INTRODUCTION.

THE Occasion which led to the production of the Lycidas is stated in the following heading prefixed to the poem by Milton himself: 'In this monody the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish seas, 1637, and by occasion foretels the ruin of our corrupted Clergy, then in their height.'

This friend was Edward King, son of Sir John King, who was Secretary for Ireland under Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. He was born at Boyle, Co. Sligo; admitted as a lesser pensioner of Christ's College, Cambridge, at the age of fourteen, with his brother Roger aged sixteen, in 1626, Milton's third year, under the same tutor Chappell (Lyc. 36); and made. Fellow by a royal mandate, dated June 10, 1630-an honour which Milton himself might well have expected. During his residence at Cambridge he wrote several copies of Greek and Latin verses (Lyc. 10) on special occasions, which are of no great merit, and was destined for holy orders (Lyc. 113 foll.). It would appear that by his moral worth and gentle bearing he had won the esteem of all his associates, though nothing is known of Milton's relations with him during their academic career, beyond what we gather from the poem before us. On August 10, 1637, as King was crossing from Chester to Dublin to visit his friends in Ireland (among whom was Chappell, now Dean of Cashel and Provost of Trinity College), the ship struck on a rock off the Welsh coast, and all on board are said to have perished (Lyc. 100). Accounts however vary about this, for Todd quotes from a preface by W. Hogg (1694),

(whose Latin version of the Lycidas is included in this volume) a statement that 'some escaped in the boat,' and that they vainly tried to get King into it, so that he and the rest were drowned, 'except those only who escaped in the boat.' We do not know whence Hogg got this story: the authorised preface to the Cambridge verses of 1638 says, 'Dum alii vectores vitæ mortalis frustra satagerent,' which seems to imply that they all perished, though ‘alii' (not being ceteri) does not necessarily mean this. The inscription goes on to say that King was in the act of prayer when the ship went down—a fact which could not have been known unless some one had survived to tell the tale. He was then aged twenty-five. Milton does not mention King's death in either of his letters to Diodati (Sept. 2 and 23, 1637); but later in Michaelmas Term he joined with other friends of the deceased in writing a series of memorial verses. He was then at Horton, where he also wrote the Sonnet to a Nightingale (1633), L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Arcades and Comus (1634). The Lycidas is signed J. M., Nov. 1637 (but the Cambridge verses appeared early in the next year), and was republished with his full name and the title Poems on Several Occasions' in 1645, when the heading In this monody, &c.' was for the first time added. The whole collection had twenty-three Latin and Greek pieces and thirteen English, of which Lycidas came last: the first are entitled 'Edvardo King naufrago ab amicis morentibus, amoris et preias xápır,' with the motto Si recte calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est. Among other names are Henry King, brother of Edward, and Beaumont of Peterhouse, afterwards better known. The verses are not worth preserving-a poetic canaille,' as Professor Masson calls them.

The name 'Lycidas' was a common one with the ancient bucolic poets, but perhaps the Seventh Idyll of Theocritus was especially in Milton's mind when he adopted it. The mon ody is cast in a form commonly known and designated as the 'pastoral;' it is not, however, strictly speaking, a pastoral, but a poem descriptive of college life under an allegory drawn from

that of shepherds. It is well to make this distinction at the outset, in order to have some grounds for defending Milton against the charge of confusion and incongruity which certain critics (and notably Dr. Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets) have laid against him. The exact value of such criticism, as applied to the Lycidas, will be discussed in its proper place; here it is enough to say that whatever may be the faults of the poem on this score (including the crowning one of all-the introduction of the Christian pastor side by side with the ideal shepherd), confusion of this kind did not begin with Milton, but had been the common practice of his predecessors in a style of composition which had long been degenerating from its primitive state of simplicity, and had now become an allowed medium for expressing opinions upon any sort of subject that might be present in the poet's mind. A brief review of pastoral poetry in its various stages from the time of Theocritus will best show how this change was brought about.

