successive storms and whirlpools, its ‘rock of Reproach’ strewn with wrecks and dead men’s bones, its ‘wandering islands,’ its ‘quicksands of Unthriftihead,’ its ‘whirlepoole of Decay,’ its ‘sea-monsters,’ and lastly, its ‘bower of Bliss,’ and the doom which overtakes it, together with the deliverance of Acrasia’s victims, transformed by that witch’s spells into beasts. Still more powerful is the allegory of worldly ambition, illustrated under the name of ‘the cave of Mammon.’ The Legend of Holiness delineates with not less insight those enemies which wage war upon the spiritual life.” All this Milton had studied in the Faerie Queene, and had understood it; and, like Sir Guyon, he felt himself to be a knight enrolled under the banner of Parity and Self-Control. So that, in Comus, we find the sovereign value of Temperance or Self-Regulation—what the Greeks called σωφροσύνη—set forth no less clearly than in Spenser’s poem: in Milton’s mask it becomes almost identical with Virtue itself. The enchantments of Acrasia in her Bower of Bliss become the spells of Comus; the armour of Belphoebe becomes the “complete steel” of Chastity; while the supremacy of Conscience, the bounty of Nature and man’s ingratitude, the unloveliness of Mammon and of Excess, the blossom of Courtesy oft found on lowly stalk, and the final triumph of Virtue through striving and temptation, all are dwelt upon.

so speaks Spenser; and Milton similarly—

In endeavouring still further to trace, by means of verbal or structural resemblances, the sources from which Milton drew his materials for Comus, critics have referred to Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (1595); to Fletcher’s pastoral, The Faithful Shepherdess, of which Charles Lamb has said that if all its parts ‘had been in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with Comus or the Arcadia, to have been put into the hands of boys and virgins, to have made matter for young dreams, like the loves of Hermia and Lysander’; to Ben Jonson’s mask of Pleasure reconciled to Virtue (1619), in which Comus is “the god of cheer, or the Belly”; and to the Comus of Erycius Puteanus (Henri du Puy), Professor of Eloquence at Louvain. It is true that Fletcher’s pastoral was being acted in London about the time Milton was writing his Comus, that the poem by the Dutch Professor was republished at Oxford in 1634, and that resemblances are evident between Milton’s poem and those named. But Professor Masson does well in warning us that “infinitely too much has been made of such coincidences. After all of them, even the most ideal and poetical, the feeling in reading Comus is that all here is different, all peculiar.” Whatever Milton borrowed, he borrowed, as he says himself, in order to better it.

It is interesting to consider the mutual relations of the poems written by Milton at Horton. Everything that Milton wrote is Miltonic; he had what has been called the power of transforming everything into himself, and these poems are, accordingly, evidences of the development of Milton’s opinions and of his secret purpose. It has been said that L’Allegro and Il Penseroso are to be regarded as “the pleadings, the decision on which is in Comus”—L’Allegro representing the Cavalier, and Il Penseroso the Puritan element. This is true only in a limited sense. It is true that the Puritan element in the Horton series of poems becomes more patent as we pass from the two lyrics to the mask of Comus, and from Comus to the elegy of Lycidas, just as, in the corresponding periods of time, the evils connected with the reign of Charles I. and with Laud’s crusade against Puritanism were becoming more pronounced. But we can hardly regard Milton as having expressed any new decision in Comus: the decision is already made when “vain deluding Joys” are banished in Il Penseroso, and “loathed Melancholy” in L’Allegro. The mask is an expansion and exaltation of the delights of the contemplative man, but there is still a place for the “unreproved pleasures” of the cheerful man. Unless it were so, Comus could not have been written; there would have been no “sunshine holiday” for the rustics and no “victorious dance” for the gentle lady and her brothers. But in Comus we realise the mutual relation of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso; we see their application to the joys and sorrows of the actual life of individuals; we observe human nature in contact with the “hard assays” of life. And, subsequently, in Lycidas we are made to realise that this human nature is Milton’s own, and to understand how it was that his Puritanism which, three years before, had permitted him to write a cavalier mask, should, three years after, lead him from the fresh fields of poetry into the barren plains of controversial prose.

The Mask was a favourite form of entertainment in England in Milton’s youth, and had been so from the time of Henry VIII., in whose reign elaborate masked shows, introduced from Italy, first became popular. But they seem to have found their way into England, in a crude form, even earlier; and we read of court disguisings in the reign of Edward III. It is usually said that the Mask derives its name from the fact that the actors wore masks, and in Hall’s Chronicle we read that, in 1512, “on the day of Epiphany at night, the king, with eleven others, was disguised after the manner of Italy, called a Mask, a thing not seen before in England; they were appareled in garments long and broad, wrought all with gold, with visors and caps of gold.” The truth, however, seems to be that the use of a visor was not essential in such entertainments, which, from the first, were called ‘masks,’ the word ‘masker’ being used sometimes of the players, and sometimes of their disguises. The word has come to us, through the French form masque, cognate with Spanish mascarada, a masquerade or assembly of maskers, otherwise called a mummery. Up to the time of Henry VIII. these entertainments were of the nature of dumb-show or tableaux vivants, and delighted the spectators chiefly by the splendour of the costumes and machinery employed in their representation; but, afterwards, the chief actors spoke their parts, singing and dancing were introduced, and the composition of masks for royal and other courtly patrons became an occupation worthy of a poet. They were frequently combined with other forms of amusement, all of which were, in the case of the Court, placed under the management of a Master of Revels, whose official title was Magister Jocorum, Revellorum et Mascorum; in the first printed English tragedy, Gorboduc (1565), each act opens with what is called a dumb-show or mask. But the more elaborate form of the Mask soon grew to be an entertainment complete in itself, and the demand for such became so great in the time of James I. and Charles I. that the history of these reigns might almost be traced in the succession of masks then written.