steeped in sensuality, as accounting his very viciousness a developed manhood, and the so-called virtues but signs of rusticity. 83. "Iris' woof." Compare P. L., XI. 244. 84. 66 a swain that to the service of this house belongs," etc. A compliment to Lawes, put into his own mouth. 92. "viewless": invisible. A word used by Milton in two other places,―The Passion, 50, and Par. Lost, III. 518. It is a peculiarly Shakespearian word: “ To be imprisoned in the viewless winds" (Meas. for Meas., III. I). 93. "The star that bids the shepherd fold": i.e. the evening star, or the first star seen at eventide. Keightley quotes Shakespeare's exactly opposite expression for the morning star: Look, the unfolding star calls up the shepherd" (Meas. for Meas. IV. 2). 113. "watchful spheres." See notes, Pens. 88, 89, and Arcad. 63-73. 115. 116. " wavering morrice," i.e. in wavering dance-like undulation. Morrice was originally one kind of dance that came from Spain, and was called the Moorish dance, morisco, or morris-dance.-Observe the alliteration in the line. "sounds and seas," i.e. straits and open seas. 118. "the pert fairies and the dapper elves." Pert (also piert and peart in O. E.), lively, nimble, is by some connected with the word pretty. Dapper, same as Ger. tapfer, quick. I2I. "wakes." A "wake" in old England was the watch or sitting-up till late before one of the Church holidays; hence a merry-making. 129. "Dark-veiled Cotytto": a Thracian Divinity, whose festival was celebrated by orgies on the hills. 132. 'spets": : ejects, throws forth. The word, which strikes us now as so much more energetic and tasteful than spits," ," is really but a form of that word. It was common among the Elizabethans. 66 135. Hecat." The dark goddess Hecate is a shadowy and unsettled personage in the ancient mythology, and various origins are assigned to her; but, on the whole, she is derived from Thrace,-which may account for Milton's fancy of her and Cotytto riding together through the darkness in the same ebony chariot. She was essentially, in later representations at least, the goddess of all kinds of nocturnal ghastliness, such as spectral sights, the howlings of dogs, haunted spots, the graves of the murdered, witches at their incantations. وو 139. "The nice Morn on the Indian steep." In this exquisite picture "nice" means "dainty or "fastidious as to what she saw"; and the word must have come with a touch of sarcasm from Comus. 141. "descry": reveal, describe; a common Spenserian sense of the word. 153, 154. "Thus I hurl," etc. At this point imagine the actor who personated Comus flinging from his hand, or making a gesture of flinging, a magical powder, with the result, by some stage-device, of a flash of coloured light. 166-169. "I shall appear," etc. It is rather difficult to decide what should be the text of this passage. In the edition of 1645 it stood "I shall appear som harmles Villager Whom thrift keeps up about his Country gear, But here she comes, I fairly step aside And hearken, if I may, her busines here." In the Edition of 1673 the passage stood thus :— "I shall appear some harmles Villager But there is a direction among the Errata of this edition to 175. "granges," granaries, farm-steads (granum, grain). 188-190. "when the grey-hooded Even, Like a sad votarist in palmer's weed, Rose from the hindmost wheels of Phœbus' wain." If this fine image is optically realized, what we see is Evening succeeding Day as the figure of a venerable greyhooded mendicant might slowly follow the wheels of some rich man's chariot. 205-209. "A thousand fantasies begin to throng into my memory, of calling shapes," etc. As the Lady here expressly says that she began to think of all the weird stories of supernatural sights and sounds she had ever read or heard of, so Milton too may be supposed to draw on his memory of books in the description. Mr. Browne's remark that "the Tempest may well have suggested the whole imagery" is to the point. 225. "And casts." We should now write "And cast." See Essay on Milton's English, p. 196. 66 231. 'thy airy shell," the hollow vault of the atmosphere. 232. "Meander's margent green." Mr. Keightley suggests that Mæander, the river in Asia Minor so celebrated for its windings, may have been here selected as one of Echo's haunts for that very reason. 237. "thy Narcissus": the youth for whose love Echo pined away till only her voice was left, and who was afterwards punished for his insensibility by being made to fall in love with his own image in a fountain, and at length turned into the flower that bears his name. 241. "Daughter of the Sphere." Compare At a Solemn Music, i. 2. 244-248. "Can any mortal mixture," etc. In the performance at Ludlow this, besides its relation to the story, would come as a compliment to the Lady Alice's singing. 