ty, and to George Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_,
which gave little but a few hints of story) is scarcely greater than that
of _Paradise Lost_; while the form of the drama, a kind nearly as venerable
and majestic as that of the epic, is completely filled. And in _Comus_
there is none of the stiffness, none of the _longueurs_, none of the almost
ludicrous want of humour, which mar the larger poem. Humour indeed was what
Milton always lacked; had he had it, Shakespere himself might hardly have
been greater. The plan is not really more artificial than that of the epic;
though in the latter case it is masked to us by the scale, by the grandeur
of the personages, and by the familiarity of the images to all men who have
been brought up on the Bible. The versification, as even Johnson saw, is
the versification of _Paradise Lost_, and to my fancy at any rate it has a
spring, a variety, a sweep and rush of genius, which are but rarely present
later. As for its beauty in parts, _quis vituperavit_? It is impossible to
single out passages, for the whole is golden. The entering address of
Comus, the song "Sweet Echo," the descriptive speech of the Spirit, and the
magnificent eulogy of the "sun-clad power of chastity," would be the most
beautiful things where all is beautiful, if the unapproachable "Sabrina
fair" did not come later, and were not sustained before and after, for
nearly two hundred lines of pure nectar. If poetry could be taught by the
reading of it, then indeed the critic's advice to a poet might be limited
to this: "Give your days and nights to the reading of _Comus_."

The sole excuses for Johnson's amazing verdict on _Lycidas_ are that it is
not quite so uniformly good, and that in his strictures on its "rhyme" and
"numbers" he was evidently speaking from the point of view at which the
regular couplet is regarded as the _ne plus ultra_ of poetry. There are
indeed blotches in it. The speech of Peter, magnificently as it is
introduced, and strangely as it has captivated some critics, who seem to
think that anything attacking the Church of England must be poetry, is out
of place, and in itself is obscure, pedantic, and grotesque. There is some
over-classicism, and the scale of the piece does not admit the display of
quite such sustained and varied power as in _Comus_. But what there is, is
so exquisite that hardly can we find fault with Mr. Pattison's hyperbole
when he called _Lycidas_ the "high-water mark of English poetry."