t more than excuses, it glorifies, his
repeated magniloquent allusions to himself throughout the prose works.
Holding himself on trust or on commission, he must needs report himself,
not only to his great Taskmaster, but also from time to time to men, his
expectant and impatient beneficiaries. Even in _Lycidas_ he is thinking
of himself as much as of his dead companion--

So may some gentle Muse
With lucky words favour _my_ destined urn,
And as he passes turn,
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.

What if he die young himself? Are his dreams and hopes for his own future
an illusion? He agonises with the question in the famous digression on
poetry and poetic fame. But he consoles himself by appeal to a Court
where the success and the fame of this world are as straw in the furnace;
and then, having duly performed the obsequies of his friend, with
reinvigorated heart he turns once more to the future--"To-morrow to fresh
woods and pastures new." A singular ending, no doubt, to an elegy! But it
is blind and hasty to conclude that therefore the precedent laments are
"not to be considered as the effusion of real passion." A soldier's
burial is not the less honoured because his comrades must turn from his
grave to give their thought and strength and courage to the cause which
was also his. The maimed rites, interrupted by the trumpet calling to
action, are a loftier commemoration than the desolating laments of those
who "weep the more because they weep in vain." And in this way Milton's
fierce tirade against the Church hirelings, and his preoccupation with
his own ambitions support and explain each other, and find a fit place in
the poem. He is looking to his equipment, if perchance he may live to do
that in poetry and politics, which Edward King had died leaving
unaccomplished. When his own time came he desired to be lamented in no
other way--

Come, come; no time for lamentation now,
Nor much more cause. Samson hath quit himself
Like Samson, and heroicly hath finished
A life heroic, on his enemies
Fully revenged.

This overmastering sense of the cause breathes through all his numerous
references to himself. He stands in the Forum,

Disturbed, yet comely, and in act
Raised, as of some great matter to begin;

and addresses himself, as he boasts in _The Second Defence of the People
of England_, to "the whole collective body of people, cities, states, and
councils of the wise and eminent,