Professor Fletcher finds difficulty in the representation of the Holy Ghost as female, and explains it by an appeal to recondite Gnostic teachings which represented the Son of God eternally married to the Holy Ghost. The Hebrew sources of Spenser, however, make this unnecessary, and in any case Spenser has so subdued his identification that the difficulty could only present itself to one who wished to emphasize this identification more than Spenser intended. Furthermore it is unnecessary to assume that Spenser's Platonism, at least so far as the fourth hymn is concerned, owes "more to late Greek and oriental theosophy and to Christian mediaeval mysticism than to Plato himself."

If the twofold identification of Spenser's Sapience with the Holy Ghost and the Platonic Heavenly Beauty is in need of evidence, it may be found without going far afield, namely in Spenser's own words, which have been curiously overlooked in all comment and discussion. In the Hymn of Heavenly Love the Holy Spirit is called "most wise" (1. 39), and invoked as "pure lampe of light, Eternall spring of grace and wisedome trew" (1. 44). In the very Hymn of Heavenly Beauty he is again invoked as "Thou most Almightie Spright, From whom all guifts of wit and knowledge flow." But the most striking passage is the seventy-ninth sonnet of the Amoretti:

the stock texts Prov. 8; Wisd. 7. 25; Col. 1. 15; Heb. 1. 3; Eusebius, Praep. Ev. 7. 12, citing Prov. 8 and Wisd. 6-8; Chrysostom, Synopsis Script. Sanct. (Patr. Gr. 56. 369); Cyril of Alexandria, Catechesis 6. 18 (Patr. Gr. 33. 569); Tertullian, Adv. Gnosticos, chap. 7; Hilarius, De Trin. 6. 21. (Patr. Lat. 10. 173); Lactantius, Div. Inst. 4. 9; Ambrose, De Fide 4. 7; (Patr. Lat. 10. 173); Rabanus Maurus, Comm. on Book of Wisd. (Patr. Lat. 109. 671 ff.); Hugo of St. Victor, De Sap. Animae Christi; (Patr. Lat. 176. 848). Augustine in De Trinitate, Bk. 7, goes into the question at length, with the conclusion that, 'the Father is wisdom, the Son is wisdom, and the Holy Spirit is wisdom, and together not three wisdoms, but one wisdom.' Thomas Aquinas says, taking issue with him in the Summa, Quaest. 37. 2: Sed sicut Filius est sapientia genita, ita Spiritus Sanctus est Amor procedens'; cf. 37. 1; 34. 2. See J. Meinhold, Die Weisheit Israels in Spruch, Sage und Dichtung, 1908, pp. 311 ff. for an excellent statement. Cf. also Wetzer and Welte, Kirchenlexikon 8. 105 (s. v. Logos); Catholic Encyclopedia (s. v. Book of Wisdom); Schaff-Herzog, Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge 12. 386 (s. v. Wisdom). Even Pico della Mirandola echoes the orthodox view (De Morte Christi, Bk. 1, near the end, and Ficino unmistakably implies it in the last chapter of his commentary on Plato's Symposium. The Calvinistic glosses of the Geneva translation of the Apocrypha express the same opinion.

Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it,
For that your selfe ye dayly such doe see:
But the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit
And vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me.
For all the rest, how ever fayre it be,

Shall turne to nought and loose that glorious hew:

But onely that is permanent, and free

From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew.
That is true beautie: that doth argue you

To be divine, and borne of heavenly seed,

Deriv'd from that fayre Spirit from whom al true
And perfect beauty did at first proceed.

He onely fayre, and what he fayre hath made;

All other fayre, lyke flowres, untymely fade.

In this sonnet the implication is clear, as in the quotations immediately preceding, that all wisdom and wit derives from the Holy Spirit, which may thus fairly be considered the Divine Wisdom or Sapience; but that the Heavenly Beauty is not one with the Holy Spirit, but derived from him. In the Hymn of Heavenly Beauty itself (107), the two persons are clearly distinct, though closely associated "that immortall Beautie, there with Thee."

After all one remains then in uncertainty. If Spenser really intended to enforce the identification of Sapience with the Heavenly Beauty, for any significance it may have held, why these uncertainties and obliquities of statement? Yet he implies such identification. If Spenser really intended to enforce the identification of Sapience with the Holy Spirit, for any significance it may have held, why does he not take obvious means within his reach to enforce it? Such identification probably had occurred to him. Instead, he leaves it so obscure that it has only recently been observed. Even when observed it seems incapable of final proof, and one may well ask what significance it would give to the poem. We can only infer that he did not care. Spenser often grew indifferent to certain considerations of his art. His indifference is pretty clear in the Hymn of Heavenly Beauty, which, though it falls not behind in loftiness of thought or beauty of cadence, fails in its last third in both construction and clarity of idea, and could have said what it has to say in a space that was shorter by at least a score of lines.

