of that speech had been transferred, in the actual performance, as we have seen, to the beginning of the masque for the Spirit's opening song, so in the actual performance the closing lines of the Epilogue as we now have it served as the Spirit's song of reascent or departure in two stanzas :— "But now my task is smoothly done : I can fly, or I can run, Quickly to the green earth's end, Where the bowed welkin slow doth bend, And from thence can soar as soon To the corners of the moon. Mortals that would follow me, Love Virtue! She alone is free : She can teach ye how to climb Or, if Virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her." "With these sounds left on the ear, and a final glow of angelic light on the eye, the performance ends, and the audience rises and disperses through the Castle. The Castle is now a crumbling ruin, "along the ivy-clad walls and through the dark passages of which the "visitor clambers or gropes his way, disturbing the crows and the "martlets in their recesses; but one can stand yet in the doorway through which the parting guests of that night descended into the "inner court; and one can see where the stage was, on which the "sister was lost by her brothers, and Comus revelled with his crew, "and the lady was fixed as marble by enchantment, and the swains "danced in welcome of the Earl, and the Spirit ascended gloriously "to his native heaven. More mystic still it is to leave the ruins, and, "descending one of the winding streets of Ludlow that lead from the "Castle to the valley of the Teme, to look upwards to Castle and "Town seen as one picture, and, marking more expressly the three "long pointed windows that gracefully slit the chief face of the wall "towards the north, to realise that it was from that ruin and from "those windows in the ruin that the verse of Comus was first shaken "into the air of England."- -So I wrote a good many years ago, when the impressions of a visit I made to Ludlow were fresh and vivid; and, as I copy the words now, they bring back, as it were in a dream, the pleasant memory of one bygone day. I remember my first sight of the hilly town as I walked into it early on a summer's morning, when not a soul was astir, and the clean streets were all silent and shuttered; then my ramble at my own will for an hour or so over the Castle ruins and the green knoll they crown, undisturbed by guide or any figure of fellow-tourist; then my descent again, past and round the great church and its tombs, into the steep town streets, now beginning their bustle for a market-day; and, finally, the lazy circuit I made round the green outskirts of the town, through I know not what glens and up their sloping sides, the ruined Castle always finely distinct close at hand, and in the distance, wherever the eye could range unopposed, a fairy horizon of dim blue mountains. Perhaps there has not been sufficient recognition of the importance of the production of Comus at Ludlow Castle at the Michaelmas of 1634 as an epoch in Milton's life. That it was by far the most considerable thing that Milton had yet written, and that the date and the circumstances of the accession of such a poem to the previous stock of the best English Poetry deserve to be carefully marked in the History of our Literature, we do indeed recognise. But, if we transfer ourselves back historically to that date and its circumstances, we ought to recognise something more. We ought to recognise that some beginnings of that feeling about Milton which we now have must then have arisen among those who witnessed the performance of Comus or were involved in the rumour of it. Here, far away on the Welsh border, at the inauguration of the Earl of Bridgewater in his Welsh Presidency, there had been produced a masque, by an unknown author, as extensive as Carew's recent masque of Calum Britannicum or Shirley's of The Triumph of Peace, both recently acted in London before Royalty, and from the splendours of which London theatre-goers were only recovering their composure. Nay, not only as extensive as these masques, but, in every respect of pure poetical beauty, artistic construction, and sweetness of moral influence, beating these masques, or even the best of Ben Jonson's, veteran and laureate though he was, into mere mediocrity, if not into vulgarity and slipshod! No probability that as much as this was actually said; for the unknown has always to make its way, and Shirley and Carew were then established somebodies, and the large Ben Jonson was in his well-merited ascendency in the literature of England. But, within the circle that saw Comus acted or heard of it, something tending in this direction must have been felt. Among the gentry of the Welsh border, not to speak of the accomplished and musical members of the Bridgewater family itself, there must have been critics capable of forming an opinion of a poem like Comus at the moment, and generous enough to spread it by talk afterwards. True, there was no horse-play in the masque, such as a motley audience likes; the machinery and the decorations can have been nothing so splendid as those of the recent masques at Court; and it may even have been a trial of patience to sit for two or three hours listening to speeches recited and songs sung by six actors, three of whom were mere children. But the quality of the songs and the speeches must have asserted itself with the best judges through all that disadvantage; a great deal depended upon Lawes himself and his songs; and the Bridgewater children, besides being interesting personally to the spectators, may have been effective little elocutionists. On the whole, we cannot doubt that the masque was a success, and a week's wonder at Ludlow. There is no evidence that Milton himself had taken the journey of 150 miles from London or Horton in order to be present at the performance. It is possible that he had done so; but it is just as possible that he had not, and even that the authorship of the masque was kept a secret