Drop serene or Gutta serena. It was formerly thought that that sort of blindness was an incurable extinction or quenching of sight by a transparent, watery, cold humour distilling upon the optic nerve, though making very little change in the eye to appearance, if any; it is now known to be most commonly an obstruction in the capillary vessels of that nerve, and curable in some cases. A cataract for many ages, and till about thirty years ago, was thought to be a film externally growing over the eye, intercepting or veiling the sight, beginning with dimness, and so increasing till vision was totally obstructed: but the disease is in the crystalline humour lying between the outmost coat of the eye and the pupilla. The dimness which is at the beginning is called a suffusion; and when the sight is lost, it is a cataract; and cured by couching, which is with a needle passing through the external coat and driving down the diseased crystalline, the loss of which is somewhat supplied by the use of a large convex glass. When Milton was first blind, he wrote to his friend Leonard Philara, an Athenian then at Paris, for him to consult Dr. Thevenot; he sent his case, (it is in the fifteenth of his familiar letters :) what answer he had is not known; but it seems by this

passage that he was not certain what his disease was: or perhaps he had a mind to describe both the great causes of blindness according to what was known at that time, as his whole poem is interspersed with great variety of learning. Richardson.

25. The very names of the two great diseases of the eye sufficiently prove that Milton intended to allude to both. Grtta serena is now usually called amaurósis, the darkening or quenching of sight: cataract, (termed by the Arabians gutta opaca,) was called by Celsus suffusio.

A cataract is now usually cured either by extraction, or by comminution, rather than by the method described by RichardE.

son.

26. Yet not the more

Cease I to wander,] This expression (which Bentley and Pearce proposed to correct) may be allowed, if not justified by Et si quid cessare poles in Virgil, Ecl. vii. 10. We may understand cease here in the sense of forbear; Yet not the more forbear I to wander: I do it as much as I did before I was blind.

29. Smit with the love of sacred song ;] So Virgil, Georg. ii. 475.

Dulces ante omnia Muse, Quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus

amore.

It

33. Those other two &c.] has been imagined that Milton dictated Those other too, which though different in sense, yet is not distinguishable in sound, so that they might easily be mistaken the one for the other. In strictness of speech perhaps we should read others instead of other, Those others too: but those other may be admitted as well as these other in iv. 783.-these other wheel the north: but then it must be acknowledged that too is a sorry botch at best. The most probable explanation of this passage I conceive to be this. Though he mentions four, yet there are but two whom he particularly desires to resemble, and those he distinguishes both with the epithet blind to make the likeness the more striking,

Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides. Mæonides is Homer, so called

30

from the name of his father Mæon and no wonder our poet desires to equal him in renown, whose writings he so much studied, admired, and imitated. The character of Thamyris is not so well known and established: but Homer mentions him in the Iliad. ii. 595; and Eustathius ranks him with Orpheus and Musæus, the most celebrated poets and musicians. That lustful challenge of his to the nine Muses was probably nothing more than a fable invented to express his violent love and affection for poetry. Plato mentions his hymns with honour in the beginning of his eighth book of Laws, and towards the conclusion of the last book of his Republic feigns, upon the principles of transmigration, that the soul of Thamyris passed into a nightingale. He was a Thracian by birth, and invented the Doric mood or measure, according to Pliny, 1. vii. c. 57. Plutarch in his treatise of Music says, that he had the finest voice of any of his time, and wrote a poem of the war of the Titans with the gods: and from Suidas we learn that he composed likewise a poem of the generation of the world, which being subjects near of kin to Milton's might probably occasion the mention of him in this place. Thamyris then and Homer are those other two whom the poet

principally desires to resemble: and it seems as if he had intended at first to mention only these two, and then currente calamo had added the two others, Tiresias and Phineus, the one a Theban, the other a king of Arcadia, famous blind prophets and poets of antiquity, for the word prophet sometimes comprehends both characters as vates does in Latin.

And Tiresias and Phineus prophets old. Dr. Bentley is totally for rejecting this verse, and objects to the bad accent of Tiresias: but as Dr. Pearce observes, the accent may be mended by supposing that the interlined copy intended this order of the words,

And Phineus and Tiresias prophets

old.

And the verse appears to be genuine by Mr. Marvel's alluding to it in his verses prefixed to the second edition;

Just heav'n thee, like Tiresias, to
requite,
Rewards with prophecy thy loss of
sight.

36. Post rapta sagacem Lumina Tiresian, &c. Eleg. vi. 68. This enumeration of Tiresias in company with other celebrated bards of the highest antiquity would alone serve for a proof

35

that the suspected line is genuine. And Tiresias occurs again, De Idea Platonica, v. 26. T. Warton.

37. Then feed on thoughts,] Nothing could better express the musing thoughtfulness of a blind poet. The phrase was perhaps borrowed from the following line of Spenser's Tears of the Muses.

I feed on sweet contentment of my thought. Thyer.

37. that voluntary move

Harmonious numbers; &c.] And the reader will observe the flowing of the numbers here with all the ease and harmony of the finest voluntary. The words seem of themselves to have fallen naturally into verse almost without the poet's thinking of it. And this harmony appears to greater advantage for the roughness of some of the preceding verses, which is an artifice frequently practised by Milton, to be careless of his numbers in some places, the better to set off the musical flow of those which immediately follow.

39. -darkling,] It is said that this word was coined by our author, but I find it used several