Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/428

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��APPENDIX

��Miindus, or Terrestrial Universe. The " daugh- ters of Necessity " may be thought of as gigan- tic figures sitting outside the Universe, which rests like the whorl of a spindle on the knees of their mother.

70. Keep unsteady Nature to her law ; mean- ing that the music of the spheres tempers the chaotic turbulence of Nature, and makes her functions harmonious and steady.

81. State; here used in the sense of dais, or platform, upon which sat the throne-chair.

97-102. Ladon's lilied banks, etc. Ladon was a river of Arcadia ; Lyca3us, Cyllene, Erymau- thus, and Maenalus were mountains of Arcadia.

lOti. Syrinx, a nymph, fleeing from her lover Pan, prayed to be transformed into a reed. The Glosse to Spenser's Shepheard's Calender con- tinues, "So that Pan, catching at the Reedes, in stede of the Damosell, and puffing hard (for he was almost out of wind), with hys breath made the Reedes to pype ; which he seeing, tooke of them, and, in remembrance of his lost love, made him a pype thereof."

Page 40. COMDS.

Dedication. Henry Lawes, whose name must often be mentioned in connection with Comus, stood at the head of the English composers of his time. He was born in 1595. His father was a vicar-choral of Salisbury Cathedral, and probably the boy received his first training as a chorister in the Cathedral choir. Later on he studied under the well-known musician Gio- vanni Coperario, an Englishman who had Ita- lianized his patronymic John Cooper. In 1626 Lawes was made one of the Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal. Coperario had won distinction as a writer of music for Masques ; that for the Masque of Flowers, 1614, was from his pen ; and Lawes soon turned his attention the same way. In 1633, in con junction with his brother William Lawes and Simon Ives of St. Paul's choir, he produced the incidental music to Shirley's Tri- umph of Peace ; and wrote single handed the music of Carew's Cselum Britannicum. Comus followed in 1634. Probably Lawes was respon- sible for the production of Arcades. He ex- celled as a song-writer. He did not belong to the line of our learned church-composers. He wrote little sacred music, little at any rate that has survived, though we possess the coronation anthem u Zadock the Priest " composed at the accession of Charles II. The older histo- rians of English music Burney and Hawkins treat Lawes rather contemptuously. The former dismissed his music as " languid and insipid ; " the latter complained that much of it was a compromise between recitative and air. Really Lawes's merit lay herein. A poet him- self, he was content in setting the poetry of others to subordinate the music to the verse. Accent and rhythm were preserved, and the melody (very often a species of aria parlante) did not divert attention from the words. This is perhaps rare with musicians, and it accounted for Lawes's great popularity with contemporary poets Cartwright, Waller, Carew, Herrick, and others. Herrick and Milton were not alone

��in praising the favorite Court-composer. Dur- ing the civil war he lost his post in the Chapel Royal, but was reinstated at the Restoration. He died in 1662. He was buried in the Clois- ters of Westminster Abbey. A portrait of him hangs in the Music-school at Oxford. The elder brother was killed at the siege of Chester in 1645. The following sonnet by Milton was first printed in 1648 among several laudatory pieces of verse prefixed to a volume of Choice Psalms, put into Musick for three Voices : com- posed by Henry and William Lawes, Brothers, and Servants to his Majestic :

" HAREY, whose tuneful and well-measured song First taught our English music how to span Words with just note and accent, not to scan With Midas' ears, committing short and long," etc.

The first quatrain exactly expresses the quality for which Lawes's music was conspicuous : cf. Comus 86-88, and 494-96. The Cambridge draft of these lines is dated Feb. 9, 164ti, new style. Evidently political differences had not interrupted the friendship of poet and composer. The best account of Lawes is given in the arti- cle on him in Grove's Dictionary of Music. VERITY.

7. Pestered in this pinfold ; pestered is from a low-Latin word pastorium = clog or hobble for a horse at pasture. It means, therefore, "shackled," "confined." Pin-f old = pound, an enclosure for strayed cattle.

10. Mortal change ; death, change from mor- tality.

13. Golden key; cf. Lycidas, 110-111.

17. Mould = earth. ^

18-21. In the division of territory, Neptune took the sea ; Jove, the sky ; and Dis (nether Jove), Hades.

29. Quarters to his blue-haired deities; quar- ters =: assigns. Sea-gods were usually repre- sented on the stage with blue hair, as we learn from the elaborate stage-direction printed with the old masques.

37. Perplexed ; involved, tortuous.

38. Horror ; in the Latin sense of ' ' rough- ness " or " shagginess."

48. After the Tuscan mariners transformed ; a Latin construction, post nautas mutatos. The allusion is to the story of Bacchus, w_ho was kid- napped by Tyrrhenian pirates, on his way from Icaria to Naxos. " The god changed the masts and oars into serpents, and himself into a lion ; ivy grew round the vessel, and the sound of flutes was heard on every side ; the sailors were seized with madness, leaped into the sea, and were metamorphosed into dolphins." SMITH'S Class. Diet.

60. Celtic and Iberian fields ; France and Spain.

65. Orient ; this epithet -was first applied to gems, as coming from the East, and later came to have a general application to anything rich and clear in color.

67. Fond; foolish.

71. Ounce; a kind of small tiger or cata- mount.

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