The Ominous Wood

Milton’s entertainment, composed at the instance of Henry Lawes for the Welcome at Ludlow of John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater on assuming office as Lord President of Wales, had originally no other title than A Maske. Sir Henry Wootton, scholar, traveller and recipient from the author of the edition of 1637, Viewed the performance with singular delight, struck by the pastoral melli-fluousness of its lyric measures, and a certain Doric delicacy in the songs and odes …’, rather (added Thomas Warton, writing more than a century later) ‘than by its graver and more majestic tones’. To John Toland ¹ there was nothing extant in any language resembling ‘the peculiar disposition of the story, the sweetness of its numbers … and the moral it teaches’. Of these laudatory critics only one was an eye-witness and did not write with the hindsight which came to regard Comus, the title bestowed by Warton, as an early work by the author of Paradise Lost, less an entertainment of a recognised and recognisable kind than a moral exercise.