248. "his hidden residence." One of the most striking possible instances of Milton's abstinence from the mongrel word its. The antecedent to which "his" refers is " something holy"; and we should inevitably have written its. 252-257. "I have oft heard," etc. In the Odyssey the Sirens or Singing Maidens who lured mariners to their destruction are not companions of Circe. But Circe sang herself, and had Naiads, or fountain-nymphs, among her handmaidens, who helped her to cull her herbs. 257-259. "Scylla. . . and fell Charybdis," etc. Homer places the island of the Sirens to the south-west of Italy, not far from Scylla and Charybdis. 66 A translation of Virgil's " latran 258. barking waves. tibus undis" (Æn. VII. 588). 267, 268. "Unless the goddess that in rural shrine Two deviations from normal English syntax here; for the regular construction would be "Unless thou be the goddess that in rural shrine dwells here." 271. "ill is lost": a Latin idiom, as Mr. Keightley points out, -"male perditur": "there is little loss in losing." 66 287. "Imports their loss, beside the present need?" Apart from the present inconvenience, would their loss be of importance ?" 293. “swinked," laboured, fatigued. 297-304. "Their port was more than human," etc. Note in this passage the cleverly-introduced compliment to the two boys, Lord Brackley and Mr. Thomas Egerton, who were about to come on the stage. 299. "the element," i.e. the sky or air. Twelfth Night, I. I, has "The element itself, till seven years' heat, Shall not behold her face at ample view." Shakespeare, In the same play (III. 1) the Clown says to Viola, “Who you are and what you would are out of my welkin; I might say element,' but the word is over-worn. 301. "dwe-strook." See note, Ode Nat. 95. 317, 318. "or the low-roosted lark From her thatched pallet rouse." On this passage Mr. Keightley comments thus :-"The ideas here belong rather to a hen-house than to the restingplace of the lark, which has no thatch over it, and in which, as it is on the ground, he does not roost. Milton, whose mornings were devoted to study rather than to rambles in the fields, does not seem to have known much of the habits of the lark. Compare L'Allegro, v. 41." Now, as we have seen that the charge of incorrect description, and ignorance of the habits of the lark, deduced from the passage in L'Allegro so referred to, arises from a gross misreading of the passage and neglect of its obvious syntax (see note on the passage), so here we believe the repeated charge springs equally from a misapprehension. Roost, though it has come to mean to rest on trees or on timberjoists, contains in it not the less the general sense of "rest"; and by "the low-roosted lark" Milton means simply "the lark in her low resting-place." The very phrase calls attention to the fact that the lark does not roost on trees like other birds, but has a nest on the ground. As for "thatched" applied to this nest or "pallet," surely the texture of the nest itself, or the corn-stalks or rushes over it, might be called "the thatch." Few birds, except those in the "hen-house," have a thatch over them in any other sense. 323-327. "courtesy, which oft is sooner found," etc. Though the word courtesy is derived from court, yet, says the Lady, the thing is not always so readily found now in courts as in humbler places. Here she differs from Spenser, as quoted by Newton : "Of Court it seems men Courtesie do call, For that it there most useth to abound." 341, 342. "our star of Arcady, or Tyrian Cynosure." For Cynosure see note, L'Alleg. 80. It was the Phoenician mariners that steered by that constellation, and hence it is called Tyrian. The Greek mariners steered by the adjacent constellation of the Greater Bear, and "star of Arcady" here means any conspicuous star in that constellation. For it was the nymph Callisto, daughter of the Arcadian king Lycaon, that was turned into the Great Bear, and called Arctos, while it was her son Arcas that was whirled up beside her as the Lesser Bear or Tyrian Cynosure. 66 370. "(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not.)" In very strict syntax "not being" would cling to want as its substantive; but the phrase passes for the Latin ablative absolute. 380. "all to-ruffled." In Milton's own texts this phrase is printed without any hyphen as three distinct words, "all to ruffl'd": and, as that does not make sense in our present printing, the question has arisen whether the reading should be all too ruffled (i.e. "all too much ruffled," as in such phrases as "all too sad to tell"), or "all-to ruffled" (where all-to would be an old adverb meaning completely), or "all to-ruffled" (where "to-ruffled" would be taken as the participle of a verb compounded of the simple verb and the intensifying prefix to, and meaning "to ruffle greatly "). Something |