sermones de se receptum est." I have no doubt that the significance of the phrase "my trembling ears" rests on this allusion. What Milton had been saying about poetic fame was evidently applicable to himself personally, and would, he said, be so understood by his readers. He had therefore the sensation described; he felt, at the moment, as if absent people were weighing his words, and appraising, coolly, or perhaps ill-naturedly, the chances he had of ever obtaining the "fair guerdon."

78-84. "Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil," &c. In this powerful passage, the supposed words of Apollo to Milton, we have the answer Milton would give to the critics imagined in the preceding note. True Fame, he says, is not a plant of earthly growth, and does not consist in any expanse of glittering reputation a man may have among his contemporaries; it depends on the clear vision and unerring judgment of God above; and, as much of fame as any one has deserved at this tribunal, so much, and no more, will infallibly come to him in the end! -“ glistering foil" is any sheet of shining metallic leaf, such as might be used to "set off" costly articles of purchase.

82. "And perfect witness of all-judging Jove." The seventh nonrhyming line in the poem.-"perfect" is spelt "perfet" in the original editions, as generally in Milton, through not always.

85, 86. "O fountain Arethuse, and thou honoured flood,

Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds."

He invokes the fountain Arethusa, in the island of Ortygia on the Sicilian coast (see note, Arc. 31), because the nymph of that fountain was the Muse of Pastoral Poetry as it had been practised by the Sicilian Theocritus and other Greek poets; and he invokes the river Mincius, one of the tributaries to the Po in northern Italy, because Virgil had been born and had lived near it, and it might therefore be taken as the representative of the Latin Pastoral. The epithet describing the Mincius is from Virgil (Ecl. vII. 12, 13):—

87, 88.

"Hic virides tenerâ prætexit arundine ripas
Mincius."

“That strain I heard was of a higher mood.

But now my oat proceeds."

i.e. the words which Apollo has just spoken were in a strain above that of the simple pastoral, but now the poet resumes his own oaten pipe.

89, 90. "the Herald of the Sea, that came in Neptune's plea": i.e. Triton, the Trumpeter of the Waves, who now came, in the name of Neptune, to conduct a judicial inquiry into the cause of the death of Lycidas. Herald is so spelt here in the First and Second editions, and not "harald," as in Par. Lost.

91, 92. "He asked the waves, and asked the felon winds, What hard mishap hath doomed this gentle swain?” These two lines, coming consecutively, are the eighth and ninth nonrhyming lines in the poem.

96. "sage Hippotades their answer brings." The waves and winds, that had been questioned by Triton as to the cause of the shipwreck in which King perished, disowned all concern in the disaster, or even knowledge of it; and their answer to this effect was brought by Hippotades, i.e. by Æolus, the God of Winds, the son of Hippotes.

97. "his dungeon": his may refer to "Hippotades," in which case "his dungeon" means the cave of Eolus, where the winds were imprisoned; or it may refer to "blast," in which case the meaning is that the winds sent answer that not a blast of them had strayed from its (his for its, as habitually with Milton) particular place of imprisonment in the cave of Æolus. I prefer the second interpretation; and it obviates the objection that the answer is given twice.

99. "Panope": i.c. one of the Nereids, or sea-nymphs. The meaning is that the sea was calm as glass when the ship went down.

ΙΟΙ. "Built in the eclipse." Warton reminds us of one of the hideous ingredients in the witches' caldron in Macbeth (IV. 1):—

and the following passage from Sir Thomas Browne (Vulgar Errors, I. 11) may be worth quoting. "Than eclipses of sun or moon nothing is more natural; yet with what superstition they have been beheld since the tragedy of Nicias and his army [B.C. 414] many examples declare. True it is, and we will not deny it, that although, there being natural productions from second and settled causes, we need not alway look upon them as the immediate hand of God, or of his ministering spirits, yet do they sometimes admit a respect therein; and, even in their naturals, the indifferency of their existences contemporized unto our actions admits a farther consideration."

