson well says, "there is a studious representation of the facts of King's brief life and his accidental death, and of Milton's regard for him, and academic intimacy with him.” Here we note the extreme interest of the passage already referred to-the

passage beginning: "For we were nursed upon the self-same hill." In this, under the conventional forms of pastoral expression, we have a clear rendering of personal history. "The hill," as Masson explains, "is, of course, Cambridge; the joint feeding of the flock is companionship in study; the rural ditties on the oaten pipe are academic iambics and elegiacs; and old Damætas is either Chappel [Milton's first tutor] . or some more kindly Fellow of Christ's."

Like "Comus," then, "Lycidas" is a product of the art and learning of the Renaissance; but also, like "Comus," though in a far more direct and obvious way, it is the vehicle of a religious and ethical spirit which is fundamentally foreign to that art and learning. In saying this, I am not thinking only of its general religious thought, here again so curiously combined with the imagery of pagan mythology; of its splendid enunciation of faith in immortality; or even of its high and strenuous moral temper. I mean that in Lycidas Milton is at length definitely Puritan; that his Puritanism is no longer merely implicit as a pervading influence, but has become specific, militant, ecclesiastical. This is shown in the famous passage of denunciation, spoken by St. Peter, which breaks in upon the low, sweet strains of the elegy like the sudden sound of a trumpetblast calling to battle, and in which for the moment the classic poet's mood of tender meditation is exchanged for the stern zeal of the

Hebrew prophet proclaiming the wrath to come. In the judgment of many critics this fierce attack upon the corrupt clergy of the time-no true shepherds (for so the pastoral metaphor is carried out), but mere hirelings-is an artistic mistake; it is not, they urge, in keeping with the body of the monody, and is fatal to that unity of feeling and tone by which such a poem should be characterised. But even if it be, strictly speaking, out of place, it is only the more conclusive testimony to the strength of the poet's emotion, which thus imperatively demands an outlet. To understand its significance we must remember not only the change in Milton's mind, but also the course of events by which that change had been brought about. Three years had passed since "Comus" was written, and that brief intervening period had witnessed continual encroachments by the king and his ill-advising counsellors upon the constitutional and religious liberties of the English people. The absolutism which Charles and Strafford were endeavouring to establish in the State, Laud on his side was equally determined to establish in the Church. A harsh, narrowminded, and obstinate despot, he ruthlessly pursued his policy of stamping out every suggestion of Puritanism in the Anglican communion, destroying freedom of conscience and of worship, and forcing the whole of religious England into that rigid uniformity of public ritual which was his ideal. At the same time, while he had recourse to the most brutal severity