How delicious is the address of the enchanter inviting to pleasure. It is Anacreon all over,

Braiding his locks with rosy twine,

Dropping odours, dropping wine.

The sophistry mingled with voluptuousness, in the address of Comus to the lady, is so subtly administered, that innocent virgins of the common race would, under such circumstances, never have unravelled it. Every sophism is a sophism only in present application; as when Comus asks:

Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,
Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks;
Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,
But all to please and sate the curious taste?

And where he says:

Beauty is nature's coin, must not be hoarded,
But must be current and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partaken bliss,
Unsavoury in th' enjoyment of itself;

If you let slip time, like a neglected rose

It withers on the stock with languish'd head.

In a circumscribed sense this is virtue and reason; in an unlimited, sensuality and profligacy. Comus, it must be confessed, has the poetry, and the lady the metaphysics of the dialogue. This is against our better taste, and is an unfortunate result of the poet's design. The loveliest lips argue contrary to our accustomed associations, but this difficulty could not have been avoided unless the successful defence of the lady had resulted from the common armour of the sex-her tears and entreaties. But Milton sought to paint a heroine, in order that the virtuous doctrines he would inculcate might not be lost, or the force of the moral weakened. The majesty of chilling Chastity could not be so well vindicated in a very woman, whose empire is naturally, as Rousseau observes, "an empire of softness, of address, of complacency, whose menaces are tears." It is to be recollected, also, that Milton's ideas of the sex were hardly favourable enough to the supposition, that a lady of the common stamp would have resisted temptation in a situation where, if she but hesitated a moment, she must have been lost past redemption. The soliloquy of the lady makes up in a great degree for the dry philosophy of her arguments with Comus. What fine painting, affluence of imagery, and noble apostrophes, adorn her speech! almost every line of which may be applied in some way of illustration. The personifications of different virtues are among the most beautiful in our language; though by one school of modern poetry the use of these has been censured as unnatural. How sweet is the apostrophe :

O welcome pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel girt with golden wings-
And thou unblemish'd form of Chastity!

But I must not quote too much from that to which all may easily refer, nor give the fine descriptions of music, showing Milton's ardent love for the sister art, beginning, "How sweetly did they float, &c." and

"At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound, &c." perhaps the two finest descriptions of the effect of music in our own, or any other language.

The address of Comus to the lady affords in itself a clear proof, that Milton did not intend that the enchanter should work the lady to his will by arguments which would have prevailed with most of her sex. He did not need to be informed of the easiest way to a woman's heart, when Satan was to tempt Eve by flattery and "glozing" words. Comus uses false reasoning, artfully coloured to look like truth. There is no attempt to move the passions of his victim; the poet's object being clearly to operate by the nobler faculty of man, and abandon natural passion. Having invested his characters with something above human frailty, he carried them through their parts on the same elevation; an altitude congenial to the sublimity of his genius, that was soon after to lead him to still loftier heights. In this view most objections made to Comus fall to the ground. I am the more anxious to press the subject in this point, because the time when the influence of nature's truth has held its widest dominion, is in the present day, and it is more than ever necessary to do away from the works of our sublimest poet what may at first sight appear to run counter to nature, and to show, that what might have seemed to do so, in Comus in particular, was the result of his aspirations to tread in more exalted paths than other mortals. The world of Milton was wholly intellectual; his mind pried into unearthly mysteries; its contemplations were in other spheres-wild and gigantic. The usual characteristics of mortality were too common-place for his pictures; he sought to create as well as develope, to astonish as well as attract, to instruct as well as delight. His march was above humanity altogether; it was out of the track of human footsteps; and the scenes of earth only served him for comparisons by which to make intelligible the objects in his own limitless universe. Comus is surrounded with unearthliness; its poetry sustains this character in a way that, if the author did not intend should be the case, and it is probable he did not, speaks the bent of his genius, and the solitary grandeur in which it towers above all competitors for the laurel of immortality. It is redolent with images of passing excellence, simplicity, and beauty.-"Leucothea's lovely hands" "Thetis's tinsel-slippered feet"—"Sabrina with chaste palms moist and cold;" and a hundred of those striking features, which image an original being to the imagination, without elaborating stature and complexion, buckle and clasp, casque, corslet, and robe, as is the fashion in more recent poetry :-it is the dash of a great artist's pencil, that gives the lineaments of the figure to the life, far more effectively than the finished and high-worked miniature. They must indeed be dead to the music of the sweetest song of the poet, who do not confess his power in Comus-whose feelings do not thrill with delight at its highly wrought passages, while its closing lines

