of poetry after 1660 we have only to compare, with this Miltonic tribute to Shakespeare, Dryden's lines on Milton himself prefixed to the first folio of 1688 :

'Three poets, in three distant ages born,' &c.

In Milton's sixteen lines the lofty tone is so independent of the thought presented, that we overlook the inadequacy of the thought itself. Were we to suppress the feeling, and look only at the logical sentence, as Johnsonian criticism used to do, we should be obliged to say that the residuum is a frigid conceit in the style of Marini. We, the readers, are turned into marble monuments to the memory of Shakespeare-a farfetched fancy, which deadens, instead of excites, awe and admiration.

2.

The dates of the two pieces headed L'Allegro and Il Penseroso can only be approximately given. They are with great probability assigned to the early years of Milton's residence at Horton, 1632 and following. The Italian titles show that they were written at a time when Milton had already begun to learn Italian, while the incorrect form 'penseroso' shows that he was only beginning. L'Allegro='the cheerful man'; Il Penseroso is intended to mean 'the thoughtful man.' But from 'pensiero' the adjectival form is 'pensieroso.' There was an old form 'pensero,' but the Italian dictionaries do not acknowledge any adjective 'penseroso' as derived from it. Petrarch, with whom Milton must have been early acquainted, habitually uses 'pensoso,' but always with the connotation of 'sadness,' 'melancholy.'

The two Odes, taken together, present contrasted views of the scholar's life. It is what the rhetoricians call an antiperistasis, or development of an idea by its opposite. Or we may rather regard them as alternating moods, buoyant spirits and solemn recollectedness succeeding and displacing each other, as in life. They are Milton's own moods, and might be employed as autobiography, depicting his studious days in those years when he was forming his mind and hiving wisdom. But they are ideally and not literally true, just as the landscape of the odes is ideally, but not literally, that of the neighbourhood of Horton. The joyous mood is the mood of daytime, beginning with the first flight of the lark before dawn, and closing with music inducing sleep. The thoughtful mood is that of the same scholar studying through the night, or meditating in his solitary moonlight walk. For the

country life of these idylls is not the life of the native of the country, peasant or proprietor, but of the scholar to whose emotions all the country objects are subordinated. Milton does not set himself to tell us what rural objects are like, but indicates them by their bearing on the life lived among them by his studious youth. Whereas in Browne's Britannia's Pastorals (1613-16), with which Milton was well acquainted, there is generally the faintest possible breath of human interest, in Milton, town and country are but scenery to the moods of the human agent. Milton, like all poets of the first order, knew or rather felt, that human action or passion is the only subject of poetry. This is no mere conventional rule established by the critics, or by custom; it rests upon the truth that poetry must be a vehicle of emotion. Poetry is an address to the feelings and imagination, not to the judgment and the understanding. The world and its cosmical processes, or nature and natural scenery, are in themselves only objects of science. They become matter for the poet only after they have been impregnated with the joys and distresses, the hopes and fears, of man. 'We receive but what we give.' This truth, the foundation of any sufficient 'poetic,' is itself contained in the still wider law, under which colour and form, light itself, are but affections of our human organs of perception.

The doctrine that human action and passion are the only material of poetic fiction was the first theorem of Greek æsthetic. But it had been lost sight of, and was not introduced into modern criticism till its revival by Lessing in 1766. The practice both of our poets, and of our English critics, in the eighteenth century, had forgotten this capital distinction between the art of language, and the art of design. The English versifiers of that century had not the poetic impulse in sufficient intensity to feel the distinction. And the Addison-Johnson criticism, which regarded a poem as made up of images and propositions in verse, could not teach the truth. So the poets went to work to describe scenery. And our collections are filled with verse, didactic and descriptive, which, with many merits of style and thought, has no title to rank as poetry.

Descriptive poetry is in fact a contradiction in terms. A landscape can be represented to the eye by imitative colours laid on a flat surface. But it cannot be presented in words which, being necessarily successive, cannot render juxtaposition in space. To exhibit in space is the privilege of the arts of design. Poetry,

whose instrument is language, involves succession in time, and can only present that which comes to pass-das geschehene— under one or other of its two forms, action or passion.

Milton was in possession of this secret, not as a trick taught him by the critics, but in virtue of the intensity of human passion which glowed in his bosom. He has exemplified the principle in these two lyrics. In them, as in Wordsworth's best passages, the imagery is not there for its own sake, it is the vehicle of the personal feelings of the Man. The composition derives its unity and its denomination from his mental attitude as spectator.

It is misleading, then, when these odes are spoken of as 'masterpieces of description.' A naturalist discerns at once, in more than one minute touch, that the poet is not an accurate observer of nature, or thoroughly familiar with country life. As a town-bred youth, 'in populous city pent,' Milton missed that intimacy with rural sights and sounds, which belongs, like the mother tongue, to those who have been born and bred among them. But the same want of familiarity which makes his notice of the object inaccurate, intensifies the emotion excited in him by the objects, when he is first brought in contact with them. Nature has for Milton the stimulus of novelty. Like other town poets, he knows nature less, but feels it more. What he does exactly render for us is not objective nature, but its effect upon the emotional life of the lettered student.

