SAMSON (Attendant leading him).

A LITTLE onward a lend thy guiding hand
To these dark steps", a little further on :
For yonder bank hath choice of sun or shade:
There I am wont to sit, when any chance
Relieves me from my task of servile toil,
Daily in the common prison else enjoin'd me,
Where I, a prisoner, chain'd, scarce freely draw
The air imprison'd also, close and damp,
Unwholesome draught: but here I feel amends,
The breath of heaven fresh blowing, pure and sweet,
With day-spring born; here leave me to respire.—
This day a solemn feast the people hold

To Dagon their sea-idol", and forbid
Laborious works; unwillingly this rest
Their superstition yields me; hence with leave
Retiring from the popular noise, I seek
This unfrequented place to find some ease,
Ease to the body some, none to the mind

From restless thoughts, that, like a deadly swarm
Of hornets arm'd, no sooner found alone,

But rush upon me thronging, and present

a A little onward, &c.

Milton, after the example of the Greek tragedians, whom he professes to imitate, opens his drama with introducing one of its principal personages, explaining the story upon which it is founded.-T HYER.

The incident, however, and the formulary of the expression, are from the Hecuba of Euripides, who thus leads on the giant sorrows of Priam's aged queen :—

HEC. Lead me, ye Trojan dames, a little onward,

A little onward lead an aged matron,

Now your poor fellow-slave, but once your queen.

b To these dark steps.

So Tiresias in Euripides, "Phoenissa," ver. 841.-RICHARDSON.
The words of this opening are very poetical, beautiful, and affecting.

e For yonder bank.

The scene of this tragedy is much the same as that of the Œdipus Coloneus in Sophocles, where blind Edipus is conducted in like manner, and represented sitting upon a little hill near Athens: but yet I think there is scarcely a single thought the same in the two pieces; and I am sure the Greek tragedy can have no pretence to be esteemed better, but only because it is two thousand years older. -NEWTON.

Milton,

e To Dagon their sea-idol.

as Dr. Newton observes, both here and in the "Paradise Lost," follows the opinion of those who describe this idol as part man, part fish, b. i. 462. Some also describe the idol as part woman and part fish:

Desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne,

according to Calmet.-TODD.

But rush upon me thronging.

The whole of this passage is pathetic, moral, and full of force.

As of 1 person ezare a Gol

Design i år er eriors. Il mar de

Benny i zaprzeć mi ni ny ESPN

Made it my memies de I HI DESE;
Tind n razen im mier st

Whi dis heaven-ciri search ! @picious strength
Pit to the labour of a beast, feui

Lower than band-tie Primis was the I
Should Leriel from Philistan ke bellmer:
Ask for this great felverer 1, wi ini kin
Eyeless in Gaza at the ni v HUTES,
Himself in bonds mder Philistan joke:
Yet stay; let me not rashly all in drake
Divine prediction: what if all festud

Had been full'd bet through mine own default.
Whom have I to complain of bet myself!
Who this high gift of strength ocmined to me.
In what part lodged, how easily bereft me,
Under the seal of silence could not keep.
But weakly to a woman must reveal it,
O'ercome with importunity and tears.
O impotence of mind, in body strong!
But what is strength without a double share
Of wisdom? vast, unwieldy, burdensome,

What once I was, and what am now.

As in "Paradise Lost," book iv. 23:—

Now conscience wakes despair

That slumber'd, wakes the bitter memory

Of what he was, what is-TODD.

h Turice by an angel.

Once to his mother, and again to his father Manoah and his mother both; and the second time the angel ascended in the flame of the altar, Judges xiii. 3. 11. 20.-NEWTON, 1 Ask for this great deliverer now, &c.

being

This may be considered as political, referring to the prospects there were, not long before, of the republican party overturning monarchy; and to that lately victorious party now completely itself overcome, and subject to the yoke which it had once moved and trampled on.-DUNSTER.

But what is strength without a double share
Of wisdom ? &c.

