[Footnote 28: On this subject, see Dr. Symons's Life of Milton, 71, 72.
ED.]
[Footnote 29: By the mention of this name, he evidently refers to Albumazar, acted at Cambridge, in 1614. Ignoramus, and other plays were performed at the same time. The practice was then very frequent. The last dramatick performance at either university, was the Grateful Fair, written by Christopher Smart, and represented at Pembroke college, Cambridge, about 1747. R.]
[Footnote 30: It has, nevertheless, its foundation in reality. The earl of Bridgewater, being president of Wales, in the year 1634, had his residence at Ludlow castle, in Shropshire, at which time lord Brackly and Mr. Egerton, his sons, and lady Alice Egerton, his daughter, passing through a place called the Haywood forest, or Haywood, in Herefordshire, were benighted, and the lady for a short time lost: this accident, being related to their father upon their arrival at his castle, Milton, at the request of his friend, Henry Lawes, who taught music in the family, wrote this masque. Lawes set it to music, and it was acted on Michaelmas night: the two brothers, the young lady, and Lawes himself, bearing each a part in the representation.
The lady Alice Egerton became afterwards the wife of the earl of Carbury, who, at his seat called Golden grove, in Caermarthenshire, harboured Dr. Jeremy Taylor in the time of the usurpation. Among the doctor's sermons is one on her death, in which her character is finely portrayed. Her sister, lady Mary, was given in marriage to lord Herbert, of Cherbury.
Notwithstanding Dr. Johnson's assertion, that the fiction is derived from Homer's Circe, it may be conjectured, that it was rather taken from the Comus of Erycius Puteanus, in which, under the fiction of a dream, the characters of Comus and his attendants are delineated, and the delights of sensualists exposed and reprobated. This little tract was published at Louvain, in 1611, and afterwards at Oxford, in 1634, the very year in which Milton's Comus was written. H. Milton evidently was indebted to the Old Wives' Tale of George Peele for the plan of Comus. R.]
[Footnote 31: This is inaccurately expressed: Philips, and Dr. Newton, after him, say a garden-house, i.e. a house situated in a garden, and of which there were, especially in the north suburbs of London, very many, if not few else. The term is technical, and frequently occurs in the Athen. and Fast. Oxon. The meaning thereof may be collected from the article, Thomas Farnaby, the famous schoolmaster, of whom the author says, that he taught in Goldsmith's rents, in Cripplegate parish, behind Redcross street, where were large gardens and handsome houses. Milton's house in Jewin street was also a garden-house, as were, indeed, most of his dwellings after his settlement in London. H.]
[Footnote 32: Johnson did not here allude to Philips's Theatrum Poetarum, as has been ignorantly supposed, but, as he himself informed Mr. Malone, to another work by the same author, entitled, Tractatulus de carmine dramatico poetarum veterum praesertim in choris tragicis et veteris comoediae. Cui subjungitur compendiosa enumeratio poetarum (saltern quorum fama maxima enituit) qui a tempore Dantis Aligerii usque ad hanc aetatem claruerunt, etc. J. B.]
[Footnote 33: Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew
Newcomen, William Spurstow. R.]
[Footnote 34: It was animadverted upon, but without any mention of Milton's name, by bishop Hall, in his Cases of Conscience, Decade 4, Case 2. J.B.]
[Footnote 35: He terms the author of it a shallow-brained puppy; and thus refers to it in his index: "Of a noddy who wrote a book about wiving." J.B.]