such is the obvious meaning of the phrase. Interpret it, however, by the circumstances at Harefield on that summer-evening when the aged Countess was seated on her throne in the Masque, robed and coroneted (the coronet not unlike Cybele's turreted tiara), and representatives of two generations of her descendants were about her. Does it not then mean, "Even now the handsomest of her daughters must do her best to keep up with her "?---While I write this note (June 15, 1872) it is but a fortnight since I paid my second visit to the site of old Harefield House, close to the old church and yew-bordered churchyard. I saw again the old cedar of Lebanon which guards the scene of Arcades in chief, traced the mounds that perhaps still conceal the foundations of the mansion, and found old bricks cropping out here and there in hollows torn among the rank grass; but the recollection of the place which I have again carried away as the sweetest and keenest is that of the Countess's tomb in the church, of her singular beauty as she is represented in her life-size sculptured effigy, recumbent on the tomb in crimson robe and gilt coronet under a canopy of pale green, while miniature effigies of her three daughters, fair-haired like herself and also beautiful, but not so beautiful, adorn the side of the tomb underneath. (See Introd. p. 226.) The small hands of the Countess, represented with delicate finger-tips touching each other over her breast in prayer, are exquisitely perfect. You could sigh as you looked at them, or at the small feet represented as carefully in their antique shoes, and then at the fair and stately face of the long-dead. To prove that the sculptor had been exact, they used to have in the church till lately one of the actual shoes which the Countess wore; but it has disappeared.

26. "GEN. Stay, gentle swains," &c. It is a fair enough surmise that THE GENIUS OF THE WOOD, who speaks this speech, was personated by Henry Lawes. (See Introd. 220–224.) He first addresses the "swains," or young gentlemen of the masque.

27. "honour": i.e. honourable or noble birth.

30, 31. "Divine Alpheus . . secret sluice . . . his Arethuse. Alpheus or Alpheius was the name of a river of Arcadia in the Peloponnesus. The legend connected with it was that a certain youthful hunter, named Alpheus, had been in love with the nymph Arethusa, and that, when she had fled from him to the island of Ortygia, on the coast of Sicily, close to Syracuse, he was turned into a river, and, in that guise, pursued her by a secret channel under the sea between Peloponnesus and Sicily, rising again in Ortygia, where he and she became one in the well or fountain called, after her, Arethusa. Both Arethusa and Alpheus are re-introduced in Lycidas (85 and 132). Todd quotes the phrase "secret sluices" from Sylvester's Du Bartas.

33. "silver-buskined Nymphs": the lady-performers, wearing buskins, like Diana and her wood-nymphs.

36-60. "the great mistress . . . whom with low reverence I adore as mine . . . I am the Power of this fair wood," &c. Although, as I have said, it is a probable guess that the speaker was Lawes, the wording of this whole passage might suggest that it was rather some gentleman land-steward, or the like, in the service of the Countess. If Lawes is the speaker, he speaks all this part of the speech metaphorically, in his assumed character of "The Genius of the Wood"; but it is not unlike Milton to veil literal fact under poetic language. Yet, on the other hand, if the speaker was any such gentleman-steward as I have supposed, he must also, from the sequel (61—76), have been a devotee of music. On the whole, therefore, on internal evidence, as well as from the external, Lawes is likeliest. Metaphorically a woodsman through this part of his speech, he emerges more himself at the close.

46. "curl the grove." The word "curl" was often applied to foliage in the old poets.

47. "wanton windings wove." Notice the alliteration. one of the alliterative passage in Spenser (F. Q. 1. ii. 13):

"Her wanton palfrey all was overspred
With tinsel trappings, woven like a wave,

Whose bridle rung with golden bels and bosses brave."

It reminds

51. "thwarting thunder blue." Thwarting" means athwart, or zigzag. Todd compares Shakespeare's "cross blue lightning" (Jul. Cæs., I. 3).

52. "the cross dire-looking planet" i.e. Saturn. See note to Pens., 43.

55. "Over the mount." This suggests personal acquaintance with the ground about Harefield. The house was on a slight slope; and behind the site there is still a wooded rise which might be called a mount. But see Introd., p. 225.

57. “tasselled horn": i.e. the horn of the huntsman, which had tassels attached to it. Spenser, as Newton noted, has (F. Q., 1. viii. 3) :—

"an horne of bugle small,

Which hong adowne his side in twisted gold
And tasselles gay."

60. murmurs": i.e. muttered phrases or charms. Mr. Browne notes the same sense of the word in Comus, 526.

63-73.

"the celestial Sirens' harmony,

That sit upon the nine infolded spheres,
And sing to those that hold the vital shears,
And turn the adamantine spindle," &c.

Another of those passages in which Milton shows his fondness for the old or Ptolemaic system of the Cosmos. (See Introd. to Par. Lost, pp. 89—96, and note on Pens., 88, 89.) Here, however, Milton revels

in a particular poetical sub-notion of that physical system--the notion involved in the phrase "music of the spheres." This mystical or Pythagorean use of the main notion was also one of Milton's dearest and most habitual fancies. See his lines At a Solemn Music; see also his Latin Academic Prolusion, De Sphærarum Concentu. In the present passage he offers it expressly. There is a music of the spheres, he seems to say; the whole Universe rolls by the law of an eternal music. On each of the "nine infolded spheres" that compose the physical Universe (in Par. Lost, e.g. III. 481-483, Milton accepts all the ten spheres of the Alphonsine development of the Ptolemaic system, but here he is content with the earlier nine; or perhaps by "the nine infolded spheres" he specially means only the inner nine and excludes the tenth or outermost, called the "primum mobile") -on each of these spheres there sits a Muse or Siren; and these nine Muses or Sirens are singing harmoniously on their revolving spheres all the while that the three Fates, called Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, are turning the spindle of so-called Necessity on which the threads of human and even divine lives are wound. This very spindle of Necessity goes round to the tune of the music that lulls the Fates as they turn it.- -In all this description, even to minute points in its phraseology, Milton, as Warton pointed out, had in view an extraordinary passage in Plato's Republic (Book X., chap. 14). Whoever would study the notion in detail ought to refer to that passage. Plato, however, according to the astronomy of his time, recognised but eight spheres, the outmost that of the fixed stars, and the inner seven those of the planets.