Ovid, "Met." xiii. 363 :

Tu vires sine mente geris

tu tantum corpore prodes,

Nos animo: quantoque ratem qui temperat, &c.-JORTIN.

apparently re

33

Proudly secure, yet liable to fall

By weakest subtleties; not made to rule,
But to subserve where wisdom bears command!
God, when he gave me strength, to show withal
How slight the gift was, hung it in my hair.
But peace, I must not quarrel with the will
Of highest dispensation, which herein.
Haply had ends above my reach to know:
Suffices that to me strength is my bane,
And proves the source of all my miseries;
So many, and so huge, that each apart
Would ask a life to wail; but chief of all,
O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!
Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight

Annull'd, which might in part my grief have eased,
Inferiour to the vilest now become

Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me:

They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own;

Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half *.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,

And Horace, Od. 1. iv. 65 :

Vis consili expers mole ruit sua.-RICHARDSON.

Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.

75

80

In these lines the poet seems to paint himself. The litigation of his will produced a collection of evidence relating to the testator, which renders the discovery of those longforgotten papers peculiarly interesting: they show very forcibly, and in new points of view, his domestic infelicity, and his amiable disposition. The tender and sublime poet, whose sensibility and sufferings were so great, appears to have been almost as unfortunate in his daughters as the Lear of Shakspeare. A servant declares in evidence, that her deceased master, a little before his last marriage, had lamented to her the ingratitude and cruelty of his children: he complained that they combined to defraud him in the economy of his house, and sold several of his books in the basest manner. His feelings on such an outrage, both as a parent and scholar, must have been singularly painful: perhaps they suggested to him these very pathetic lines. - HAYLEY.

As it appears, from the latest discoveries relating to the domestic life of Milton, that his wife was particularly attentive to him, and treated his infirmities with much tenderness, this passage seems to restrict the time when this drama was written to a period previous to his last marriage, or at least nearly to that immediate time, while the singular ill-treatment of his daughters was fresh in his memory. This also coincides with what Mr. Hayley has observed respecting its being written immediately after the execution of Sir Henry Vane, which took place June 14, 1662. Milton was then in his fifty-fourth year, in which we are told he married his third wife. This would make the "Agonistes" at least three years anterior to the "Paradise Regained," of which we know he had not thought previous to the summer of 1665; when, on account of the plague raging in London, he retired to Chalfont, where an accidental expression of Elwood, on returning him the copy of "Paradise Lost," laid the foundation of the second poem. - DUNSTER.

H H

70

65

60

65

No 12 SÒu on the Nativ," ver. 146 :

ill Tubali ta cù, más à. #2 steering

Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be he,

That heroick, that renown'd,

Irresistible Samson? whom unarın'd

No strength of man, or fiercest wild beast, could withstand;

Who tore the lion, as the lion tears the kid;

115

120

125

Ran on embattel'd armies clad in iron;

And, weaponless himself,

Made arms ridiculous, uscless the forgery

Of brazen shield and spear, the hammer'd cuirass,

Chalybean temper'd steel', and frock of mail

Adamantëan proof?

But safest he who stood aloof,

When insupportably his foot advanced 3,

In scorn of their proud arms and warlike tools,

130

135

Spurn'd them to death by troops. The bold Ascate

Fled from his lion ramp"; old warriours turn'd

t

The old writers use it simply for moving. Thus Chaucer, in "The Flower and the Leaf:”— Stering so fast, that all the earth trembled.-HURD.

P Carelessly diffused.

This beautiful application of the word "diffused" Milton has borrowed from the Latins.

So Ovid,

"Ex Ponto," 11. iii. 7 :—

Publica me requies curarum somnus habebat,

Fusaque erant toto languida membra toro.-THYER.

A Made arms ridiculous.

This, it must be admitted, is prosaic.

Chalybean temper'd steel.

That is, the best tempered steel by the Chalybes, who were famous among the ancients for their iron works. Virg. "Georg." i. 58. "At Chalybes nudi ferrum."-NEWTON.

When insupportably his foot advanced.

For this nervous expression Milton was probably indebted to the following lines of Spenser, "Faery Queen," i. vii. 11 :—

That when the knight he spied, he 'gan advance

With huge force, and insupportable main.-THYER,

The bold Ascalonite.

The inhabitant of Ascalon, one of the five principal cities of the Philistiues, mentioned 1 Sam. vi. 17.-NEWTON.