Volume Ii Part 29 (1/2)

”Blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss,”

and perhaps

”I see his tents Pitched about Sechem”

might be added.

[370] I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the nearness of _enemy_ and _calamity_ in this pa.s.sage. Mr. Ma.s.son leaves out the comma after _If not_, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the sense, and certainly to keep _not_ a little farther apart from _what_, (”teach each”!)

[371] ”First in his East,” is not soothing to the ear.

[372] There seems to be something wrong in this word _sh.o.r.es_. Did Milton write _shoals_?

[373] But his etymological notes are worse. For example, ”_recreant_, renouncing the faith, from the old French _recroire_, which again is from the mediaeval Latin _recredere_, to 'believe back,' or apostatize.” This is pure fancy. The word had no such meaning in either language. He derives _serenate_ from _sera_, and says that _parle_ means treaty, negotiation, though it is the same word as _parley_, had the same meanings, and was commonly p.r.o.nounced like it, as in Marlowe's

”What, shall we _parle_ with this Christan?”

It certainly never meant _treaty_, though it may have meant _negotiation_. When it did it implied the meeting face to face of the princ.i.p.als. On the verses

”And some flowers and some bays For thy hea.r.s.e to strew the ways,”

he has a note to tell us that _hea.r.s.e_ is not to be taken ”in our sense of a carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a tomb or framework over a tomb,” though the obvious meaning is ”to strew the ways for thy hea.r.s.e.” How could one do that for a tomb or the framework over it?

[374] A pa.s.sage from Dante (Inferno, XI. 96-105), with its reference to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of ”Nature taught art,” which seems to puzzle him. A study of Dante and of his earlier commentators would also have been of great service in the astronomical notes.

[375] Almost every combination of two vowels might in those days be a diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of elision was confirmed and sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study of the Italians, with whose usage in this respect he closely conforms.

[376] Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791.

[377] So Dante:-- ”Ma sapienza e amore e virtute.”

So Donne:-- ”Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives.”

[378] Mr. Ma.s.son is evidently not very familiar at first hand with the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been trained, but seems to have learned something from Abbott's ”Shakespearian Grammar” in the interval between writing his notes and his Introduction. Walker's ”Shakespeare's Versification” would have been a great help to him in default of original knowledge.

[379] Milton has a verse in Comus where the _e_ is elided from the word _sister_ by its preceding a vowel:--

”Heaven keep my sister! again, again, and near!”

This would have been impossible before a consonant.

[380] So _spirito_ and _spirto_ in Italian, _esperis_ and _espirs_ in Old French.

[381] Milton, however, would not have balked at _th' bottomless_ any more than Drayton at _th' rejected_ or Donne at _th' sea_. Mr. Ma.s.son does not seem to understand this elision, for he corrects _i' th'