The Comus is constructed on the plan of the Italian _masque_, and belongs to that class of poems, which do not depend for their interest on any complication of plot or conflicts of intense passion, on dramatic unities or strange developments; startling scenes and horrible catastrophes. The poem rather claims and commands our admiration for the Doric simplicity of its structure, than for any gay and glittering forms of poetic architecture. Though dramatic in its plan, the Mask—while it has the simplest form of the drama—is essentially lyric, especially in the carol of the Water Nymph and the song of the attendant spirit, which constitutes a kind of delicious epilogue to the piece, and concludes with a beautiful moral lesson: Mortals, that would follow me, Love Virtue; she alone is free: She can teach you how to climb Higher than the sphery chime; Or if Virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her. Indeed, the whole design and execution of the poem is evidential of that purity of mind, that chasteness of the imagination, so nobly distinguishing all the productions of this first of poets. There is no reason why Shakspeare should not have maintained the same elevated tone of morality and purity in his immortal works, but that he was destitute of those religious principles, which purify the heart, and, indeed, clarify all the powers of the mind. The polluting habits of his early life, so closely connected with the stage, when it was in its deepest debasement, contributed to this malformation of his moral character. Let it not be said it was rather the “fault of the age” than of the individual. Milton was of that age. There was little more than a generation between them. But the poet was not ensnared either with the conspicuous examples of vice before him or around him. In the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, he shone as a light of superior brilliancy, entering upon the responsibilities and trials of life, with a heart full of love for freedom, and of hatred of tyrants, just at that illustrious period of the world, when the genius of Liberty had set her foot on these North American shores.