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Milton's Comus

Note 150 — COMUS.

Reading edition

charms ... wily trains; i.e. spells ... cunning allurements. Charm is the Lat. carmen, a song, also used in the sense of ‘magic verses’; wily = full of wile (etymologically the same as guile). Train here denotes an artifice or snare as in ‘venereal trains’ (Sams. Agon. 533): “Oh, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note” (Com. of Errors, iii. 2. 45). See Index, Globe Shakespeare. Some would take ‘wily trains’ as = trains of wiles.

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