poets, I have put limits to my reproduction of matter of this kind. In cases of clear reminiscence, or of very close and interesting parallelism, I have generally quoted the parallel passage textually; but, where the resemblance is more vague and general, or where the parallel passage is in a book easily accessible, I have contented myself (as in most citations of passages of the Bible) with a simple reference to the place. In not a few instances, I have added parallel or illustrative passages, more particularly from English authors, to those cited by previous editors.

III. In some editions, intended for scholastic use, there has been a multiplication of minute philological, and especially minute etymological, notes. Even in such editions I doubt the necessity or propriety of incessant and miscellaneous annotation of the merely etymological kind. In reading Milton, or any other English author, the student ought surely to have an English Dictionary beside him; and why should he be saved the wholesome trouble of looking up any ordinary word about the derivation of which he may be uncertain? Enough, at all events, in an edition like the present, if unusual words are duly noted, and also all peculiarly Miltonic grammatical forms and constructions. Care has been taken of this in the individual Notes; and an effort has been made to systematise the results in the General Essay on Milton's English and Versification.

IV. On the whole, more duty has remained for myself in the way of new annotation, both hermeneutical and exegetical, than I should have anticipated. Even in the particular of the detection of wrong readings that had crept into the text something has been gleaned by comparison of the later texts with those of Milton's own editions; while, in the larger matters of the interpretation of difficult passages and the full exposition of others in connexion with Milton's life and with his general philosophy, I found a great deal that had been missed or had been but imperfectly treated. Again and again, for example, in the Notes to Paradise Lost, I have had to illustrate afresh the significance of particular phrases and passages in connexion with that Miltonic Cosmology which I have already expounded so far, and in part expressed by diagram, in the Introduction to that Poem.

NOTES TO THE MINOR POEMS

PART I: THE ENGLISH POEMS

PARAPHRASE ON PSALMS CXIV. AND CXXXVI.

PSALM CXIV. :-Several of the phrases and rhymes in this Paraphrase have been traced, by Warton and others, to older poets, whom Milton is supposed to have read in his boyhood. It is enough to say that, like every one else, he inherited a traditional phraseology, and began with it. A favourite book in English households in the early part of the seventeenth century was Joshua Sylvester's Translation of The Divine Weeks and Works of the French poet Du Bartas ; and there is evidence that Milton, in his childhood, had revelled in this quaint, but really rich and poetical, book. The verse employed in the present Paraphrase is the verse of Sylvester's Du Bartas; and some of the rhymes—such as recoil, foil (lines 9, 10), mountains, fountains (13, 14), and crush, gush (17, 18)-were already Sylvester's.

I. "Terah's faithful son": i.e. Abraham. See Gen. xi. 24—27. 3. “Pharian”: i.e. Egyptian. Unless this is an ill-formed adjective from " Pharaoh," or from Pharan or Paran, the name of a part of the desert between Egypt and Palestine (Gen. xxi. 21, and 1 Kings xi. 18), it is from Pharos, the island in the Bay of Alexandria on the northern coast of Egypt, made to give its name, by extension, to Egypt itself. But clearly Milton had Buchanan's translation of the Psalm before him :

"Egyptian."

Indeed, in Buchanan Pharius is a common word for " Thus in Psalm CXXXVI., the next of Milton's paraphrasing, Buchanan has

VOL. III

"Pharonem et Pharios submersit gurgite currus."

PSALM CXXXVI. :-Here also several of the phrases are, by Warton and others, traced to older poets. Thus, "watery plain " for the sea (line 23) is found in Spenser, in William Browne, and in Drayton; "golden-tressèd," as applied to the sun (29), is in Chaucer ; "hornèd moon" (33) is Spenser's, Shakespeare's, and everybody's ; "tawny king" (55) is in Fairfax's translation of Tasso. These recollections may be unconscious and general; but perhaps the influence of Sylvester is direct. The rhymes fell, Israel (lines 42, 43), and Israel, dwell (73, 74), are after Sylvester.

"Who"

IO. "Who doth the wrathful," etc. The initial pronoun in this line, and also in lines 13, 17, 21, and 25, is a substitute, in the Second Edition, for "That" in the first. This is worth noting.

45, 46. "ruddy waves of the Erythraan main": i.e. the Red Sea. The word ερυθρός (erythros) is Greek for “ red,” and ἡ Ἐρυθρὰ Oáλaora was the name for the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in Herodotus and later Greek writers. Various origins of the name have been assigned,—the red coral reefs in the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, etc. Evidently, however, the name begot a popular idea that the water itself was red. Hence "ruddy waves" in this passage. Both that phrase and its adjunct "Erythræan" are from Sylvester's Du Bartas. Thus, in a passage quoted by Dunster :—

along the sandy shore

Where th' Erythrean ruddy billows roar."

But Sylvester beats this in another couplet in his actual description of the drowning of Pharaoh's host:

"Another with loud lashes

Scours his proud coursers through the scarlet washes."

49. "walls of glass." Sylvester has the phrase in his description of the crossing of the Red Sea; also "walls of crystal" and "bulwarks of billows."

