were frustrated by the wisdom of the Senate rather than by the repelling force of arms.

1. 6. states. Perhaps States, i. e. the States-General of Holland are

meant.

Sonnet XV.

1. 3. Milton only claims to have received one talent (Matt xxv.).

1. 12. Spenser's Hymn to Heavenly Love, with its outlines of the story of the fall of Lucifer, seems to have been familiar to Milton. The angels are there as

Either with nimble wings to cut the skies,

When He them on His messages doth send,
Or on His own dread presence to attend.'

Sonnet XVI.

The Duke of Savoy, urged by Capuchin propagandists, gave to the Vaudois, his Protestant subjects in Piedmont, the alternative of attending Mass or of leaving their country in twenty days. Savoyard troops were sent to enforce the edict, and carried fire and sword into the valleys of Piedmont. All England was indignant at this crime, and Cromwell loudly remonstrated with the Duke of Savoy and Louis XIV. A collection of £80,000 was made for the sufferers. A treaty was concluded between the Duke and his subjects by French mediation (August 1655), and was ratified before the arrival of Cromwell's protest against the unfairness of its terms. Even this arrangement was violated three years afterwards, and Cromwell again employed Milton to write to Louis XIV. The Vaudois had peace thenceforward till the Restoration.

1. 7. There is a print of this particular act of cruelty in a contemporary history of the massacre, by Sir Samuel Moreland, Cromwell's agent.

1. 10. Alluding to the proverb that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.'

1. 14. Babylonian woe; i. e. the woe denounced against Babylon. Milton, in his Latin verses on November 5, calls the Pope the Babylonian high-priest.

Sonnet XVII.

1. 1. In the Defensio Secunda, Milton says that he is unwillingly, and in one matter only, a dissembler-his eyes being as clear and cloudless as those of the most keen-sighted.

1. 7. one jot. The usual reading is 'a jot.' the earliest printed ed. (1694).

'One' is the reading of

1. 10. conscience; here = consciousness, as in Paradise Lost, viii. 502. In the work above quoted Milton relates that he was warned that the prosecution of his task (the answering Salmasius) would certainly cost him the sight of his remaining eye, but that he did not hesitate to incur the penalty.

Sonnet XVIII.

1. 3. Jove's great son, Hercules.

pale and faint. See Euripides, Alcestis, 1127.

1. 5. It is nowhere said in the Scriptures that the Hebrew women were washed or wore white at their purification after childbed. Perhaps, however, Milton does not make the latter assertion. (Keightley.)

PARADISE LOST.

The Verse. The first edition of Paradise Lost, in 1667, was without this preface. In 1668, when a new title-page was prefixed to the edition, it was added, with the following Address of the printer to the reader: Courteous Reader, there was no Argument at first intended to the book; but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, I have procured it, and withal that which stumbled many others, why the poem rimes not.' (Todd.)

Book I.

1. 1. Cp. with the opening of the Iliad, and with that of the Æneid. 1. 2. Mortal; Lat. mortalis, in its classical use, is generally='human,’ but in Cyprian and the later fathers it is equivalent to 'lethalis,’ deadly. (Keightley.)

1. 4. Romans v. 19. Lines 4 and 5 are incumbrances and deadeners of the harmony, as are lines 14-16. (Landor.)

1. 6. Cp. Book vii. 1. Secret is here used for 'separate,' ‘apart,' (Æneid, viii. 670.) As in Arcades 30; Circumcision 19.

1. 7. Horeb (not Oreb, Judges vii. 25) and Sinai are two peaks of the same mountain range, on which Moses had been a shepherd for forty years. The Law is said in Deuteronomy to have been given from Horeb, and in the other books of the Pentateuch Sinai is named as the mount' of its promulgation.

1. 10. Sion was the hill opposite to Moriah, on which latter the Temple was built. In the valley beside them was the Pool (not brook) of Siloam-an intermittent well, ebbing and flowing at irregular intervals.

1. 12. fast by, close to, frequently used by Milton (Paradise Lost, ii. 725, x. 333; Ode on Passion 21).

1. 14. middle; middling, mediocre, mean. i. 49). Cp. Horace (Odes, ii. 20. 1).

Tacitus has this use (Hist.

1. 15. Aonia was the name of part of Boeotia, near Phocis, in which were the mountain Helicon and the fountain Aganippe, the favourite haunts of the Muses. The Aonian mount is here used for the productions of the Greek poets, which Milton intends to surpass in boldness of conception.

pursues; like the Latin prosequor (Georg. iii. 340). Southey (in Landor's Imaginary Conversations) remarks that Milton as early as the fifth line begins to give the learned and less obvious signification to English words, as 'seat,'' secret,' 'middle.'

1. 16. Cp. Comus 44.

1. 17. Spirit is here a monosyllable, as frequently in Milton. Cp. I Cor. iii. 16, 17.

1. 21. brooded is the strict translation of the Hebrew word rendered in our version by 'moved' (Gen. i. 2).

1. 24. argument; subject. Spenser, in the introductory lines of his poems, speaks of the argument of his afflicted stile' (pen), and the King asks Hamlet, Have you heard the argument of the play?'

(Hamlet, iii. 2.) Cp. Paradise Lost, ix. 28.

1. 27. Cp. Iliad, ii. 485; Æneid, vii. 645.

1. 28. Prov. XV. II.

1. 29. grand; for 'great,' as in Paradise Lost, iv. 192; x. 1033.

1. 36. what time; at the time when. Cp. Lycidas 28.

the poem.

1. 38. Landor remarks that this is the first hendecasyllabic line in It is a very efficient line in dramatic poetry, but hardly ever is so in Milton, who uses it much more in Paradise Regained than in Paradise Lost.

1. 40. Isaiah xiv. 13.

