cunning Circe, his offspring is a voluptuary whose gay
exterior and flattering speech hide his dangerously seductive and
magical powers. He bears no resemblance, therefore, to Comus as
represented in Ben Jonson's _Pleasure reconciled to Virtue_, in which
mask "Comus" and "The Belly" are throughout synonymous. In the
_Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus, Comus is a "drinker of human blood"; in
Philostratus, he is a rose-crowned wine-bibber; in Dekker he is "the
clerk of gluttony's kitchen"; in Massinger he is "the god of pleasure";
and in the work of Erycius Puteanus he is a graceful reveller, the
genius of love and cheerfulness. Prof. Masson says, "Milton's _Comus_ is
a creation of his own, for which he was as little indebted intrinsically
to Puteanus as to Ben Jonson. For the purpose of his masque at Ludlow
Castle he was bold enough to add a brand-new god, no less, to the
classic Pantheon, and to import him into Britain." ~Bacchus~, the god who
taught men the preparation of wine. He is the Greek Dionysus, who, on
one of his voyages, hired a vessel belonging to some Tyrrhenian pirates:
these men resolved to sell him as a slave. Thereupon, he changed the
mast and oars of the ship into serpents and the sailors into dolphins.
The meeting of Bacchus with Circe is Milton's own invention; in the
_Odyssey_ it is Ulysses who lights upon her island: "And we came to the
isle AEaean, where dwelt Circe of the braided tresses, an awful goddess of
mortal speech, own sister to the wizard AEetes," _Odys._ x. ~from out~,
etc. Comp. _Par. Lost_, v. 345. 'From out' has the same force as the
more common 'out from.'

47. ~misused~, abused. The prefix _mis-_ was very generally used by
Milton; _e.g._ _mislike_, _misdeem_, _miscreated_, _misthought_ (all
obsolete).

48. ~After the Tuscan mariners transformed~, _i.e._ after the
transformation of the Tuscan mariners (see Ovid, _Met._ iii.). They are
called Tuscan, because Tyrrhenia in Central Italy was named Etruria or
Tuscia by the Romans: Etruria includes modern Tuscany. This grammatical
construction is common in Latin; a passive participle combined with a
substantive answering to an English verbal or abstract noun connected
with another noun by the preposition _of_, and used to denote a fact in
the past; _e.g._ "since created man" (_P. L._ i. 573) = since the
creation of man: "this loss recovered" (_P. L._ ii. 21) = the recovery
of this loss.

49. ~as the winds listed~; at the pleasure of the winds: c