¹ Laura Lockwood, “Milton's Corrections to the Minor Poems,” MLN, xxv (1910). Miss Lockwood's four-page article is in large part concerned with material treated here. I have drawn upon it frequently. Mr. C. S. Lewis's study, “A Note on Comus,” RES, viii (1932), is important to us for its demonstration of Milton's concern for unity of tone in Comus.

² Helen Darbishire, The MS. of Paradise Lost, Bk. I, Introduction, pp. xv ff.

³ “The Punctuation of Comus,” PULA, li (1936) and “Milton's Prosody in the Poems of the Trinity Manuscript,” PMLA, liv (1939).

⁴ Bold a counterpoint is the reading of the Bridgewater MS. It has therefore sometimes been attributed to Lawes's influence. Since it is a reading cancelled in the Trinity MS, however, it is more likely that the revision was made after the performance of the Mask—at any rate after the preparation of the Bridgewater MS or its original. See my article, “The Text of Comus, 1634–1645,” PMLA, lii (1937).

⁵ Another revision, not listed as such by Miss Lockwood, seems to me to be even more properly thought of as designed to avoid a “technical” term. In line 154,

dazling replaces powder'd. Verity has the following note: “Dazzling. The Cambridge MS. has powdered; cf. ‘magic dust,’ 165. No doubt as the actor spoke these lines, 153–156 (cf. ‘Thus’), he scattered some powder in the air … ” Verity's note is based on Masson's, which goes on, “… Milton by a judicious change, concealing the mechanism of the stage trick, substituted ‘dazzling’.”

That some change to conceal the stage trick was “judicious” we may agree, but the change that was made is as near to careless and slip-shod work as any in the MS., for thus in line 153, as Verity's note points out, refers to a throwing gesture, whether or not it be a powder that Comus hurls into the air, and magick dust in 165 makes it a powder whether the word is cancelled or not. As the line first read, Comus quite literally threw dust into the eyes of his victim, dust “of power to cheate the eye with sleight, blind, or bleare (he tries all three words) illusion.” As it stands revised, he only hurls “dazling spells,” which have the same power and which appear later as dust. There are too many implications beyond the line in which the change is made for the substitution of a single word to be sufficient for the end in view.

Warton's note on this line concludes, “When a poet corrects, he is apt to forget and destroy his original train of thought.” Masson responds in his note to line 165: “Some commentators think Milton had forgotten that he had changed ‘powdered’ into ‘dazzling’ in the former passage, or else he would not have kept ‘dust’ here. The criticism is absurd. Why should Comus not divulge here that it was ‘dust’ or ‘powder’ he had thrown in line 154?”—which leaves us wondering why the change that concealed the “mechanism of the stage trick” should have seemed “judicious” to Masson in the first place. If Milton's intention was to conceal the stage mechanism, he has not succeeded.

⁶ When Milton changes a line, we may be sure that he was dissatisfied with it, but whether we can know the reasons for his dissatisfaction is by no means certain. The best we can do is describe the effect of the revision he makes, remembering even when we point out a possible reason for a correction that an author's motives in choosing between alternative expressions are uecessarily mixed.

⁷ The line, especially in its second form, hath lockt up mortall eyes, is a reminiscence of line 163 of The Rapt of Lucrece: “When heavy sleep had clos'd up mortal eyes.” The final reading almost completely obscures the parallel. Dr. R. H. Singleton has pointed out to me a number of passages in which revision similarly removes obvious reminiscences.

⁸ Miss Lockwood cites the revision of line 181 as a revision aimed solely at “poetic suggestiveness.”

⁹ Verity points out that this line is part of the unquestionable debt of Comus to The Tempest, here to i, 2, 375:

and that the substitution of tawnie for yellow makes the likeness between the lines much less striking. Cf. note 7, above.

¹⁰ Todd gives Warburton's note on granges: “Altered with judgement to granges. Two rural scenes of festivity are alluded to, the Spring (teeming flocks), and the Autumn (granges full), sheep-shearing, and harvest-time. But the time, when the garners are full, is in Winter, when the corn is thrashed.”

¹¹ Again Todd gives Warburton's note on the line:

“Altered with judgement to prosperous: for tall wood implies full grown, to which prosperous agrees, but prospering implies it not to be full grown.”

¹² This change is made in the cancelled version of the epilogue, which is a mine of similar changes. Todd observes that Milton “altered bow to stoop, because the latter word expresses greater condescension. So, in his Ode on the Passion, he applies, to the Son of God when he took our nature upon him, the phrase ‘stooping his regal head’.”

¹³ The substitution of one connective for another does not always involve change in syntax, of course. Thus in line 45,

44. What never yet was heard in tale or song

45. from old or moderne Bard in hall, or bowre,

from replaces by, properly making the bard the narrator and not the listener. In 144,

143. Come knit hands, & beate the ground

144. in a light fantastick round, in replaces with, as does it also in

114. lead in swift round the months & yeares.

¹⁴ Masson's edition, iii, 71–103, contains a complete and careful classification of such peculiarities. See also N. B⊘gholm, Milton and “Paradise Lost,” pp. 66–94.

¹⁵ See Gustav Hübener, Die Stilistiche Spannung in Milton's “Paradise Lost.” Hübener (p. 15) distinguishes between two basic types of suspension: “einfache Retardierung,” in which the suspension results from the arrangement of elements in the sentence, “syntaktischen Disposition,” and “Retardierung durch Intercision,” in which the suspension results from the interposition of parenthetic material between syntactically related elements.

