4. 122. enranged. Comp. arranged. See Faerie Queene:

"As fair Diana, in fresh summer's day,

Beholds her nymphs enranged in shady wood."

127. See Spenser's Life.

129. [What is meant by sourse here?]

132. When the order of the Knights Templar was suppressed in Edward the Second's reign, their London estate on the bank of the Thames was given over to the Knights of St. John; by these it was leased to the students of the Common Law, who not finding a home at Cambridge or Oxford were at that time in want of a habitation. At the Dissolution of the Religious Orders this arrangement was continued by the Crown, at least for some two-thirds of the estate; the third-what should have been the Outer Temple-was bestowed on a favourite. At a later time, in the reign of James I., the property was given to the lawyers. 135. whilom, an old dat.

byde

=

abide. Comp. bate, abate; maze, amaze; mend, amend; σkaipw, ȧokaiρw; σπαίρω, ἀσπαίρω; στάχυς, ἄσταχυς; στεροπή, αστεροπή; stella, ἀστήρ. Comp. also wake, awake; vouch, avouch; wait, await; verus, aver; down, adown; base, abase; but, abut; chief, achieve; Fr. droit, adroit. Comp. further, sperare, espérer; spatium, espace; spiritus, esprit; species, espèce.

137. The mansion here spoken of stood in the gardens of what should have been the Outer Temple. It covered the ground where Essex Street now is. The two pillars which still stand at the bottom of Essex Street-those between which you pass in order to reach the river at the Temple Pier-belonged to some part or appurtenance of it. In this "stately place" the Earl of Leicester was living in 1580; one of Spenser's letters to his friend Harvey in that year is dated from it. Leicester is the "great Lord" mentioned in l. 140. He died in the autumn of 1588. After him the Earl of Essex occupied the house. It was from and in it that, in 1601, he attempted that rash insurrection against the Queen's advisers which involved him in ruin.

next whereunto. It was on the upper or western side of the Temple; not, as might seem from Spenser's description, on the lower.

139. wont. This word, as used here and often elsewhere in older English, is, in fact, the pret. of the old verb won, "Ang.-Sax. wunian; Dan. wonen; G. wohnen, to dwell, persist, continue" (Wedgewood). So in Waller's lines:

"The eagle's fate and mine are one,

Which on the shaft that made him die

Espy'd a feather of his own,

Wherewith he wont to soar so high."

And so in 1 Henry VI. I. ii. 14:

"Talbot is taken, whom we wont to fear."

Comp. the disuse of use in the sense of "am accustomed," while used is common enough. This pret. came to be used itself as a quasi-present; so ought-dare-durst-mind—wot-ought-can-may-memini-oida. (See Latham.)

"Through power of that, his cunning thieveries

He wonts to work that none the same espies.”—Faerie Queene.

But much more commonly wont is a part., with this peculiarity, that it is used only predicatively, never attributively. We say, "he was wont to be vigorous," but cannot speak of "his wont vigour." To pass on to a third sense, wont is sometimes a subst. The word wonted, which is used in the inverse way to wont the part.-i.e. is always an attributive, and not predicative-is perhaps an adj. derived from this subst. = customary; but it may be a

=

part. formed from the secondary verb wont. Spenser has also an adj. wontless unwonted, Hymne in Honour of Beautie:

4. 140.

"What wontlesse fury dost thou now inspire

Into my feeble breast when full of thee?"

"Of all English writers Spenser shows himself most independent of the laws of position." (Marsh.)

freendles. The privative termination les is more correctly spelt, as here, with only one s. It is quite distinct from the word less. It is a modernised form of Ang.-Sax. -leas. Thus friendless = Ang.-Sax. freondleas. 141. fits. So Faerie Queene, II. ii. 11: where it is expressed :

"Herc fits not tell." Comp. Sidney's Arcad.,

"How evil fits it me to have such a son."

In methinks, them seemed, &c. the it is omitted, as here.

146. Observe the alliteration.

147. See in Knight or Lingard an account of Essex's expedition against Spain in 1596. There are contemporary accounts by Camden, Stowe, Strype, Raleigh. It was a splendid feat of arms. Macaulay calls it, in his Essay on Bacon, "The most brilliant military exploit that was achieved on the Continent by English arms during the long interval which elapsed between the battle of Agincourt and that of Blenheim." There is a contemporary ballad on it given in Percy's Reliques from the Editor's "Folio MS." entitled The Winning of Cales,"

i.e. of Cadiz.

