[132.] spets, a form of spits (as spettle for spittle).
[133.] one blot, i.e. a universal blot: comp. Macbeth, ii. 2. 63. Milton first wrote, “And makes a blot of nature.”
[134.] Stay, here used causally = check. The radical sense of the word is ‘to support,’ as in the substantive stay and its plural stays. ebon, black as ebony. Ebony is so called because it is hard as a stone (Heb. eben, a stone); and the wood being of a dark colour, the name has become a synonym both for hardness and for blackness.
[135.] Hecat’, i.e. Hecatè (as in line [535]): a mysterious Thracian divinity, afterwards regarded as the goddess of witchcraft: for these reasons a fit companion for Cotytto and a fit patroness of Comus. Jonson calls her “the mistress of witches.” She was supposed to send forth at night all kinds of demons and phantoms, and to wander about with the souls of the dead and amidst the howling of dogs.
[136.] utmost end, full completion. Compare L’Alleg. 109, “the corn That ten day-labourers could not end,” where ‘end’ = ‘complete.’
[137.] dues: see [note], l. 12.
[138.] blabbing eastern scout, i.e. the tale-telling spy that comes from the East, viz. Morning.
[139.] nice; hard to please, fastidious: “a finely chosen epithet, expressing at once curious and squeamish” (Hurd). It is used by Comus in contempt: comp. ii. Henry IV. iv. 1, “Hence, therefore, thou nice crutch”; and see the index to the Globe Shakespeare. the Indian steep. In his Elegia Tertia Milton represents the sun as the “light-bringing king” whose home is on the shores of the Ganges (i.e. in the far East): comp. “the Indian mount,” Par. Lost, i. 781, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, xxvi., “ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas.”
[140.] cabined loop-hole: an allusion to the first glimpse of dawn, i.e. the peep of day. Comp. “Out of her window close she blushing peeps,” said of the morning (P. Fletcher’s Eclogues), as if the first rays of the sun struggled through some small aperture. ‘Cabined,’ literally ‘belonging to a cabin,’ and therefore small.
[141.] tell-tale Sun. Compare Spenser, Brit. Ida, ii. 3,