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In 1637 Henry Lawes published "Comus" as a pamphlet of thirty-five pages, with a dedication by himself to John Lord Brackley, who had played the part of the elder brother. Milton's name was not upon its title-page, and Henry Lawes said of it in the dedication, "Although not openly acknowledged by the Author, yet 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." Milton revised the copy for the press, but in the place upon the title-page where his name would have stood had he given it, is a sigh in a few words from Virgil's second Eclogue-"Ah me, what have I wished? A dry wind spoils my flowers." The dry south wind that Milton felt as withering his spring was in the griefs and contests of the time. The veteran Ben Jonson died in that year, 1637, fallen, as he felt, on evil times. The very writing of the masque of "Comus" was connected with thoughts of oppression and cruelty, with resentment of wrongs done to Prynne that must have made a part of his unwillingness to sign his name at that time to a masque, and be supposed in any way the adversary of a victim to Star Chamber tyranny. Eheu! quid volui misero mihi? I would have sung, and discord clashes to the soul of my best music. I would have consecrated all my powers to the pure service of God; the dry wind blighted then what blossom I was ready to put forth and now what little rill of song within me can expand into the light of heavenly love and beauty before it is dried up by the sirocco of dissension and ill-will that parches all this land? It was no sigh of despair; in time of greatest seeming reason for despair, the last use to which Milton put his genius as a poet was for an outpouring of the music of a patient trust in God. But he has not known life who has never sighed over the little that could be attained, and has not thought of old hopes while they lay dead or asleep, and has not felt as Milton felt in 1637, Eheu, quid volui.

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That was the year in which he whispered to his friend Diodati of his dream of immortality, of wings too tender for a lofty flight, and said, Let us be humbly wise. In the same letter to his bosom

friend there was also this passage:-"As to other points, what God may have determined for me I know not; but this I know, that if he ever instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the breast of any man, he has instilled it into mine: Ceres in the fable pursued not her daughter with a greater keenness of enquiry than I, day and night, the idea of perfection. Hence, wherever I find a man despising the false estimates of the vulgar, and daring to aspire in sentiment, language, and conduct, to what the highest wisdom through every age has taught us as most excellent, to him I unite myself by a sort of necessary attachment; and if I am so influenced by nature or destiny, that by no exertion or labours of my own I may exalt myself to this summit of worth and honour, yet no powers of heaven or earth will hinder me from looking with reverence and affection upon those who have thoroughly attained this glory, or appear engaged in the successful pursuit of it."

This was written on the 23rd of September 1637. About the same time, or soon afterwards, it was agreed at home that Milton should leave England for a year or two and visit Greece and Italy; then, coming back, he would establish himself in what would be his business of life, the better poet and the better teacher for that closing time of rest in Italy and Greece. The two years abroad would yield new pastures to his mind. He would write no more verse until those fresh influences should have breathed into him health and strength. The journey could not be begun with winter at the door. It was resolved, therefore, that he should set out for Italy in the next following spring, the spring of 1638.

But in October 1637 there came to him a request from Cambridge that he would join in the forming of a little volume of memorial verses by members of the University. They were to be in memory of a young friend at Christ's College, Edward King, who had been drowned by the wreck of the vessel in which he was going home to Ireland for the long vacation. Edward King's father was Sir John King, a Privy Councillor for Ireland, whose character and credit at court had obtained for his son a

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fellowship at Christ's which, perhaps, might otherwise have fallen to Milton. Milton was friend and fellow-worker with him. King took his M.A. degree in 1633, only a year later than Milton. He was about to enter the ministry of the Church when his sudden death led to the request that Milton among others would, according to a good and kindly custom, contribute to the memorial volume of "Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King." He at once responded and sent "Lycidas," which is dated in November 1637. In the opening lines Milton referred to his withdrawal from the use of verse while waiting for the day of riper power, a silence broken by the touch of human sympathy, and the piece closed with a glance towards the coming days of travel,—“To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." The only part of "Lycidas" that here concerns us is the passage in which Milton draws from his friend's fitness for the service of the Church a comment upon the unfitness of many in it who neglected faithful preaching, and cared only for the incomes they could make. These were the pastors-blind mouths-whose hungry sheep-whose congregations-looked up and were not fed,

But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw,

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread :

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw

Daily devours apace, and nothing said:

Yet that two-handed engine at the door

Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.

