Justice Anderson, who had sold it in 1601 to Lord Keeper Egerton. Harefield is still in possession of the Newdegates. The place is worth visiting, not only as the scene of the Arcades, but for other reasons. Harefield House indeed has disappeared. It was burnt down in 1660, in consequence, it is said, of the carelessness of the witty Sir Charles Sedley, who was then on a visit to the place, and indulged in his habit of reading in bed. But the pedestrian on the road from Uxbridge to Rickmansworth may still identify the site of the House by two mounds, an old garden, and a large cedar of Lebanon, on the quiet slopes behind Harefield Church; and in the church itself he may see, besides other antiquities of interest, the tomb of the heroine of the Arcades. It is a richly-sculptured and heraldically emblazoned marble monument, exhibiting the effigy of the Countess, in a crimson robe and gilt coronet, recumbent under a canopy of pale green and stars, and, on the side, effigies of her three daughters in relief and also painted. The Countess is represented as in her youth, beautiful, and with long fair hair. The three daughters have the same long fair hair, and like features.

AT A SOLEMN MUSIC.

(Editions of 1645 and 1673; and four earlier Drafts, in Milton's own hand, among the Cambridge MSS.)

This piece must have been written after the Arcades, for the original draft of it in Milton's own hand follows the original draft of the Arcades in the Cambridge volume of preserved Milton MSS. There are, indeed, in that volume no fewer than four drafts of the piece, exhibiting, in perhaps a more extraordinary manner than any other extant specimen of Milton's autograph, his extreme fastidiousness in composition, his habit of altering, correcting, rejecting, erasing, and enlarging, till he had brought a piece to some satisfactory perfection of form. The title, "At a Solemn Music," may be translated "At a Concert of Sacred Music." Milton, as we know, had been a musician from his childhood, accustomed to the society of musicians, and with opportunities of access to the best musical performances in London or Westminster. The present seems to be his testimony to the effects of one such performance. The metrical structure of the piece is peculiar, and without precedent in the

A SOLEMN MUSIC: TIME: THE CIRCUMCISION 153

Minor Poems hitherto. It is not in mere couplets, nor in stanzas, but is a single continuous burst of twenty-eight lines of Iambics of varying length, interlinked irregularly in rhyming pairs. It seems to have been a new metrical experiment of the author.

ON TIME.

(Editions of 1645 and 1673; and early Draft, in Milton's own hand, among the Cambridge MSS.)

This piece looks like a continuation of Milton's mood of new metrical experimentation. Like the last piece, it is a single continuous burst of Iambic lines of different lengths, rhyming irregularly in pairs. This fact, with the fact that the copy of the piece in Milton's hand in the Cambridge volume follows the drafts of the last piece, seems to certify that the date of the composition was the end. of 1633 or the beginning of 1634. The copy in the Cambridge volume bears the title, "On Time: to be set on a Clock-case"; and in the beginning of the piece itself the poet seems to be thinking of the mechanism of a clock, and watching the slow swing of the pendulum.

UPON THE CIRCUMCISION.

(Editions of 1645 and 1673; and early Draft, in Milton's own hand, among the Cambridge MSS.)

This follows the last piece in the Cambridge volume of drafts, and is therefore assignable perhaps to Circumcision Day, or January I, 1634. The mood of metrical experimentation visible in the two preceding pieces seems still continued; for, though the piece breaks itself into two symmetrical stanzas, each stanza is a complex combination of fourteen Iambic lines of varying lengths, rhymed capriciously.

COMUS:

"A Masque, presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, before the Earl of Bridgewater, Lord President of Wales."

(Editions of 1645 and 1673; prior printed edition of 1637; and two MS. copies, —one, which was probably the family-copy or Lawes's stage-copy, in the library at Bridgewater House, and the other, which is the original draft in Milton's own hand, among the Cambridge MSS. The Bridgewater copy was printed in a special edition of Comus, published at Canterbury in 1798, by the Rev. H. J. Todd, afterwards well known as the editor of all Milton's Poetical Works.)

The history of this, the most important of all the minor poems of Milton, is closely connected with that of the Arcades, and our introduction to the Arcades is partly also an introduction to the Comus. What of more specific introduction is necessary remains to be given here.

One branch of the relatives of the venerable Countess-Dowager of Derby, the heroine of the Arcades, consisted, as we have seen, of the members of the noble family of Bridgewater: to wit, John, 1st Earl of Bridgewater, the Countess's stepson, being the son of her second husband, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere; this nobleman's wife, the Countess's second daughter, Lady Frances Stanley, by her first husband, Ferdinando, 5th Earl of Derby; and the numerous children born to this pair,-two of them daughters already married and with houses of their own, but other daughters still unmarried, and residing, together with their two boy-brothers, Viscount Brackley and Mr. Thomas Egerton, sometimes at their father's town-house in the Barbican, and sometimes at his country-seat of Ashridge in Hertfordshire. It is with these members of the Bridgewater family that we have chiefly to do in the Comus.

