so speaks Spenser; and Milton similarly-- He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i' the centre, and enjoy bright day: But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the mid-day sun; Himself is his own dungeon. In endeavouring still further to trace, by means of verbal or structural resemblances, the sources from which Milton drew his materials for _Comus_, critics have referred to Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_ (1595); to Fletcher's pastoral, _The Faithful Shepherdess_, of which Charles Lamb has said that if all its parts 'had been in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with _Comus_ or the _Arcadia_, to have been put into the hands of boys and virgins, to have made matter for young dreams, like the loves of Hermia and Lysander'; to Ben Jonson's mask of _Pleasure reconciled to Virtue_ (1619), in which Comus is "the god of cheer, or the Belly"; and to the _Comus_ of Erycius Puteanus (Henri du Puy), Professor of Eloquence at Louvain. It is true that Fletcher's pastoral was being acted in London about the time Milton was writing his _Comus_, that the poem by the Dutch Professor was republished at Oxford in 1634, and that resemblances are evident between Milton's poem and those named. But Professor Masson does well in warning us that "infinitely too much has been made of such coincidences. After all of them, even the most ideal and poetical, the feeling in reading _Comus_ is that all here is different, all peculiar." Whatever Milton borrowed, he borrowed, as he says himself, in order to better it.