¹⁶ Masson discusses such queer syntactical phenomena as this double predication with men under the heading, “construction changed by change of thought.”

¹⁷ Similar additions are to be found in lines 442, 456, 726, 730, 869–875, 883–884. In ines 180–181,

we find a change which results in the avoidance of suspension. Line 180 is a marginal insertion. It cannot be, like the parenthetic insertions listed above, in the nature of an afterthought; it is essential to the sense of the passage. I surmise that it, or its equivalent, was to follow line 181 instead of preceding it and that Milton had already copied 181 when he changed his mind about the order. The original reading, if this is a “sure guesse” would exhibit a typical suspension; the revision does away with it. I am aware of no other change with a similar result.

¹⁸ We find partial explanation, of course, in observing that the original reading places an unwarrantable stress on the. Nor is there any question that the alliteration of lewd & lavish is here used to great effect. This too depends upon the distribution of stresses. The reading of the Bridgewater Manuscript,—lewd lascivious —avoids the weak stress on the but loses the effect of the alliteration by placing the second l (the first syllable of lascivious) in the arsis, as it also loses the full effect of the double epithet by losing the conjunction which throws both into emphatic position.

¹⁹ Similar revisions are made in Arcades, line 59, and in Comus, lines 21, 72, 199, 712, and 851.

At least twice we find Milton inserting (as it happens harmless) “line-fillers” in lines in the original version not complete decasyllables, in Comus, 344,

and 560,

Thire in 344 and so in 560 are insertions.

²⁰ Once this procedure is reversed, surely to put the verse stress upon the important syllable. Line 468,

is written loose quite, this transposition also indicated by the numbers 2 and 1 under the words as written.

²¹ Charlton M. Lewis, The Principles of English Verse, p. 130: “Next to rime, the chief embellishment of verse is what we call tone-color. Tone-color is given to verse by the preponderance of any particular sound or kind of sounds, whether vowel or consonant.”

Ibid., pp. 133–134: “If you put together a great many similar consonants in one sentence, they will attract special attention to the words in which they occur, and the significance of those words, whatever it may be, is thereby intensified; but whether the words are ‘a team of little atomies’ or ‘a triumphant terrible Titan,‘ it is not the sound of the consonants that makes the significance.”

²² A revision similar in breaking up an s-alliteration is found in line 454,

the first reading of which,

with its sequence of three initial s's produced an unbearable hiss.

²³ We have already cited this revision as an instance of Milton's search for truer imagery.

²⁴ Todd quotes Warburton's note: “‘Potent art’ are Shakespeare's words, and better than ‘mighty art’.” Neither notes the alliteration. It is interesting to observe that in 255,

²⁵ Two other changes of alliteration, too interesting to be ignored, are here relegated to a note because one of them is not indicated in the manuscript at all and the other is possibly not Miltonic but a liberty of the scribe. See my article, “The Text of Comus, 1634–1645,” PMLA, lii (1937). In 213–214,

the questionable although to modern ears extremely inviting substitution of hov'ring for flittering substitutes an h -alliteration with Hope for an f -alliteration with Faith. Both are pointed by the g's of girt with golden.

In line 472,

the word lingering replaces hovering in the editions of 1645 and 1673 (but not in either of the manuscripts nor in the edition of 1637). The result is a word in better harmony with sitting, in strict logic, and an addition to the already heavy l -alliteration of loath, leave, lov'd, and link't. Since both of these revisions involve the word hovering, since both appear in print for the first time in 1645, and since one of them is not in the manuscript at all and the other not in Milton's hand, it is impossible not to suggest that they are somehow related.

²⁶ Westring, of course, besides being the more meaningful in the context, is much the fresher word, as is clowdie where it is substituted for polisht in Comus 134, and close where it replaces sad and lone in Comus 349. Milton avoids the danger inherent in his fondness for the “classical” epithet by keeping constant guard against the trite and the commonplace, so that, as here, his second or third thought is often more spontaneous, in its strict sense, than his first.

²⁷ Or faintly. Wright and the Columbia Milton read the cancelled word as, faintly. Saintsbury reads it stintly. It is not clearly legible in Wright's facsimile, but I read it stintly, which takes the revision out of the group of those resulting in changed alliteration except in the “subsidiary consonant.” Saintsbury comments on it as follows (in “Milton and the Grand Style,” Milton Memorial Lectures, 1908, ed. by Percy W. Ames, pp. 95–96): “… Alliteration, it sometimes has been held, is a childish thing—perhaps worse—a foolish and tawdry bedizenment. Is it? Try, for instance, such a phrase as

Try it with the adverb which Milton himself once thought of substituting—‘stintly’; try it with anything but this cunning variation of the same ‘s’ alliteration with a different subsidiary consonant and the almost more cunning selection of the different values of the same vowel. Your ear, if you happen to have one, will tell you of the heavy change.“

²⁸ J. A. Symonds, Blank Verse, p. 103.

²⁹ Once more let us remind ourselves that we are merely describing the effect of Milton's changes, not trying to offer simple, unmixed motives behind them, so that there is no contradiction involved in discussing this substitution once as part of a change in syntax in the preceding line and here as an improvement in sound.

³⁰ Freez'd in this line is not a correction. The word froze does not appear at all, nor does it appear in Milton's verse at all, although frozen appears five times. This is the only appearance of freez'd.

³¹ Helen Darbishire, The Early Lives of Milton, p. 73.

³² Ibid., p. 33.

³³ Ibid., p. 291.