than to the pomps and solemnities of cathedral ritual:—­

   “But let my due feet never fail
    To walk the studious cloisters pale,
    And love the high-embowed roof,
    With antique pillars massy proof,
    And storied windows richly dight,
    Casting a dim religious light: 
    There let the pealing organ blow,
    To the full-voic’d quire below,
    In service high and anthems clear,
    As may with sweetness through mine ear
    Dissolve me into ecstacies,
    And bring all heaven before mine eyes.”

He therefore readily fell in with Lawes’s proposal to write a masque to celebrate Lord Bridgewater’s assumption of the Lord Presidency of the Welsh Marches.  The Earl had entered upon the office in October, 1633, and “Comus” was written some time between this and the following September.  Singular coincidences frequently linked Milton’s fate with the north-west Midlands, from which his grandmother’s family and his brother-in-law and his third wife sprung, whither the latter retired, where his friend Diodati lived, and his friend King died, and where now the greatest of his early works was to be represented in the time-hallowed precincts of Ludlow Castle, where it was performed on Michaelmas night, in 1634.  If, as we should like to think, he was himself present, the scene must have enriched his memory and his mind.  The castle—­in which Prince Arthur had spent with his Spanish bride the six months of life which alone remained to him, in which eighteen years before the performance Charles the First had been installed Prince of Wales with extraordinary magnificence, and which, curiously enough, was to be the residence of the Cavalier poet, Butler—­would be a place of resort for English tourists, if it adorned any country but their own.  The dismantled keep is still an imposing object, lowering from a steep hill around whose base the curving Teme alternately boils and gushes with tumultuous speed.  The scene within must have realized the lines in the “Allegro “: 

   “Pomp, and feast, and revelry,
    Mask and antique pageantry,
    Where throngs of knights and barons bold,
    In weeds of peace high triumphs hold,
    With store of ladies, whose bright eyes
    Rain influence.”

Lawes himself acted the attendant Spirit, the Lady and the Brothers were performed by Lord Bridgewater’s youthful children, whose own nocturnal bewilderment in Haywood Forest, could we trust a tradition, doubted by the critics, but supported by the choice of the neighbourhood of Severn as the scene of the drama, had suggested his theme to Milton.  He is evidently indebted for many incidents and ideas to Peele’s “Old Wives’ Tale,” and the “Comus” of Erycius Puteanus; but there is little morality in the former production and little fancy in the latter.  The peculiar blending of the highest morality with the noblest imagination is as much Milton’s own as the incomparable diction.  “I,”