o keep up a frail and feverish being,
Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives,
After this mortal change, to her true servants
Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats."

That looks forward to _Paradise Lost_, not backward to the masks of the
previous generation of poets. The "loud uplifted angel-trumpet" is
sounded in it, and we know that we have travelled a long way from the
trivial, superficial and often coarse entertainments which would have
been the models of _Comus_ if Milton had been the man to accept models
of any kind, least of all of such a kind. Like them his mask was an
aristocratic entertainment, played to a noble {114} audience by the
scions of a great house. But the resemblance scarcely goes further.
The older masks were mainly spectacles; magnificent spectacles indeed,
designed sometimes, as one may see in the Chatsworth Library, by such
artists as Inigo Jones and produced at immense expense; but just for
that reason addressed to the eye much more than to the ear, and
scarcely at all to the mind. Even when written by such a man as Ben
Jonson, the words, except in the lyrics, are of almost no importance.
The business was to show a number of pretty scenes, and noble ladies,
and to give them a chance of exhibiting their clothes, and their
voices. The last gave Jonson his chance; the fine Horatian workman
that he was could always produce a lyric that would fit any situation
and give some dignity to any trivial personage. But the taint of
vanity and fashion, pomp and externality, inevitably clung to the whole
thing. Too many personages were introduced, probably because in such
plays there were always a great many applicants for parts; and the
inevitable result was that in a short piece none of them had space to
develop any character or life. But Milton knew, as the Greeks knew and
Shakspeare did not always, that in the few hours of a {115} stage
performance only a very few characters have time to develop themselves
in such a way as to interest and convince the hearer's imagination, and
that if there are many they never become more than a list of names. So
he, who could not touch anything without giving it character, limits
his personages to four or five that they may at least be human beings
and not mere singers of songs or allegorical abstractions. And, like
some of his predecessors, he takes an ethical theme, the praise and
power of Chastity. Fletcher in _The Faithful Shepherdess_ had ta