P. 83, No. lxxxv. l. 133, 134: These lines are very perplexing. Milton’s lines on Shakespeare abundantly attest that the true character of the greatness of England’s greatest poet rose distinct and clear before the mind of him who in greatness approached him the nearest. But in this couplet can we trace any sense of the same discernment? ‘Fancy’s child’ may pass, seeing that ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ were not effectually desynonymized when Milton wrote; nay, ‘fancy’ was for him the greater name (see _Paradise Lost_, v. 100-113). ‘Sweetest’ Shakespeare undoubtedly was, but then the sweetness is so drawn up into the power, that this is about the last epithet one would be disposed to use about him. And then what could Milton possibly have intended by ‘his native woodnotes wild’--the sort of praise which might be bestowed, though with no eminent fulness, upon Clare, or a poet of his rank. The _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ and _As You Like It_ are perhaps the most idyllic of his plays; but the perfect art controlling at every step the prodigality of nature, in these as in all his works, takes away all fitness from language such as this, and I can only wonder that of all the commentators on Milton not one has cared to explain to us what the poet here meant. P. 87, No. lxxxvi. l. 18: Memnon, king of Ethiopia (nigri Memnonis arma, Virgil), who according to the cyclic poets was slain before the walls of Troy by Achilles, is described in the _Odyssey_, xi. 522, as the most beautiful of the warriors there. A sister of his might therefore be presumed to be beautiful no less. Milton did not, as some say, invent the sister. Mention is made of her, her name is Hemera (Ήμἑρα), in Dictys Cretensis. It is she who pays the last honours to the ashes of her brother.--l. 19: Cassiopeia, ‘starred’ as having been translated into the heaven, and become a constellation there. She offended the Nereids by contesting the prize of beauty with them. Milton concludes that as an Ethiopian she was black, but this is nowhere said.--l. 108-115: Milton does not introduce Chaucer in his _Allegro_, but in his _Penseroso_; seeing in him something beside ‘the merry bard,’ which is all that Addison can see in the most pathetic poet in the English language.--l. 116-120: Spenser is here alluded to, of course--‘our sage and serious poet, Spenser,’ as Milton loved to call him. Contrast his judgment of Spenser’s allegory, as being something ‘Where more is meant than meets the ear;’ with Addison’s, ‘The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, While the dull moral lies too plain below.’