1. 45. Luke x. 18.

1. 46. Ruin and combustion is a phrase occurring in an order of the two Houses in 1642. Hence Keightley conjectures it may have been an ordinary phrase of the time.

1. 48. adamant is strictly the unconquerable,' usually applied to the hardest metal. Diamond is a corrupted form of the same word. Here adamantine-not to be broken.

1. 50. Hesiod's description of the fall of the giants is here imitated.

1. 56. bale is misery, sorrow; baleful = either sorrowful' or (as here) mischievous,' 'causing sorrow.'

6

1. 57. witness'd; bore witness to. The word is used always in this

sense in Shakespeare and in Milton, and not (as now) as merely equivalent to saw.' The affliction and dismay were Satan's own.

1. 60. situation; site. The word is used only here in Milton's poems, and only twice by Shakespeare.

1. 63. no light (came);—a zeugma. (Keightley.) Cp. Il Penseroso 80. A sullen light intermingled with massy darkness.' (De Quincey.) 1. 68. urges; in the Latin sense=drives,' as in Paradise Lost, vi. 864.

1. 72. utter outer. shell of knowledge.' 'bridge's utter gate.'

Matt. xxii. 13. Ben Jonson speaks of the 'utter

Spenser (Faery Queene, iv. 10. 11) of the Cp. Paradise Lost, iii. 16; y. 614.

1. 73. Not very far for creatures who could have measured all that, and a much greater distance, by a single act of the will. (Landor.)

1. 74. Cp. Paradise Lost, ix. 103; x. 671. According to Milton's system the centre of the earth is also the centre of the world. The utmost pole here meant is not the pole of the earth, but that of the universe. Homer makes hell as far below the deepest pit of earth as heaven is above the earth. Virgil makes it twice as far (Æneid, vi. 577-9).

1. 81. Matt. xii. 24. Beelzebub, 'Lord of Flies,' was worshipped in Ekron, a city of Palestine, on a moist soil in a hot climate and infested with flies, against which the protection of the idol was invoked.

1. 84. beest is not to be confounded with the subjunctive 'be.' Our substantive verb, as it is called, is made up of fragments of several verbs, of which at least' am,' 'was,' and 'be' are distinguishable; beest is 2nd pers. sing. pres. indic. of O. E. beon, to be. It is now obsolete, but is used by Shakespeare in Julius Cæsar, iv. 3. (Craik's English of Shakespeare.) Cp. Isaiah xiv. 12; Æneid, ii. 274.

1. 86. Nausicaa thus surpassed her damsels, though they were lovely. (Odyssey, vi. 108.)

1. 94. So Prometheus defies Zeus (Æschylus, Prom. Vinct. 992-7). 1. 197. Study, here = Lat. studium, 'endeavour,' as in Hotspur's outburst against Bolingbroke (1 Henry IV, i. 3), and in Paradise Lost, xi.

577.

1. 114. empire, imperium,' supreme authority.

1. 115. ignominy here shortened (as always in Shakespeare) to 'ignomy.' (1 Henry IV, v. 4. The Prince's speech. over Hotspur's body.) So in Paradise Regained, iii. 136.

1. 117. empyreal substance, fiery essence, which is the expression in the Circumcision 7.

1. 123. triumphs. For the accent, see note On Time, line 22.

1. 124. Though tyranny in the classical sense only signifies usurped

supreme power (without any reference to the manner in which that power is used), it is probable that Satan may here employ the word in its usual acceptation.

1. 125. Cp. Æneid, i. 208.

1. 128. throned Powers; cp. line 360.

1. 131. perpetual is supposed to be used here to avoid eternal,' and to signify that the King is only such by immemorial uninterrupted possession. But Milton uses perpetual' for 'eternal' in Nativity Ode 7.

1. 141. extinct, extinguished like a flame. Cp. line 39, and book iii. 401-2, for similar elisions of final y, often recurring in this poem.

1. 144. of force, perforce, like Big. So in Shakespeare, It must, of force' (1 Henry IV, ii. 3).

1. 149. Thrall, O. Engl. word for 'slave,' frequent in Spenser. 1. 152. Cp. To do me business in the veins of the earth.'

(Tempest, i. 2.)

1. 157. Satan, in Milton's poem, is not the principle of malignity or of the abstract love of evil, but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own are subordinate. He expresses the sum and substance of all ambition in this one line.' (Hazlitt.)

1. 158. Cp. Paradise Lost, ii. 199.

1. 167. if I fail not, if I err not; Lat. ni fallor.

1. 172. laid, stilled; cp. Paradise Regained, iv. 429. (Odes, i. 9. 10), and

'When all the winds are laid.'

Cp. Horace

(Tennyson's translation from Iliad.)

1. 176. bis. The A. S. personal pronoun was he, heo, bit. For beo we have substituted she,' (fem. of demonst. se, seo, thaet.) The genitive was bis for masculine and neuter, and hire for feminine. The form its' is of late introduction. It does not occur in the authorised Bible, 'his' or 'whereof' being used instead. (Gen. i. 11, Matt. v. 13, Mark ix. 50, Acts xii. 10.) It' was used where we now use 'its,' as in Winter's Tale, ii. 3, original text, where Antigonus is enjoined to leave the infant child of Hermione to 'it own protection; and long before 'its' was generally received, we have it self,' so written under the impression that it was a possessive. Milton does use 'its' sometimes (Paradise Lost, i. 254; iv. 813), but generally avoids the word by feminine personification (as was done in early translations of the Bible, wherein 'her was used for his ' in Numb. iv. 9). See Paradise Lost, i. 723; ii. 4, 175, 271, 584, &c. Mr. Craik, from whose English of Shakespeare the above note is abridged, says that Milton nowhere uses 'his' in a neuter sense. Cp. note on Comus 248.