e rested upon if he had not lived to write _Paradise
Lost_ and its two successors? Upon the volume published in the year
1645, the year of Naseby, when people, one would have supposed, were
not thinking much of poetry, and those who were most likely to be doing
so were just those least inclined to look for it from John Milton, the
Puritan pamphleteer. Yet in that little book was heard for the last
time the voice, now raised above itself, of the old poetry which the
Cavaliers and courtiers had loved.

No single volume has ever contained so much fine English verse by an
unknown or almost unknown poet. It is true that _Lycidas_ and _Comus_
had been printed before, but _Comus_ had appeared anonymously and {91}
_Lycidas_ had been signed only with initials. So that only friends, or
people behind the scenes in the literary world, could know anything of
Milton's poetry. Nor does he seem to have been very anxious that they
should. The other contributors to the volume in memory of Edward King
gave their names: the only signature to _Lycidas_ is J. M. It was
Lawes the composer, not Milton the author, who published _Comus_ in
1637. Milton's feelings about it are indicated by the motto on the
title page--

"Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus Austrum
Perditus--"

Quotations can often say for us what we cannot say for ourselves. What
Virgil says for Milton is "Alas what is this that I have done? poor
fool that I am, could not I have kept my tender buds of verse a little
longer from the cutting blasts of public criticism?" Yet no one knew
better than Milton that _Comus_ was incomparably the greatest of the
masks. So in the sonnet on reaching the age of twenty-three he says
that his "late spring no bud or blossom shew'th." Yet he had already
written the _Ode on the Nativity_, a performance sufficient, one would
have {92} thought, to give a young poet reasonable self-satisfaction in
what he had done, as well as confidence in what he would be able to do.
Nor was Milton in the ordinary sense, or perhaps in any, a humble man.
Of that false kind of humility, too often recommended from the pulpit,
which consists in a beautiful woman trying to suppose herself plain, or
an able man trying to be unaware of his ability, no man ever had less
than Milton. Neither from himself nor from others did he ever conceal
the fact that he was a man of genius. In his eyes no kind of untruth,
however specious, could be a virtue. But of