smilingness, and finds us at home when we most seem to have gone out of ourselves.

It is observable, that in proportion as the critic possesses something of poetry himself, or the poet rises in the enthusiasm of his art, he gets above this kind of prejudice. What are styled "fooleries" by Warbur ton are called "liberal and elegant amusements" by Warton; and what were neglected by the wits of Charles the Second's day for French rhetoric, rhyming tragedies, and the conceits of the corrupted Italian school (for when writers talk of the conceits of the Italians, they are speaking of what the Italians themselves condemn) were praised and practised by the men, who, by universal consent, are at the head of our native poetry.

Had our great poets indeed stopped short of actual practice in this instance, it would be clear from a variety of passages in their works, what hold these gorgeous and fanciful exhibitions had taken on their minds. Pageant and Mask are common terms in

Shakspeare and Spenser for something more than ordiMarily striking in the way of vision; they often furnish them with resemblances and reflections; and a great deal of the main feature of the Faerie Queen has with great probability been traced to the influence of these congenial spectacles. Milton, it is true, who objected to kings on earth and filled heaven with regalities, who denied music to chapel-goers and allowed it to angels,-who would have had nothing brilliant in human worship and sprinkled the pavement before the deity's throne with roses and amaranths,-has a passage in which he speaks contemptuously of

Court-amours,

Mix'd dance, or wanton Mask, or midnight ball;*

but it was after he had learnt to quarrel with the graces of the world, as something which Providence had sent us only to deny ourselves. He is speaking here too of the entertainment in it's abuse rather than it's pro

* Parad. Lost, Book v.

per character. In his younger, happier, and it may be added, not less poetical days, he counted

Mask and antique Pageantry

among the rational pleasures of cheerfulness, and gave them perhaps the very highest as well as most lovely character of abstract and essential poetry, by calling them

Such sights as youthful poets dream

On summer eves by haunted stream.*

In short, Comus had been the result of his early feelings; and it was curious, that he who inveighed against Masks in his more advanced age, should have been fated to leave to posterity the very piece by which this species of composition is chiefly known.

Comus, however, though an undoubted Mask in some

* L'Allegro.

t

respects, as in it's magic, it's route of monsters, and it's particular allusion to an event in the noble family that performed it, is more allied, from it's regularity of story and it's deficiency in scenic shew, to the Favole Boschereccie, or Sylvan Tales of the Italian poets, which had just then been imitated and surpassed by the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher. A Mask may be pastoral or not as it pleases; but scenic shew and personification are, upon the whole, it's distinguishing features; and Milton, with the Faithful Shepherdess on his table (his evident prototype), was tempted to deviate more and more from the title of his piece by the new charm that had come upon him.

On the other hand, Spenser, who appears at one time to have written a set of Pageants, has introduced into his great poem an allegorical procession into which Upton conjectures them to have been worked up,* and which the author has expressly called a "Maske,"

* See a note on the passage. Todd's Spenser, vol. 5. p. 106— 1805.

by a

though it is in the other extreme of Comus, and has nothing but shew about it. It is in Book the third, Canto the twelfth, where Britomart, in the strange Castle, and in the silence and solitude of night, is awaked "shrilling trumpet," and after a storm of wind and thunder, with the clapping of doors, sees the "Maske of Cupid" issue from the Enchanted Chamber, and pace about her room. The whole scene is in his noblest style of painting; but as it is only a mute spectacle, and that too rather described than acted, it does not include the dramatic character necessary to complete the more general idea of the Mask.

The Mask which is introduced in the Tempest, and which Warburton had unluckily forgotten when he thought to countenance his opinion of these "foolèries" by saying that Shakspeare had written none,* is a much completer thing of it's kind. In addition to supernatural agency, it has songs and a dialogue, and is called up by Prospero for the purpose of celebrat

* Note to Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Sc. 4.