back into the Anglo-Saxon times. You are told that the rock was once called "The Hoar Rock in the Wood," and that even in the fifth century it was regarded with religious reverence; and you are shown the origin of all the feeling about it in a semi-accessible craggy seat, overhanging the sea, and called "St. Michael's chair," because there some hermits once saw an apparition of the Archangel Michael. With all this there mingles in the minds of modern tourists, as one reason for the celebrity of the Mount, the recollection of the present passage in Lycidas. But, as the passage itself implies, the Mount was celebrated before Milton made this mention of it, and he made this mention of it because of its previous celebrity.

"St. Michael's Mount who does not know
That wards the western coast?"

Spenser had said, in his Shepherd's Calendar (July) fifty-seven years before Lycidas was written; and in Drayton's Polyolbion (Song I.), not only had the Mount been described, but it had been made to speak its memories of the forgotten ages with which it had been familiar

"Then from his rugged top the tears down trickling fell;

And, in his passion stirred, began again to tell

Strange things that in his days Time's course had brought to pass :
That forty miles, now sea, some time firm foreland was,

And that a forest then which now with him is flood,

Whereof he first was called the Hoar Rock in the Wood."

:

The legend of the apparition of St. Michael is that incident in the history of the Mount on which Milton's imagination had fastened. Possibly he had never seen Land's End; but, in his readings about it, what had struck him most was this great Vision of the Archangel on the top of the neighbouring "guarded Mount," or rock-fortress, in the extreme bay of Cornwall. And so, as he fancies the dead body of his friend whirled somewhere in the tide round Land's End, there flashes in, by inevitable association, this vision of the great Archangel, seated in his craggy chair on the top of the Mount, and gazing over the waters! But gazing whither? Here also Milton's imagination was swayed by his reading. It was a kind of boast of the Cornish people that from Land's End there was a direct line of sea-view southwards, passing France altogether, and hitting no European land till it terminated in Spain. This boast had found literary expression. Thus, Drayton (Polyolb., XXIII.) —

"Then Cornwall creepeth out into the western main,
As, lying in her eye, she pointed still at Spain."

Nay, it appears, Spain, on her side, was aware of the same fact, and returned the compliment; for in a passage from Orosius, the geographer of the fifth century, quoted by Warton, it is said of Brigantia, a town

in the north-west of Spain, that it had "a most lofty watch-tower, of admirable construction, in full view of Britain." If the reader will look at the map, he will see that the statement is perfectly accurate, in the sense that, if the eye could travel 500 miles, there might be a direct interchange of view, without any interrupting land, between Cornwall and the north-west Spanish province of Gallicia. This explains the rest of Milton's phraseology. Land's End, in his imagination, is the part of Britain "where the great Vision of the guarded Mount "-i.e. St. Michael in his rocky chair-" looks to Namancos and Bayona's hold." In the old maps of Spain Namancos is marked as a town in the province of Gallicia, near to Cape Finisterre; and Bayona is a city on the west coast of the same province, some way to the south of the Cape. The notion, once entertained, that by 'Bayona's hold" Milton meant Bayonne in southern France, and that by the fancy-name of Namancos he meant to designate the site of the famous ancient Numantia of eastern Spain, is nonsensical in itself, and misses that exact tradition of the geographical relationship between Spain and Cornwall which he took pains to commemorate.

159. "moist," i.e. tearful.

161. "Where the great Vision of the guarded Mount." The tenth and last non-rhyming line in the poem.

163, 164. "Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth:

And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth."

In the first of these lines (which to me seem the worst in the poem, and the most like a "conceit") it is no longer Lycidas that is addressed, but the Archangel Michael. Instead of continuing his gaze over the sea to distant Spain, let him turn homeward to the nearer seas, and melt with pity for the youth there drowned. In the second line the allusion is to the legend of the lyrist Arion, who had charmed the dolphins by his singing, and was carried ashore by them when the sailors had thrown him overboard.

165-181. "Weep no more," &c, In this closing strain of the Monody, changing the grief for the loss of Lycidas into joy over the thought of his elevation into the society of Heaven, there is a close resemblance, even to identity of expressions, to the closing part (lines 198-219) of the Epitaphium Damonis, written two years later. Compare also the last four stanzas of Spenser's pastoral lament for the Shepherdess Dido in the November part of his Shepherd's Calendar. Such merging of a funereal elegy into the religious thought of the translation of the dead to the higher happiness of another world was especially natural to Milton. See On the Death of a Fair Infant and Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, But Virgil, after a more Pagan fashion, and in more Pagan phraseology, has something of the same kind. See Ecl. v.

173. Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves." Matt. xiv. 22-33. Note the appositeness to the whole subject of the poem

in this reference to Christ's power over the waters.

176. "unexpressive": i.e. inexpressibly sweet.

181. "And wipe the tears," &c. Rev. vii. 17.

183, 184. "Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore," &c. Here, after a contemplation of the state of the dead Lycidas which is purely Christian and Biblical, there is a relapse into the classic manner, and Lycidas is converted into a numen. Thus, as Thyer notes, Virgil's deification of the dead Daphnis (Ecl. v. 64, 65):

and Mr. Browne quotes a still closer parallelism from a Latin eclogue of the Italian pastoralist Sannazaro, in which a drowned friend is told-

"Numen aquarum

Semper eris, semper lætum piscantibus omen."

There is a hint of the same kind respecting the dead Diodati in Epitaph. Dam. 207–211.