103-107. "Next, Camus," &c. Camus, the tutelary genius of the Cam, and of Cambridge University, appeared as one of the mourning figures; for had not King been one of the young hopes of the University? The garb given to Camus must doubtless be characteristic, and is perhaps most succinctly explained by a Latin note which appeared in a Greek translation of Lycidas by Mr. John Plumptre in 1797. "The mantle," said Mr. Plumptre in this note, "is as if made of the plant river-sponge' which floats copiously in the Cam; the bonnet of the river-sedge, distinguished by vague marks traced somehow over the middle of the leaves, and serrated at the edge of the leaves, after the fashion of the ai ai of the hyacinth." It is said that

the flags of the Cam still exhibit, when dried, these dusky streaks in the middle, and apparent scrawlings on the edge; and Milton (in whose MS. "scrawled o'er" was first written for "inwrought") is supposed to have carried away from the "arundifer Camus" (Eleg I. 11) this exact recollection. He identifies the edge-markings with the ai ai (Alas! Alas!) which the Greeks fancied they saw on the leaves of the hyacinth, commemorating the sad fate of the Spartan youth from whose blood that flower had sprung. See On the Death of a Fair Infant, lines 23-28. "Last came, and last did go,

108-112.

The Pilot of the Galilean Lake," &c.

i.e. St. Peter, here called by a name suggesting his original occupation as a fisherman on the sea of Galilee (Matt. iv. 18-20), and with occult reference to the fact that Lycidas had perished at sea. As appears from the sequel, however, he is introduced mainly in his subsequent character as the Apostle to whom Christ had entrusted so high a charge in his Church, with the power of the keys (Matt. xvi. 17-19), and whom he had constituted so expressly the Shepherd of his Flock (John xxi. 15-17). As the Power of the Church, St. Peter recognises the loss of one who had been destined for the ministry of the Church of England; and, as pre-eminently the "Shepherd," he may fitly, in expressing this recognition, be supposed to conform to the language of the Pastoral in the highest strain it can assume. He bears his two keys, the golden one which opens the gates, and the iron which shuts them "amain" (i.e. with force). The number of the keys given to St. Peter is not mentioned in Scripture; but ecclesiastical and poetical tradition had made them two, and otherwise distinguished them.

112. "He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake." Milton does not refuse here to the Apostle Peter the "mitre" which he afterwards ridiculed in English Bishops.

113-131. "How well could I have spared," &c. These nineteen lines of the poem are, in some respects, the most memorable passage in it. They are an outburst in 1637, or when Milton was twentynine years of age, of that feeling about the state of the English Church under Laud's rule which, four years afterwards (1641-42), found more direct and as vehement expression in his prose-pamphlets. In his heading of the poem, when he republished it in 1645, he calls particular attention to the passage on this account, and especially to the prophecy with which it closes; and the wonder certainly is that the passage, at the time of its first publication, did not come under Laud's notice, and so bring the author into trouble. Note the studied contemptuousness of the phraseology throughout-"their bellies' sake," "shove away," "Blind mouths!" (a singularly violent figure, as if the men were mouths and nothing else)—and the raspy roughness of the sound in line 124, where “scrannel" (for "screeching ""ear-torturing ") seems to be a

word of Milton's own making. The "rank mist” and “foul contagion" are unsound and unwholesome doctrines. The "grim wolf," who is let sneak into the fold and daily devour a sheep or two, while nothing is said about it by the careless shepherds, is evidently the Church of Rome, a secret sympathy with which, or at all events an indifference to its encroachments in England, was one of the charges made by the Puritans against Laud, while among the other English Bishops there were some suspected even of closer agreement with Romish doctrines, so that Lord Falkland could say in the House of Commons in 1641 that they were "so absolutely, directly, and cordially Papists that it was all that 1500l. a year could do to keep them from confessing it."— Milton, it is worth noting, had been preceded by Spenser, fifty-three years before, in this vehement denunciation of hireling shepherds in the Church, and must have had Spenser's verses in his mind. They occur in the May Eclogue in the Shepherd's Calendar, where, at the sight of "a shoal of shepherds" out in idle merrymaking, there is this dialogue between Palinode and Piers :

Pal. "Ah! Piers, bene not thy teeth on edge, to thinke
How great sport they gaynen with little swinck?

