rrangement of the piece, in the almost unearthly beauty of the
exordium, and in the famous stanzas beginning "The oracles are dumb." It
must be remembered that at this time English lyric was in a very
rudimentary and ill-organised condition. The exquisite snatches in the
dramatists had been snatches merely; Spenser and his followers had chiefly
confined themselves to elaborate stanzas of full length lines, and
elsewhere the octo-syllabic couplet, or the quatrain, or the dangerous
"eights and sixes," had been chiefly affected. The sestines and canzons and
madrigals of the sonneteers, for all the beauty of their occasional
flashes, have nothing like the gracious and sustained majesty of the
"Nativity" piece. For technical perfection in lyric metre, that is not so
much to be sung as said, this ode has no precedent rival. As for
_L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, who shall praise them fitly? They are among
the few things about which there is no difference of opinion, which are as
delightful to childhood as to criticism, to youth as to age. To dwell on
their technical excellences (the chief of which is the unerring precision
with which the catalectic and acatalectic lines are arranged and
interchanged) has a certain air of impertinence about it. Even a critical
King Alfonso El Sabio could hardly think it possible that Milton might have
taken a hint here, although some persons have, it seems, been disturbed
because skylarks do not come to the window, just as others are troubled
because the flowers in _Lycidas_ do not grow at the same time, and because
they think they could see stars through the "star-proof" trees of the
_Arcades_.

The fragments of the masque just mentioned consist only of three songs and
an address in rhymed couplets. Of the songs, those ending--

Such a rural queen,
All Arcadia hath not seen,

are equal to anything that Milton has done; the first song and the address,
especially the latter, do not fall far below them. But it is in _Comus_
that, if I have any skill of criticism, Milton's poetical power is at its
greatest height. Those who judge poetry on the ground of bulk, or of
originality of theme, or of anything else extra-poetical,--much more those
(the greater number) who simply vary transmitted ideas,--may be scandalised
at this assertion, but that will hardly matter much. And indeed the
indebtedness of _Comus_ in point of subject (it is probably limited to the
Odyssey, which is public proper