at
of a free maiden, not that of a vowed nun, and there is nothing in it
to unfit her to play the part which, when Eve plays it, gives Milton
occasion for his well-known apostrophe to true love. Nor is there any
inconsistency between his denunciation of "wanton masks" in that
passage, and his being the author of _Comus_. His own mask was as
different as possible from those others, the common sort, in which he
saw the purveyors of "adulterous lust," and with which, now as then, he
would have nothing whatever {122} to do. His "Lady" alone, even
without her brothers, makes that clear. What she says may not be so
poetically attractive as the speech of Comus; but it has just the note
of exaltation which is heard in all Milton's great ethical and
spiritual outbursts, and plainly utters the other and stronger side of
his convictions. The truth is that from the very beginning to the very
end of his life Milton had all the intensity of Puritanism, more than
all its angry contempt of vice, but nothing whatever of its uncivilized
narrow-mindedness. A large part of the peculiar interest of his
character lies in the fact that he, almost alone of Englishmen, managed
to unite the strength of the Reformation with the breadth of the
Renaissance. We have both in the lovely verses which are the Epilogue
of _Comus_; and if it begins with--

"the gardens fair
Of Hesperus, and his daughters three
That sing about the golden tree:"

and the--

"Beds of hyacinth and roses
Where young Adonis oft reposes,
Waxing well of his deep wound
In slumber soft, and on the ground
Sadly sits the Assyrian queen";

{123} it ends with the Stoic Puritan motto, "Love Virtue, she alone is
free." And that these last six lines were no formal compliment to the
conventions is proved by the fact that Milton chose the final couplet--

"if Virtue feeble were
Heaven itself would stoop to her,"

as the motto he appended to his signature in the album of an Italian
Protestant at Geneva in 1639, adding the significant Latin which claims
the sentiment as utterly his own--

"Caelum, non animum, muto dum trans mare curro."

These words we, looking back on his whole life, may fitly translate: "I
am always the same John Milton, whether in Rome, Geneva, or London,
whether I write _Comus_ or _Allegro_ or _Paradise Lost_." For never
were unity and continuity of personality more complete than in Milton.

There remains _Lycidas_