Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/434

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��APPENDIX

��" Among Montrose's most influential adherents in his enterprise there were several Gordons, of whom the most prominent were George, Lord Gordon, the eldest son of the Marquis of Hunt- ly, and his next brother Charles Gordon, Vis- count Aboyne." He also says that the three names in line 9 all belonged to the same person, the younger Alexander Macdonald, called Col- kitto, i. e. the Left-handed, an officer of Mont- roee. See Scott's Legend of Montrose, chap. xv.

11. Quintilian ; the Roman rhetorician, au- thor of the famous treatise De Institutione Oratoria. He flourished in the second half of the first Christian century.

12-14. Sir John Cheek held the first profes- sorship of Greek at Cambridge, established by Henry VIII. He was afterward tutor to Ed- ward VI. and the young Princess Elizabeth. There is a special reason for the reference to him here ; he had been a member of a commis- sion appointed by Edward VI. to formulate an ecclesiastical code, which, among other reforms, advocated relaxation of the church laws of divorce.

Page 75. ON THE SAME.

1. Clogs ; a peculiarly contemptuous tone is given by this word, which literally means weights or encumbrances put upon beasts to prevent them from straying.

4-7. Latona, after the birth of her children Apollo and Artemis, wandering through Lycia, stopped to drink from a pool. Some peasants tried to prevent her, whereupon she changed them into frogs. The haughtiness of Milton is emphasized by the parallel.

14. Waste of wealth and loss of blood, i. e. in the Civil War.

Page 75. ON THE NEW FORCERS OF CON- SCIENCE UNDER THE LONG PARLIAMENT.

For the peculiar form of this sonnet (sonnetto codato) and the uses to which it was commonly put, see introduction, Milton's Later Sonnets. The following from Pattison will explain fur- ther: "It is of the form called 'colla coda,' a form which seems to have been introduced as early as the fifteenth century, and was much used by a Rabelaisian Florentine satirist who went by the name of Burchiello. From him was derived the denomination Burchielleschi, applied to a species of homely and familiar verse. This form went out of fashion during the sixteenth century, but was revived at the beginning of the seventeenth, and Milton may have met with sonnets of this burlesque form in circulation at Florence. At any rate, in this sonnet alone we have sufficient evidence that Milton went to Italian models for his sonnets."

1, 2. In October, 1646, Parliament formally abolished episcopacy (" prelate lord "), having previously forbidden the public or private use of the Book of Common Prayer ("renounced his Liturgy ")

3. Widowed whore plurality; Pluralism, i. e. the holding by the same minister of more than one living, without rendering service therefor, was as flagrant under the Presbyterian system as it had been under the Episcopal.

��5. Adjure the civil sword ; the Presbyterians were quite willing to call in the power of the state to enforce submission to their rule.

7. Classic hierarchy; "Under the Presbyte- rian organization the classis is the synod or council composed of all the ministers and lay- elders of a town or district. It has certain powers over the ministry and religious affairs of the district which it represents. When Pres- byterianism was established in England, the country was divided into provinces instead of dioceses, and each province was subdivided ac- cording to classes. The province, i. e. diocese, of London had twelve of these classes or sy- nods." VERITY.

8. Mere A. S. ; Adam Steward, a pamphleteer champion of strict Presbyterianism against In- dependency. He always signed his pamphlets, A. S. Samuel Rutherford was one of the four Scotch ministers who, in the Westminster As- sembly of Divines, drew up a Presbyterian scheme for England.

12. Shallow Edwards and Scotch What V ye call ; Thomas Edwards, in a pamphlet entitled Gangraena ; or a Catalogue of many of the Er- rors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this Time (1645-46), had taken occasion to attack Milton for his views on divorce. By "Scotch what 'd 'ye call " is intended George Gillespie (see p. 71), or Rev. Robert Baillie, another Scottish member of the Westminster Assembly, and author of a pamphlet entitled Dissuasive from the Errors of the Time, in which Milton's theory of divorce was also animadverted against.

14. The meaning is that the Westminster As- sembly was "packed" with Presbyterians as badly as the Council of Trent (1545-63) had been with Roman Catholics.

15. " More than once the Parliament had re- buked the over-officiousness of the Westminster Assembly, and reminded it that it was not an authority in the realm. . . . Especially in April, 1646, there had been a case of this kind, when the Commons voted certain proceedings of the Assembly to be a breach of privilege, and intimated to the Divines that a repetition of such proceedings might subject them indi- vidually to heavy punishment." MASSON.

17. Clip your phylacteries; i. e. rebuke your hypocritical pretension. Phylactery, meaning in the Greek, " amulet " or " safeguard," was a piece of parchment inscribed with passages from the Mosaic law, and worn by priests on the forehead or wrist. The size of these phy- lacteries came to stand as a gauge of the wear- er's hypocrisy. Professor Masson comments on this line : In its original form the line ran,

" Crop ye as close as marginal P 's eares " :

an allusion " to the celebrated William Prynne, the Lincoln's Inn Lawyer, who had been twice pilloried and had his nose slit and his ears cut off for anti-Prelatic pamphlets by sentence of the Star-Chamber. . . . Since his release from prison at the opening of the Long Parliament in 1640, Prynne had been a conspicuous Presby- terian, enforcing his views in tract after tract

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