Mortals that would follow me,
Love Virtue, she alone is free,
She can teach you how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if Virtue feeble were,

Heaven itself would stoop to her

shew what I would most insist upon, that Milton's object in Comus

was to personify virtue by characters superior to impulses prompted by common passion; and that with this object, he gave them an action inconsistent in a great degree with real life, but in unison with the peculiar character of his genius-a measure, that while it effected his object, rendered the poem inferior in interest to one founded on human fallibility. For the purest of mankind only was Comus written, and it can only be enjoyed to the full extent of its excellencies by the " in heart."

pure

Y. J.

PLAIN PREACHING.

A PRIEST-not such as Hogarth drew
With paunch rotund and visage red,
And eyes that glistering like dew
Protruded fatly from his head-
Yet still with look canonical,
Though feminine as any Molly,
Prank'd out in dandihood withal

To the top pitch of fashion's folly:

Full to the throat of Greek and college,

And words 'twould break the jaw to speak 'em,
Though he at best could only squeak 'em,

While doling forth his stock of knowledge
Asked to ascend a country rostrum,

And "hold forth" to the congregation;
Up-mounted to his proper station,
Carrying his black morocco nostrum

Fill'd with fine sentences omnigenous,
Words ne'er to man nor jay indigenous,

:

And moral axioms gleaned from heathen scribe,
Displayed his white hand decked with rings,
His cambric handkerchief, and things
That trap the eyes and hearts of lady-tribe.
He was the pink of parsons, essenced o'er
With nard and perfumes from a foreign shore.
He spoke of "theism," the "cosmogony"-
Of vice, that "autocrat pestiferous,"
Of" Hyperborean blasts frigoriferous,"
And how," disjunct" from home and prog any,
The "boding fowls" the prophet fed,
While "scistose rocks" composed his bed.

The pulpit's owner was a man of worth

Who loved, as Vicars should, his congregation,

And well he knew no mortal power on earth

Could make it comprehend his friend's oration—
Zounds, thought he, college men in this our day
Are sadly gone from good old rules astray,

I'll ne'er ask Finnikin to preach again-
The farmers stare; even Miss Deborah Screw,
Through all the parish noted as a
"blue,"

To understand will find no little pain.

The service o'er, the Vicar freely spoke,
"My brother Finnikin, it was no joke

For country folk to sit and hear your lecture

mary hose, wandered along the floor, seeming like the main roots of a giant oak in its senility, than the limbs of a man. His mantle of yellow frieze*, curiously embroidered at the edges, was thrown entirely from one shoulder, so as to reveal the bandel cloth vest, and studded bark belt beneath it, and streamed down in great plenitude of fold to the base of his oaken throne. His long hair was turned back in the ancient Glibb or Cooleen fashion, and surmounted by a burred or conical woollen cap: moreover, it was of so peculiar a complexion and wavy a nature, as (like the bard's of old) to be compared to a living stream of milk. His large features, worn as they were by time and mischance, bore an imposing similarity to a mouldering ruin of which sufficient masses remain to shew what it had been in the days of its glory. The transient smile upon the one, as the passing sunbeam upon the other, illumined but to expose. A wreath of the red sundried dillosk-weed, mingled with old laver, encircled his brows, and while his bony left hand wandered lovingly among the light tresses of a sleeping girl, he supported its fellow on one of the bends of a huge black staff, warped and scotched by nature or art into the figure of a snake. This was the Brehon King's sceptre, the symbol of his authority, and all in his domains paid implicit obedience to the laws promulgated by him who wielded it, for the time being, on the oaken log of ages. Tradition and legend were fertile in its honour, but neither Bard nor Shanaghos could narrate the story of its mysterious origin. The general belief was, that it had been vital, and would again resume its pristine nature, to the infinite peril of man, if ever the old Tanistry laws and Brehon Kings should be banished from Erin.

