wrote Sir Henry Wootton on receiving a copy of the anonymous edition printed by Lawes in 1637, “should much commend the tragical part if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language.”  “Although not openly acknowledged by the author,” says Lawes in his apology for printing prefixed to the poem, “it is a legitimate offspring, so lovely and so much desired that the often copying of it hath tired my pen to give my several friends satisfaction, and brought me to a necessity of producing it to the public view.”  The publication is anonymous, and bears no mark of Milton’s participation except a motto, which none but the author could have selected, intimating a fear that publication is premature.  The title is simply “A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle,” nor did the piece receive the name of “Comus” until after Milton’s death.

It has been remarked that one of the most characteristic traits of Milton’s genius, until he laid hand to “Paradise Lost,” is the dependence of his activity upon promptings from without.  “Comus” once off his mind, he gives no sign of poetical life for three years, nor would have given any then but for the inaccurate chart or unskilful seamanship which proved fatal to his friend Edward King, August 10, 1637.  King, a Fellow of Milton’s college, had left Chester, on a voyage to Ireland, in the stillest summer weather:—­

   “The air was calm, and on the level brine
    Sleek Panope and all her sisters played.”

Suddenly the vessel struck on a rock, foundered, and all on board perished except some few who escaped in a boat.  Of King it was reported that he refused to save himself, and sank to the abyss with hands folded in prayer.  Great sympathy was excited among his friends at Cambridge, enough at least to evoke a volume of thirty-six elegies in various languages, but not enough to inspire any of the contributors, except Milton, with a poetical thought, while many are so ridiculous that quotation would be an affront to King’s memory.  But the thirty-sixth is “Lycidas.”  The original manuscript remains, and is dated in November.  Of the elegy’s relation to Milton’s biography it may be said that it sums up the two influences which had been chiefly moulding his mind of late years, the natural influences of which he had been the passive recipient during his residence at Horton, and the political and theological passion with which he was becoming more and more inspired by the circumstances of the time.  By 1637 the country had been eight years without a parliament, and the persecution of Puritans had attained its acme.  In that year Laud’s new Episcopalian service book was forced, or rather was attempted to be forced, upon Scotland; Prynne lost his ears; and Bishop Williams was fined eighteen thousand pounds and ordered to be imprisoned during the King’s pleasure.  Hence the striking,