186-193. "Thus sang the uncouth swain," &c. Note the separateness of this closing stanza from the rest of the poem. It is a stanza of Epilogue, added, as it were, in Milton's own name, and distinguishing him from the imaginary shepherd, or "uncouth (i.e. unknown) swain,' who has been singing the previous lament for Lycidas. That imaginary shepherd was, of course, Milton too; but in this stanza Milton looks back upon what he had written in that character, and criticises it, or at least characterizes it. It had been a 66 Doric lay," i.e. a poem written after the fashion of the bucolic poets, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, whose dialect was the Doric variety of the Greek. Nay in this lay "the tender stops of various quills" had been touched; i.e. there had been changes of mood and minute changes of metre in it.

192, 193. "At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue : To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new."

A peculiarly picturesque ending, in which Milton announces that he is passing on to other occupations. The last line seems to be an improvement upon one in Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island, published in 1633 (VI. 78):

Home, then, my lambs; the falling drops eschew:
To-morrow shall ye feast in pastures new.'

No line of Milton's is more frequently quoted; but it is generally spoilt in the quotation by the substitution of the word "fields" for "woods."

ADDITIONAL NOTE.

In only two passages does Todd report any considerable variation of the printed text of the poem from the original draft in Milton's own hand among the Cambridge MSS. :

(1) Lines 58-63 ran originally in the draft thus :

"What could the golden-haired Calliope

For her enchanting son,

When she beheld (the gods far-sighted be)
His gory scalp roll down the Thracian lea?"

Then, in the margin, after the words "enchanting son," was inserted this substitute for the two following lines :

"Whom universal Nature might lament,

And Heaven and Hell deplore,

When his divine head down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore."

Of the whole passage as so altered in the draft the present six lines are an improved expansion.

(2) For the beautiful flower-and-colour passage, lines 142-151, the draft had the following:

66 Bring the rathe primrose that unwedded dies,
Colouring the pale cheek of unenjoyed love
And that sad flower that strove

To write his own woes on the vermeil grain :
Next add Narcissus that still weeps in vain,
The woodbine, and the pansy freakt with jet,
The glowing violet,

The cowslip wan that hangs his pensive head,
And every bud that Sorrow's livery wears;
Let daffadillies fill their cups with tears;
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
To strew," &c.

"Sorrow's livery" is changed into "sad escutcheon," and that into the present reading, "sad embroidery," and other verbal changes are made; but the passage still remains in the draft short of its present perfection.

Smaller Variations noted by Todd are the following:-In line 10 for "he knew" the draft has "he well knew"; in line 22 for "And bid" it had originally "To bid"; in line 26 for "opening" it had first "glimmering"; in line 30 for "star that rose at evening bright' it had first "even-star bright" merely, with "burnished" for "westering" in the following line; in line 47 for "wardrobe" it had originally "buttons"; in line 69 for "Or with " it had "Hid in "; in line 85 for "honoured" it had "smooth," with "soft-sliding" for "smooth-sliding" in the following line; in line 105 "Scrawled o'er" appeared first for

"Inwrought," though "Inwrought" is substituted in the margin ; in line 129 for "nothing" the draft has "little"; in line 138 "stintly" appears for "sparely," though "sparely" had been first written; in line 139 for "Throw" the draft has "Bring"; in line 153 for "frail" it has "sad"; in line 154 for "shores" it has "floods;" in line 160 for "Bellerus" it had originally "Corineus," though "Bellerus" appears as an afterthought; and in line 176 for " And hears" it has "Listening."

THE SONNETS.

SONNET I.—See Introd. to the Sonnet (Vol. II. pp. 281, 282), and note to Il Penseroso, 61-64. No farther annotation is needed here, unless I may remark that "warblest" (line 2) is printed "warbl'st” in the First and Second editions, and is to be pronounced accordingly.

SONNET II.-Observe the rhymes "shew'th" and "endu'th" to "youth" and "truth," both rather quaint to our ears now, and the former indicating the old pronunciation of the word "to shew." For the rest, the Sonnet is sufficiently annotated in the Introd. to it (Vol. II. pp. 282, 283).

FIVE ITALIAN SONNETS AND CANZONE.-For the subject of these pieces, and the probable date and circumstances of their composition, see Introd. to them (Vol. II. pp. 283—285).—As the word "Reno” in line 2 of Sonnet III. was printed "Rheno" in Milton's editions, a misconception seems to have prevailed among early editors that the German Rhine was meant; whereas it is the Italian river Reno, north of Bologna.

Farther annotation of the pieces resolves itself chiefly into a criticism of their Italian style, and a detection of the minute errors or irregularities of idiom which they may contain. This duty having already been performed by two eminent Italian scholars, it is sufficient here to present the results (1.) In the Gentleman's Magazine for Nov. 1836, a contributor, signing himself "J. M." and acknowledging an Italian scholar as his authority, gave these Italian poems of Milton "for the first time printed with corrections": i.e. not as they had been printed by previous English editors, whose slight knowledge of Italian obliged them to follow slavishly the copies in Milton's editions of 1645 and 1673; but as they would be printed by an Italian editor, punctiliously keeping to the original words, but giving them that tidiness of modern spelling, &c., which is given in reprints of Dante, Tasso, and other old Italian poets. The "J. M." of this communication was the Rev. John Mitford, and the Italian friend to whom he was indebted was, as he afterwards announced (Addenda to Mitford's Memoir of Milton, prefixed to the VOL. III.

H H