charge, it is true, rather than denies it. Yet the retort
bespeaks a certain severity and preciseness in judging of plays and their
actors, which can hardly have found gratification in the licenses and
exuberances of the contemporary drama. It was not difficult, he remarks,
to see plays, "when in the Colleges so many of the young divines, and
those in next aptitude to divinity, have been seen so often upon the
stage, writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and
dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, buffoons, and bawds." "If it be
unlawful," he continues, "to sit and behold a mercenary comedian
personating that which is least unseemly for a hireling to do, how much
more blameful is it to endure the sight of as vile things acted by
persons either entered, or presently to enter into the ministry; and how
much more foul and ignominious for them to be the actors!"

It was, at least, a happy chance that the first of Milton's verses to
appear in print should have been _An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatick
Poet, W. Shakespeare_, contributed to the Second Folio in 1632. The main
interests of the household at the Spread Eagle in Bread Street must have
been far enough remote from the doings of the companies of players. John
Milton the elder would probably have agreed with Sir Thomas Bodley, who
called plays "riffe-raffes," and declared that they should never come
into his library. The Hampton Court Conference, the Synod of Dort, the
ever-widening divisions in the Church, between Arminian and Calvinist,
between Prelatist and Puritan, were probably subjects of a nearer
interest, even to the poet in his youth, than the production of new or
old plays upon the stage. Milton's childhood was spent in the very
twilight of the Elizabethan age; it was greatly fortunate for him, and
for us, that he caught the after-glow of the sunset upon his face. He
read Spenser while Spenser was still the dominant influence in English
poetry. "He hath confessed to me," said Dryden, "that Spenser was his
original,"--an incredible statement unless we understand "original" in
the sense of his earliest admiration, his poetic godfather who first won
him to poetry. He read Shakespeare and Jonson in the first editions. He
read Sylvester's translation of _Du Bartas, His Divine Weekes and
Workes_; and perhaps thence conceived the first vague idea of a poem on a
kindred subject. It is necessary to insist on his English masters,
because, although the g