Note 358 — Chapter VII

I ought, perhaps, to apologize for thus alluding to these poems as subsequent to Comus, seeing that criticism usually places them some years earlier. There is, however, no external evidence of any kind, and to me the internal evidence of style points strongly to a later date. Possibly, since they are not fonnd in the Trinity MS., they were composed during Milton's travels, which would place them after Lycidas even, somewhere about 1638 or 1639. One of the ablest of our living critics, himself a close and original student of Milton, writes in a private letter: 'I long ago heard a good critic say that Comus seemed to him prentice work beside L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; and these do seem to me, I must confess, the maturer poems.' The point was raised by F. Byse in the Modern Language Quarterly for July, 1900, iii. p. 16.