Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/203

Rh Comus blends in a result that is altogether individual—a new dramatic kind, as distinct and delightful as the Aminta—suggestions derived from many sources, classical drama, Italian pastoral and Jonsonian masque, Fletcher and Shakespeare. But its largest debt is to A Midsummer Night's Dream. In that play and The Tempest Milton recognised work of Shakespeare's which was sui generis, provoking no comparison with "correct" classical tragedy and comedy; and if one work more than another floated in the back of his brain while he wrote Comus, it was Shakespeare's play "in the fairy manner." Comus also is a tale of a single night's adventure in a wood where there is magic in the air, though by Milton all is given a high and grave moral purpose. Even the style, though rich in classical imagery and literary association, is redolent of Shakespeare and the dramatists as Milton's style never was again.

For with Lycidas (1638) emerged the Milton of Paradise Lost, classical in his conception of poetic style and form, combatively Puritan in spirit. Johnson's criticism of Lycidas as an elegy does not altogether miss the mark. Lycidas is no more a moving lament than Paradise Lost is a profoundly satisfying religious poem. So far as King is concerned, the poem is a conventional compliment, touched with pathos perhaps only once, in the lines—

"Ay me! while thee the shores and sounding seas          Wash far away where'er thy bones are hurled,"