759. _pranked_: set off, adorned, decked.
760. _bolt_: sift, refine; a metaphor from the process of separating flour from the bran. But the word may mean, as Dr. Newton explains, 'to shoot,' or, as Dr. Johnson explains, 'to blurt out, or throw out precipitantly.'
785. _the sublime notion_: see in extract from 'Apology for Smectymnuus,' in this volume.
788. _worthy_: deserving, in a bad sense.
790. _your dear wit_: the change from 'thy' to 'your' is not explainable here.
791. _her dazzling fence_: dear wit's and gay rhetoric's dazzling art of fencing. Todd quotes from Prose Works, 'Hired Masters of Tongue-fence': 'dear wit' and 'gay rhetoric,' not constituting a compound idea in Milton's mind, the relative 'that,' of which they are the antecedents, takes a singular verb, and the two nouns are represented by the singular personal pronoun 'her.' In the following passage from Spenser's 'Faerie Queene,' B. II. C. ii. St. 31, two subjects take a singular verb, and are represented by a singular personal pronoun:
'But lovely concord, and most sacred peace, Doth nourish vertue, and fast friendship breeds; Weake she makes strong, and strong thing does increace.'
The italicized portion of the following passage from 'The Passions and Faculties of the Soul,' by Reynolds, C. xxxix, given in Trench's 'Select Glossary,' _s.v._ Wit, defines well 'dear wit': 'I take not _wit_ in that common acceptation, whereby men understand _some sudden flashes of conceit whether in style or conference, which, like rotten wood in the dark, have more shine than substance, whose use and ornament are, like themselves, swift and vanishing, at once both admired and forgotten_. But I understand a settled, constant and habitual sufficiency of the understanding, whereby it is enabled in any kind of learning, theory, or practice, both to sharpness in search, subtilty in expression, and despatch in execution.'
797. _brute_: senseless; _lend her nerves_: _i.e._ to this sacred vehemence.
804. _speaks thunder_: threatens thunder and the chains of Erebus to some of the Titans who are disposed to be rebellious in their imprisonment in Tartarus. It seems to be meant that Erebus is a more painful region than that into which they were cast after their defeat by Jove (Zeus).