That two-handed engine is St. Paul's "Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God:" "For the Word of God," said Paul, "is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword." We wield it by a double grip, on the Old Testament and on the New. The Bible chained to its desk, for use of any who might turn in out of the street to read a chapter and to breathe a prayer, was a familiar object at the old church doors. Milton's complaint is that the spirit of evil laid hold upon men in the congregations of unfaithful preachers, by whom there was nothing said. The Bible was at the church door, open to all, but they made no

use against evil of the only weapon that could be a sword of

victory.

In 1637 Milton must have flinched the more from immediate association of his name with Comus, because in that year William Prynne was again made the victim of a cruel sentence. He had issued in 1636 a pamphlet setting forth judgments against sabbathbreakers who had been multiplied and encouraged by the King's Declaration of Sports. In another pamphlet he charged the Bishops with suppression of preaching, that they might prepare the way for popery. The Rev. Henry Burton preached two sermons in November 1636, which he published as "For God and the King," wherein he attacked the ceremonies on which Laud insisted, the removal of communion tables from the centre of the church where they had commonly stood, and hats had been often placed on them, to the east end where they were railed in, the bowing towards them, and the setting up of crosses, as wrongdoing of Bishops for which the remedy was abolition of Prelacy. Dr. Bastwick, physician, already under sentence of the High Commission Court, published "the Litany of John Bastwick," in which one clause was, "From plague, pestilence and famine, from bishops, priests and deacons, good Lord deliver us." They were all three, Prynne, Burton and Bastwick, brought before the Star Chamber, sentenced to fine, pillory, and loss of ears; Prynne was found to have had ear enough left for a second cropping. Prynne was also again to be branded. The sentence was executed against all three on the last day of June 1637, and the victims had the people on their side. Their path to the pillory was strewn with herbs and flowers.

There had been no parliament called for eight years. In 1637 the King issued his third writ for ship-money. A widespread feeling against personal rule gathered new strength, and blended with rebellion in the Church against Laud's honest and impartial endeavours to build up spiritual life by compelling strict conformity in the observance of all legally appointed forms. In 1635 three thousand persons had crossed the Atlantic to join the New England colony. Young Henry Vane, then twenty-three years old, landed

at Boston in that year, and in 1636 he was made Governor of the colony. His opposition to a desire of the religious commonwealth to refuse admission to men holding opinions that would conflict with theirs-Vane arguing for full liberty of judgment, Winthrop for the policy of protection against discord-caused John Winthrop to be elected Governor at the end of Vane's first year of office, and in 1637 Vane returned to England.

The new Service Book sent into Scotland at the beginning of 1637 was to be brought into use there at Easter, but the strength of opposition caused the first day of reading it to be put off to Sunday, the 23rd of July. In St. Giles's Kirk at Edinburgh the people met the opening of the Service Book and the attempt to read from it with uproar, and when the Bishop of Edinburgh came forward to allay the tumult there was a joint stool thrown at his head. Committees were established to maintain the people's cause, and on the 1st of March 1638 there was fervent prayer in St. Giles's Kirk, after which nobles, clergy, burgesses lifted their hands and swore fidelity to the National Covenant, by which they undertook to maintain at all hazards their old form of worship and their old Confession of Faith. This news was fresh in England, and still the Covenant was being signed, when Milton, in the middle of April 1638, left England for Italy and Greece. He was then three or four months older than nine-and-twenty.

Milton left home with one servant, who would be the more necessary because in those days much travel was on horseback. He had letters of recommendation to Lord Scudamore, the English ambassador in Paris, by whom he was introduced to Hugo Grotius, exiled from his own country by the intolerance of an ecclesiastical synod, and then in Paris as ambassador from the Queen of Sweden. From Lord Scudamore he took letters of introduction to English merchants whom he would find upon his way, and travelled to Nice. He sailed from Nice to Genoa, visited Leghorn, Pisa, and Florence, staying two months at Florence, and making friends among the men of letters there. Milton at Horton had become a good Italian scholar, and in Italy he wrote Italian verse that pleased Italian poets. From Florence

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