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Updated: May 21, 2025
The hackneyed metaphor of Pegasus harnessed to a luggage trolley, will recur to us when we think of the author of L'Allegro, setting himself to compile a Latin lexicon. If there is any literary drudgery more mechanical than another, it is generally supposed to be that of making a dictionary.
The things which live in literature, the books which make a man worth editing a century or two after he is dead, are, after all, the creative and imaginative books. It is not in the hope of being edited that imaginative authors write. Milton did not compose L'Allegro in the spirit of desiring that it might be admirably annotated by a Scotch professor.
To his love of music we owe the melody of all his poetry, and we note it in the rhythm and balance which make even his mighty prose arguments harmonious. In "Lycidas," "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Arcades," "Comus," and a few "Sonnets," we have the poetic results of this retirement at Horton, few, indeed, but the most perfect of their kind that our literature has recorded.
The Lycidas treads closely in the steps of the Daphnis and Gallus of Virgil. The Sampson Agonistes is formed upon the model of Sophocles. Even the little pieces, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso have their source in a song of Fletcher, and two beautiful little ballads that are ascribed to Shakespeare. But the classical model upon which Comus was formed has not yet been discovered.
Eheu! quid volui miscro mihi! floribus anstrum Perditus The words are Virgil's, but the appropriation of them, and their application in this "second intention" is too exquisite to have been made by any but Milton.To the poems of the Horton period belong also the two pieces L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and Lycidas.
The tradition followed by Milton, who was eight years of age when Shakespeare died, and who wrote L'Allegro just after leaving Cambridge, makes Shakespeare "sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child," with "native wood-notes wild"; and gives to Jonson "the LEARNED sock." Fuller, like Milton, was born eight years before the death of Shakespeare, namely, in 1608. Like Milton he was a Cambridge man.
"Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures While the landscape round it measures. Towers and battlements it sees Bosomed high in tufted trees, Where perhaps some beauty lies The Cynosure of neighboring eyes." L'Allegro. The reference here is both to the Pole-star as the guide of mariners, and to the magnetic attraction of the North.
Some of Milton's most early, as well as mos't exquisite pieces, are his Lycidas, l'Allegro, and il Penseroso, if we may except his ode on the Nativity of Christ, which is, indeed, prior in order of time, and in which a penetrating critick might have observed the seeds of that boundless imagination, which was, one day, to produce the Paradise Lost."
He remembered too the honour such a type of creature had had in being lapt around for ever in the airy folds of L'Allegro. And to think that Mistress Jean, for whom everybody had such a respect, should speak of the creature in such a tone! it sent a thrill of horrific wonder and delight through the whole frame of the boy: might, could there be such creatures?
In 1632, having given up the idea of entering the Church, for which his f. had intended him, he lived for 6 years at Horton, near Windsor, to which the latter had retired, devoted to further study. Here he wrote L'Allegro and Il Penseroso in 1632, Arcades , Comus in 1634, and Lycidas in 1637.
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