Page:Lyra heroica.djvu/368

 344 NOTES

��xv

The Nineteenth Sonnet (Masson) 'may have been written any time between 1652 and 1655,' the first years of Milton's blindness, ' but it follows the Sonnet on the Piedmontese Massacre in Milton's own volume of 1673.'

XVI, XVII

From the choric parts of Samson Agonistes (i.e. the Agonist, or Wrestler), first printed in 1671.

��Of uncertain date; first printed by Watson 1706-11. The version given here is Emerson's (which is shorter than the original), with the exception of the last stanza, which is Napier's (Afontrose, i. Appen- dices). Napier is at great pains to prove that the ballad is al legorical , and that Montrose's ' dear and only love ' was that unhappy King whose Epitaph, the famous Great, Good, and Just, he is said falsely to have written with his sword. Be this as it may, the verses have a second part, which has dropped into oblivion. For the Great Marquis, who reminded De Retz of the men in Plutarch's Lives, was not averse from the practice of poetry, and wrote, besides these numbers, a prayer ( Let them bestow on every airth a limb'), a 'pasquil,' a pleasant string of conceits in praise of woman, a set of vehement and fiery memorial stanzas on the King, and one copy of verses more.

��XIX, XX

To Lucasta going to the Wars and To Althea from Prison are both, I believe, from Lovelace's Lucasta (1645).

��XXI

First printed by Captain Thomson, Works (1776), from a copy he held, on what seems excellent authority, to be in Marvell's hand. The true title is A Horatian Ode on Cromwell's Return from Ireland (1650). It is always ascribed to Marvell (whose verse was first collected and printed by his widow in 1681), but there are faint doubts as to the authorship.

��Poems (1681). This elegant and romantic lyric appears to have been inspired by a passage in the life of John Oxenbridge, of whom, ' religionis causa oberrantem,' it is enough to note that,

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