75 93 _The assault_ was an attack on London expected in 1642, when the troops of Charles I reached Brentford. 'Written on his door' was in the original title of this sonnet. Milton was then living in Aldersgate Street. _The Emathian Conqueror_: When Thebes was destroyed (B.C. 335) and the citizens massacred by thousands, Alexander ordered the house of Pindar to be spared. 7 -- l. 2, _the repeated air Of sad Electra's poet_: Plutarch has a tale that when the Spartan confederacy in 404 B.C. took Athens, a proposal to demolish it was rejected through the effect produced on the commanders by hearing part of a chorus from the _Electra_ of Euripides sung at a feast. There is however no apparent congruity between the lines quoted (167, 168 Ed. Dindorf) and the result ascribed to them. -- 95 A fine example of a peculiar class of Poetry;--that written by thoughtful men who practised this Art but little. Jeremy Taylor, Bishop Berkeley, Dr. Johnson, Lord Macaulay, have left similar specimens. 78 98 These beautiful verses should be compared with Wordsworth's great Ode on _Immortality_: and a copy of Vaughan's very rare little volume appears in the list of Wordsworth's library.--In imaginative intensity, Vaughan stands beside his contemporary Marvell. 79 99 _Favonius_: the spring wind. 80 100 _Themis_: the goddess of justice. Skinner was grandson by his mother to Sir E. Coke:--hence, as pointed out by Mr. Keightley, Milton's allusion to the _bench_. L. 8: Sweden was then at war with Poland, and France with the Spanish Netherlands. 82 103 l. 28 _Sidneian showers_: either in allusion to the conversations in the 'Arcadia,' or to Sidney himself as a model of 'gentleness' in spirit and demeanour. 85 105 Delicate humour, delightfully united to thought, at once simple and subtle. It is full of conceit and paradox, but these are imaginative, not as with most of our Seventeenth Century poets, intellectual only. 88 110 _Elizabeth of Bohemia_: Daughter to James I, and ancestor of Sophia of Hanover. These lines are a fine specimen of gallant and courtly compliment. 89 111 Lady M. Ley was daughter to Sir J. Ley, afterwards Earl of Marlborough, who died March, 1629, coincidently with the dissolution of the third Parliament of Charles' reign. Hence Milton poetically compares his death to that of the Orator Isocrates of Athens, after Philip's victory in 328 B.C. 93 118 A masterpiece of humour, grace, and gentle feeling, all, with Herrick's unfailing art, kept precisely within the peculiar key which he chose,--or Nature for him,--in his Pastorals. L. 2 _the god unshorn_: Imberbis Apollo. St. 2 _beads_: prayers. 96 123 With better taste, and less diffuseness, Quarles might (one would think) have retained more of that high place which he held in popular estimate among his contemporaries.