e so ridiculous that
quotation would be an affront to King's memory. But the thirty-sixth is
"Lycidas." The original manuscript remains, and is dated in November. Of
the elegy's relation to Milton's biography it may be said that it sums
up the two influences which had been chiefly moulding his mind of late
years, the natural influences of which he had been the passive recipient
during his residence at Horton, and the political and theological
passion with which he was becoming more and more inspired by the
circumstances of the time. By 1637 the country had been eight years
without a parliament, and the persecution of Puritans had attained its
acme. In that year Laud's new Episcopalian service book was forced, or
rather was attempted to be forced, upon Scotland; Prynne lost his ears;
and Bishop Williams was fined eighteen thousand pounds and ordered to be
imprisoned during the King's pleasure. Hence the striking, if
incongruous, introduction of "The pilot of the Galilean lake," to
bewail, in the character of a shepherd, the drowned swain in conjunction
with Triton, Hippotades, and Camus. "The author," wrote Milton
afterwards, "by occasion, foretells the ruin of the corrupted clergy,
then in their height." It was a Parthian dart, for the volume was
printed at the University Press in 1638, probably a little before his
departure for Italy.

The "Penseroso" and the "Allegro," notwithstanding that each piece is
the antithesis of the other, are complementary rather than contrary, and
may be, in a sense, regarded as one poem, whose theme is the praise of
the reasonable life. It resembles one of those pictures in which the
effect is gained by contrasted masses of light and shade, but each is
more nicely mellowed and interfused with the qualities of the other than
it lies within the resources of pictorial skill to effect. Mirth has an
undertone of gravity, and melancholy of cheerfulness. There is no
antagonism between the states of mind depicted; and no rational lover,
whether of contemplation or of recreation, would find any difficulty in
combining the two. The limpidity of the diction is even more striking
than its beauty. Never were ideas of such dignity embodied in verse so
easy and familiar, and with such apparent absence of effort. The
landscape-painting is that of the seventeenth century, absolutely true
in broad effects, sometimes ill-defined and even inaccurate in minute
details. Some of these blemishes are terrible in n