The Earl of Bridgewater, now about fifty-four years of age (he had been born in 1579), had a place among the nobility of the Court of Charles I. for which he was probably indebted to the fame and long services of his father, the Lord Chancellor. Already a Privy Councillor, etc., he had, on the 26th of June 1631, been nominated by Charles to the high office of the Viceroyalty of Wales, or, as it was more formally called, the office of "Lord President of the Council in

the Principality of Wales and the Marches of the same." This office, --including military command and civil jurisdiction, not only over the Welsh principality itself, but also over the four contiguous English counties of Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, and Shropshire, -had been filled, in Elizabeth's reign, by Sir Henry Sidney, the father of Sir Philip Sidney, and after him by Henry, 2d Earl of Pembroke; and men of scarcely inferior note had held it since. The official seat of the Lord President was the town and castle of Ludlow in Shropshire, about twenty miles south from Shrewsbury, and beautifully situated in one of those tracts of green hilly country which mark the transition from England proper into Wales. The town, which was formerly walled, is mainly on an eminence near the junction of two streams, the Teme and the Corve, whose united waters flow on to meet the Severn in Worcestershire. On the highest ground of the town, and conspicuous to a great distance over the surrounding country, Ludlow Church, a large, cathedral-looking building of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Near it, at a point where the ascending slope on which the town is built ends in a precipitous rock overhanging a steep valley through which the river runs, is Ludlow Castle, now a romantic ruin, but once a garrisoned place of strength, separately walled in from the town, and approached by a gateway from a kind of esplanade at the top of the main street. It was this Castle, with its outer court, inner court, keep, barracks, drawbridge, etc., that was more immediately the residence of the Presidents of Wales. The older portions of the castle dated from the Conquest, when they had been built by the Conqueror's kinsman, Roger de Montgomery; and there was hardly a part of the edifice but had its interesting legends and associations,-legends and associations connected with the old wars of race between the Welsh and the Norman-English, or with those subsequent Wars of the Roses in which the Welsh had taken so active a share. Thus there were shown in the Castle certain rooms, called "the Princes' Apartments," where Edward, Prince of Wales, and his young brother, the sons of Edward IV., had lived from 1472 to 1483, when they left Ludlow on that fatal journey which ended in their murder in the Tower. Arthur, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Henry VII., had also resided in Ludlow Castle, with a court and under guardianship, by his father's arrangement; and Henry, himself a Welshman, had often visited his son there before the death of the Prince in 1502 made his brother, Henry, afterwards Henry VIII., the

heir-apparent. In short, Ludlow Castle was, by long tradition, the proper seat of the government of Wales under the English crown; and, after the duties of that government ceased to be nominally by the Princes of Wales and a Council under them, and came to be exercised by officials styled "Lords-President of the Council of the Principality and its Marches," the Castle was still kept in repair as a kind of palatial residence for these Lords-President.

Although appointed Lord President of Wales in June 1631, the Earl of Bridgewater does not seem to have assumed his functions actively, or to have gone near Ludlow, till some time afterwards. On the 12th of May 1633, his powers in his office were defined afresh by a Royal Letter of Instructions, which was also to regulate the future proceedings, judicial and administrative, of the Council over which he presided. This Council was ostensibly to consist of upwards of eighty persons named in the Letter, among whom were many bishops and the chief state-officers of England, besides a number of knights and gentlemen of the Welsh border. But the real functionaries, under the Lord President, and responsible along with him, or in his absence, were to be these four salaried officers: Sir John Bridgman, Chief Justice of Chester; Sir Marmaduke Lloyd, Second Justice; Sir Nicholas Overbury; and Edward Waters, Esq. In all proceedings of the Council three were to be a quorum; of which three the President, or, in his absence, the Vice-President or Chief Justice of Chester, must always be one. There can be no doubt that this redefinition, in May 1633, of the powers and constitution of the Welsh Presidency was part of that general scheme of a strong government, wherever possible, by officials acting directly for the Crown, which Charles found it the more necessary to depend upon since he had determined (1629) to have nothing more to do with English Parliaments. He had the very pattern of such a Lieutenant for the Crown in Wentworth, who had been "President of the Council in the North," or, in other words, chief administrator of all England north of the Trent, with York for his head-quarters, since 1628, and had more recently (1632) been made also Viceroy of Ireland. It was hoped, perhaps, that the Earl of Bridgewater would be as efficient for the Crown in Wales and its borders as Wentworth had been in Yorkshire and the adjacent parts, and promised to be in Ireland.

In October 1633 the Earl sent his new Letter of Instructions to his Council at Ludlow, to be read and registered before his own