Bridgewater family itself, there must have been critics capable of forming an opinion of a poem like Comus at the moment, and generous enough to spread it by talk afterwards. True, there was no fun or horse-play in the masque, such as a motley audience likes; the machinery and the decorations can have been nothing so splendid as those of the recent masques at Court; and it may even have been a trial of patience to sit for two or three hours listening to speeches recited and songs sung by six actors, three of whom were mere children. But the quality of the songs and the speeches must have asserted itself with the best judges through all that disadvantage; a great deal depended upon Lawes himself and his songs; and the Bridgewater children, besides being interesting personally to the spectators, may have been effective little elocutionists. On the whole, we cannot doubt that the masque was a success, and a week's wonder at

Ludlow.

There is no evidence that Milton himself had taken the journey of 150 miles from London or Horton in order to be present at the performance. It is possible that he had done so; but it is just as possible that he had not, and even that the authorship of the masque was kept a secret at the time of its performance, known only to Lawes, or to Lawes and the Earl's family. But the Earl of Bridgewater's masque began to be talked of beyond Ludlow; as time passed, and the rumour of it spread, and perhaps the songs in it were carried vocally into London society by Lawes and his pupils of the Bridgewater family, it was still more talked of; and there came to be inquiries respecting its authorship, and requests for copies of it, and especially of the songs. All this we learn from Lawes. His loyalty to his friend Milton in the whole affair was admirable; and he appears to have been more proud, in his own heart, of his concern with the comparatively quiet Bridgewater masque than with his more blazoned and well-paid co-operation in the London masques of the same year. The music which he composed for the songs in Comus still exists, written out in his own hand and signed with his name, on a single sheet of old music paper (Add. MSS., Brit. Mus., No. 11,518), with this heading "Five Songs set for a Mask presented at Ludlo Castle before the Earl of Bridgewater, Lord President of the Marches:

October 1634." It is probably but one of many copies which he made to gratify his musical friends. But there were many friends of his, it appears, who were not satisfied with copies of the songs and their music only, but wanted complete copies of the masque. To relieve himself from the trouble so occasioned, Lawes resolved at length to publish the masque. He did so in 1637 in a small, and now very rare, quarto of 40 pages, with this title-page :

"A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, on Michaelmasse Night, before the Right Honourable John, Earle of Bridgewater, Viscount Brackley, Lord President of Wales, and one of his Majesties' most honourable Privy Counsell. Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus Austrum Perditus

London: Printed for Humphrey Robinson, at the signe of the Three Pidgeons in Paul's Churchyard, 1637.”

The volume was dedicated by Lawes to the Earl's son and heir, young Viscount Brackley, who had acted the part of Elder Brother in the masque. The Dedication complete will be found prefixed to Comus in the present edition; but its opening sentences may be quoted here. "My Lord," says Lawes to the young Viscount, still but a boy of fifteen years, "this Poem, which "received its first occasion of birth from yourself and others of "your noble family, and much honour from your own person in "the performance, now returns again to make a final dedication "of itself to you. 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." From this we learn that the proposal of publication was Lawes's own, and that Milton still preferred the shelter of the anonymous. That Lawes had Milton's consent, however, is proved by the motto on the titlepage. It is from Virgil's Second Eclogue, and must certainly have been supplied by Milton. "Alas! what have I chosen for

1 The Five Songs in this MS. answer, with one omission, to the enumeration of the Songs in their series given in our description of the masque as performed. They are :—(1) From the heavens. (2) Sweet Echo. (3) Sabrina fair. (4) Back, Shepherds, back, with its continuation Noble Lord and Lady bright. (5) Now my task. The Song wanting is the Song of the nymph Sabrina, By the rushy-fringèd bank.

my wretched self! thus on my flowers, infatuated that I am, letting in the rude wind!" So says the shepherd in Virgil's Eclogue; and Milton, in borrowing the words, hints his fear that he may have done ill in letting his Comus be published. Though he was now twenty-eight years of age, it was actually, with hardly an exception, his first public venture in print.

