devoted to prose works of no particular interest to us. He continued to live in London. His third marriage had proved happy, and he enjoyed something of the renown which was rightly his. Various well-known men used to visit himnotably Dryden1, who on one of his visits asked and received permission to dramatise Paradise Lost. It does not often happen that a university can point to two such poets among her living sons, each without rival in his generation.

His death.

Milton died in 1674, November 8th. He was buried in St Giles' Church, Cripplegate. When we think of him we have to think of a man who lived a life of very singular purity and devotion to duty; who for what he conceived to be his country's good sacrificed-and no one can well estimate the sacrifice-during twenty years the aim that was nearest to his heart and best suited to his genius; who, however, eventually realised his desire of writing a great work in gloriam Dei.

The sonnet on the "Massacre in Piedmont" is usually considered the finest of the collection, of which the late Rector of Lincoln College edited a well-known edition, 1883. The sonnet inscribed with a diamond on a window pane in the cottage at Chalfont where the poet stayed in 1665 is (in the judgment of a good critic) Miltonic, if not Milton's (Garnett's Life of Milton, p. 175).

1 The lines by Dryden which were printed beneath the portrait of Milton in Tonson's folio edition of Paradise Lost published in 1688 are too familiar to need quotation; but it is worth noting that the younger poet had in Milton's lifetime described the great epic as "one of the most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced" (prefatory essay to The State of Innocence, 1674). Further, tradition assigned to Dryden (a Catholic and a Royalist) the remark, "this fellow (Milton) cuts us all out and the ancients too."

ARCADES.

Arcades was first printed in the edition of his poems issued Date of the by Milton in 1645. We have no direct means of Masque. determining when it was written. A probable date, however, is 1633. We may assume that Milton was busy over Comus in 1634, and since Arcades has great stylistic affinity with the longer Masque and was produced under very similar circumstances, it is fair to suppose that only a brief space of time separated the two poems. Probably Arcades was the earlier in each of Milton's editions of his minor works it precedes Comus; and it shows, so far as its fragmentary state permits us to judge, rather less finish and maturity of workmanship. Combining these points, critics are content, for the most part, to take 1633 as the date of the shorter poem.

There is, I think, little to be said in favour of the view which would assign the composition of Arcades to an earlier date than 1633-to 1631 or 1630. The evidence of style, the æsthetic test, is never conclusive, but if we compare Arcades with the poems undoubtedly written before Milton left Cambridge we shall at least find that it presents a very strong contrast with them. It is, for instance, far more akin to Comus than to the Nativity Ode: scarcely less so to L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. In all four we have much the same atmosphere of calm, the same fragrance and freshness of outdoor life, the same enjoyment of nature and country sights and sounds, so that it is hard to resist the impression that many touches in each were suggested by the quiet woodland scenery of Horton. It will be well therefore and safe to accept with Professor Masson the year 1633.

The title of Arcades explains the circumstances of its composition—“Part of an Entertainment presented to the Countess Dowager of Derby at Harefield by some Noble Persons of her Family."

whom Arcades

The Countess Dowager of Derby was a daughter of Sir John Spencer of Althorpe in Northamptonshire, ancestor The Egerton of the present Earl Spencer. Born about 1560, she family for married Lord Strange, eldest son of the fourth Earl was written. of Derby. She had several sisters, two of whom-Elizabeth Spencer, afterwards Lady Carey, and Anne Spencer, afterwards Lady Compton-were celebrated by Spenser; as was the Countess herself. Spenser indeed claimed kinship with the Spencer family; cf. the Prothalamion1,

Though from another place I take my name,

An house of auncient fame."

To Lady Carey he dedicated his Muiopotmos (1590); to Lady Compton his Mother Hubberds Tale (1591); to Lady Strange The Teares of the Muses2. This last poem was published (in the volume curiously entitled Complaints) in 1591. Two years later, September 1593, Lady Strange became Countess of Derby. In the spring of 1594 her husband died (popular report attributing his death to witchcraft), and his widow retained for the rest of her life the title of Alice, Countess Dowager of Derby. The death of the Earl is alluded to in Colin Clout's Come Home Againe. The greater portion of that poem had been previously written, indeed soon after Spenser's return to Ireland in 1591; but the whole work was not published till 1595. Between these dates various additions were made, the following lines among them:

"But Amaryllis, whether fortunate

Or else unfortunate may I areade,
That freed is from Cupids yoke by fate,

Since which she doth new bands adventure dread."

