Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/446

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��APPENDIX

��Page 207, lines 1017-20. Of sapience no small part, since, etc.

Adam's witticism is a trifle abstruse and pon- derous, depending on the double meaning of the Latin sapere, either to taste or to know. The word savour (taste), he says, we apply to intellectual things, and conversely apply to the discerning palate an intellectual epithet, judi- cious.

Page 208, lines 1102-10.

This description of the banyan tree is famous, especially line 1107, praised by Coleridge.

Page 209. BOOK X.

Page 210, line 38. Foretold so lately, etc.

An absolute construction. What would come to pass having been so lately foretold.

Page 210, line 49. Death denounced that day.

In apposition with "sentence;" denounced = pronounced.

Page 211, line 84. Conviction to the Serpent none belongs,

The Serpent's guilt is too apparent to need proof, seems to be the meaning.

Page 212, lines 169-174. More to know con- cerned not Man.

It was not necessary for man to understand the "mysterious terms " of God's judgment on the Serpent, which referred to the brute instru- ment only symbolically, really to Satan ; man knew not that Satan was his tempter, nor would such knowledge have altered his offence.

Page 212, lines 183-190. When Jesus, son of Mary, etc.

This passage is a curious conglomerate of allusions to Biblical texts : Luke x. 18 ; Eph. ii. 22 ; Col. iii. 15 ; Ps. Ixviii. ; Rom. xvi. 20.

Page 212, lines 217, 218. Skins of beasts, or slain, etc.

Milton leaves us in doubt whether, to obtain the skins with which Adam and Eve were clothed, beasts were slain, or whether skins were used which had been shed by their wearers, as the snake sheds his, to be " repaid " with a youthful coat.

Page 213, line 231. In counter view.

Gazing at each other.

Page 213, line 246. Sympathy or some connatu- ralforce, etc.

Because the fall of Man had " brought death into the world, and all our woe."

Page 213, line 279. Feature.

The derivation is from Latin facere, to make ; Italian fattura, thingmade. Here used in sense of shape or image.

Page 213, line 281. Sagacious.

From Lat. sagax, keen of scent.

Page 213, lines 290-293. Cronian Sea, etc.

The Cronian Sea is the Arctic Ocean ; Peteora (modern Petchora) is a gulf of the Arctic in "northeastern Russia;" " imagined way " re- fers to the seventeenth-century hypothesis of a northeast passage to China (Cathay).

Page 213, lines 294-301. Death with his mace petrific. . . smote.

Death forms the beginning of the bridge be- tween Hell and the Earth by striking into " Gorgonian rigor," i. e. stiffness like that

��which seized upon those who beheld the Gor- gon, the uncompounded matter of chaos. This he fastened at the mouth of Hellgate as firmly as Zeus fastened the floating isle of Delos to the bottom of the sea, that there Leto might bring forth Apollo and Artemis. By the same process of solidifying the crude floating sub- stances of chaos he carries the bridge out to- ward the great ball of the Mundus or created universe, where it hung from Heaven.

Page 214, line 311.

When a storm destroyed the bridge begun over the Hellespont, Xerxes ordered the waves to be scourged.

Page 214, line 313. Pontifical.

The present meaning of the word comes from the fact that in ancient Rome the building of bridges was a sacred function, in the hands of priests, who were called pontifices, or bridge- makers.

Page 214, lines 320-329. And now their way to Earth they had descried.

We must imagine Sin and Death landing and mooring their bridge somewhere on the outer and upper surface of the opaque ball of the Pri- iniini Mobile, and proceeding thence to the opening into the interior of the universe at the foot of the heavenly stairway and directly un- derneath Heaven-gate. Here was the converg- ing point of "three several ways," one leading upward to Heaven, a second downward to the Earth, the third across Chaos to Hell. Enter- ing here they are about to fly inward throngh the successive spheres toward the earth ball, when they behold Satan steering upward toward them, keeping, perhaps, from fear of Uriel, as far as possible from the sun ; between the con- stellations of Centaur and Scorpio, he would be separated by nearly the whole expanse of the Heavens from Aries, in which constellation the sun then was.

Page 214, line 348. Pontiftce.

Bridge structure.

Page 214, line 381. His quadrature, from thy orbicular world.

Satan implies that Heaven is square or cubi- form, in contrast with the spheric contour of the World. Milton probably had in mind the description of the New Jerusalem as "four- square," as Hume suggests.

Page 215, Hue 403. My substitutes.

I. e. as my substitutes or deputies.

Page 215, lines 431-436. As when the Tartar from his Russian foe, etc.

In writing these lines Milton had in mind re- cent conflicts between the Russians and Tartars on the one hand, and Persians and Turks on the other. Bactrian Sophi rz Shah of Persia, Bac- tria forming a part of the Persian dominion, and Sophi (Sooffee, Snffavee), being the name of the reigning dynasty. The "realm of Aladule " is Greater Armenia, so called from its last king ; this country the Persian would leave waste in retreating to his capital Tauris (Tebreez) or the fortified city of Casbeen (Kasveen). KEIGHT- LEY and MASSON.

Page 215, line 457. Divan.

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