dominates and informs all his later poems,
dictating even their subjects. How was it possible for him to choose King
Arthur and his Round Table for the subject of his epic, as he had
intended in his youthful days; when chivalry and the spirit of chivalry
had fought its last fight on English soil, full in the sight of all men,
round the forlorn banner of King Charles? The policy of Laud and
Stratford kept Milton out of the Church, and sent him into retirement at
Horton; the same policy, it may be plausibly conjectured, had something
to do with the change in the subject of his long-meditated epic. From the
very beginning of the civil troubles contemporary events leave their mark
on all his writings. The topical bias (so to call it) is very noticeable
in many of the subjects tentatively jotted down by him on the paper that
is now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The corrupted
clergy, who make so splendid and, as some think, so irrelevant an
appearance in _Lycidas_, figure frequently, either directly or by
implication, in the long list of themes.

Without misgiving or regret, when the time came, Milton shut the gate on
the sequestered paradise of his youth, and hastened downward to join the
fighters in the plain. Before we follow him we may well "interpose a
little ease" by looking at some of the beauties proper to the earlier
poems, and listening to some of the simple pastoral melodies that were
drowned when the organ began to blow. _L'Allegro_ is full of them--

Sometimes, with secure delight,
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the chequered shade,
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday.

That is Merry England of Shakespeare's time. But already the controversy
concerning the _Book of Sports_ had begun to darken the air. Already the
Maypole, that "great stinking idol," as an Elizabethan Puritan called it,
had been doomed to destruction. Some years before _L'Allegro_ was
written, a bard, who hailed from Leeds, had lamented its downfall in the
country of his nativity--

Happy the age, and harmelesse were the dayes,
(For then true love and amity was found)
When every village did a May-pole raise,
And Whitson Ales and May games did abound;
And all the lusty Yonkers in a rout
With merry Lasses danced the rod about;
Then friendship to their banquets bid