If Milton is not ideally descriptive, still less is he the copyist of a given scene. That the locality of Horton suggested the scenery of these odes is one thing; that they describe that locality, that the 'mountains' are the Chilterns, and the 'towers and battlements' are Windsor, is quite another. It might seem hardly necessary to dwell upon this, but that this confusion of poetical truth with historical truth is so widely spread, even among the educated. While pilgrims are still found endeavouring to identify the Troy sung by Homer with some one Asiatic site, Hissarlik or other, the critic must continue to repeat the trite lesson that poetry feigns, and does not describe. Fact and fiction are contradictories, and exclude each other. Truth of poetry may be called philosophical truth; truth of fact, historical. So beauty in nature is one thing, beauty of a work of art quite another thing. And this is how it is that L'Allegro and Il Penseroso have the highest beauty as works of art, while they may abound with naturalistic solecism.

3.

Comus, 1634, bears the title of a 'Mask,' and may be described as a lyrical drama. It was written as words to a musical composition by Henry Lawes, and intended to be performed by amateurs, at an entertainment given by the Earl of Bridgwater to celebrate his entry on his office as Lord President of Wales. These shows, in which the dramatic element was subordinated to the pageantry and the music, had been popular at court in the beginning of the century. But the gradual growth of Puritan sentiment throughout the nation was chilling the taste for such entertainments. The 'mask' would have died out but for the publication, in 1633, of a violent and onesided invective against the stage, in Prynne's Histriomastix. This overt attack occasioned a reaction in favour of the drama, and there was, for a short time, a spasmodic revival of the 'mask'in cavalier and courtly circles. It was during this brief revival that Comus was written, a chance thus making the future Puritan poet the last composer of a cavalier mask. The extract we give from Comus, 11. 93-330, comprises, in one continuous scene, specimens of its (1) lyrical measures, (2) its monologue, and (3) its dialogue. For while Comus was to be a 'mask,' after the model of those written by the dramatists of the previous age, Milton endeavoured to mould its parts on the pattern of those Greek tragedies, the perfection of whose form his pure taste had already recognised. In 'The star that bids the shepherd fold &c.' we have a close imitation of the dithyrambic monody of Euripides; as in the brief dialogue between the Lady and Comus ('What chance, good lady, hath bereft you thus ?') we have the Greek stichomythia in single alternate lines exactly reproduced.

4.

Comus (1634) was followed by Lycidas (November, 1637), which we give entire. Lycidas is an elegiac ode contributed by Milton to a volume of memorial verse, printed at Cambridge on the occasion of the death of one of the Fellows of Christ's College. Edward King had been a contemporary and companion of Milton at Christ's, and in 1630 had been elected to a fellowship in that college, in obedience to a royal mandate, and, as it should seem, over Milton's head. King, who is described to us as a young man of great promise, perished by shipwreck on the passage from

Chester to Dublin in the long vacation of 1637. This piece, unmatched in the whole range of English poetry, and never again equalled by Milton himself, leaves all criticism behind. Indeed so high is the poetic note here reached, that the common ear fails to catch it. Lycidas is the touchstone of taste; the 18th century criticism could not make anything of it. The very form of the poem is a stumbling-block to the common-sense critic. For while the equable and temperate emotion of L'Allegro allowed of direct expression in the poet's own person, the burning heat of passion in Lycidas has to be transferred into the artificial framework of the conventional pastoral to make it approachable. At the same time it will be observed that this passion is not stirred by personal attachment, such as lends its pathos to In Memoriam. It is obvious from the elegy itself that Milton's relation to Edward King was not a specially tender relation. The sorrow for his loss does not go beyond such regret as may have been generally excited at Cambridge by the shock of such a casualty. It is when the poet passes on from the individual bereavement to generalise as to the fortunes of the Church, that he attains to a rapt grandeur of enigmatic denunciation in the lines 'Last came and last did go,' &c. In the suppressed passion of this Cassandra prophecy first emerges the Milton of Paradise Lost and Samson. The effect of the passage is enhanced by the contrast of the quiet beauty of the pastoral dirge in the preceding part of the poem. Lycidas accordingly marks the point of transition from the early Milton, the Milton of mask, pastoral, and idyll, to the quite other Milton, who, after twenty years of hot party struggle, returned to poetry in another vein,-never to the 'woods and pastures' of which he took a final leave in Lycidas.

5.

Between the composition of Lycidas, 1637, and the commencement of Paradise Lost, 1657, a space of twenty years, the course of Milton's life and thoughts was such as did not admit of the abstraction necessary for a sustained poetical effort. Officially, as Latin secretary to the Commonwealth, and unofficially, as an ardent partisan of the republican movement, he was absorbed in the interests of the day. Occasionally, during this interval, his feeling found vent in a sonnet, ‘the Petrarchian stanza,' as he calls it, now first put to martial uses. The sonnets are of two kinds, personal or political. Our selections offer two examples of each