her seat. Thyrsis then (relapsing in manner into the Attendant Spirit) pronounces an ode of blessing on the Severn River for this service done by the goddess, and offers to conduct the party to safer ground.

“ I shall be your faithful guide

Through this gloomy covert wide;
And not many furlongs thence
Is your Father's residence,
Where this night are met in state
Many a friend to gratulate
His wished presence; and beside
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."

Here they go off, and “The scene changes, presenting Ludlov Toron and the President's Castle. Then come in Country Dancers : after them the Attendant Spirit, with the two Brothers and the Lady." The Attendant Spirit sings a short song, bidding the shepherds cease their dancing; advances with the lady and her brothers; and then “This second song presents them to their father and mother:"

Noble Lord, and Lady bright,
I have brought ye new delight:
Here behold, so goodly grown,
Three fair branches of your own;
Heaven hath timely tried their youth,
Their faith, their patience, and their truth,
And sent them here, through hard assays,
With a crown of deathless praise,
To triumph, in victorious dance,
O'er sensual folly and intemperance.”

There is then more dancing; and “the dances being ended, the Spirit epiloguizes," slowly ascending and swaying to and fro as he sings the final song:

" But now my task is smoothly done;

I can fly or I can run
Quickly to the green earth's end,
Where the bow'd 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.”

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. The 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 Sabrina arose with her water-nymphs, and the swains danced in welcome of the earl, and the Spirit gloriously ascended to its native heaven. More mystic it is to leave the ruins, and, descending one of the winding streets that lead from the castle into 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 realize that it was from that ruin, and from those windows in the ruin, that the verse of Comus was first shook into the air of England.

Much as Milton wrote afterwards, he never wrote anything more beautiful, more perfect than Comus. Let it be compared with Shirley's masque or Carew's masque of the preceding year, or even with any of Ben Jonson's masques (the last of which was one acted before the King and Queen at the Earl of Newcastle's seat of Bolsover, July 30, 1634, while Comus may have been in rehearsal), and it will be seen that, if Milton did not intend to prove by this one example, against all preceding or contemporary masque-writers, what the pure poetry and the pure morality of a masque might be, he had certainly accomplished the feat without intending it. Critics have pointed out that, in writing Comus, he must have had analogous compositions by some previous writers before him — more especially “ The Old Wives' Tale” of the dramatist Peele (1595); Fletcher's pastoral of the “Faithful Shepherdess," which had been revived as a royal play for Twelfth Night, and also at the theatres in 1633-4; Ben Jonson's masque of Pleasure reconciled to Virtue" (1619), in which masque Comus is one of the characters; and, most especially of all, a Latin poem entitled “Comus,” by Erycius Puteanus (IIenri du Puy, Professor of Eloquence at Louvain), originally published at Louvain in 1608, and republished at Oxford in 1634. Coincidences as regards the plan, the characters, and the imagery, are undoubtedly discernible between Comus and these compositions. Infinitely too much has been made, however, of such coincidences. Let any one glance into Peele's “Old Wives' Tale," and the sensation after a single page will simply be that Peele and Milton were poles asunder. And so with the others — with Fletcher, with Jonson, with Puteanus. After all of them, even the most ideal and poetical, the feeling in reading Comus is that all here is different, all peculiar. The peculiarity consists no less in the power and purity of the doctrine than in the exquisite perfection of the literary finish ; and, doctrine and poetry together, this one composition ought to have been sufficient, to use the words of Mr. Hallam, “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.” The words are as just as they are carefully weighed.

Did the poet meet the recognition to which the merits of the masque entitled him ?

There may have been good judges of poetry present at the performance; and we know that rumors of its great excellence did gradually travel from Ludlow to other parts, raising curiosity as to the name and circumstances of the author. Originally, however, the masque was anonymous; and, for three years or more, it was not known, except to Lawes, and perhaps to the Bridgewater family and a few others, who the author was. This circumstance is not unimportant in connection with another question which may have occurred to the reader. Was Milton present at the performance of his own masque? Wherever he wrote it, he had certainly seized with sufficient clearness the spirit of the occasion for which it was intended, and had not failed in the introduction of appropriate local circumstances — the proximity of Wales to Ludlow; the love of the people of Shropshire and other western counties for their river Severn; and the like. But did he take the journey of 150 miles to Ludlow to be present when the masque was performed? If so, we should have, as a fact in Milton's life, a journey into Shropshire in the autumn of 1634, with visits, of course, to places around Ludlow - to Shrewsbury, whence the Philipses had come; perhaps to Cheshire and the banks of the Dee, where his friend Diodati had lived and probably lived still; perhaps even to Lancashire and parts of Wales. This is a region of England, at all events, with which the total life of Milton contains numerous associations.

