"The air was calm, and on the level brine
Sleek Panope and all her sisters played."

Suddenly the vessel struck on a rock, foundered, and all on board
perished except some few who escaped in a boat. Of King it was reported
that he refused to save himself, and sank to the abyss with hands folded
in prayer. Great sympathy was excited among his friends at Cambridge,
enough at least to evoke a volume of thirty-six elegies in various
languages, but not enough to inspire any of the contributors, except
Milton, with a poetical thought, while many are so ridiculous that
quotation would be an affront to King's memory. But the thirty-sixth is
"Lycidas." The original manuscript remains, and is dated in November. Of
the elegy's relation to Milton's biography it may be said that it sums
up the two influences which had been chiefly moulding his mind of late
years, the natural influences of which he had been the passive recipient
during his residence at Horton, and the political and theological
passion with which he was becoming more and more inspired by the
circumstances of the time. By 1637 the country had been eight years
without a parliament, and the persecution of Puritans had attained its
acme. In that year Laud's new Episcopalian service book was forced, or
rather was attempted to be forced, upon Scotland; Prynne lost his ears;
and Bishop Williams was fined eighteen thousand pounds and ordered to be
imprisoned during the King's pleasure. Hence the striking, if
incongruous, introduction of "The pilot of the Galilean lake," to
bewail, in the character of a shepherd, the drowned swain in conjunction
with Triton, Hippotades, and Camus. "The author," wrote Milton
afterwards, "by occasion, foretells the ruin of the corrupted clergy,
then in their height." It was a Parthian dart, for the volume was
printed at the University Press in 1638, probably a little before his