148. Hercules two pillors: i.e. Calpe on the European, Abyla on the African coast, at the Fretum Gaditanum, our Straits of Gibraltar. This name for these facing projections is found first in Pindar (Olymp. 3, 77; Nem. 3, 35), who calls them variously the ornλai and the kioves of Hercules. They were said to have been erected by Hercules to mark the limit of his westward wanderings.

5. 154. Does he mean that Devereux "promises" he shall be heureux?

Essex].

"Few noblemen of his age were more courted by poets [than was Robert, Earl of From Spenser to the lowest rhymer he was the subject of numerous sonnets or popular ballads. I will not except Sidney. I could produce evidence to prove that he scarce ever went out of England, or even left London, on the most frivolous enterprise without a pastoral in his praise, or a panegyric in metre, which were sold or sung in the streets." (Warton.)

158. Thy wide Alarmes = the wide alarms excited by you. So the Wycliffite translation of Gen. ix. 2: "And youre feer and youre trembling be upon all the beestis of the earth." Comp. the current version. See above on 1. 99. So in Latin, as Ovid. Her, v. 149-50:

"Ipse repertor opis vaccas pavisse Phereas
Fertur, et a nostro saucius igne fuit."

So in Greek, as in Aristotle's Ode to Arete:

σοῖς δὲ πόθοις ̓Αχιλλεὺς Αἴας τ' Αίδαο δόμους ἦλθον,

Alarmes orig. a French cry = "to arms." Alarum is the same word, the additional syllable in it having sprung perhaps from the full sound of the r. Comp. in Havelok, vv. 2408-9 (Ed. Skeat):

"And smot him thoru the rith arum;

Therof was ful litel harum,”

159. muse = a poet; as in Faerie Queene, IV. xi. 34; Lycid. 19. Shaksp. Sonn. 21:

Comp. Dryden's Abs. and Ach. Part I. :

"Sharp-judging Adriel, the Muses' friend,
Himself a muse."

5. 173. [What is meant by sight here?]

=

"A

174. bauldricke belt. Lat. balteus. O. Fr. baudré. O. H. G. balderick. belt, girdle, or sash, of various kinds : sometimes a sword-belt." (Halliwell.) It was sometimes merely a collar or strap passing round the neck; but most commonly it passed over one shoulder and under the arm on the other side. It was frequently used for a bugle-horn sash: as in Chaucer, Prol. 116, of the yeoman :

"An horn he bar, the bawdrik was of grene."

Much Ado about Nothing, I. i. 242: "But that I will have a recheat winded in my forehead, or hang my bugle in an invisible baldrick, the ladies shall pardon me." The Bauldricke of the Heauens bright: = the Zodiac.

177. which is commonly used of persons in Older English, as in the Lord's Prayer, &c It is quite wrong to suppose it to be the neuter of who. See above, 1. 12.

JOHN MILTON.

MILTON'S life may be divided into three parts: (1) 1608-1639; (2) 1639-1660; (3) 1660-1672 (1) He was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, London, towards the close of the year 1608. Bread Street is close by Friday Street, in which was the Mermaid Tavern, where Shakspere and Jonson, and the other great wits of the day, used to meet together; so that Milton may be said to have been born within sound of their famous merriments. His father seems to have been a man of a grave earnest nature, of high views on the subject of education and of the end of life, of strong religious convictions, himself well educated and accomplished, being a skilful and eager musician. Of his mother little is known. In very many respects he inherited his

father's character.

He was very carefully educated at home under a private tutor, Thomas Young (his initials form part of Smectymnuus), at St. Paul's School, at Christ's College, Cambridge, at home again (Horton, Buckinghamshire), and lastly by a tour upon the Continent (in France, Italy, and Switzerland). Thus his formal education lasted down to his thirty-first year. The great number of the years thus occupied is to be accounted for by the fact that after he had once chosen his vocation of poetry, which he appears to have done at an early age, it seemed both to him and to his father above all things important that he should earnestly prepare himself for it. This first period of his life, then, may be called the period of preparation. During it he did not attempt any great work; he only prepared himself to attempt one. At Christmas 1629 he wrote his Hymn on the Morning of the Nativity, his first considerable work; seven years afterwards he wrote Lycidas, his last considerable minor work; between these he wrote L'Allegro and Il Penseroso and Comus, besides some sonnets and other short pieces.

