_Histriomastix_, and as a natural consequence, the loyal and cavalier
portion of society threw itself into dramatic amusements of every
kind. It was an unreal revival of the Mask, stimulated by political
passion, in the wane of genuine taste for the fantastic and
semi-barbarous pageant, in which the former age had delighted. What
the imagination of the spectators was no longer equal to, was to
be supplied by costliness of dress and scenery. Those last
representations of the expiring Mask were the occasions of an
extravagant outlay. The Inns of Court and Whitehall vied with each
other in the splendour and solemnity with which they brought out,--the
Lawyers, Shirley's _Triumph of Peace_,--the Court, Carew's _Coelum
Britannicum_.

It was a strange caprice of fortune that made the future poet of the
Puritan epic the last composer of a cavalier mask. The slight plot, or
story, of _Comus_ was probably suggested to Milton by his recollection
of George Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_, which he may have seen on the
stage. The personage of _Comus_ was borrowed from a Latin extravaganza
by a Dutch professor, whose _Comus_ was reprinted at Oxford in
1634, the very year in which Milton wrote his _Mask_. The so-called
tradition collected by Oldys, of the young Egertons, who acted in
_Comus_, having lost themselves in Haywood Forest on their way to
Ludlow, obviously grew out of Milton's poem. However casual the
suggestion, or unpromising the occasion, Milton worked out of it a
strain of poetry such as had never been heard in England before. If
any reader wishes to realise the immense step upon what had gone
before him, which was now made by a young man of twenty-seven, he
should turn over some of the most celebrated of the masks of the
Jacobean period.