[73] 89 l. 6 ore: rays of golden light. Doric lay (l. 25) Sicilian, pastoral.
[75] 93 The assault was an attack on London expected in 1642, when the troops of Charles I reached Brentford. 'Written on his door' was in the original title of this sonnet. Milton was then living in Aldersgate Street.
The Emathian Conqueror: When Thebes was destroyed (B.C. 335) and the citizens massacred by thousands, Alexander ordered the house of Pindar to be spared.
[76] — l. 2, the repeated air Of sad Electra's poet: Plutarch has a tale that when the Spartan confederacy in 404 B.C. took Athens, a proposal to demolish it was rejected through the effect produced on the commanders by hearing part of a chorus from the Electra of Euripides sung at a feast. There is however no apparent congruity between the lines quoted (167, 168 Ed. Dindorf) and the result ascribed to them.
— 95 A fine example of a peculiar class of Poetry;—that written by thoughtful men who practised this Art but little. Jeremy Taylor, Bishop Berkeley, Dr. Johnson, Lord Macaulay, have left similar specimens.
[78] 98 These beautiful verses should be compared with Wordsworth's great Ode on Immortality: and a copy of Vaughan's very rare little volume appears in the list of Wordsworth's library.—In imaginative intensity, Vaughan stands beside his contemporary Marvell.
[79] 99 Favonius: the spring wind.
[80] 100 Themis: the goddess of justice. Skinner was grandson by his mother to Sir E. Coke:—hence, as pointed out by Mr. Keightley, Milton's allusion to the bench. L. 8: Sweden was then at war with Poland, and France with the Spanish Netherlands.
[82] 103 l. 28 Sidneian showers: either in allusion to the conversations in the 'Arcadia,' or to Sidney himself as a model of 'gentleness' in spirit and demeanour.