Note 186 — INSCRIBED ON THE BLANK LEAVES OF THE POEM MADOC.

l. 19. To Verse—Paradise Lost, which, through the long period intervening between its first publication, in the author’s life-time, and Addison’s Essays upon it in the Spectator, met little public notice, while his equally beautiful lesser works, Lycidas, Comus, L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso, were scarcely known at all, till more than seventy years after his death.