clear-sighted that the juggling practice of her antagonist is wholly ineffectual against her. There is much in the Lady which resembles the youthful Milton himself, and we may well believe that the great debate concerning temperance was not altogether dramatic (where, indeed, is Milton truly dramatic?), but was in part a record of passages in the poet's own spiritual history. Milton admired the Lady as he admired the ideal which he projected before him of himself."

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF MILTON'S EARLY POEMS.

[STOPFORD BROOKE: "CLASSICAL WRITERS," MILTON.]

"Puritanism, when Milton began to write, was not universally apart from literature and the fine arts. In its staid and pure religion Milton's work had its foundation, but the temple he had begun to build upon it was quarried from the ancient and modern arts and letters of Greece and Italy and England. And filling the temple rose the peculiar incense of the Renaissance. The breath of that spirit is felt in the classicalism of the Ode to the Nativity, in the love proclaimed for Shakespeare, in the graceful fancy of the Epitaph to Lady Winchester, and in the gaiety of the Ode to a May Morning. But a new element, other than any the Renaissance could produce, is here; the element that filled the Psalms of David, the deep, personal, passionate religion of the Puritan, possessing, and possessed by, God. Over against the Renaissance music is set the high and devout strain of the first sonnet and of the Odes to Time and A Solemn Musick. Even while at Cambridge, the double being in Milton makes itself felt, the struggle between the two spirits of the time is reflected in his work. These contrasted spirits in him became defined as the political and social war deepened around his life. The second sonnet still is gay, fresh with the morn of love, Petrarca might have written it; the Allegro does not disdain the love of nature,

the rustic sports, the pomp of courts, the playhouse and the land of faery, nor does the Penseroso refuse to haunt the dim cathedral. But yet, in these two poems more than in the Cambridge poems, the deepening of the struggle is felt. Milton seems to presage in them that the time would come when the gaiety of England would cease to be shared in by serious men; when the mirth of the Cavalier would shut out the pleasures derived from lofty Melancholy, because they shut out the devil; as the Puritan pensiveness would be driven to shut out the pleasures of Mirth, because they shut out God. While he gives full weight in the Allegro to 'unreproved pleasures free,' he makes it plain in the Penseroso that he prefers the sage and holy pleasures of thoughtful sadness. These best befitted the solemn aspect of the time.

A few years later and the presage had come true. Milton is driven away from even the Allegro point of view. In Comus the wild licence of the Court society is set over against the grave and temperate virtue of a Puritan life. The unchastity, the glozing lies, the glistering apparel that hid moral deformity, the sloth and drunkenness, the light fantastic round of the enchanter's character and court, are (it seems likely) Milton's allegory of the Court society of his time. The stately philosophy of the Brothers which had its root in subduing passion and its top in the love of God; the virginal chastity of the Lady, and at the end the releasing power of Sabrina's purity, exalt and fill up more sternly the idea of the Penseroso and symbolise that noble Puritanism which loved learning and beauty only when they were pure, but holiness far more than either. It may be, as Mr Browne supports, that there is a second allegory within the first, of Laud and his party as the Sorcerer commending the cup of Rome by wile and threat to the lips of the Church and enforcing it by fine and imprisonment; paralysing in stony fetters the Lady of the Church. It may be that Milton called in this poem on the few who, having resisted like the Brothers, but failed to set the Church free, ought now to employ a new force, the force of Purity; but this aspect of the struggle is at least not so clear in Comus as in Lycidas.

In Lycidas Milton has thrown away the last shreds of Church and State and is Presbyterian. The strife now at hand starts into prominence, and not to the bettering of the poem as a piece of art. It is brought in-and the fault is one which

frequently startles us in Milton-without any regard to the unity of feeling in the poem. The passage on the hireling Church looks like an after-thought, and Milton draws attention to it in the argument. The author...by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy then in their height.' But he does not leave Laud and his policy nor the old Church tenderly. When he felt strongly, he wrote fiercely. The passage is a splendid and a fierce cry of wrath, and the rough trumpet note, warlike and unsparing, which it sounds against the unfaithful herdsmen who are sped and the 'grim wolf with privy paw,' was to ring louder and louder through the prose works, and finally to clash in the ears of those very Presbyterians whom he now supported.

There is then a steady progress of thought and of change in the poems. The Milton of Lycidas is not the Milton of Comus. The Milton of Comus is not the Milton of the Penseroso, less still of the Allegro. The Milton of the Penseroso is not the Milton of the Ode to the Nativity. Nothing of the Renaissance is left now but its learning and its art."

CAMBRIDGE: printed BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

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