If Milton did make a journey to the north-west of England at the time of the performance of his masque at Ludlow, he was back again at Horton by the 4th of December, 1634 - on which day we find him writing thence a letter to the younger Gill. It is in acknowledgment of a copy of some new poetical composition just received from Gill. We translate from the Latin :

“TO ALEXANDER GILL.

"If you had presented to me a gift of gold, or of vases preciously embossed, or of whatever of that sort mortals admire, it were certainly to my shame not to have some time remunerated you, in as far as my faculties might serve. Seeing, however, that you presented us the other day with a copy of Hendecasyllabics, so sprightly and elegant, by how much more dear than gold that gift is in value, by so much the more anxious have you made us as to the dainty device by which we should repay the kindness of so pleasant a benefit. We had, indeed, at hand, some things of our own in this kind, but which I could nowise deem fit to be sent in trial of equality of gift with yours. I send, therefore, what is certainly not mine, but also belongs to that truly divine poet, this Ode of whom, only last week, with no deliberate intention certainly, but from I know not what sudden impulse, before day-break, i composed, almost in bed, to the rule of Greek heroic verse; in order that, relying on this coadjutor, who surpasses you no less in his subject than you surpass me in art, I should have something that might seem to approach a balancing of payments. Should anything occur to you in it not coming up to your usual opinion of our productions, understand that, since I left your school, this is the first and only thing I have composed in Greek, – employing myself, as you know, more willingly in Latin and English matters; inasmuch as whoever spends study and pains in this age on Greek composition, runs a risk of singing generally to the deaf. Farewell, and expect me on Monday (if God will) in London among the booksellers. Meanwhile, if with such influence of friendship as you have with that Doctor, the annual president of the College, you can anything promote our business, take the trouble, I pray, to go to him as soon as possible on my account. Again, farewell.

“From our suburban residence (E nostro suburbanol), Decemb. 4, 1634.”

The composition which accompanied this letter was a translation into Greek hexameters of the 114th Psalm — the same Psalm, the translation of which into English is the first known composition of Milton's boyhood. The verdict pronounced on the translation by competent critics is that it is superior to that of Duport” in his version of the same Psalm, “has more vigor,” but “is not wholly free from inaccuracies.” 1 The general conclusion from this, as from one or two other short Greek compositions of Milton, is that, however familiar with Greek as a reader, his Greek scholarship was less exact than his Latin.

From the date of the letter to Gill (Dec. 4, 1634) we have to advance to the year 1637, before we again meet with direct traces of Milton, furnished by his own correspondence. The gap of two years or more thus left in his life is, in part, however, filled up by information from other sources..

An incident of some consequence in his life, according to the ideas of those times, was his incorporation in 1635 as Master of Arts at Oxford. It was then the custom, as we have seen, for men who had been educated at either of the English Universities, and who were so situated in life as to desire to keep up their academic connections, to apply, after some little lapse of time, for admission into the other University in the same degree as that which they had previously attained in their Alma Mater. Every year, Cambridge “ incorporated” in this manner some thirty, forty, or fifty Oxford men, and every year Oxford returned the compliment both Universities at the same time usually incorporating also a few stray Scots from St. Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, or Aberdeen, or foreigners from continental colleges. As Milton, at Horton, was within thirty-six miles of Oxford, whereas he was more than sixty miles distant from his own University of Cambridge, there may have been peculiar conveniences in incorporation in his case. At all events, the necessary steps were taken, and his incorporation took place. It is interesting to record that, among those who were incorporated along with him, was Jeremy Taylor, of Caius Taylor, who had graduated M. A. at Cambridge the year after Milton, was now attracting notice as an eloquent young preacher, and was about to be more intimately connected with Oxford by his nomination, through Laud (1636), to a fellowship in All Souls' College.

Milton's incorporation as M. A. of Oxford in 1635, may have afforded him an opportunity of forming some acquaintance for himself, if such acquaintance still remained to be formed, with Oxford and its neighborhood. In the University, there were men