at the time of its performance, known only to Lawes, or to Lawes and the Earl's family. But the Earl of Bridgewater's masque began to be talked of beyond Ludlow; as time passed, and the rumour of it spread, and perhaps the songs in it were carried vocally into London society by Lawes and his pupils of the Bridgewater family, it was still more talked of; and there came to be inquiries respecting its authorship, and requests for copies of it, and especially of the songs. All this we learn from Lawes. His loyalty to his friend Milton in the whole affair was admirable; and he appears to have been more proud, in his own heart, of his concern with the comparatively quiet Bridgewater masque than of his more blazoned and well-paid co-operation in the London masques of the same year. The music which he composed for the songs in Comus still exists, written out in his own hand and signed with his name, on a single sheet of old music paper (Add. MSS., Brit. Mus., No. 11,518), with this heading-"Five Songs set for a Mask presented at Ludlo Castle before the Earl of Bridgewater, Lord President of the Marches: October 1634." It is probably but one of many copies 1 The five Songs in this MS. answer, with one omission, to the enumeration which he made to gratify his musical friends. But there were many friends of his, it appears, who were not satisfied with copies of the songs and their music only, but wanted complete copies of the masque. To relieve himself from the trouble so occasioned, Lawes resolved at length to publish the masque. He did so in 1637 in a small, and now very rare, quarto of 40 pages, with this title-page : "A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, on Michaelmasse Night, before the Right Honourable John, Earle of Bridgewater, Viscount Brackley, Lord President of Wales, and one of his Majesties most honourable Privy Counsell. Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus Austrum London: Printed for Humphrey Robinson, at the signe of the Three Pidgeons in The volume was dedicated by Lawes to the Earl's son and heir, young Viscount Brackley, who had acted the part of Elder Brother in the masque. The Dedication in complete form is prefixed to Comus in the present edition; but its opening sentences may be quoted here. "My Lord," says Lawes to the young Viscount, still but a boy of fifteen years, "this Poem, which received its first occa"sion of birth from yourself and others of your noble family, and "much honour from your own person in the performance, now "returns again to make a final dedication of itself to you. Although "not openly acknowledged by the Author, yet it is a legitimate offspring, so lovely and so much desired that the often copying of "it hath tired my pen to give my several friends satisfaction, and "brought me to a necessity of producing it to the public view." From this we learn that the proposal of publication was Lawes's own, and that Milton still preferred the shelter of the anonymous. That Lawes had Milton's consent, however, is proved by that motto on the title-page, taken from Virgil's Second Eclogue, to the significance of which we have already called attention in the GENERAL INTRODUCTION; where this English paraphrase was offered for want of something closer and better:- 66 of the Songs in their series given in our description of the masque as performed. They are :—(1) From the heavens. (2) Sweet Echo. (3) Sabrina fair. (4) Back, Shepherds, back, with its continuation Noble Lord and Lady bright. (5) Now my task. The Song wanting is the Song of the nymph Sabrina, By the rushy-fringed bank. "Ah! wretched and undone! Myself to have brought The wind among my flowers!" Milton must himself have supplied this Virgilian motto; and it hints his fear that he had perhaps done ill in letting his Comus go forth at all, even anonymously. Though he was now twenty-eight years of age, it was actually, if we except his lines on Shakespeare, his first distinctly public venture in print. He had no reason to regret the venture. Comus," says Hallam, was sufficient to convince any one of taste and feeling that a great poet had arisen in England, and one partly formed in a different "school from his contemporaries." Such a strong statement was easily made when Hallam wrote; but there may have been some in England capable of forming the same opinion when so clear an expression of it would have needed more courage, i.e. in 1637 (the year of Ben Jonson's death), when modest copies of Lawes's anonymous edition were first in circulation. We know of one Englishman, at all events, who did then form and express an equivalent opinion. This was Milton's near neighbour at Horton, Sir Henry Wotton, Provost of Eton College. Born in 1568, mixed up with political affairs in Elizabeth's reign, and in the height of his active career through that of James,-when he had been English Ambassador to various foreign Courts, but had resided, in that capacity, most continuously at Venice, ---Sir Henry, since Charles came to the throne, had been in veteran retirement in the quiet post of the Eton provostship, respected by all England for his past diplomatic services, but living chiefly on his memories of those services, his Italian experiences in particular, and in the delights of pictures, books, scholarly society, and constant smoking of tobacco. Some chance introduction having, as we saw (ante, pp. 81-82), brought Milton and the aged Knight together for the first time early in 1638, the consequence was that, on the 6th of April in that year, when Milton was preparing for his journey to Italy, he sent to Sir Henry a letter of leave-taking, with a copy of the Comus, by way of parting gift and acknowledgment of courtesy received. Sir Henry, as we saw, had read the poem in a previous copy, without knowing who the author was; and, writing in reply to Milton on the 13th of April, just in time to overtake him before he left England, he mentioned this fact, and expressed his pleasure at finding that a |