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and colour our imaginative literature. Many of our professional dramatic writers, notably Fletcher and Jonson, had employed it with admirable effect; by the opening of the seventeenth century its popularity at court and in aristocratic circles was enormous. A number of reasons thus combined to render it as hateful to the Puritan bigot as even the regular stageplay itself. Yet Milton was willing to use it. That is a point upon which the utmost stress should be laid. A single detail will serve to make its significance clear. In 1633-the very year before the production of "Comus "-the famous Puritan William Prynne published a volume entitled "Histrio-Mastix, or Actor's Tragœdie." In this prodigious work of one thousand and six closely printed pages no fewer than four thousand texts of Scripture are cited to prove the absolute sinfulness of all stage-plays, including private theatricals, which are made the object of specially virulent abuse. The coincidence in time between Prynne's book and Milton's poem is certainly striking. Hardly had the violent controversialist delivered his sweeping attack before the great poet gave proof that one of the forms which had been savagely denounced as hopelessly vile could be turned to the service of the highest and purest moral teaching.

The special interest of "Comus" as marking another stage in the development of Milton's mind will now be apparent. Its literary affiliations are entirely with the Renaissance;

as a piece of art, it belongs to the dramatic traditions of Peele, Fletcher, and Jonson, whom Milton had, it is clear, carefully and lovingly studied, and to all of whom he was more or less indebted for suggestions. Yet though the old form is maintained, the spirit which it embodies is new. No reader of "Comus "" can fail to be impressed by the evidence which it affords of Milton's deepening seriousness. A note is struck which is far more nearly the real Puritan note than we have as yet anywhere heard in his work. A strenuous moral purpose lies at the very core of the action. Conception and details alike are filled with a splendid passion for righteousness. The simple story (plot it can hardly be called) of the lady lost in the dark wood, lured away by Comus and his band, and rescued by her brothers with the help of an attendant spirit and a river nymph, is a patent allegory of virtue, unharmed amid all dangers, invincible amid all trials, overcoming all temptations through its inherent might and the support in dire necessity of never-failing divine aid. Faith in the ultimate triumph of good pervades the poem, and finds full utterance in the magnificent outburst in which the Elder Brother declares that virtue is eternal and evil selfconsuming, and that the very foundations of the universe are bound up with that supreme fact. In the contrast of principles and ideals which the movement of the action involves, it must also be remembered that Milton was writing with his thought upon the conditions of his

time; for while Comus and his crew of insolent revellers represent the growing license of Charles's profligate court and fashionable society, the lady and her brothers are set forward as types of the sobriety and temperance of the true religious life. In the brothers in particular we may see Milton's ideal of Puritanism as it was then conceived by him; an ideal large, generous, humane, combining love of divine philosophy and knowledge with zeal for holiness, and yet pointing to the spirit of holiness always as the overruling and unifying power in life.

To such high uses, then, did Milton's moral spirit bend one of the popular forms of Renaissance art, and the classical learning which he naturally incorporated in it. What we have called the Hellenic and the Hebraic elements in his work are now clearly beginning to change their relative proportions; for while the vehicle adopted shows the persistence of his Hellenism, the matter and purpose exhibit the growth of his Hebraism. This is a point to which the closest attention should be given.

Let me add that it will lend a fresh interest to "Comus" if in reading we also keep the purely personal aspects of it well in mind. We should remember that the principal actors were the Earl's children, that the two brothers were represented by little Viscount Brackley, aged twelve, and Thomas Egerton, aged eleven, and the heroine by Lady Alice Egerton, a beautiful girl of between fourteen and fifteen. The charming compliments to the young lady and

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the two boys cleverly introduced in Comus's speeches beginning "Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould," and "Two such I saw," will thus be better understood, and a new meaning will be found in the closing scene, in which the children are presented to their father and mother with words of no idle flattery. Lawes himself played the part of the Attendant Spirit ; and when this Spirit is pointedly praised for the beauty and power of his music (as in the passages beginning "Who with his soft pipe and smooth-dittied song," and "Thyrsis! whose artful strains have oft delayed "), we may be sure that his friend the poet intended the audience to take these words as referring to the musician himself as much as to his assumed character.

COMUS: A MASK

PERSONS

The Attendant Spirit, afterwards in the

habit of Thyrsis ;

Comus, with his crew;

The Lady;

First Brother;

Second Brother;

Sabrina, the Nymph.

The first Scene discovers a wild Wood. The
Attendant Spirit descends or enters

Before the starry threshold of Jove's court
My mansion is, where those immortal shapes
Of bright aëreal spirits live insphered

In regions mild of calm and serene air,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot,

Which men call Earth; and, with low-thoughted care
Confined and pestered in this pinfold here,
Strive to keep up a frail and fev'rish being,
Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives,
After this mortal change, to her true servants,
Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats.
Yet some there be, that by due steps aspire
To lay their just hands on that golden key,
That opes the palace of Eternity :

To such my errand is; and, but for such,
I would not soil these pure ambrosial weeds
With the rank vapours of this sin-worn mould.
But to my task. Neptune, besides the sway
Of ev'ry salt flood and each ebbing stream,
Took in by lot 'twixt high and nether Jove1
Imperial rule of all the sea-girt isles,
That like to rich and various gems, inlay
The unadorned bosom of the deep;
Which he, to grace his tributary gods,

By course commits to several government,

And gives them leave to wear their sapphire crowns,
And wield their little tridents; but this Isle,
The greatest and the best of all the main,
He quarters to his blue-haired deities;
And all this tract that fronts the falling sun
A noble peer of mickle trust and pow'r
Has in his charge, with tempered awe to guide
An old and haughty nation, proud in arms;
Where his fair offspring nursed in princely lore,
Are coming to attend their father's state,
And new-intrusted sceptre; but their way
Lies through the perplexed paths of this drear wood,

In the division of the earth, Pluto or _Hades obtained the Nether regions; he was hence called "Infernal Zeus," or "Nether Jove."

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