72, 73. "which none can hear of human mould with gross unpurgèd ear." So in Shakespeare's well-known speech of Lorenzo to Jessica on the same "music of the spheres" (M. of Ven., V. 1) :—

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it."

See also Milton's Prolusion, De Sphærarum Concentu, where there is, however, a consolatory passage which may be thus translated: "Yet, if we carried pure and chaste and snow-clean hearts, as erst did Pythagoras, then should our ears sound and be filled with that sweetest music of the ever-wheeling stars."

66

75. "height;" so spelt here in the First and Second editions, though usually highth" in Milton. The "her" following probably made the sound of highth objectionable.

81. "

glittering state." "State" here in its old sense of "chair of state." See note, Pens., 37.

88-99. "shady roof of branching elm star-proof": clearly a recollection of Spenser's famous, but always misquoted, line (F. Q., 1. i. 7) :

"Not perceable with power of any star."

96-109. Ladon was a river in Arcadia; Lycæus, Cyllene, and Manalus, were mountains in the same; and Erymanthus was an Arcadian river-god. Of Pan and his Syrinx all have heard. Both are mentioned, as Warton notes, in that masque of Ben Jonson's which the Countess may have seen nearly thirty years before at her paternal Althorpe. A Satyr there, gazing on the Queen and the young Prince, says:

"That is Cyparissus' face,

And the dame hath Syrinx' grace :
O that Pan were now in place!"

As Cyparissus here was young Prince Henry, and Syrinx Queen Anne, the Pan whose absence was regretted must have been King James.

ADDITIONAL NOTE :-In the original draft of Arcades in Milton's own hand in the Cambridge volume of Milton MSS. (see General Introd., pp. 175-180), we see that the text did not stand at first exactly as now, but sustained some corrections, either at the moment of composition, or at all events before it went to press in 1645. Todd (IV. 22, edit. 1852) has given a list of these little changes, calling them "Original Various Readings of Arcades." That, however, is hardly a fair name to give them. By "various readings" we usually mean those varieties of the text which are presented by different manuscripts or different printed copies of the same piece, and from among which we have to do our best to find out the correct readings-i.e. those that the author intended. But here there is no such doubt, and no such liberty. Milton printed his text, as he wished it to stand, in 1645, and reprinted it in 1673; and we have no more right to amend that text now by referring to the earlier manuscript draft than we should have to substitute parts of the rough draft of a legal document for the corresponding parts of the later and authenticated copy, or to change the wording of a letter by bringing back into it expressions which the writer erased, but which we can still read under the lines or blots of erasure. Still, not for any purpose of amending the text, but out of curiosity respecting Milton's habits of composition, it is interesting to note differences between his first wording of a piece and the text as finally approved by his taste. In the present case they are but few, and of small consequence. The most important are these:

.1, 2. Milton had originally started Song I. in a different metre, thus:

"Look, Nymphs and Shepherds, look! here ends our quest,

Since at last our eyes are blest."

These two lines, however, he instantly dashes out with a cross line, to begin afresh as now.

10-14. These four lines were originally written thus :—

"Now seems guilty of abuse

And detraction from her praise:

Less than half she hath expressed;

Envy bid her hide the rest."

"Her hide" is erased and "conceal" written over the erasure; the rest of the correction into our present form is not made by erasure, but by marginal substitution.

23. Originally as now, "Juno dares not give her odds"; but "Juno erased, "Ceres" substituted, and then "Ceres" erased, so as to let back "Juno."

4I. "What shallow-searching": a substitution for "Those virtues which dull" expunged.

59. The first form of this line was "And number all my ranks and every sprout."

62. "locked up mortal sense": substitution for "chained mortality” erased.

Slighter corrections are these:-18. "sitting" substituted for "seated” 24. "had" for "would have"; 44. "am" for "have"; 47." With In for ; 49. "and" for " or ; 50. "boughs" for "leaves"; 52. "Or" for "And"; 81. "ye" for "you"; 91. "you" for "ye."

66

COMUS.

I -4. "Before the starry threshold," &c. Mr. Browne compares the passage in the Latin poem to Mansus, 94-98, and refers to John

xiv. 2.

3. "insphered." See notes, Penseroso, 88, 89, and Arcades, 63-73.

4. "serene." Mr. Keightley thinks the word has to be pronounced here with the accent on the first syllable; which I doubt. I seem to detect a finer effect in the metrical liberty involved in the ordinary pronunciation; and the first syllable of “serenus" is short.

7. "pestered . . . pinfold." Pestered is interpreted "crowded" by Todd, as if from the Italian pesta, a crowd; but perhaps the derivation is from pestis, a pest or plague, and "plagued is our present sense of the word.-Pinfold, a pen or enclosure in which sheep are folded; from A.-S. pyndan to shut-in, whence also pound, an enclosure for strayed animals.