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high motive. It was a stern conflict for a great and mighty purpose; and happy would it have been if the passions which party always engenders had stopped short of their last extremity, and History been spared that tragedy which stains one of her most useful but gloomiest pages.

We find the opinions of the different factions expressed in the poetry as well as in the polemical literature of the period, giving a tone and color to the efforts of the imagination, and ranging the Muses themselves under the party banners of the times. On the one side we have gallantry approaching to levity, and an attachment to institutions rendered venerable by age; on the other, the vehement and masculine efforts of minds educated in the rugged school of disputation, proud of their independance, and looking with suspicion on old forms, old usages, and old sentiments.

While Carew, Suckling, Davenant, and Lovelace were delighting the courtly taste of the cavaliers with the wit and license of their lays, Milton in the seclusion of the country composed his beautiful Masque of Comus. It abounds in learned allusion, in profuse imagery, and in that power of language in which he stands alone. The tale is slight. The Masque consists of some allegory or poetical legend thrown into the form of a dialogue, and relieved with lyrical stanzas which were generally sung. The drama, if it merit that name, was privately played

before select circles upon festive occasions, and the characters were not sustained by professional actors. Such were the masques often performed by the students of the Inner Temple, and of the Universities. Comus was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634 before the Earl of Bridgewater, then president of Wales; and the chief characters were represented by the Lord Brackley, Mr. Thomas Egerton his brother, and the Lady Alice Egerton.

A maiden lost in the depths of a forest amidst the shades of night is beguiled into the haunts of Comus, the son of Circe, a spirit who lures his victims into his realm of pleasures, and offers them 'orient liquor from a crystal cup,' which potion so distorts their countenances that they resemble the brutish forms of the grosser animals, while the enchanted, so far from perceiving their foul disfigurement, boast themselves comelier than before. Comus is first attracted by the song of the lady, and testifies his wonderment and delight at those sweet sounds in the following outbreak of eloquent verse:

Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould
Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment?
Sure something holy lodges in that breast,
And with these raptures moves the vocal air
To testify his hidden residence.

How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness, till it smiled! I have oft heard
My mother Circe with the Syrens three,

Amidst the flowery-kirtled Naiades,

Culling their potent herbs and baleful drugs;
Who, as they sung, would take the prison'd soul,
And lap it in Elysium; Scylla wept,

And chid her barking waves into attention,
And fell Charybdis murmur'd soft applause:
Yet they in pleasing slumber lull'd the sense,
And in sweet madness robb'd it of itself;
But such a sacred and home-felt delight,
Such sober certainty of waking bliss,

I never heard till now. I'll speak to her,
And she shall be my queen.

The brothers of the lady wander through the wood in search of their sister, discoursing somewhat dispassionately of the dangers by which she is surrounded, and the power of chastity to sustain her untainted through all. They are accosted by the attendant spirit in the disguise of the shepherd Thyrsis, one

Whose artful strains have oft delay'd The huddling brook to hear his madrigal, And sweeten'd every musk rose of the dale.

The spirit leads them to the stately palace of Comus, set out with delicious luxuries, where voluptuous banquets are spread, and the lapse of soft music steals upon the Here they arrive just as the lady has triumphed over the wiles of the enchanter, and by the further assistance of the water-nymph Sabrina, the spell is broken, and the moral inculcated:

senses.

Mortals that would follow me,

Love Virtue; she alone is free;

Such is

plot mere merit of th persons are argumentati ease of enshrines gorg lofty where we

the

some of those characters mo unrestrained ou on the other magnificent th the virgin nyn step-dame, and that stayed he pearled wrists gave

woes and lavers strewed into every sens argument of a of the sensualis superior power as when Jove i of Erebus to

She can teach you how to climb

Higher than the sphery clime;

Or if Virtue feeble were,

Heaven itself would stoop to her.

Such is the outline of the Masque. But it is not in plot merely, nor character, nor dialogue that the chief merit of the drama consists. The plot is too flimsy, the persons are too cold, the dialogue is too constrained and argumentative; it has the full body of verse, but it wants the ease of conversation-it is too didactic. But it enshrines gorgeous and elaborate imagery, and if it be lofty where we had rather it should be familiar, if it want some of those natural touches that would identify its characters more closely with humanity, if it have no unrestrained outbreak of passion or feeling, it attracts us on the other hand with poetry of fine imagination, magnificent though undramatic. Whether he describe the virgin nymph flying the mad pursuit of her enraged step-dame, and commending her innocence to the flood that stayed her flight, where water nymphs held up their pearled wrists and bore her to Nereus, who pitied her woes and gave her to his daughters to embathe in nectared lavers strewed with asphodel, and dropped ambrosial oils into every sense till she revived-whether he paint the argument of a pure mind convincing the overpowered soul of the sensualist, till he conceives her words prompted by a superior power, and is dipped all over in a cold shuddering, as when Jove in his wrath speaks thunder and the chains of Erebus to Saturn's crew-or whether he celebrate

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melodies whose soft and solemn breathing rises like a stream of distilled perfume, until even Silence, taken unawares, wishes to deny her nature—there is the same exalted sentiment, the same rich flow and harmony of words, and ideas springing in summer luxuriance, like flowers. But the lyrical part of the poem is doubly excellent; it is fresh and full of music, whether he sing the tipsy revels of the spirit of Night, or call the goddess of the river from her bed of coral, invoking her by the tinsel-slippered feet of Thetys, and the songs of syrens sitting on diamond rocks sleeking their soft tresses.

Nothing can contrast more strongly with the pomp and sound of Milton's blank verse than the ease and fancy of his lyrics. It is true there is the same learning displayed in both, they are alike steeped in the sunny waves of classical allusion, and teem equally with rich and well arranged metaphor; but there is all the solemn stateliness of majesty in the one, and all the gracefulness of natural harmony in the other. Although he brings us to contemplate the deeds of supernal powers with awe and reverence, he leads us in blythe song to tower and terrace, and streams from whose banks rise fragrant groves of myrrh and cinnamon; and paints with warm and happy colors those fairy scenes of which the Spirit sings in the epilogue to Comus :

To the ocean now I fly,

And those happy climes that lie

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