To CHARLES WILLIAMS

DEAR WILLIAMS,

When I remember what kindness I received and what
pleasure I had in delivering these lectures in the strange and
beautiful hillside College at Bangor, I feel almost ungrateful
to my Welsh hosts in offering this book not to them, but to
you. Yet I cannot do otherwise. To think of my own lecture
is to think of those other lectures at Oxford in which you
partly anticipated, partly confirmed, and most of all clarified
and matured, what I had long been thinking about Milton.
The scene was, in a way, medieval, and may prove to have
been historic. You were a vagus thrown among us by the chance
of war. The appropriate beauties of the Divinity School pro-
vided your background. There we elders heard (among other
things) what he 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 tolera-
tion, and finally with delight, to something so strange and new
in their experience as the praise of chastity. Reviewers, who
have not had time to re-read Milton, have failed for the most
part to digest your criticism of him; but it is a reasonable hope
that 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. It gives me a
sense of security to remember that, far from loving your work
because you are my friend, I first sought your friendship
because I loved your books. But for that, I should find it
difficult to believe that your short Preface1 to Milton is what
it seems to me to be--the recovery of a true critical tradition

-v-