concluding: 

    Mortals that would follow me,
    Love vertue, she alone is free,
    She can teach ye how to clime
    Higher than the Spheary chime;
    Or if Vertue feeble were,
    Heav’n it self would stoop to her.

Such is the bare outline, the skeleton of the piece; what, we cannot help wondering, was it like when it first appeared clothed in the beauty of the flesh and inspired with the spirit of song?  Its fashion and its form we have indeed yet before us, though nothing can again quicken it into the life it enjoyed for one brief hour nearly three hundred years ago.  We must be thankful that we count the poem itself among our treasures, and be content to confine our inquiry to it.  It is, after all, to the accidents of its production as the body to the robes that adorn it.

It must be confessed that outwardly at least Comus has but little connexion with pastoral.  The habit of the Spirit, the disguise of the magician, the dance in the third scene, these are the only points serving to connect the poem with pastoral tradition in any formal manner.  It is not, however, on account of these that Comus has been commonly assigned to the same category as the Faithful Shepherdess and Lycidas, but rather because its whole tone, its mode, one might almost say, is essentially pastoral, and because it is directly dependent upon previous pastoral work.

It has been the fashion to praise Comus above all other masques whatever, and from the point of view of the poetry it contains it would be idle to dispute its supremacy.  But there are other considerations.  As a masque proper, and from the point of view of what had come to be expected of such compositions, how does it stand?  I am not here concerned to inquire how far the term can with strict propriety be applied to the piece, a question which may be left to the somewhat arid region of the formal classification of literature.  The points in which it resembles the regular spectacular masques, as well as those in which it differs from them, will be alike evident from the analysis given above.  It may, however, be well to put in a caution against the manner in which some writers on the masque seek to make their distinctions appear more clearly defined than they in reality are by declaring Comus to be not a masque at all but a play.  It is no more a regular play than it is a strict masque, but a dramatic composition containing elements of both in almost equal proportions.

That the songs are for the most part exquisite, that they were worthily set to music and adequately rendered; that the measures, the dance of the revellers in their half-brutish disguises, the antimasque of country folk, and the final or main dance of the wanderers, were effective; that the whole was graceful, complete and polished, is either self-evident to-day, or may with reason be inferred.  The scenery, too, must have