[76-77. But not the praise, Phœbus replied, and touched my trembling ears.] The Fury cannot destroy the praise, which necessarily belongs to doing well. Praise here means the essential praise, which naturally inheres in excellence, and not the being talked about by men.
The speaker is now Phœbus, the august god Apollo, the pure one, who protects law and order, and promotes whatever is good and beautiful; who reveals the will of Zeus, and presides over prophecy.
Phœbus has now an admonition to give and he touches the poet’s ears; as in Virgil, Eclogue IV 3,—Cynthius aurem vellit et admonuit, “The Cynthian twitched my ear and warned me.”
[79. in the glistering foil Set off.] See Shakespeare, Richard III. V 3 250,—“A base foul stone, made precious by the foil of England’s chair.”
[85-86. O fountain Arethuse, and thou honored flood, Smooth-sliding Mincius.] Arethusa was a fresh-water fountain at Syracuse in Sicily, and the Mincius is a river in north Italy, on which is situated Mantua, the birthplace of the poet Virgil. The great pastoral poet Theocritus is said to have been born at Syracuse. Thus Arethusa and the Mincius typify the pastoral tone in which Milton conceives and constructs his poem. But the intervention of the great god Apollo has frighted the bucolic muses, to whom therefore the poet explains it, line 87.
[88.] Now I am on good terms again with the deities of lower rank. Oat is a common designation of the shepherd’s pipe, or syrinx.
[89-90.] Neptune, through his herald, Triton, pleads his freedom from all complicity in the drowning of Lycidas. Triton sends to Æolus, god of the winds, requesting him to cross-question all his subjects as to what they were doing on the day of the wreck.
[95-99.] The winds prove their innocence, and Æŏlus himself comes to report to Triton that at the time of the disaster they were all at home and the air was perfectly calm. Even Panope and all her sisters were out playing on the tranquil water.
[96. sage Hippotădes.] Æolus was the son of Hippotes. See all about him in Odyssey, book X. Read also Ruskin, Queen of the Air, section 19.
[99. Panope] was a Nereid, one of the numerous daughters of Nereus.