If, as we should like to think, he was himself present, the scene must have enriched his memory and his mind.
The castle--in which Prince Arthur had spent with his Spanish bride the six months of life which alone remained to him, in which eighteen years before the performance Charles the First had been installed Prince of Wales with extraordinary magnificence, and which, curiously enough, was to be the residence of the Cavalier poet, Butler--would be a place of resort for English tourists, if it adorned any country but their own.
The dismantled keep is still an imposing object, lowering from a steep hill around whose base the curving Teme alternately boils and gushes with tumultuous speed.

The scene within must have realized the lines in the "Allegro ": "Pomp, and feast, and revelry, Mask and antique pageantry, Where throngs of knights and barons bold, In weeds of peace high triumphs hold, With store of ladies, whose bright eyes Rain influence." Lawes himself acted the attendant Spirit, the Lady and the Brothers were performed by Lord Bridgewater's youthful children, whose own nocturnal bewilderment in Haywood Forest, could we trust a tradition, doubted by the critics, but supported by the choice of the neighbourhood of Severn as the scene of the drama, had suggested his theme to Milton.
He is evidently indebted for many incidents and ideas to Peele's "Old Wives' Tale," and the "Comus" of Erycius Puteanus; but there is little morality in the former production and little fancy in the latter.

The peculiar blending of the highest morality with the noblest imagination is as much Milton's own as the incomparable diction.

"I," wrote Sir Henry Wootton on receiving a copy of the anonymous edition printed by Lawes in 1637, "should much commend the tragical part if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language." "Although not openly acknowledged by the author," says Lawes in his apology for printing prefixed to the poem, "it is a legitimate offspring, so lovely and so much desired that the often copying of it hath tired my pen to give my several friends satisfaction, and brought me to a necessity of producing it to the public view." The publication is anonymous, and bears no mark of Milton's participation except a motto, which none but the author could have selected, intimating a fear that publication is premature.

The title is simply "A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle," nor did the piece receive the name of "Comus" until after Milton's death.
It has been remarked that one of the most characteristic traits of Milton's genius, until he laid hand to "Paradise Lost," is the dependence of his activity upon promptings from without.