Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/430

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��APPENDIX

��424. Infamous ; of evil fame.

426. Mounta iner ; mountaineer is in Shake- speare and his contemporaries almost always used in a bad sense.

429. Horrid; Latin horrldus, rough, bris- tling.

430. Unblencked ; unfaltering. Cf. Sir Henry Wotton's letter to Milton, " You will not blanch Paris in your way ; " blanch and blench are the same.

451. Dashed ; put out of countenance, shamed.

454. Sincerely = entirely ; Latin sincerus, pure, unalloyed.

455. For " liveried angels " compare the line in Nativity Ode, " bright-harnessed angels sit in order serviceable." Lackey = attend.

471-475. This passage is adapted from the Phaedo of Plato ; see Jowett's translation, vol. i. p. 429.

474. Sensualty ; i. e. sensuality, and often un- warrantably so emended by editors.

480. Crude = undigested, a derived meaning from the original one of " unripe."

483. Night-foundered ; plunged in night, night-bound.

494-496. A pretty compliment to Lawes.

495. Huddling ; hurrying, one wave crowding upon another.

509. Sadly; seriously.

517. Chimeras ; the Chimera, slain by Beller- ophon, was a beast with a lion's head, dragon's tail, and woman's body.

520. Navel; centre.

531, 532. Crofts that brow, etc. ; small enclosed pieces of land near to the houses on the hill, sloping up from the valley.

548. Ere a close; "close" is probably used in the technical musical sense of "cadence;" if so, the meaning is, " Ere I had reached the first cadence."

552-554. This is a much-discussed passage. All three early editions, that of Lawes, 1637, and those of Milton, 1645 and 1673, read ' drow- sie frighted ; " the Cambridge manuscript alone gives drowsy flighted " (the hyphen has been put in by the editors). " Drowsy-flighted " is certainly the more picturesque ; but what is to be done with " gave respite to " ? The " stop of sudden silence" could give to the steeds of Sleep respite from fright, and allow them to proceed in their course undisturbed ; but could it give them respite in any other sense ? It is possibly this difficulty which caused Milton to leave the picturesque phrase in the one place, and the logical one in the o+her.

567. " Near" modifies "thou," not "snare."

568. Lawns ; cleared spaces in the wood. 607. Purchase ; booty.

610. / love thy courage yet ; the force of "yet" is either "still as of old," or "although it is of no avail."

620. Of small regard to see to ; colloquially, " not much to look at." One wonders if Milton has his friend Diodati in mind.

fi34. Unknown, and like esteemed, i. e. nnes- taemed.

��635. Clouted ; patched. The derivation from French clou, nail, has been disproved.

636, 637. Cf. Odyssey, x. 281-306: "Therewith the slayer of Argos gave me the plant that he had plucked from the ground, and he showed me the growth thereof. It was black at the root, but the flower was like to milk. Moly the gods call it, but it is hard for mortal men to dig ; howbeit with the gods all things are possible" (Butcher and Lang).

638. Hcemony; a word of Milton's creation, from Ha^monia, or Thessaly. the land of magic.

646. Limetwigs of his spells ; a reference to the practice of catching birds by smearing bird- lime on the twigs of trees.

655. Virgil (^Eneid, viii. 251, 252) attributes this action to Cacus, Vulcan's son.

661. Daphne, fleeing from the embraces of Apollo, prayed to be changed into a laurel- tree. The tree was ever afterward sacred to Apollo.

675-676. Odyssey, iv. 219-229: " Helen, daugh- ter of Zeus, presently cast a drug into the wine whereof they (Menelaus and Telemachus) drank, a drug to lull all pain and anger, and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow. Whoso should drink a draught thereof, when it is mingled in the bowl, on that day he would let no tear fall down his cheeks, not though his father and mother died. . . . Medicines of such virtue had the daughter of Zeus, which Polydamna, the wife of Thon, had given her, a woman of Egypt " (Butcher and Lang).

685. Unexempt condition ; condition from which no exemption is given.

694. Aspects; apparitions, objects.

698. Vizored ; concealed or disguised, as with a vizor.

700. Lickerish; tempting to the palate, but used in a bad sense. The word is connected with " lecherous."

707, 708. The " Cynic tub " is the tub in which Diogenes, the cynic philosopher, used to sit, in scorn of the comforts and luxuries of life. "Budge doctors of the Stoic fur" means of course, in general, "Stoic philosophers;" but the phrase is not easy to explain. Budge has two meanings, "fur" (cf. Budge-row, the Lon- don street where furriers had their shops) and an adjectival meaning = " solemn," "formal." The second meaning would fit here exactly, but seems not to have been in use before the end of the 17th century. "Budge" was especially used of the fur employed in the trimming of academic gowns, and in writing the line Milton doubtless had in mind some of the solemn big- wigs of Cambridge whose pedantry and lifeless- ness he had had occasion to know.

714. Curious : critical, discriminating.

719. Hutched ; stored. Hutch = bin or shed ; cf. rabbit-hutch.

722. Frieze ; a coarse woolen cloth, imported originally from Friesland.

732-736. Can it be that Milton believed that diamonds were found, like pearls, in the sea, or does he refer to diamonds which have been cast there from shipwrecks? Or is diamond

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