"Comus," says

He had no reason to regret the venture. Hallam, “was sufficient to convince any one of taste and feeling "that a great poet had arisen in England, and one partly formed "in a different school from his contemporaries." Such a strong statement is easily made now; but there may have been some in England capable of forming it when it was a merit to form it, i.e. in 1637 (the year of Ben Jonson's death), when modest copies of Lawes's edition, without the author's name, were first in circulation. We know of one Englishman, at all events, who did form it and express it. This was Milton's near neighbour at Horton, Sir Henry Wotton, Provost of Eton College. Born in 1568, mixed up with political affairs in Elizabeth's reign, and in the height of his active career through that of James-when he had been English Ambassador to various foreign Courts, but had resided, in that capacity, most continuously at Venice-Sir Henry, since Charles came to the throne, had been in veteran retirement in the quiet post of the Eton provostship, respected by all England for his past diplomatic services, but living chiefly on his memories of those services, his Italian experiences in particular, and in the delights of pictures, books, and scholarly society. Some chance introduction had brought Milton and the aged Knight together for the first time early in 1638, when Milton was preparing for his journey to Italy; and on the 6th of April in that year Milton, by way of parting acknowledgment of Sir Henry's courtesy, sent him a letter with a copy of Lawes's edition of his Comus. Sir Henry, it appears, had read the poem in a previous copy, without knowing who was the author; and, writing in reply to Milton on the 13th of April, just in time to overtake him before he left England, he mentioned this fact, and expressed his pleasure at finding that a poem that he had liked so singularly was by his neighbour and new acquaintance. "A dainty piece of entertain"ment," he calls it, "wherein I should much commend the tragical

part [ie. the dialogue] if the lyrical did not ravish me with a "certain Doric delicacy in your songs and odes; whereunto I "must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language." Here was praise worth having, and which did, as we know, gratify Milton. He was actually on the move towards Italy when he read Sir Henry Wotton's letter.

66

When, in 1645, six years after his return from Italy, Milton, then in the very midst of his pamphleteering activity, and of the ill-will which it had brought him, consented to the publication by Moseley of the first collective edition of his Poems, Comus was still, in respect of length and merit, his chief poetical achievement. Accordingly, he not only reprinted it in that edition, but gave it the place of honour there. He put it last of the English Poems, as a bulky little poem by itself, occupying as much space as all the rest together (pp. 67-120); and he gave it a separate title-page, thus:"A Mask of the same Author, presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, before the Earl of Bridgewater, then President of Wales: Anno Dom. 1645." The title-page of Lawes's edition of 1637 was, of course, cancelled by this new one; but Lawes's Dedication of that edition to young Viscount Brackley was retained, and there was inserted also, by way of pendant to that Dedication, Sir Henry Wotton's courteous letter of April 13, 1638. The courteous old Sir Henry was then dead, but Milton rightly considered that his word from the grave might be important in the circumstances. And so this Second Edition of the Comus, thus distinguished and set off as part of the First collective Edition of the Poems, served all the demand till 1673, when the Second collective Edition of the Poems appeared. Comus was, of course, retained in that edition, as still the largest and chief of Milton's minor Poems; but it was made less mechanically conspicuous than in the earlier edition. It did not come last among the English Poems, being followed by the translations of some Psalms; and it had no separate title-page, but only the heading, "A Mask presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, &c." Lawes's Dedication of the edition of 1637 and Sir Henry Wotton's Letter were likewise omitted.

In none of the three first printed editions, it will be observed (Lawes's of 1637, Milton's of 1645, and Milton's of 1673), is the

poem entitled COMUS.

Nor is there any such title in Milton's original Draft among the Cambridge MSS., nor in that Bridgewater transcript which is supposed to have been the stage-copy. "A Mask presented," &c.: such, with slight variations in the phrasing, was the somewhat vague name of the piece while Milton lived. It was really inconvenient, however, that such a poem should be without a briefer and more specific name. Accordingly, that of COMUS, from one of the chief persons of the drama, has been unanimously and very properly adopted.

Although the word comus, or μos, signifying "revel" or carousal," or sometimes "a band of revellers," is an old Greek common noun, with various cognate terms (such as wμaw, “to revel," and wμodia, comedy), the personification or proper name COMUS appears to have been an invention of the later classic mythology. A passage is indeed cited from the Agamemnon of Eschylus (1191-1193) where kμog may be construed in a personal sense; but such a construction of that passage is rather forced. So far was Kuos from being a distinct deity among the older Greeks that the kμo or revels we most frequently hear of among them were revels in honour of Bacchus. Gradually, however, when Mythology became more of a conscious poetical art, Comus emerged as a person, the God of Mirth, just as we might raise our common noun revel to the personage Revel by the use of a capital letter. In the Eikóres, or "Descriptions of Pictures," by Philostratus, a Greek author of the third century of our era, COMUS is represented as a winged god, seen in one picture "drunk and languid after a repast, his head sunk on his breast, slumbering in a standing attitude, and his legs crossed" (Smith's Dict. of Greek and Roman Biog. and Myth.). But, in fact, poets were left at liberty to fancy Comus, or the god Revel, very much as their own notions of what constitutes mirth or revel directed them; and the use of this liberty might perhaps be traced in the tradition of Comus, and the allusions to him in the poetry of different modern nations, down to Milton's time. He is an occasional personage among the English Elizabethan poets; and he figures especially in Ben Jonson's masque of "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, presented at Court before King James, 1619."

In this masque the scene was a mountain, all snow and frost