Fill'd her with thee a daughter fair, Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles, 23. Fill'd her, &c.] From Gower's song in Pericles Prince of Tyre, act i. s. 1. See Malone's Suppl. Sh. ii. 7. This king unto him took a phear, Vos adeste, rursus, 27. Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles.] A quip is a satirical joke, a smart repartee. See Jonson's Cynthia's Revels, act ii. s. 4. Shakespeare, First P. Hen. IV. act i. s. 2. and in other places. By cranks, a word yet unexplained, we are to under 25 Spenser, F. Q. vii. vii. 52. the involutions of the planets. To crank, in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, is to cross, wind, double, &c. The verb crankle, with the same sense, but its frequentative, occurs more than once in Drayton. Our author has cranks, which his context explains, Pr. W. i. 165. “To "shew us the ways of the Lord, "strait and faithful as they are, "not full of cranks and contra"dictions." T. Warton. Crank, any conceit formed by twisting or changing the form or meaning of a word. Johnson. 28. Nods and becks, and wreathed smiles, Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek.] Compare a stanza in Burton's Anatomie of Melancholy, p. 449. ed. 1628. With becks and nods he first beganne, &c. And Richard Brathwayte's Shepheard's Tales, Lond. 1621. p. 201. some stand cross-purposes, or other similar conceit of conversation, surprising the company by its intricacy, or embarrassing by its difficulty. Such were the festivities of our simple ancestors! Cranks, literally taken, in Coriolanus, act i. s. 1. signify the ducts of the human body. In Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And in thy right hand lead with thee, Trip and go 30 35 In Love's Labour Lost, is part of another, or the same, Trip and 'go, my sweet." A. iv. s. 2. So also in Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament, 1600. "Trip "and go, heave and hoe," &c. T. Warton. 36. The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;] I suppose Liberty is called the mountain nymph, because the people in mountainous countries have generally preserved their liberties longest, as the Britons formerly in Wales, and the inhabitants of the mountains of Switzerland at this day. 36. Milton was not so political here. Warmed with the poetry of the Greeks, he rather thought of the Oreads of their mythology, whose wild haunts among the romantic mountains of Pisa are so beautifully described in Homer's hymn to Pan. The allu sion is general to inaccessible and uncultivated scenes, such as mountainous situations afford, and which were best adapted to the free and uninterrupted range of the nymph Liberty. So he compares Eve to an Oread, P. L. ix. 387. See also El. v. 127. T. Warton. And if I give thee honour due, Mirth, admit me of thy crew To live with her, and live with thee, To hear the lark begin his flight, And singing startle the dull night, 40. In unreproved pleasures free.] Blameless, innocent, as in P. L. iv. 492. -with eyes Of conjugal attraction unreproved. So Spenser has "unreproved "truth." Sandys unreproved "kisses." Drayton, "I may "safely play and unreproved." T. Warton. 41. To hear the lark begin his flight, &c.] At the same time that Milton delights our imagination with this charming scene of rural cheerfulness, he gives us a fine picture of the regularity of his life, and the innocency of his own mind. The principal circumstances are taken from the earliest dawn of the morning, and prove the truth of what he says of himself in his Apology for Smectymnuus," that he was up and stirring, in winter "often ere the sound of any bell "awake men to labour, or to devotion; in summer as oft "with the bird that first rouses, 66 or not much tardier, to read good authors, &c:" and few minds, I believe, but such as are innocent and unstained with guilty pleasures have any great taste for these pure and genuine ones which the poet describes. Thyer. 40 41. See an elegant little song in Lilly's Alexander and Campaspe, presented before Queen Elizabeth, a. v. s. 1. The larke so shrill and cleare, The morne not waking till she sings. See the notes on P. L. v. 198. and P. R. ii. 279. There is a peculiar propriety in startle: the lark's is a sudden shrill burst of song. Both in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso there seem to be two parts, a day-piece, and a night-piece. Here, or with three or four of the preceding lines, our author begins to spend the day with mirth. T. Warton. 