ABSTRACT
In his 1942 dedication of his Preface to Paradise Lost to his friend the poet and critic Charles Williams, C.S.Lewis remembers a lecture given by Williams at Oxford’s Divinity School:
There we elders heard (among other things) what we had long despaired of hearing-a lecture on Comus which placed its importance where the poet placed it-and watched “the yonge fresshe folkes, he or she,” who filled the benches listening first with incredulity, then with toleration, and finally with delight, to something so strange and new in their experience as the praise of chastity…of those who heard you in Oxford many will understand henceforward that when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted.1
