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falling into the Euxine Sea in the country of the legendary Amazons.

I20. "nitrati pulveris." The accepted Latin phrase for gunpowder was "pulvis nitratus" or "pulvis nitrosus."

126. "vel Gallus atrox, vel savus Iberus." The French King in 1605 was Henry IV., the hero of Navarre; the Spanish King was Philip III. Milton thinks of the two peoples and their religion, and not of the particular sovereigns.

127. "Sæcula. Mary."

Mariana": the times of "the Bloody

139-154. "Est locus," etc. This Latin poem, juvenile production though it is, contains extremely fine poetical passages; and the present, describing the Cave of Murder and Treason, is one of them.

143. "præruptaque." So in Second edition. In the First the word was 66 semifractaque"; which gave a false quantity, the first syllable of semi being long.

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155. pugiles Roma": 'champions of Rome," in the sense of hired bravoes or ruffians.

Treason.

165. "paruere gemelli." The gemelli are Murder and The first syllable of paruere being long, Milton, as Warton observed, either committed a false quantity here, or is to be absolved on the ground that he meant the u to pass as v, and the whole word to be a trisyllable.

170-193. "Esse ferunt spatium," etc. In this imagination of the House or Tower of Fame, the young poet dares to come after Ovid's similar description (Met. XII. 39-63) and Chaucer's much more elaborate one (House of Fame: beginning of Book III.) He helps himself to touches from both, and uses also Virgil's description of Fame herself (Æn., IV. 173-188); yet he produces an Abode of Rumour quite his own, and suitable for his purpose.

171. "Mareotidas undas": distinctly so in both Milton's editions; but certainly, as Mr. Keightley observes, either a mistake or a misprint for Mæotidas. For Milton cannot have meant Lake Mareotis, which is in Egypt, but the great Lake Mæotis, now "the sea of Azof," north of the Black Sea.

178--180. " Qualiter instrepitant . . . agmina muscarum," etc. The original of this image, in its exact form, as Warton noted, is in the Iliad, II. 469 et seq., and XVI. 641; but Chaucer has a modification of it in his House of

Fame, describing the coming in of the petitioners to the Goddess.

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182-188. "Auribus innumeris cinctum caput . пес tot, Aristoride, . . volvebas lumina." Aristorides is Argus, the hundred-eyed guardian of the cow Io, or Isis; his father was Aristor. Compare Virgil's Fame as above (181-183), and Chaucer in his House of Fame.

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IN OBITUM PRÆSULIS ELIENSIS.

4-6. Quem nuper effudi," etc. Elegia Tertia.

7-10.

A reference to his

"Cum centilinguis Fama . . . spargit," etc. This is as if Milton had still in his ear lines 211, 212 of the preceding poem, In Quint. Nov. Possibly he did not write the present piece till he had finished that, though Bishop Felton had died Oct. 5.

See In Quint. Nov., 26, 27, and

10. Neptuno satos." note there; also Comus, 18-29.

13, 14. "insulâ quæ nomen Anguillæ tenet," i.e. the Isle of Ely, so called from its abundance of eels (anguillæ Lat. for "eels").

18, 19. "Nec vota Naso in Ibida concepit. . . diriora." The Ibis of Ovid, one of the poems which he wrote in his exile, is a furious invective, in 646 lines of elegiac verse, against an unknown enemy.

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20-22. Graiusque vates," etc. The early Greek poet Archilochus (about B.C. 680), famous for the severity of his satires, and of whom the story is that, when Lycambes, who had promised him his daughter Neobule in marriage, broke his word and gave her to another, he took revenge in a poem of such tremendous scurrility that the whole family hanged themselves.

25, 26. "Audisse tales videor

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sonos, etc. As appears from the sequel, it is the voice of the dead Bishop that the poet hears.

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and luminaries through or past which the soul of the dead mounted on its flight to the Heaven where it was to abide. Perhaps, as he had been reading Chaucer's House of Fame for the purposes of his In Quint. Novembris (see note to that poem, lines 170-193), he may have had in his mind Chaucer's description there (Book II.) of his flight with the eagle, through the elements and constellations, and past the galaxy itself, on their way to Fame's House.

56, 57. "deam . . . triformem,”" i.e. the Moon. See Par. Lost, III. 730.

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57, 58. suos

dracones." See Pens. 59, 60, and

note.

NATURAM NON PATI SENIUM.

noctem": such night as

3. "Edipodioniam Edipus moved in after he was blind.

31, 32. "Ceraunia." The name "Ceraunian Mountains" was applied to a part of the great Caucasian range between the Euxine and the Caspian, and also to a lofty mountain-chain in Epirus. The latter "Ceraunians " are meant here, as being near Thessaly, which was the theatre of the war between the Gods and the Titans.

