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perfectness and completeness of his work. The moral grandeur of the
Puritan breathes, even in these lighter pieces of his youth, through
every line. The "Comus," which he planned as a masque for some
festivities which the Earl of Bridgewater was holding at Ludlow Castle,
rises into an almost impassioned pleading for the love of virtue.

[Sidenote: Puritan fanaticism.]

The historic interest of Milton's "Comus" lies in its forming part of a
protest made by the more cultured Puritans at this time against the
gloomier bigotry which persecution was fostering in the party at large.
The patience of Englishmen, in fact, was slowly wearing out. There was a
sudden upgrowth of virulent pamphlets of the old Martin Marprelate type.
Men, whose names no one asked, hawked libels, whose authorship no one
knew, from the door of the tradesman to the door of the squire. As the
hopes of a Parliament grew fainter, and men despaired of any legal
remedy, violent and weak-headed fanatics came, as at such times they
always come, to the front. Leighton, the father of the saintly
archbishop of that name, had given a specimen of their tone at the
outset of this period by denouncing the prelates as men of blood,
Episcopacy as Antichrist, and the Popish Queen as a daughter of Heth.
The "Histriomastix" of Prynne, a lawyer distinguished for his
constitutional knowledge, but the most obstinate and narrow-minded of
men, marked the deepening of Puritan bigotry under the fostering warmth
of Laud's persecution. The book was an attack on players as the
ministers of Satan, on theatres as the Devil's chapels, on hunting,
maypoles, the decking of houses at Christmas with evergreens, on cards,
music, and false hair. The attack on the stage was as offensive to the
more cultured minds among the Puritan party as to the Court itself;
Selden and Whitelock took a prominent part in preparing a grand masque
by which the Inns of Court resolved to answer its challenge, and in the
following year Milton wrote his masque of "Comus" for Ludlow Castle. To
leave Prynne however simply to the censure of wiser men than himself was
too sensible a course for the angry Primate. No man was ever sent to
prison before or since for such a sheer mass of nonsense; but a passage
in the book was taken as a reflection on the Queen, who had purposed to
take part in a play at the time of its publication; and the sentence
showed the hard cruelty of the Primate's temper. In 1634 Prynne was
d