composition now obsolete, but somewhat allied to our modern drama. "Comus" is a magnificent poem, and as an eulogium upon virtue, has never been surpassed. Milton never afterwards wrote any thing more perfect and beautiful. He proved against all contemporary masque writers, Ben Jonson and the rest, whose similar works abound in vulgarity, what the pure poetry and the pure morality of a masque might be. "Comus" also shows that, had Milton devoted himself to the drama, he might have occupied a niche next to Shakspeare in the dramatic temple.

This masque was originally acted at Ludlow castle, under the auspices of a noble family, for whom it had been composed. It was afterwards represented several times in London, being received with distinguished consideration.

The most prominent and peculiar trait of Milton's writings, both in prose and verse, is their elevated tone, their sublimity. In this respect no writer has equalled him. Others occasionally soar and kiss the heavens; he walks upon the stars, and with an ease and

grace which proves that he made no effort to be grand. From his boyhood he had revelled in ideas of the infinite and the eternal-time, space, immortality; themes which other men seldom touch, save apologetically and with awe, were his intellectual commonplaces. This habit, which made some of his earlier compositions seem magniloquent, ripened in his manhood into the most gorgeous elevation of sentiment.

There was nothing contracted or mean in Milton's soul; every thing was high and noble. Even his faults were such as belong to grand temperaments. Consequently his writings all bear the impress of his spirit, to which the very rhythm of his sentences corresponds.

He is one of the most original of writers. Still, like Shakspeare, he did not disdain to borrow and adopt any isolated phrase or expression that pleased him. Many of his phrases may be found scattered through the pages of preceding or contemporary authors; but he only had the power to collect and remould them into one grand and elevated whole. Spencer, Fletcher, Beaumont, Ben

Jonson, Sylvester-he levied upon them all, and that too without ceasing to be original; for though many of these writers abounded in noble passages, Milton's genius was of a haughtier character, his sublimity was higher and more unapproachable.

Though this elevation is Milton's peculiar and distinctive quality, it is not his only beauty. He is the full equal of others in those other characteristics which go to make up a great writer. In fitness of epithet, in sprightliness of wit, in splendor of imagination, in a certain dainty quaintness of expression, he has no master. To sum up all, he is a marvel and a model in English literature.

In 1637 Milton's dearly beloved and excellent mother died, ripe in years and in virtues, and happy in the knowledge that she left her children, all of whom were with her upon the solemn occasion of her death-Anne the married daughter, Christopher, then a law student at the Inner Temple, London, and John-in the promise of useful and Christian lives. This blow was a sad one to the Milton family, each member of which felt it keenly.

Milton had scarcely recovered from the shock of his mother's death, when he learned of the accidental drowning of one of his old college friends, Edward King, a young man of piety and erudition, while on a voyage to Ireland on a visit home. It was upon this occasion that he composed his weird monody called "Lycidas."

Worn by grief and study, and desirous to see something of foreign countries, Milton now determined to go abroad. Accordingly, after procuring his father's somewhat unwilling consent, and leaving his country in a still more unsettled and threatening condition than ever, in April, 1638, he bade England and his friends adieu for a time, and crossed the channel into France.

Milton did not leave his father, aged and a widower, alone at Horton during his absence. His brother Christopher, then about to be called to the bar, married the daughter of a London citizen in the April of Milton's departure, and he left the young couple domesticated with his father at his country villa.*

* Masson's Life of Milton, vol. 1, p. 530.

CHAPTER. V.

WHEN John Milton went abroad, the whole Continent heaved in the throes of that Titanic conflict which commenced in 1618, and raged without cessation until 1648, to which history has affixed the name of "The Thirty Years' War." That momentous struggle between prerogative and popular liberty, between prelacy and Puritanism in England, whose early phases we have traced, and which was about to burst forth when the great poet crossed the channel, was but an eddy of the European contest between the Jesuitism of the Vatican and the Protestant idea.

In its origin, the "Thirty years' war" was an insurrection of the Protestants of Bohemia, and other Slavonian possessions of Austria, in 1618-19, against the unbearable persecutions of the Austrian Cæsars who then led the Catholic reaction in its assault upon the Reforma-! tion. These sovereigns being likewise empe