33, 34. "At Pater Omnipotens

consuluit rerum summa." Compare Par. Lost, VI. 671-673, "The Almighty Father.. consulting on the sum of things." ambitos.

calos."

37, 38. "Mundi rota prima The "rota prima" is the Primum Mobile of the Ptolemaic system; the " ambiti cæli," or "enclosed heavens," are the nine inner spheres.

By

39-65. "Tardior haud solito Saturnus, et," etc. Observe how, throughout this whole passage, Milton's imagination is regulated by the Ptolemaic system of Astronomy then prevalent. The thesis of the entire poem is "Naturam non pati senium," "That there is no decay in Nature." "Nature" is meant the entire Cosmos or Physical Universe; and the poet verifies his thesis by actually glancing at the successive portions of this "sum of things." He begins, as we have seen in last note, with the Primum Mobile, or that outermost shell which bounds the Universe in from Chaos or Nothingness; and he maintains that that outermost shell

is still wheeling in its vast diurnal revolution as soundly as ever. And now, in the present passage, he proceeds to say that not only is that outermost shell still safe, but also each of the successive parts of its enclosed heavens, inwards to the very Earth at the core of all. He keeps to the Ptolemaic or Alphonsine order in his enumeration, only skipping a sphere or two for brevity. All the planetary spheres having been reported on inwards from Saturn's to the Moon's, one arrives (51) at the aërial region of the so-called Elements, within the Moon's sphere and more immediately surrounding the Earth. Observe how, even in

the mention of the Earth, the fancy still moves centrewards, or from the surface (61-63) to the interior (63-65). Since the Ptolemaic theory was abandoned, there has been no such easy or convenient way of taking an inventory of "the sum of things."

While denying

65-69. "Sic denique in ævum," etc. the doctrine of slow and progressive decay in Nature, the debater accepts the Scriptural prophecy of the ultimate and sudden conflagration of all things (2 Peter iii. 7-10).

DE IDEA PLATONICÂ QUEMADMODUM ARISTOTELES

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INTELLEXIT.

7-10. Quis ille," etc.: the Platonic Idea or Archetype. See Introduction.

10. "exemplar Dei": the model from which the Deity worked in the creation of Man.

II, 12. "Haud ille," etc. The meaning is "This Eternal Idea or Archetype is not a mere conception of the Divine Mind, a kind of twin with Minerva in the brain of Jove."

13-15. "Sed, quamlibet," etc.: i.e. "But, though his nature is common in the sense of being distributed among many, yet he stands apart after the manner of an individual unit, and, wonderful to tell, is bound to a definite locality." This seems to be a rendering, in the language of poetical burlesque, of one part of Aristotle's famous criticism of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas or Universals.

16-24. "Seu sempiternus," etc. Here Milton, still in

poetical burlesque of Aristotle, inquires what is the locality of the Archetype, in what part of the total Mundus he is to be sought; and in doing so he falls back, as always, on the Alphonsine conception of the Mundus as a thing of ten spheres (see note to preceding poem, 39-65). 25-34. "Non, cui profundum," etc. The burlesque is still continued; only in this form :-No one can tell where the Archetype is no one has ever seen him. : Not the Dircæan augur (Theban prophet) Tiresias, whose blindness only enlarged his spiritual vision; not the God Mercury himself (here called by his Ovidian synonym "Pleiones nepos"); not any old Assyrian priest, learned in the most ancient lore of Ninos, Belos, and Osiris; not even Hermes Trismegistus, though he knew all secrets and founded the Egyptian philosophy.

AD PATREM.

14. "Clio": the muse of History, inasmuch as what he is to say about his Father is strictly true.

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32-34. Ibimus," etc. Rev. iv. 4, and v. 8.

35-40. "Spiritus et rapidos qui circinat igneus orbes, Nunc quoque." etc.

The "nunc" here is emphatic, meaning "Even now, while we are in this mortal life." See Ezekiel i. 20, and connect that text imaginatively with Milton's idea of the Heaven or Empyrean, as explained in the Introd. to Par. Lost.

56-66. "Nec tu perge, precor," etc. On these compli

ments to his father on his musical distinction, see Introd.

66. "Dividuum." The Latin adjective “dividuus" for "divisible" or "divisible into two " had fastened on Milton; and he turned it into English. See Par. Lost, VII. 382 and XII. 85; also On Time, 12.

74. "procul urbano strepitu," i.e. at Horton. The "sinis," in the present tense, in line 76, seems to certify that this poem was written there.

79. "Cum mihi Romulea patuit facundia linguæ, et... grandia magniloquis elata vocabula Graiis," i.e. at St. Paul's School and the University.

82-85. "Addere suasisti," etc. Milton seems to have added French, Italian, and Hebrew to his Latin and Greek

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