'Amaryllis" was the Countess of Derby. Apparently she did not fear " new bands adventure." She married in 1600 Sir

1 131, 132.

2 Cf. the note on Arcades, line 8. In each "soft dedication" the poet alluded to his relationship. It may be added that the northern branch of the family to which he belonged spelt the name with s.

Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Elizabeth. In 1603 he was made Baron Ellesmere; in 1616, Viscount Brackley. For many years the Countess and her husband lived at Harefield in Middlesex; they had purchased the property in 1601. No children were born of the marriage. The Countess, however, had three daughters by her first husband; the Lord Keeper was a widower. His son, Sir John Egerton, married her second daughter, Lady Frances Stanley. The father, shortly after being created Viscount Brackley, died in 1617. The Countess, a widow for the second time, was then in her fifty-sixth year, and till her death in 1637 continued to live at Harefield. In 1617 Sir John Egerton, her son-in-law (and stepson), who had succeeded to the title of Viscount Brackley, received the earldom intended for his father. He became Earl of Bridgewater. It was he who commissioned the performance of Comus.

Milton tells us that Arcades was performed by "some Noble Persons" of the family of the Countess. "Family" means direct descendants and relatives, and these were sufficiently numerous. The eldest daughter of the Countess, Lady Chandos, lived at Harefield; she was a widow with several children. The second daughter, Countess of Bridgewater, had a very large family, most of whom, no doubt, acted in Comus. There were other grandchildren, the family of the third daughter, Countess of Huntingdon. To these might be added the families of the married sisters of the Countess. Milton therefore when he compared her to Cybele, "mother of a hundred gods," indulged in no poetic hyperbole. Nor does it require any strenuous effort of the imagination to conceive the position which the Countess occupied. She was in a way the head of the whole line, a picturesque survival from the great Elizabethan generation of the Spencer family which the great Elizabethan poet, their kinsman, had honoured in "the proud full sail" of his verse. She lived at the noble country house where the Queen had stayed on one of her progresses, the famous visit in 1602 at which tradition says (but falsely) that Othello was first performed. She had seen her three daughters raised by

Arcades.

marriage to splendid rank; she herself bore one of the greatest of English titles; her beauty and personal worth had been rehearsed by more than one writer. There was everything in her past life and present fortunes that could stimulate admiration and reverence. Out of compliment to her the members of her family conceived the happy idea of repreOccasion of the senting a Masque. Perhaps a birthday or some performance of anniversary of felicitous memory was the immediate occasion. In any case the entertainment added one more link to the chain of illustrious associations which unites the name of the Countess with the history of the first great age of English poetry. Milton ended what Spenser had begun. As long as literature endures, the memory of this noble lady of the Elizabethan and Jacobean world will remain.

toral.

A private entertainment at that time meant a Masque1. Especially in vogue were slight dramatic pieces The piece is a which might be characterised as Masque-idylls Dramatic Pasof a pastoral type, such as could be played in the open air. The classics were ransacked and pillaged for suitable subjects, the result being representations in which fancy and fiction were supreme, realism or strict dramatic propriety conspicuously absent. Great ladies fretted their hour on the level grass, under broad, spreading trees, as goddesses, or nymphs, or shepherdesses more Arcadian than any Alpheus had ever seen on his banks. The young noble from the University who knew exactly how a Latin comedy was rendered in the hall of Trinity, or the Templar who had borne his part in the Christmas Revels of one of the Inns of Court, would masquerade as Apollo, or Sylvanus, or Thyrsis. Everybody was faultless as the graceful figures on a delicate piece of Dresden china or the fine seigneurs in the fêtes champêtres of Watteau. A lawn made the best of stages; the woodland background supplied the place of scenery; madrigals and choruses that blended with the notes of birds and the splash of fountains heightened the illusion; and if the piece was performed at

1 See the sketch of the history of the English Masque given later on.