divine volume of Plato, and
filled with a noble trust in God. In the second scene we breathe the
unhallowed air of the abode of the wily tempter, who endeavours, "under
fair pretence of friendly ends," to wind himself into the pure heart of
the Lady. But his "gay rhetoric" is futile against the "sun-clad power
of chastity"; and he is driven off the scene by the two brothers, who
are led and instructed by the Spirit disguised as the shepherd Thyrsis.
But the Lady, having been lured into the haunt of impurity, is left
spell-bound, and appeal is made to the pure nymph Sabrina, who is "swift
to aid a virgin, such as was herself, in hard-besetting need." It is in
the contention between Comus and the Lady in this scene that the
interest of the mask may be said to culminate, for here its purpose
stands revealed: "it is a song to Temperance as the ground of Freedom,
to temperance as the guard of all the virtues, to beauty as secured by
temperance, and its central point and climax is in the pleading of these
motives by the Lady against their opposites in the mouth of the Lord of
sensual Revel." _Milton: Classical Writers_. In the third scene the Lady
Alice and her brothers are presented by the Spirit to their noble father
and mother as triumphing "in victorious dance o'er sensual folly and
intemperance." The Spirit then speaks the epilogue, calling upon mortals
who love true freedom to strive after virtue:

Love Virtue; she alone is free.
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or, if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.

The last couplet Milton afterwards, on his Italian journey, entered in
an album belonging to an Italian named Cerdogni, and underneath it the
words, _Coelum non animum muto dum trans mare curro_, and his
signature, Joannes Miltonius, Anglus. The juxtaposition of these verses
is significant: though he had left his own land Milton had not become
what, fifty or sixty years before, Roger Ascham had condemned as an
"Italianated Englishman." He was one of those "worthy Gentlemen of
England, whom all the Siren tongues of Italy could never untwine from
the mast of God's word; nor no enchantment of vanity overturn them from
the fear of God and love of honesty" (Ascham's _Scholemaster_). And one
might almost infer that Milton, in his account of the sovereign plant
Haemony which was to foil the wiles of _Comus_, had remembered not only
Homer's description of the