ftihead,' its 'whirlepoole of Decay,' its 'sea-monsters,' and
lastly, its 'bower of Bliss,' and the doom which overtakes it, together
with the deliverance of Acrasia's victims, transformed by that witch's
spells into beasts. Still more powerful is the allegory of worldly
ambition, illustrated under the name of 'the cave of Mammon.' The Legend
of Holiness delineates with not less insight those enemies which wage
war upon the spiritual life." All this Milton had studied in the _Faerie
Queene_, and had understood it; and, like Sir Guyon, he felt himself to
be a knight enrolled under the banner of Parity and Self-Control. So
that, in _Comus_, we find the sovereign value of Temperance or
Self-Regulation--what the Greeks called +sophrosyne+--set forth
no less clearly than in Spenser's poem: in Milton's mask it becomes
almost identical with Virtue itself. The enchantments of Acrasia in her
Bower of Bliss become the spells of Comus; the armour of Belphoebe
becomes the "complete steel" of Chastity; while the supremacy of
Conscience, the bounty of Nature and man's ingratitude, the unloveliness
of Mammon and of Excess, the blossom of Courtesy oft found on lowly
stalk, and the final triumph of Virtue through striving and temptation,
all are dwelt upon.

It is the mind that maketh good or ill,
That maketh wretch or happie, rich or poore:

so speaks Spenser; and Milton similarly--

He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit i' the centre, and enjoy bright day:
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
Himself is his own dungeon.

In endeavouring still further to trace, by means of verbal or structural
resemblances, the sources from which Milton drew his materials for
_Comus_, critics have referred to Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_ (1595); to
Fletcher's pastoral, _The Faithful Shepherdess_, of which Charles Lamb
has said that if all its parts 'had been in unison with its many
innocent scenes and sweet lyric intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to
vie with _Comus_ or the _Arcadia_, to have been put into the hands of
boys and virgins, to have made matter for young dreams, like the loves
of Hermia and Lysander'; to Ben Jonson's mask of _Pleasure reconciled to
Virtue_ (1619), in which Comus is "the god of cheer, or the Belly"; and
to the _Comus_ of Erycius Puteanus (Henri du Puy), Professor of
Eloquence at Louvain. It is true that Fletcher's pastoral was