To gain a sceptre, oftest better missed.'
All this, it may be truly said, is nothing more than the old teaching of Solomon, 'He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city' (Prov. xvi. 32). There has always been truth enough in the world which, if realized in men's lives, would soon bring about the millennium. But, unfortunately, it has only been born in their brains.
Great writers owe their power among men, not necessarily so much to a wide range of ideas or to the originality of their ideas, as to the vitality which they are able to impart to some one comprehensive fructifying idea with which, through constitution of mind, or circumstances, they have become possessed. It is only when a man is really possessed with an idea (that is, if it does not run away with him), that he can express it with a quickening power, and ring all possible changes upon it.
The passages quoted sufficiently show the kind of liberty which Milton estimated above all others, and to the advancement of which he devoted his best powers, for twenty years, and those years the best, generally, of a man's life, for intellectual and creative work, namely, from thirty-two to fifty-two. The last eight of those years he worked in total darkness, not bating a jot of heart or hope, sustained by the consciousness of having lost his eyes 'overplied in Liberty's defence'—'the glorious liberty,' more especially, 'of the children of God,' 'the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free,' without which, outward liberty he regarded as a temptation and a snare.
In addition to the absolute merit attaching to his labors in the cause of liberty, it must not be forgotten that he turned aside with a heroic self-denial, during all those years of his manhood's prime, from what he had, from his early years up, felt himself dedicated to, and toward fitting himself for the accomplishment of which, he had, with an unflagging ardor, trained and marshalled all his faculties.
COMUS
A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, before the Earl of Bridgewater, then President of Wales
Masques, in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I., were generally written for the entertainment of royalty and nobility. They were, besides, in most cases, presented by royal and noble persons. In their setting, they were in strong contrast to the public drama of the day, got up, as they were, with great magnificence of architecture, scenery, and 'appareling' (Ben Jonson's word for the apparatus of the scene), and frequently at an enormous expense. They were generally offset by grotesque and comic antimasques, which were played by common actors, dancers, and buffoons, from the public theatres. Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' was probably not written as a regular drama for the public stage, but as a masque, on the occasion of some noble marriage. 'The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe' presented by the 'rude mechanicals,' 'hard-handed men,' in the fifth act, is the antimasque. It offsets the Masque in a special way. The Masque makes great demands on the imagination in its presentation of the fairy world; the antimasque is absurdly realistic—nothing is left by the 'rude mechanicals' to the imagination.