Perfect in music, faultless in feeling, exquisite in refined simplicity of expression, this passage is hardly more beautiful and noble than one or two in the play which follows. "The Phoenix" is a quaint and homely compound of satirical realism in social studies with Utopian invention in the figure of an ideal prince, himself a compound of Harun-al-Rashid and "Albert the Good," who wanders through the play as a detective in disguise, and appears in his own person at the close to discharge in full the general and particular claims of justice and philanthropy. The whole work is slight and sketchy, primitive if not puerile in parts, but easy and amusing to read; the confidence reposed by the worthy monarch in noblemen of such unequivocal nomenclature as Lord Proditor, Lussurioso, and Infesto, is one of the signs that we are here still on the debatable borderland between the old Morality and the new Comedy--a province where incarnate vices and virtues are seen figuring and posturing in what can scarcely be called masquerade. But the two fine soliloquies of Phoenix on the corruption of the purity of law (act i. scene iv.) and the profanation of the sanctity of marriage (act ii. scene ii.) are somewhat riper and graver in style, with less admixture of rhyme and more variety of cadence, than the lovely verses above quoted. Milton's obligation to the latter passage is less direct than his earlier obligation to a later play of Middleton's from which he transferred one of the most beautiful as well as most famous images in "Lycidas": but his early and intimate acquaintance with Middleton had apparently (as Mr. Dyce seems to think[1]) left in the ear of the blind old poet a more or less distinct echo from the noble opening verses of the dramatist's address to "reverend and honorable matrimony." [Footnote 1: Mr. Dyce would no doubt have altered his opinion had he lived to see the evidence adduced by the Director of the New Meltun Society that the real author of "A Game at Chess" was none other than John Milton himself, whose earliest poems had appeared the year before the publication of that anti-papal satire. This discovery is only less curious and precious than a later revelation which we must accept on the same authority, that "Comus" was written by Sir John Suckling, "Paradise Regained" by Lord Rochester, and "Samson Agonistes" by Elkanah Settle: while on the other hand it may be affirmed with no less confidence that Milton--who never would allow his name to be spelled right on the title-page or under the dedication of any work published by him--owed his immunity from punishment after the Restoration to the admitted fact that he was the real author of Dryden's "Astraea Redux."]