three years after, lead him from the
fresh fields of poetry into the barren plains of controversial prose.

The Mask was a favourite form of entertainment in England in Milton's
youth, and had been so from the time of Henry VIII., in whose reign
elaborate masked shows, introduced from Italy, first became popular. But
they seem to have found their way into England, in a crude form, even
earlier; and we read of court disguisings in the reign of Edward III. It
is usually said that the Mask derives its name from the fact that the
actors wore masks, and in Hall's Chronicle we read that, in 1512, "on
the day of Epiphany at night, the king, with eleven others, was
disguised after the manner of Italy, called a Mask, a thing not seen
before in England; they were appareled in garments long and broad,
wrought all with gold, with _visors_ and caps of gold." The truth,
however, seems to be that the use of a visor was not essential in such
entertainments, which, from the first, were called 'masks,' the word
'masker' being used sometimes of the players, and sometimes of their
disguises. The word has come to us, through the French form _masque_,
cognate with Spanish _mascarada_, a masquerade or assembly of maskers,
otherwise called a mummery. Up to the time of Henry VIII. these
entertainments were of the nature of dumb-show or _tableaux vivants_,
and delighted the spectators chiefly by the splendour of the costumes
and machinery employed in their representation; but, afterwards, the
chief actors spoke their parts, singing and dancing were introduced, and
the composition of masks for royal and other courtly patrons became an
occupation worthy of a poet. They were frequently combined with other
forms of amusement, all of which were, in the case of the Court, placed
under the management of a Master of Revels, whose official title was
Magister Jocorum, Revellorum et _Mascorum_; in the first printed English
tragedy, _Gorboduc_ (1565), each act opens with what is called a
dumb-show or mask. But the more elaborate form of the Mask soon grew to
be an entertainment complete in itself, and the demand for such became
so great in the time of James I. and Charles I. that the history of
these reigns might almost be traced in the succession of masks then
written. Ben Jonson, who thoroughly established the Mask in English
literature, wrote many Court Masks, and made them a vehicle less for the
display of 'painting and carpentry' than for the expression