now,

"Wed your divine sounds and mixed power employ." Line 10 originally princely, then tripled, now burning.

originally,

Line 11

"And the Cherubic host in thousand quires."

Line 14 originally the blooming, now victorious.

Line 15 originally sacred, now holy.

Line 19: originally could, now did.

Line 28 originally,

"To live and sing with Him in ever-endless light."

Subsequent successive variations :—

"To live and sing with Him in ever-glorious light;"

"To live and sing with Him in uneclipsed light;"

"To live and sing with Him where Day dwells without Night;"

"To live and sing with Him in endless morn of light;"

"To live and sing with Him in cloudless birth of light;"

"To live and sing with Him in never-parting light;"

and now, finally,

"To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light."

ON TIME.

3. "Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace": i.e. the slow rate of descent of the leaden weights in a clock. The lines, as the draft of them among the Cambridge MSS. shows, were written "to be set on a clock-case. Compare Shakespeare in Sonnet LXXVII.— "Thou by thy dial's shady stealth mayst know Time's thievish progress to eternity.”

12. “individual”: meaning here "indivisible," never to be separated. See Par. Lost, IV. 486, VII. 382, and XII. 85, with

notes.

18. "happy-making sight": "the plain English," says Newton, "of Beatific Vision."

21. "Attired with stars." Either "clothed with stars," or, as Mr. Keightley suggests, "crowned with stars." He produces instances of "attire" meaning head-dress.

UPON THE CIRCUMCISION.

1-5. "Ye flaming Powers," etc. From the wording of these first lines of the piece, one may imagine it to have been written on some 1st of January, that being Circumcision Day in the Church Calendar. The "flaming Powers" are the Seraphim (which name in Hebrew implies "burning"); the "wingèd Warriors" may be the Cherubim. Gabriel is styled the "wingèd warrior," Par. Lost, IV. 576. Todd quotes from Tasso the very phrase "wingèd warriors ("guerrieri alati").

6-9. "if . your fiery essence can distil no tear, burn in your sighs," etc. i.e. "if it is impossible for your Angelic constitutions, formed as they are of fire, to yield tears, yet, by burning as you sigh, you may borrow the water of our tears, turned into vapour."

IO. "Heaven's heraldry": i.e. the heraldic pomp of Heaven.— "whilere": a little while ago.

This begins the second stanzas of fourteen lines The stanzas are not

15, 16. "O more exceeding love," etc. stanza of the piece; which consists of two each, of exactly the same construction. separated in the original editions. In the opening of the second stanza, as Richardson pointed out, there seems to be a recollection of two lines in Virgil's Eighth Eclogue (49, 50):

"Crudelis mater magis, an puer improbus ille?

Improbus ille puer: crudelis tu quoque mater!”

COMUS.

1-4. "Before the starry threshold," etc.

Mr. Browne compares

the passage in the Latin poem to Mansus, 94-98, and refers to John xiv. 2.

3. "insphered." See notes, Penseroso, 88, 89, and Arcades, 63-73.

4. "serene."

Mr. Keightley thinks the word has to be pronounced here with the accent on the first syllable; which I doubt.

I seem to detect a finer effect in the metrical liberty involved in the ordinary pronunciation; and the first syllable of "serenus" is short.

7. “pestered . . . pinfold." Pestered is interpreted "crowded" by Todd, as if from the Italian pesta, a crowd; but Skeat's derivation of the word is far more accurate, and more exact to Milton's meaning here. "PESTER: See PASTOR "" is the entry of the word in Mr. Skeat's Etymological Dictionary; which looks mischievous, till it is explained by turning to PASTOR, when it becomes very innocent. Pastorium in later Latin meant "a clog for a horse at pasture"; whence the French empestrer "to hobble a horse at pasture"; whence pester, to clog or impede one's movements. This gives point and coherence to Milton's phrase "confined and pestered in this pinfold here": i.e. confined and clogged.-Pinfold, a pen or enclosure in which sheep are folded; from A.-S. pyndan to shut in, whence also pound, an enclosure for strayed animals.

9, IO.

"the crown that Virtue gives, after this mortal change." See Rev. iv. 4. The meaning of "mortal change" is a little obscure. Hastily it may be read as if it meant "death"; but rather it seems to mean "this mortal state of life." Mr. Browne imagines a recollection of the use of "change" for a figure in a dance (as in Love's Labour's Lost, V. 2); but may not Milton, without any definite idea of pre-existence, have had in his mind such a meaning as "this variation of our condition "?

II. "Amongst the enthroned gods": spelt enthron'd in the First and Second Editions, and therefore to be pronounced as a dissyllable, and not enthroned. As Mr. Ross points out, this passage is an instance of Milton's habit of expressing Christian doctrine in the language of classic mythology.

13. "golden key." See Lycidas, 111.

16. "ambrosial weeds." Though, from the special use of ambrosia as the name for the food of the gods, we are apt to confine the adjective ambrosial to the sense of "delicious," it really means only "immortal" "; whence celestial or "heavenly."—" weeds" :

see note, L'All. 120.