Spenser, for all his use of Plato, Aristotle, and fragments of mediaeval Catholic teaching or symbolism, was neither philosopher nor theologian. It evidently stimulated his productive imagination to range among great ideas, but he ranges with no definite plan for the

conquest and use of a system. He appropriates here and there such conception or idea, as fits exactly with his own rather intense experience and aspirations. These great fragments newly vitalized with the energy of his own spiritual life, and projected in concrete form, constitute his poetry. In some lights he is even more egoistic than Milton. It is small wonder if he does not keep his promises about Aristotle; if he gives us trouble about the squaring of plan with execution, about identifications and consistencies. Another matter preoccupies him-the uttering of his own intense feelings and convictions growing out of his own life as he lived it. Herein lie at once the defects and the glories of his art.

Princeton University.

BY JAMES HOLLY HANFORD

Among the literary influences which inspired and guided the genius of Milton critics have never failed to accord a large measure of importance to Elizabethan drama. His early enthusiasm for the English stage is well known. His initial imaginative kinship with Shakespeare and Fletcher and Jonson is admitted and made much of. The obvious fruit is Comus, wherein Milton blends a philosophical idealism and a moral seriousness which are peculiarly his own with the imaginative spirit of Elizabethan drama in its more lyric aspects. Commonly, however, the poetic inspiration of the Elizabethans is felt to be in Milton a steadily decreasing factor, giving way more and more to the domination of classical standards and to the requirements of a sterner moral and theological purpose, lingering to a measurable degree in Paradise Lost and imparting to it much of its poetic glory, fading into grayness in Paradise Regained, and suffering all but complete eclipse in Samson Agonistes. So in a sense it is. But a distinction which criticism has tended to neglect must here be carefully maintained. What passes out of Milton is but the more sensuous and aesthetic essence of Elizabethan poetry, the spirit of the masque and the lyric, of The Faithful Shepherdess and A Midsummer-night's Dream. Milton's sympathy with the English renaissance in its moral, philosophical, and human phases deepens with advancing years. Classicism moulds and modifies the Elizabethan influences; Puritanism makes them wear a special expression which though not new is intensified by the circumstances of the later time. But neither classicism nor Puritanism can efface them. They form the groundwork of Milton's imagination in his greatest period; and Paradise Lost not less but rather more than Comus and L'Allegro must be explained and interpreted in the light of Elizabethan literature. In the present article I wish to consider some effects which seem to me important of the dramatic tradition on the form and substance of Milton's epic.

I

If the consequences of Milton's dramatic heritage have never received full recognition it is because of certain facts and assumptions which have tended to draw critical attention in other directions. Chief among these are, first, his disparagement of modern drama and

his often expressed preference for the antique; secondly, the fact that his greatest achievement is in epic, whence it is assumed that 3 he is an "epic genius" and that whatever dramatic qualities may be observed in his work are relatively unimportant, an accidental outcome of his subject, and not the product of his more vital inspiration; finally, the notorious Miltonic self-consciousness, which has led critics to regard all his work, from Lycidas to Samson, as essentially autobiographical and non-dramatic.

But Milton's critical disapproval of modern as opposed to ancient drama is not conclusive with regard to his instinctive sympathies. That Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are "as yet unequalled of any" was the conviction of a scholar. The fact that his plans for drama show that he contemplated only tragedy on severely classical lines means simply that his classical conscience forbade him to stoop below his critical and conscious ideal. There is no evidence that Milton ever outgrew his early love of Elizabethan drama. Though the masque and comedy which had charmed his youthful fancy ceased to claim him as serious interests became more dominant, the dynamic appeal of the profounder drama of the preceding age would naturally, if he remembered it at all, become stronger in his maturer years and the deep impression of the "Delphic lines" of Shakespeare was not so easily effaced. Frequent echoes in Paradise Lost of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and the histories show how intimate was Milton's knowledge of these plays. In Eikonoklastes he points out a verbal parallel between a passage in Richard III and a phrase in one of Charles's prayers, and he commentson the historic truth of Shakespeare's picture of Richard's hypocrisy. More important evidence of the continued relation with Elizabethan tragedy is to be found in his blank verse, which is borrowed as a medium from the English drama though justified by classical and Italian precedent as well, and which in its special Miltonic character is deeply impregnated with the influence of Marlowe.2

Finally Milton's very fondness for Greek tragedy above all other ancient forms may perhaps be regarded as itself an evidence of the per

'Compare Verity's notes in his Cambridge edition of Paradise Lost to II, 662, 911, 1033; III. 1, 60, 606; V. 285; VI. 306, 586; VII. 15, XI. 496; XII. 646, etc. 2 For specific recollections of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus see Verity on P. L. I. 254; IV. 20, 75; V. 671, etc. The geographical survey of the kingdoms of the east in Paradise Regained is suggestive of Tamburlaine's dying enumeration of his conquests. Part II, scene v. But the kinship of Milton's verse and Marlowe's does not rest on verbal parallels.