There is no reason for refusing the claims of the Syracusan bard to the honour of having originated this kind of poetry, if only we are careful to distinguish the pastoral of real life, such as the shepherds loved to practise in early times, from the artificial drafts of professed poets who made rural themes a vehicle for their imagination. Among these last we do not know for certain that Theocritus had any predecessors whose names can worthily be coupled with his own. Naeke (Opuscula Philologica, vol. i. p. 162) draws a good distinction between the old pastoral life and manners, which existed in the first ages of the world, and the artificial description of them which we call 'pastoral poetry.' He maintains that speculations, such as those prefixed to the Idylls on the origin of the pastoral,' really

The Scholia on Theocritus (ed. Ziegler, 1867) say that, after some civil discord at Syracuse, the citizens held a festival to Artemis for having brought about a reconciliation, and that the rustics presented offerings and sang praises to the goddess in

their own fashion; hence bucolic poetry had its beginning. Also that they afterwards continued the custom and sang for prizes of loaves and wallets full of seeds and skins of wine, with crowns on their heads, and horns on their foreheads, and

concern the olden times; but that the pastoral itself had no proper existence before Theocritus. He takes no notice of any difference between Theocritus and his successors in their method of treatment; and his remarks seem to imply that the Idylls of Theocritus were no more a picture of facts than Virgil's Eclogues or the Italian pastorals. It is indeed very hard to say how much in Theocritus is literal fact; but there is the plainest evidence that his scenes have been drawn from nature and from the shepherd-life of Sicily, and that they are the direct and first-hand presentation of actual shepherds singing of their flocks and of their loves, poetically but not allegorically. At the same time, his Idylls bear the trace of Alexandrian refinement, and of having been written, as Naeke says, 'non ad priscorum hominum ingenium sensumque,' &c., but for those qui tædio capti aliunde imaginem simplicitatis revocare student.' It was only natural that in those early times, when the conditions of human life were simple and uniform, and the shepherd's calling was followed by nearly all classes, the long hours of leisure should have been beguiled by song; and, as Lucretius' supposes, the whistling of the wind through the reeds might have suggested the first rude shepherd's pipe. Various degrees of skill would engender competition, and for this the rural festivities of Pan or Ceres would afford grand opportunities of display, which is probably the reason why the oldest theories on the subject ascribe the origin of pastoral poetry to such occasions. In course of time the best specimens would become known beyond the original rustic circle, and so professional poets began to adopt a similar mode of expression;

hence soon arose a distinct school of poetry, in which the poet and his friends are introduced in the dramatic form of shepherds, telling of their flocks and herds, their rustic amours, and the joys of a country life.'

But pastoral poetry was not destined to remain long in this state of uniform simplicity. The real and the dramatic characters soon became blended into one, and the shepherd was identified with the poet. Even in Theocritus we see the beginnings of this very natural confusion, for in the seventh Idyll the swain Simichidas professes his inferiority to Philetas and Asclepiades, actual poets of the day and the instructors of Theocritus, who, in fact, introduces himself under the name of Simichidas; but this Idyll is the only one which contains personal allusions to the poet, and in which real and imaginary names are intermingled. Passing on to the Επιτάφιος Βίωνος of Moschus, we find the same phenomenon more apparent; for there not only is the deceased bard lamented by name in the midst of a highly allegorical passage, and the real cause of his death by poison nakedly stated, but so transparent is the veil of pastoral allegory which disguises the personality of the poet, that Bion is represented as piping to his flocks and milking his goats at the same time that he is compared with Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, with his own master_Theocritus, and even with Moschus himself, in language which expressly intimates that something like a school of bucolic poetry was even thus early establishing itself in Sicily. Whether such an idea ever had any recognised existence, or had reached any degree of maturity during the period of 200 years that intervened between Theocritus and Virgil, is a question we have no means of deciding; suffice it to say that in the time of the latter poet the terms 'Sicilian' and 'Syracusan' had come to be used as distinctive literary epithets of pastoral song (Virgil, Ed. iv. 1;

'At secura quies et nescia fallere

vita,

Dives opum variarum, at latis otia fundis

Mugitusque boum mollesque

sub arbore somni

Non absunt.'-VIRG. G. ii. 467.