Impressions made in earliest youth are ever afterwards most sensibly felt. Milton was probably first affected with, and often indulged the pensive pleasure which the awful solemnity of a Gothic church conveys to the mind, and which is here so feelingly described, while he was a school-boy at St. Paul's. The church was then in it's original Gothic state, and one of the noblest patterns of that kind of architecture.

B. i. c. x. s. V.

Humilta admits the Red-crosse Knight into

the house of Holinesse.

* Il Penseroso.

They passe in stouping lowe;

For straight and narrow was the path which he did

showe.

Drawn from our Saviour's discourse on the

66

Mount. Strait is the gate, and narrow is which leadeth unto life *.”

the

way,

B. i. c. x. s. xxvii.

And bitter Penance, with an iron whip,
Was wont him once to disple every day.

By to disple, i. e. to disciple or discipline, was formerly signified the penitentiary whippings, practised among the monks, so that it is here applied with the greatest propriety. In Fox's Book of Martyrs there is an old wood-cut, in which the whipping of an heretic is represented; with this title, "The displing of John Whitelock." Displing Friers was a common expression, as it is found in A Worlde of Wonders, 1608 †. Milton uses

Matt. ch. vii. v. 14.

+ Pag. 175,

it with allusion to the same sense.

""Tis

only the merry frier in Chaucer can disple Disciplina, in the Spanish lan

them *"

guage, signifies the scourge which was used by penitents for these very purposes of religious flagellation.

B. i. c. x. s. lxiv.

Sith to thee is unknowne the cradle of thy brood.

Thus again,

Even from the cradle of his infancy.

5. 1. 5.

Thus also, G. Gascoigne to Lady Bridges.

Lo thus was Bridges hurt

In cradel of her kynd.

And in the Hymne in Honour of Love.

The wondrous cradle of thine infancy.

* Of Reformation in England, Birch's Edit. vol. i. pag. 13.

B. i. c. x. s. lv.

From thence a Faerie thee unweeting reft.

Thus St. George, while an infant, is stolen by an enchantress. "Not many yeares after his nativitie, the fell enchantress Kalyb,by charmes and witchcraft stole this infant from the carefull nurses *"

B. i. c. xi. s. liii.

Gaping wide,

He thought at once him to have swallowd quight,
And rusht upon him, &c.

Thus the winged serpent, in the Black Castle, attacks St. George," pretending to have swallowed whole this courageous warrior, &c t."

B. i. c. xi. s. liv.

Of the Dragon's death.

* Seven Champions, b. i. c. 1. + Ibid. b. ii. c. 6.

So downe he fell, and forth his life did breath

That vanisht into smoake, and clowdes swift.

We meet with the same circumstance in Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure. But it is usual in romance.

There is a romance, called Sir Huon of Bordeaux, mentioned among other old histories of the same kind, in Laneham's Letter, concerning Queen Elizabeth's entertainment at Kenelworth-castle, above quoted *. It is

*Vol. i. sect. 2.