Countess, whom they address in a song.  As this ends their progress is barred by the Genius of the Wood, who delivers a long speech.[354] This is followed by a song introducing the dance, after which a third song brings the performance to a close.  It cannot be honestly said that the bulk of this slender poem is of any very transcendent merit; but the final song stands apart from the rest, and deserves notice both on its own account and for the sake of that to which it served as herald: 

    Nymphs and Shepherds dance no more
      By sandy Ladons Lillied banks;
    On old Lycaeus or Cyllene hoar
      Trip no more in twilight ranks;
    Though Erymanth your loss deplore
      A better soyl shall give ye thanks. 
    From the stony Maenalus
    Bring your Flocks, and live with us;
    Here ye shall have greater grace
    To serve the Lady of this place,
      Though Syrinx your Pans Mistres were,
      Yet Syrinx well might wait on her. 
        Such a rural Queen
    All Arcadia hath not seen.

Here we have, if nothing else, promise at least of the melodies to be, as also of that harmonious interweaving of classical names which long years after was to lend weight and dignity to the ‘full and heightened style’ of the epic.  One other point in connexion with the poem is noteworthy, the quality, namely, in virtue of which it claims our attention here.  It is, indeed, not a little curious that on the only two occasions on which Milton was called upon to produce something of the order of the masque, he cast his work into a more or less pastoral form; and this in spite of the fact that, as we have seen, the form was by no means a prevalent one among the more popular and experienced writers.  It would appear as though his mind turned, through some natural bent or early association, to the employment of this form; an idea which suggests itself all the more forcibly when we find him, a few years later, setting about the composition of a conventional lament in this mode on a young college acquaintance, and producing, through his power of alchemical transmutation, one of the greatest works of art in the English language.

It was, no doubt, in the earlier months of 1634, while his friend Lawes was engaged on the gorgeous and complicated staging and orchestration of the Triumph of Peace and the Coelum Britannicum, that Milton composed the poem which perhaps more than any other has made readers of to-day familiar with the term ‘masque.’  In the second of the elaborate productions just named—­a poem, be it incidentally remarked, which does no particular credit to the pen of its sometimes unsurpassed author, Tom Carew, but in the presentation of which the king and many of his chief nobles deigned to bear a part—­minor roles had been assigned to the two sons of the Earl of Bridgewater, namely, the Viscount Brackley and Master Thomas Egerton.  When the earl shortly afterwards went to assume the Presidency of the Welsh Marches, it was these two who, together with their sister the Lady Alice, bore the central parts in the masque performed before the assembled worthies of the West in the great hall of Ludlow Castle.  The ages of the three performers ranged from eleven to thirteen, the girl, who was the eighth daughter of the marriage, being the eldest.