65, 66. "Seon . . . Amorrean coast." The phrase in the Authorised Version is "Sihon King of the Amorites"; but Milton, as Todd points out, must have had Buchanan's Latin before him :—

"Stravit Amorrhæum valida virtute Seonem."

Todd, however, did not remark that, though the same line occurs in the preceding Psalm (CXXXV.) in more recent editions of Buchanan, as a translation of the same phrase "Sihon King of the Amorites,” older editions of Buchanan had this line in that Psalm:

"Quique Amorrhæis Seon regnavit in oris."

Milton all but translates this.

89. "warble forth." Sylvester again; who, in the very opening of his translation of Du Bartas, has

"O Father, grant I sweetly warble forth

Unto our seed the world's renowned birth !"

ON THE DEATH OF A FAIR INFANT.

In Milton's own edition (1673) the date "Anno ætatis 17" is put before the title of the poem, instead of after, as now. This was done, I fancy, to avoid the absurdity of meaning that would arise if the date were read after the title and as part of it. There are instances of the same thing in the headings of the 2nd, the 3rd, and the 4th of the Latin Elegies, and of the 1st and 3rd of the Sylvæ.

I.

1. "O fairest flower," etc. This opening reminds one of that of a little piece in Shakespeare's Passionate Pilgrim :—

"Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely plucked, soon vaded,
Plucked in the bud, and vaded in the spring!

Bright orient pearl, alack, too timely shaded!

Fair creature, killed too soon by death's sharp sting!" Milton's taste in rhythm had by this time outgrown Sylvester's Du Bartas.

8-10. "grim Aquilo... Athenian damsel got." Aquilo, or Boreas, the North Wind, dwelt in a cave in Thrace, and carried off Oreithyia, the daughter of the Athenian king Erechtheus.

8. "charioteer": spelt "charioter" in the original, and also in the only other line of Milton's poetry in which it occurs (Par. Lost, VI. 390). In all modern editions the spelling has been changed to "charioteer"; but I am not quite sure that Milton intended our modern stress on the last syllable.

12. "infamous blot." The phrase, with the same pronunciation of infamous, occurs in Spenser, Faery Queene, III. vi. 13. (Todd.)

15. "icy-pearled." Warton suggested "ice-ypearled," on the analogy of ychained in the Ode on the Nativity (155) and star-ypointing in the lines on Shakespeare; but, on the other analogy, afforded by such words as rosy-bosomed (Comus, 986), fiery-wheeled (Pens. 53), we may keep the word as it is.-Sylvester calls hail "ice-pearl" and "bounding balls of ice-pearl."

23-27. "For so Apollo... young Hyacinth... purple flower." The myth referred to is that of the beautiful youth, Hyacinthus, son of a king of Sparta or Laconia, in which territory is the river Eurotas. He was killed unwittingly by Apollo at a game of quoits, and from his blood sprang the flower that bears his name.

31. “wormy bed." Warton cites the phrase from Shakespeare, Midsum. N. Dr. III. 2. "Already to their wormy beds are gone."

39. "that high first-moving sphere": i.e. the primum mobile, or the outermost shell or sphere, enclosing, according to the Ptolemaic astronomy, all the other spheres of the mundane system, and separating that system from the unknown. See Introd. to Par. Lost, pp. 87-92.

44. "shaked Olympus." Shaked was not an uncommon form. Todd quotes the instance in Shakespeare, Troil. and Cress. I. 3: "O, when degree is shaked."

48. "and thou," etc. The word "wert " is implied before "thou.”

50, 51. "that just maid who," etc.: i.e. Astræa or Justice. Astræa, the daughter of Zeus and Themis, dwelt on earth during the golden age, when men were just, but at length forsook it, in disgust, for her true home among the stars.

52. "camest." Observe the curious change of person from forsook to camest. Yet it is natural and indeed inevitable; came would not have done. Possibly, however, who is not the nominative to camest, but the construction intended is camest (thou)?

53. "Or wert thou [Mercy], that sweet smiling Youth ?" In the original this line is short of the just length by two syllables: evidently a word had dropped out in the printing. The suggestion of the word "Mercy" to fill the blank was first made in a periodical, about 1750, by Mr. John Heskin, of Christ Church, Oxford, "who published," says Warton, "an elegant edition of Bion and Moschus." It is almost certainly correct, making the three personages of the stanza Justice (the maiden), Mercy (the young man), and Truth (the matron); which is the triad also in stanza 15 of the Ode on the Nativity.

54. "crowned Matron." In the original it is "cowned Matron," clearly a misprint.

59. “prefixèd": i.e. "pre-appointed."

68. "Or drive away the slaughtering pestilence." An allusion to the prevalence of the Plague in London and England when the poem was written. See Introduction.

76, 77. "he will an offspring give," etc. One cannot say that this prophecy was fulfilled in either Edward Phillips or John Phillips, the two sons of Milton's sister by her first marriage, born after the loss of the little infant girl of the poem; unless it be that we remember them through their uncle, and Edward Phillips especially for his Life of that uncle.