44. the dappled dawn] The word is used and explained in Shakespeare. Much Ado about Nothing, act v. sc. 8. -and look the gentle day, Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about Dapples the drowsy east with spots of gray. 44. So also Drummond, Sonnets, ed. 1616. signat. D. 2. Sith, winter gone, the sunne in dapled skie Now smiles on medowes, mountaines, hills, and plaines. T. Warton. Then to come in spite of sorrow, And at my window bid good morrow, Through the sweet-briar, or the vine, Or the twisted eglantine: While the cock with lively din And to the stack, or the barn-door, 45. Then to come in spite of sorrow,] These two poems, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, are certainly the best of Milton's productions in rhyme, for the rhymes in Lycidas are irregular: but yet we may observe that several things are said, which would not have been said but only for the sake of the rhyme, and we have an instance, I conceive, in the line before us. Mr. Pope, I have been informed, had remarked several defects of the same kind in these two poems; and there may be some truth and justness in the observation, which Dryden has made in the dedication of his Juvenal, that "rhyme was not Milton's talent, " he had neither the ease of doing "it, nor the graces of it;" but then it must be said, that he had talents for greater things, and there is more harmony in his blank verse than in all the rhyming poetry in the world. 46. And at my window bid good morrow,] Sylvester's Du Bartas, in the Cave of Sleep, p. 315. ed. 1621. -Cease, sweet chantecleere, VOL. III. Again, ibid. p. 70. But cheerful birds chirping him sweet Milton perhaps remembered Virgil in these descriptions of the morning, and the morning sounds; Evandrum ex humili tecto lux sus- Et matutini volucrum sub culmine And Gray certainly copied both The breezy call of incense-breathing The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, and the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed. E. 47, 48. Sweet-briar and eglantine are the same plant. By the twisted eglantine he therefore means the honeysuckle. T. Warton. 54. Rouse the slumb'ring morn,] Compare an elegant triplet of an obscure poet, John Habington, Castara, ed. 1640. p. 8. D d From the side of some hoar hill, Through the high wood echoing shrill: Some time walking not unseen 55 By hedge-row elms, on hillocs green, The nymphes with quivers shall Their active sides, and rouse the state, &c.] Here is an allusion to a splendid or royal procession. Gray has adopted the first of these lines in his Descent of Odin. The eastern gate is a common image. See Milton's poem In Quintum Novembris, 133. Drayton, Polyolb. st. xiii. Shakespeare, Mids. Ñ. Dr. a. iii. s. 9. Compare also Browne, Brit. Past. b. i. s. v. and b. ii. s. iii. And Tasso, c. xiv. 3. T. Warton. 62. The clouds in thousand liveries dight,] And so in Il Pen seroso, And storied windows richly dight. Dight, dressed, adorned; a word used by Spenser, and our old writers. Faery Queen, b. i. cant. iv. st. 6. With rich array and costly arras dight. Fairfax, cant. i. st. 72. 60 So every one in arms was quickly dight. 62. Literally from a very puerile poetical description of the morning in one of his academic Prolusions. Ipsa quoque tellus in adventum solis, cultiori se induit vestitu, nubesque juxta variis chlamydata coloribus, pompa solenni, longoque ordine, videntur ancillari surgenti Deo. Pr. W. vol. ii. p. 586. This morning landscape of L'Allegro has served as a repository of imagery for all succeeding poets on the same subject. Much the same circumstances however, amongst others, are assembled by the author of Britannia's Pastorals, who wrote above thirty years before, b. iv. s. iv. p. 75. ed. 1616. By this had chanticlere, the village. clocke, Bidden the good wife for her maides to knocke: And the swart plowman for his breakfast staid, That he might till those lands were fallow laid: The hills and vallies here and there resound With the re-ecchoes of the deepe mouth'd hound: Each sheapherd's daughter with her cleanly peale, Was come afield to milke the morn ings meale; |