Piers. Perdie, so farre am I from envie

That their fondnesse inly I pitie :

Those faytours little regarden their charge,

While they, letting their sheepe runne at large,
Passen their time, that should be sparely spent,

In lustihede and wanton meryment.

Thilke same bene sheepeheardes for the Devil's stedde,
That playen while their flockes be unfedde:

Well is it seene theyr sheepe bene not their owne,

That letten them runne at randon alone:

But they bene hyred for little pay

Of other, that caren as little as they

What fallen the flocke, so they han the fleece,
And get all the gayne, paying but a peece.

I muse what account both these will make-
The one for the hire which he doth take,
And thother for leaving his Lords taske--

When great Pan account of shepeherdes shall aske."

The Eclogue continues in the same strain, and a passage from the sequel, in which the intruding "wolves" are spoken of, is quoted by Milton in his pamphlet against Bishop Hall, entitled Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence (1641). "Our admired Spenser," he there says, in introducing the quotation, had made such invectives "not without some presage of these reforming times."

130, 131. "But that two-handed engine at the door

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more."

These lines have greatly exercised the critics. What was the "twohanded engine" thought of by Milton? "The axe that was to cut off

Laud's head," say some.

The conjecture is perfectly absurd. Laud was not beheaded till 1645; in 1637 that catastrophe could not be foreseen; and, if it had been, the future axe concerned in it could not have been fancied in the function given to the engine in the present passage. "The axe spoken of by Christ in Matt. iii. 10 and Luke ii. 9," say others, "i.e. the axe laid at the root of the trees and which was to hew down every tree that did not bear good fruit.", This supposition also is absurd: the engine in the present passage is at the door of an edifice, and not at the root of a tree. A third supposition is that the "two-handed engine" here is an anticipation of the Archangel Michael's mighty sword in Par. Lost, VI. 250—253, which he "brandished with huge two-handed sway" among the rebel-angels in Heaven, felling "squadrons at once." This also is futile; for that sword would not be in the least relevant here. On the whole, we must first seek Milton's general meaning. That is plain enough. He has been describing the Church of England, and he winds up by prophesying a speedy Reformation of that Church. This Reformation presents itself in the image of a "two-handed engine at the door," standing ready to smite. One immediately fancies that this means to smite on the door, and the picture accordingly that rises to the mind is that of a strong man wielding a huge axe, like the Black Knight at the postern gate of Front-de-Boeuf's castle, and ready to batter down the opposing timbers, so as to let the besiegers in. Possibly Milton meant no more than this; and it is worth while to notice that, in one case out of the two in which the word "engine" occurs in the Authorized Version of the Bible, it is in this sense of a battering engine, Ezek. xxvi. 9. “And he [Nebuchadnezzar] shall set engines of war against thy [Tyre's] walls, and with his axes shall he break down thy towers." It is not unlike. Milton, however, to have had some subtler meaning in the name given to his battering-engine here, and either to have construed it out of some Apocalyptic metaphor in Scripture, or else to have invented it to describe the particular agency by which he himself foresaw that the English Church Reformation would be effected. If the former, we are directed, I think, to the first three chapters of the Book of Revelation, where St. John sees the awful vision of "one like unto the Son of Man," and receives from him the messages that are to be sent to the Seven Churches of Asia. Part of the description of the divine figure is that "he had in his right hand seven stars" and that "out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword" (Rev. i. 16: poμpaía dioтOμng ožia is the Greek phrase for the implement, implying a very large sword which might require two hands). Now this "two-edged sword" figures in the subsequent messages to at least one of the Churches. Thus, Rev. ii. 12-16, "To the angel of the Church in Pergamos write These things saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges; I know thy works, and where thou dwellest . . . Thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith . . . But I have a few