tragedies are condemned for “mixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons”—as Shakespeare does. In “Paradise Lost” the poet speaks with contempt of the romances whose “chief mastery” it was . . . to dissect, With long and tedious havoc, fabled knights In battles feigned. And in “Paradise Regained” he even disparages his beloved classics, preferring the psalms of David, the Hebrew prophecies and the Mosaic law, to the poets, philosophers, and orators of Athens. The Puritans were Old Testament men. Their God was the Hebrew Jehovah, their imaginations were filled with the wars of Israel and the militant theocracy of the Jews. In Milton’s somewhat patronizing attitude toward women, there is something Mosaic—something almost Oriental. He always remained susceptible to beauty in women, but he treated it as a weakness, a temptation. The bitterness of his own marriage experience mingles with his words. I need not cite the well-known passages about Dalila and Eve, where he who reads between the lines can always detect the figure of Mary Powell. There is no gallantry in Milton, but a deal of common sense. The love of the court poets, cavaliers and sonneteers, their hyperboles of passion, their abasement before their ladies he doubtless scorned as the fopperies of chivalry, fantastic and unnatural exaggerations, the insincerities of “vulgar amourists,” the fume of . . . court amour, Mixt dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, Or serenate which the starved lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. To the Puritan, woman was at best the helpmate and handmaid of man. Too often she was a snare, or a household foe, “a cleaving mischief far within defensive arms.” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are the only poems of Milton in which he surrenders himself spontaneously to the joy of living, to “unreproved pleasures free,” with no _arrière pensée_, or intrusion of the conscience. Even in those pleasant Horatian lines to Lawrence, inviting him to spend a winter day by the fire, drink wine, and hear music, he ends with a fine Puritan touch: He who of these delights can judge, yet spare To interpose them oft, is truly wise. “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” inquires Sir Toby of Shakespeare’s only Puritan. “Yes,” adds the clown, “and ginger shall be hot in the mouth, too.” And “wives may be merry and yet honest,” asserts Mistress Page.