20, 21. "Took in by lot, 'twixt high and nether Jove, imperial rule," etc. Homer calls Hades or Pluto Ζεύς καταχθόνιος, or "underground Jove" (II. IX. 457); Ovid has the phrase "Jupiter Stygius"; and Dunster quotes from Sylvester's Du Bartas the line

"Both upper Jove's and nether's diverse thrones."

The primeval distribution of rule among Jupiter, Pluto, and Neptune, after Saturn's overthrow, is described by Neptune himself in the Iliad (XV. 190 et seq.):-"We are three brothers, sons of Saturn by Rhea,-Jupiter and myself two, and Pluto, governing the

infernal regions, the third: all things were divided into three portions, and each of us was allotted his dignity. The lots being shaken, I, in the first place, was appointed to inhabit for ever the hoary sea; Pluto next obtained the pitchy darkness; but Jove, in the third place, had allotted to him the wide Heaven in the air and in the clouds. Nevertheless, the Earth is still the common property of all, and the lofty Olympus."-Took in is the past tense here, with Neptune in line 18 for its nominative, and rule in line 21 for its objective. This is necessary to the syntax and might seem obvious; but the pointing in some editions shows a tendency, in hasty reading, to regard took as an old past participle, applying to "the sway of every salt flood," etc. About the pointing of line 20, however, there is The pointing in the First and Second

farther room for difference. Editions is

"Took in by lot 'twixt high, and neather Jove,
Imperial rule," etc.

This leaves it questionable whether we should now point.

or

"Took in, by lot 'twixt high and nether Jove,
Imperial rule," etc.

"Took in by lot, 'twixt high and nether Jove,
Imperial rule," etc.

The second, which makes 'twixt a preposition of place, and understands "twixt high and nether Jove" as meaning "between Heaven and Hell," is truer to the myth that all the three gods were concerned in the lot, and Mr. Keightley adopts it. Perhaps he is right; but the other reading, though it seems to make Jove and Pluto the only active parties in the lot, may possibly be what Milton intended. If less accurate, it keeps the personality of the two Joves in the passage, instead of using their names only for their realms while Neptune figures in person. To the ear also it is perhaps the more natural. A pause after "lot" is not agreeable.

23.

"unadornèd": for "otherwise unadorned."

24. "his tributary gods": i.e. the sea-gods under Neptune and paying him tribute.

25. "several": separate.

27. "this Isle": i.e. Great Britain. Compare Shakespeare's splendid burst about "England" from the mouth of John of Gaunt (Rich. II. II. 1).

29. "He quarters to his blue-haired deities." Quarters in the sense of divides, not necessarily in the sense of dividing into four parts, though Mr. Keightley finds a shadow of reason for this sense

in the fact that Great Britain was then divided into the two kingdoms of Scotland and England, and that in the latter the Northern Counties and Wales were distinct Viceroyalties. There seems to be some emphasis on the phrase "blue-haired deities," as if these were a special section of the "tributary gods" of line 24. Can there be a recollection of "blue" as the British colour, inherited from the old times of the blue-stained Britons who fought with Cæsar? "Green-haired" is the usual poetic epithet for Neptune and his subordinates.

30. "all this tract that fronts the falling sun": i.e. Wales, or West Britain.

31-33. A noble Peer," etc. i.e. the Earl of Bridgewater, Viceroy of Wales, at whose expense the Masque was given, and who was looking on at the performance. See Introd. I. pp. 154 et seq.

33. "An old and haughty nation": i.e. the Welsh. well as Shakespeare, had a kindness for this people.

Milton, as

34. "nursed in princely lore." In this phrase some find an allusion to a link with Royalty at a remote point in the pedigree of the Egerton family; others find a reference to the fact that the young people had been a good deal at Court (see Introd. I. pp. 157, 158). The more natural meaning, however, is simply "highlyeducated."

37. “perplexed": in its etymological sense of "entangled," "intertwined."

43-45. "And listen why," etc. Not unlike Horace's Favete linguis, etc. (Od. III. i. 2), and with something of the sound of Par. Lost, I. 16.-" hall or bower," a frequent phrase with Spenser and the minstrel-poets: "hall" being the great general room in princely residences, and "bower" the more private apartment.

46-50. "Bacchus. after the Tuscan mariners transformed, coasting the Tyrrhene shore on Circe's island fell." For Circe and her famous Island of Ææa, off the coast of Latium, see the Odyssey, Book X., where it is Ulysses that is her visitor; and for the story of the voyage of Bacchus along the Tyrrhene shore, the seizure of him by the pirate sailors, and the transformation of these, all save the good pilot, into dolphins for this act of violence to his godship, see the Homeric Hymn to Bacchus, and Ovid's Metamorphoses, III. 660 et seq. The bringing of Bacchus to Circe's Island, after this last adventure in probation of his godship, is Milton's own invention, with a view to the parentage he had resolved on for Comus.--Notice the Latin idiom "after the Tuscan mariners