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

in all his dealings with nonconforming Protestants, he behaved with conspicuous leniency towards Roman Catholics, and as this leniency was obviously due, not to liberality of opinion or the spirit of tolerance (of which he knew nothing), but to personal preferences, it boded ill for the work of the Reformation. The immense development in the mere externals of public worship which took place under his rule was regarded by the Puritans, to whom all ceremonial formalism was hateful, as a sure sign of his sympathy with the anti-Protestant tendencies which were at work in the land; even moderate men began to suspect that it was his ultimate design to bring the Church of England as near as possible to the Church of Rome, perhaps even to unite it to the Church of Rome; and the known bias of the Court, taken in conjunction with his policy of relentless bigotry, spread a feeling of panic among the masses of the people. By 1637, indeed, Laud had succeeded in alienating the best thought of England, and in fanning into a mighty flame the spirit of antagonism which had been rising rapidly in the Puritan party ever since his appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury four years before. Such was the state of things in the English religious world when Milton wrote his "Lycidas"; and it was because he so keenly realised the peril of the hour, because his soul was filled with such indignation and contempt for everything that Laud and his followers stood for and were seeking to achieve,

that he poured out his passion in the burning lines in which, for the first time, he openly proclaimed his sympathy with the Puritan cause. Whatever, therefore, may be said about the artistic aspects of the passage in question, its autobiographical interest is unmistakable.

LYCIDAS:1 A MONODY

[In this Monody the Author bewails a learned friend, unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by occasion, foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then in their highth.]i

Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
Ye Myrtles brown, with ivy never-sere,

I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude;
And, with forced fingers rude,

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year:
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due :
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his wat❜ry bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.

Begin, then, Sisters of the Sacred Well 3

3

That from beneath the Seat of Jove doth spring;
Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.
Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse :

So may some gentle Muse

With lucky words favour my destined urn ;

1 Lycidas is the name of a shepherd in Virgil's ninth Eclogue.

This explanatory note was added by Milton in the first edition of

his collected poems, published in 1645.

The fountain of the Muses on Mount Helicon.