merry at forty year," having seen his earlier Gillian and Marian and a
score more happily married. She is, in fact, the domestic magician,
the good fairy, the genius of home, the thoughtful, tactful, careful,
intelligent house-keeper, the very she whom Milton sings, introducing
us to

"Herbs and other country messes
Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses."

Her name is Phillis--not exactly a romantic name, nor, indeed, is it
meant by the poet to be a romantic name; for he has just before
sketched another kind of woman:

"Towers and battlements it sees
Bosom'd high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The cynosure of neighboring eyes."

Such a cynosure could not possibly have been named Phillis: Artemis,
perhaps, or Hildegarde; Constance, Una, Mildred, or Cunigunda, but by
no possibility Phillis. That is a pastoral name, a shepherd's
sweetheart. Indeed, the two kinds of women are perfectly indicated and
distinguished in these lines of _L'Allegro_, which have no detail of
description. The impression of womanly difference is nowhere more
completely given. One picture is that of the lofty, haughty, "highborn
Helen," the superb Lady Clara Vere de Vere; the other is that of the
thrifty Baucis, the gardener Adam's wife. And the two are as near in
the young man's heart as they are in the poem.

When Mr. William Guppy raised his eyes from the pit of the theatre to