Note 139 — INDEX TO THE NOTES.
Reading edition
nice; hard to please, fastidious: “a finely chosen epithet, expressing at once curious and squeamish” (Hurd). It is used by Comus in contempt: comp. ii. Henry IV. iv. 1, “Hence, therefore, thou nice crutch”; and see the index to the Globe Shakespeare. the Indian steep. In his Elegia Tertia Milton represents the sun as the “light-bringing king” whose home is on the shores of the Ganges (i.e. in the far East): comp. “the Indian mount,” Par. Lost, i. 781, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, xxvi., “ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas.”