ing. From his 12th year
he generally sat up all night at his studies, which, accompanied with
frequent head-aches, proved very prejudicial to his eyes. In the year
1625 he was entered into Christ's College in Cambridge, under the
tuition of Mr. William Chappel, afterwards bishop of Ross in Ireland,
and even before that time, had distinguished himself by several Latin
and English poems[2]. After he had taken the degree of master of arts,
in 1632 he left the university, and for the space of five years lived
with his parents at their house at Horton, near Colebrook in
Buckinghamshire, where his father having acquired a competent fortune,
thought proper to retire, and spend the remainder of his days. In the
year 1634 he wrote his Masque of Comus, performed at Ludlow Castle,
before John, earl of Bridgwater, then president of Wales: It appears
from the edition of this Masque, published by Mr. Henry Lawes, that
the principal performers were, the Lord Barclay, Mr. Thomas Egerton,
the Lady Alice Egerton, and Mr. Lawes himself, who represented an
attendant spirit.

The Prologue, which we found in the General Dictionary, begins with
the following lines.

Our stedfast bard, to his own genius true,
Still bad his muse fit audience find, tho' few;
Scorning the judgment of a trifling age,
To choicer spirits he bequeath'd his page.
He too was scorned, and to Britannia's shame,
She scarce for half an age knew Milton's name;
But now his fame by every trumpet blown,
We on his deathless trophies raise our own.
Nor art, nor nature, could his genius bound:
Heaven, hell, earth, chaos, he survey'd around.
All things his eye, thro' wit's bright empire thrown,
Beheld, and made what it beheld his own.

In 1637 Our author published his Lycidas; in this poem he laments the
death of his friend Mr. Edward King, who was drowned in his passage
from Chester on the Irish seas in 1637; it was printed the year
following at Cambridge in 4to. in a collection of Latin and English
poems upon Mr. King's death, with whom he had contracted the strongest
friendship. The Latin epitaph informs us, that Mr. King was son of Sir
John King, secretary for Ireland to Queen Elizabeth, James I. and
Charles I. and that he was fellow in Christ's-College Cambridge, and
was drowned in the twenty-fifth year of his age. But this poem of
Lycidas does not altogether consist in elegiac strains of tenderness;
there is in it a mixture of satire and severe