bliss; and, his mind therefore being at peace, the only faculty he could employ was the imagination. We may ask any reader of true taste and poetic feeling, if he thinks it likely that he should receive as much pleasure as he does at present from Lycidas, if the poet had divested it of pastoral ideas, banished all allegoric forms, abstained with religious awe from introducing the "Pilot of the Galilæan lake," and written it after such a manner as would have obtained the approbation of Johnson. We trow not. As to the versification of Lycidas, it was of course disagreeable to the ear of Johnson, which could relish nothing but tame regularity, 'the right butter-woman's rank to market,' as Touchstone terms it. The verse is of Milton's own formation, in this, as in most of his other poems. From Tasso and Guarini he adopted the practice of mingling three-foot lines with the regular verses of five feet, and of adding occasionally the ornament of rime. In this he did not follow any rule but that of his own ear, and they therefore can only be perfectly enjoyed by those few whose ear, like his own, is fully attuned to the variety of poetic melody. It has not, we believe, been observed by any critic,* that the last eight lines of Lycidas form a perfect stanza in ottava rima. As they stand detached, such was probably the poet's design; but we meet with eight other lines (124-131), which, though they terminate a paragraph, are united with what precedes more closely than is ever the case in the Italian poets. Whether this was accidental or not, we are unable to determine. He had, it is true, the authority of Fairfax for such a structure; but we incline to think * Mason however was aware of it, as he imitated it in his Musæus, See Godfrey of Bullogne, xix. 3, 4. it casual, as in another place (vv. 165-172), by merely transposing two lines we should have a perfect stanza, and in a third (vv. 111-118), by altering a single rime. The following passage in this poem long perplexed the critics : Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, At length Warton threw light on this, as on many other obscure places. He showed that the place called by the poet "the fable of Bellerus old" was St. Michael's Mount, at the Land's-end, in Cornwall, anciently named Bellerium, from which the poet formed the name Bellerus, as that of one of the fabulous old giants who, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, possessed Britain in times of old. He further adds, that, beside his celebrated apparition on Mount Gargano, in Italy, the archangel Michael had appeared on various other eminences, among others on this in Cornwall, thence named from him. Warton describes St. Michael's Mount as a steep rock in Mount's Bay, accessible from the land at low-water. On its summit stood a monastery, founded before the time of Edward the Confessor, with which was connected a fortress. A stone lantern in one of the angles of the tower of the church is called St. Michael's chair; but this is not the original chair of which Carew, in his Survey of Cornwall, says, "a little without the castle there is a bad seat in a craggy place, called St. Michael's chair." Warton further quotes William of Worcester (A.D. 1490), who, in speaking of this place, says there was an "apparitio Sancti Michaelis in Monte Tumba antea vocato Le Hore Rock in the Wode;"* which Hoar Rock, he says, is the Mount, which, according to Drayton and Carew, was anciently covered with thick wood. There is still, he adds, a tradition that a vision of St. Michael, seated on this crag, appeared to some hermits, which gave occasion to the building of the monastery. The "great vision" then, he concludes justly, is St. Michael, termed Angel v. 163; and the Mount, he says, is styled guarded on account of the fortress. We however rather think that in the poet' view, St. Michael himself, whom he represents looking out over the sea, kept watch and ward on the Mount. So far was Warton able to advance, but “ Namancos and Bayona's hold" remained inaccessible to him. At length, in 1800, a writer in the Monthly Magazine conjectured that Namancos must have been intended for the ancient Numantia, near Tarragona, on the coast of Catalonia,† and that Milton had given a Spanish termination to the word. "I am aware," he adds, "that this place is on the opposite side to Bayona; but let it be remembered that they are no common eyes that look upon the scene; they are no less than those of an archangel." Dunster adopts this opinion, only adding that it was the French Bayonne, and not the Spanish Bayona that was meant, as "Milton scarcely meant to make his archangel look two ways at once." Todd thought that Milton had adopted the orthography Namancos from some romance. Finally, a literary friend of Mr. Todd's happening to be turning over Mercator's Atlas, met the very word *This, and Spenser's lines St. Michel's Mount who does not know, That wards the western coast ?-Shep. Cal. vii. 41. were probably Milton's sole authority; his imagination did the rest. † He must mean Saguntum (Murviedro), for Numantia was in Old Castile. Namancos. In the map of Gallicia in that Atlas, and in the peninsula of Cape Finisterre, we find, about the site of the present Mujio, "Namancos T.," i.e. Turris. Bayona lies south of this, a little to the north of the Minho, and it was used, Mercator says, by the English merchants as a staple for their woollen cloths, whence probably its name was more familiar in Milton's time than it is now, and better known than perhaps any other name in the part of Gallicia opposite the Land's-end, except The Groine (Coruña), which was not a very poetic term. As Mercator's Atlas was a common book, he may have supposed the name Namancos to be generally known to persons of education.* To prove to demonstration how utterly negligent of punctuation Milton was, we here give a passage of Lycidas exactly as it stands in the editions of 1645 and 1673, premising that it was far more correctly punctuated in the original edition of 1638: Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies. The Musk-rose, and the well-attir'd Woodbine, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. * Mr. Hunter (Milton, page 51) maintains that it was not Bayona, but a place near Cape Finisterre, of which is said, in a book of Pilotage, printed at Amsterdam, in 1662 : About a league to the eastward of 66 Here, it will be seen, there are periods instead of commas at dies, violet, and surmise; at the last there is a semicolon in the edition of 1638,* but it should not be greater than a comma, as surmise connects with whilst, Ay me! being parenthetic. By wash far away must be meant "lave at a great distance;" but the expression is ambiguous, for the proper meaning of wash away is, to remove by the action of water. It has sometimes occurred to us that the poet, who, as we have seen, was careless about punctuation, might have intended that there should be a full stop at away, and an address to Lycidas commence at where'er, to be interrupted by an aposiopesis at Bayona's hold, but that, as sometimes happens, he acquiesced in the punctuation given by the printer. If we do not deceive ourselves, the punctuation at which we have hinted would increase the force and vividness of the passage, which is in itself so very picturesque. We cannot refrain from making a digression here on the state of our typography in former times. We have seen that Milton was utterly careless about punctuation, and that even a most important word could be omitted in one of his poems, without himself or his friend who read the proof-sheets becoming aware of it; and yet we are called upon to receive as almost immaculate the first folio Cape de Finisterre, on the south side, lieth the haven of Seche or Corcovia, and is called by the Dutch shipmasters Corcke Bayone." But no such place occurs on Mercator's map, which was evidently Milton's authority. *The edition of 1638 reads the last four lines as follows: For so to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise; |