No single volume has ever contained so much fine English verse by an unknown or almost unknown poet. It is true that _Lycidas_ and _Comus_ had been printed before, but _Comus_ had appeared anonymously and {91} _Lycidas_ had been signed only with initials. So that only friends, or people behind the scenes in the literary world, could know anything of Milton's poetry. Nor does he seem to have been very anxious that they should. The other contributors to the volume in memory of Edward King gave their names: the only signature to _Lycidas_ is J. M. It was Lawes the composer, not Milton the author, who published _Comus_ in 1637. Milton's feelings about it are indicated by the motto on the title page-- "Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus Austrum Perditus--" Quotations can often say for us what we cannot say for ourselves. What Virgil says for Milton is "Alas what is this that I have done? poor fool that I am, could not I have kept my tender buds of verse a little longer from the cutting blasts of public criticism?" Yet no one knew better than Milton that _Comus_ was incomparably the greatest of the masks. So in the sonnet on reaching the age of twenty-three he says that his "late spring no bud or blossom shew'th." Yet he had already written the _Ode on the Nativity_, a performance sufficient, one would have {92} thought, to give a young poet reasonable self-satisfaction in what he had done, as well as confidence in what he would be able to do. Nor was Milton in the ordinary sense, or perhaps in any, a humble man. Of that false kind of humility, too often recommended from the pulpit, which consists in a beautiful woman trying to suppose herself plain, or an able man trying to be unaware of his ability, no man ever had less than Milton. Neither from himself nor from others did he ever conceal the fact that he was a man of genius. In his eyes no kind of untruth, however specious, could be a virtue. But of a finer humility, built on truth, he was not without his share. The truly humble man may be a genius and may know it and may never affect to deny it: he may know that he has done great things, far greater than have been done by the men he sees around him: but he is not judging himself by the standard of other men: he has another standard, that of "the perfect witness of all-judging Jove," that of "as ever in my great Taskmaster's eye," and of that he knows how very far he has fallen short. Of this nobler humility Milton had something all his life and in his youth much. It is this which reconciles the apparent inconsistency between his many proud {93} confessions that he knows himself to be a man called to do great things and his reluctance to let the world see what he had already done: between his keeping _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ ten years unpublished and his preserving and ultimately publishing almost everything he had ever written, even to scraps of boyish and undergraduate verse.