rton he
wrote, among other things, the companion pieces, _L'Allegro_ and _Il
Penseroso_, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an
expression in harmony with two contrasted moods. _Comus_, which
belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elisabethan court
masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of
the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales.
Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of
Circe, with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in praise of
chastity and temperance. _Lycidas_, in like manner, was the perfection
of the Elisabethan {153} pastoral elegy. It was contributed to a
volume of memorial verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge
friend of Milton's, who was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637. In
one stern strain, which is put into the mouth of St. Peter, the author
"foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then at their height."

"But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more."

This was Milton's last utterance in English verse before the outbreak
of the civil war, and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle.
In technical quality _Lycidas_ is the most wonderful of all Milton's
poems. The cunningly intricate harmony of the verse, the pressed and
packed language with its fullness of meaning and allusion make it
worthy of the minutest study. In these early poems, Milton, merely as
a poet, is at his best. Something of the Elisabethan style still
clings to them; but their grave sweetness, their choice wording, their
originality in epithet, name, and phrase, were novelties of Milton's
own. His English masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Sylvester, the
translator of Du Bartas's _La Sepmaine_, but nothing of Spenser's
prolixity, or Fletcher's effeminacy, or Sylvester's quaintness is found
in Milton's pure, energetic diction. He inherited their beauties, but
his taste had been tempered to a finer edge by his studies in Greek and
Hebrew poetry. He was the last of the Elisabethans, and {154} his
style was at once the crown of the old and a departure into the new.
In masque, elegy, and sonnet, he set the seal to the Elisabethan
poetry, said the last word, and closed one great literary era.

In 1639 the breach between Charles I. and his Parliament brought Milton
back from Italy. "I thought it base to be traveling at my ease for
amusement, w