(2) It might seem that in 1639 Milton was at last ready to address himself to his great task : that "the mellowing year" (Lycid. 5) had come; or to use another phrase (see Sonnet On arriving to his Three-and-twentieth Year), that he was sufficiently "endued" with that "inward ripeness" after which he had so sincerely and ardently aspired; but he was now to be drawn away, perhaps for ever, from the object of his devotion. Poetry was to be abandoned for politics. Such was the condition of the times, that other services than those of a poet were required of him. He obeyed this call, and for more than twenty years he gave himself up to the urgent political and social questions of the day. He wrote on the Freedom of the Press, on Church Government, on Divorce, on Education, in defence of the English people when assailed by Saumase for the execution of their king. During all this period he wrote no poetr} except a few sonnets. Of these sonnets several deal with the same matters which form the subjects of his prose works; others give some insight into his social and personal life: the last one, written in 1658, reflects his profound grief for the loss of his second wife. By his first wife he had been made the father of three daughters. His incessant studiousness injured his sight, and at last produced blindness: the immediate cause of that affliction being his controversy with Saumase (see Sonnet to Cyriac Skinner on his Blindness).

(3) When the Republic fell and was superseded, Milton was no longer able to serve his country as a political writer, He could now once more, after an interval of some twenty-one

years, entertain and pursue the great idea of his life: he now set himself to compose his great epic poem. The subject which had once attracted him-King Arthur-now gave place to a strangely different one-the Fall of Man. That former subject was not consonant with Milton's nature, educed and developed as it had been during the Commonwealth days, nor with the circumstances amidst which he found himself and the spectacles he witnessed. It was not practical and real enough. In 1667 appeared Paradise Lost, in ten books. It was in that same year that Dryden brought out his Annus Mirabilis. Thus in that year the great poetic leader of the setting age and the leader of the rising age stood strikingly contrasted. Four years afterwards were published Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. In 1674 Miltor passed away from the evil times and evil tongues upon which his life had fallen.

HYMN ON THE NATIVITY.

INTRODUCTION.

THIS hymn was written by Milton in the year 1629, when he was just twenty-one years of age. Hallam therefore is inaccurate in saying that we have nothing written by Milton earlier than his sonnet on "his being arrived to the age of twenty-three," which would be written in December 1631. The Hymn was written while he was yet an undergraduate. He gives some account of his writing it in one of his elegies—the sixth—which is a letter addressed to his friend Deodati-that same friend the news of whose death met him when he returned from his tour on the Continent, and whom he bewailed in his Epitaphium Damonis:

"At tu siquid agam scitabere, si modo saltem

Esse putas tanti noscere siquid agam.
Paciferum canimus cælesti semine regem,

Faustaque sacratis secula pacta libris ;
Vagitumque Dei et stabulantem paupere tecto
Qui suprema suo cum patre regna colit ;
Stelliparumque polum, modulantesque æthere turmas

Et subito elisos ad sua fana deos.

Dona quidem dedimus Christi natalibus illa,

Illa sub auroram lux mihi prima tulit."

Which passage contains an excellent outline of the poem. Apparently he proposed to celebrate other great Christian events in a similar way. See the fragment on The Passion, and the ode on The Circumcision. With regard to the former he writes:-"This subject the author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished."

It

The metre of the introductory stanzas is that in which Spenser wrote his Four Hymns. is a modification of the Italian eight-lined stanza, first made by Chaucer, who composed in it several of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer modified the Italian stanza by the omission of a line; Spenser in his Faerie Queene by the addition of one, that one of greater length than the others.

This hymn is the first considerable poem which Milton wrote.

6. 2. Wherein. We should rather say whereon. See Spenser's Prothal. l. 119.

4. redemption: here in sense, as etymologically, = ransom.

6. our deadly forfeit should release = that he should remit, or rather cause to c

mitted, the penalty of death to which we were liable.