"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 passage. Mr. Masson 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 _shores_. 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 pronounced like it,
as in Marlowe's
"What, shall we _parlé_ with this Christïan?"
It certainly never meant _treaty_, though it may have meant
_negotiation_. When it did it implied the meeting face to face of the
principals. On the verses
"And some flowers and some bays
For thy hearse to strew the ways,"
he has a note to tell us that _hearse_ 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 hearse." How could one do that for a tomb or the
framework over it?
[374] A passage 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. Masson 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. Masson
does not seem to understand this elision, for he corrects _i' th'
midst_ to _i' the midst_, and takes pains to mention it in a note. He
might better have restored the _n_ in _i'_, where it is no
contraction, but merely indicates the pronunciation, as _o'_ for _of_
and _on_.
[382] Exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened to
two syllables.
[383] Milton himself has _ínvísible_, for we cannot suppose him
guilty of a verse like
"Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep,"
while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions
that he loved.