"My sons," said old Fergus to his attentive dilloskers, "you have heard enough from the Sassenach, to put every young limb among you in motion. Far be it from one who sits on the oak of old times, to rise up against the festivals which our fathers rejoiced in and honoured-above all, so sacred a one as that of the Wren on the holy tide of Saint Stephen-may the Bancointhaf wail over poor Onagh, the dear child of my child, when I do so! But, my sons, the honours of the day are done-you have ensnared the kingly little Wren on the brown furze-you have enthroned him in the green holly bush, set off with white love-knots and the fair tresses of your most comely virgins; you have carried him far and near in glory and state, and lastly, raised him above your broad board while feasting on what men have bestowed on you, as homage and gift to the king of all birds‡. 'Tis now near unto morning, and the reign of the Wren is over. Bestir yourselves, boys. Misfortune has come upon a crew of strangers on your coast. They are now, perhaps, watching with eager eyes for the remains of

*The choice colour of the old Irish.

The praises of the dead are sung prior to interment by the Bancointha or Cointaghaun, who is hired by the friends of the deceased for that purpose. A similar custom prevails among the Greeks. Les pleureuses publiques are mentioned by Pouqueville, in his Voyage en Morée, and there seems to be but little difference between their occupation and the Bancointha's. The whole ceremony of a burial, as described by him, approaches remarkably near to a rural wake and funeral in Ireland.

The Wren feast is still kept up in Munster with the ceremonies detailed by the Brehon.

helm a-lee and about ship!-a sail a-head here, all hands, yohoy!' Reuben roared, but 'twas too late. A sloop of a thing, wi' all aboard snoring under hatches, lay just neast our bows. We crushed upon her about midships, and rode her down awfully-most awfully, by G-d. A demurrage, for a second, succeeded the shock, and then on we went again as if nought had mattered. She proved to be a Dutch swab, lurking in yander seas for fish-or something richer may hap. To put about, or bring to, in time for help, was impossible-moreover every sand in the glass was gold to us. But the yawl was out, and three hearties, with the captain himself, and my fool of a boy here, wer' aboard her in a snatch. It got light in the nick, the moon having struck out from her black cloudy harbour into the broad blue sea of Heaven. We tugged aback wi' heart and sinew, but all was quiet and silent above and about the place where she went down, as a grave at midnight, and nought visible but the trailing feather o' foam which the strong brig left astern. I thought I heard a deep screech in the waters' below us-'twas fancy mayhap, but it hit me hard like a bullet. "Twas just as if my heart heard it afore my ear. It reminded me against my will o' the night when my old father sunk abaft the keel (as we say), long ago. Presently up shot a cask and a few spars, then a shoal of hake, skate, and your beggarly ling, some gasping, others quite dead wi' their white bellies and glazed eyes glittering in the moonlight. We heard a dash and a splutter windward, and upon looking about, to our awful wonder, eyed a little out-o'-sorts creature kicking and spluttering amid another troop o' floating milk-bellies, and laying among 'em wi' his arms, like a windmill in a hurricane. His face was lean, hard, and tawny. It looked like old gold horribly tarnished by time, but age could not wrinkle it. Sometimes he stood aloft, and clamouring kneedeep about in the sea; then he sunk fathoms, and we saw nought of him for a time again. We were one and all mortally gallied at the sight, but the captain. The yawl lay like a log upon the waters, while we stood to glowy at the wonder. Anon, however, the captain doffed woollens, and, dashing among the pieces of wreck that now covered the sea's face, grappled the tawny one, and towed him manfully alongside. Upon hauling him aboard, smite me, cousins, but there was a most enormous Hollander hanging by his legs, and he came up, clumsily wriggling in the wake, like a thumping chub at the tail of a fisherboy's muckworm, ha! ha! But I must tellee, the whole crew (three Dutchmen and a black boy) was saved by line or spar, and preciously swabbed was the captain about it; howsomever, just as we'd hove in sight of your blazing hearth, he tacked about, and bore away like a Geneva pink that has run full upon a king's ship in a fog.' As Jasper Trevenny concluded his tale, the dillosk-gatherers were summoned to front about to the hearth, by the deep voice of their patriarch and Brehon King, old Fergus Consadine the wise. The Cornishman, who had entered the hut with his boy to seek refreshment after landing the Hollanders, now beheld for the first time, as the dilloskers opened on either side, the gaunt old monarch of the beach. Although reposing on the oak-log, which had been the throne of his predecessors for ages, it was plain, that, when erect, he towered far above even those of surpassing stature who gathered around him. His huge legs, encased in dark brown leather trowsers instead of the custo