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by opposition from earth and heaven which his hero was to sustain and finally, by the assistance of the fates and of Jupiter, to overcome, the poet closes the awful recital with this majestic line—

Tanta molis erat Romanam condere gentem.

So great a toil it was to found imperial Rome.

This was spoken of a mighty empire which was to extend over the world and to endure for a succession of ages: but an Arab camp may be planted in one day, and its vestiges may be effaced by the wind of the desert in another.

Having completed his intended residence at Naples, he addressed himself to the execution of the remaining part of his plan of travel which extended to Sicily and Greece; those regions on which the classic imagination loves to dwell, which it invests with unfading green and brightens with perpetual sunshine. The fancy of Milton was, no doubt, strongly excited by the approach of that time when he was to tread the vales of Enna and of Tempe, the plains on which Gelon and Miltiades had triumphed for the liberty of Greece over Carthage and Persia, the favoured spot where Theocritus had charmed the ear with his Doric melodies,

or Euripides had drawn tears with his pathetic scene. But the dream of fancy was soon to be interrupted, and duty required a privation to which our traveller did not hesitate to submit. As he was preparing for his passage to Sicily, he received letters from England, acquainting him with the distracted state of his country and with the near prospect, which affrighted it, of a civil war. His own account on this occasion is concise and impressive.

"As I was desirous," he says, "to pass into Sicily and Greece, the melancholy intelligence from England of the civil war recalled me: for I esteemed it dishonourable for me to be lingering abroad, even for the improvement of my mind, when my fellow citizens were contending for their liberty at home."*

"In Siciliam quoque et Græciam trajicere volentem, me tristis ex Angliâ belli civilis nuntius revocavit: turpe enim existimabam, dum mei cives de libertate dimicarent, ne animi causâ, otiosè peregrinari."

Def. Sec. P. W. v. 231.

When Milton speaks of the civil war as already begun, and I mention it as existing only in prospect at the same period, we do not give incompatible accounts: he considers the civil war as begun by the resistance of the Scots, and I as commencing, somewhat later, at the declaration of the English parliament for the raising of an army, or at the immediately subsequent event of the siege of Hull. The Scots rebellion began in 1637, the civil war of England in 1642.

He resolved however to revisit Rome, and, though he was cautioned by some friendly merchants to avoid that city where the English Jesuits were meditating plans. against his safety, he persevered in his resolution and returned to the papal capital. Here, according to his previous determination, neither timidly concealing nor ostentatiously flaunting his religious opinions, he continued in fearless openness for nearly two months; and whenever his religion was attacked, he scrupled not to defend it with spirit, even within the precincts of the sacerdotal palace. Whatever dangers might threaten him in this strong hold of priestly domination, (and I can see no reason for supposing that there were none,) they were averted by a good Providence, and he was allowed to repair again in safety to Florence.

His second visit to this city, which the kindness of his friends made a species of home to him, was of equal duration with his first. He stole indeed a few days from it to pass them at Lucca, the former residence of the Deodati, the family of his respected and beloved schoolfellow. When he departed from Florence, he crossed the Apennines and travelled, through Bologna and Ferrara,

to Venice. He spent a month in viewing the curiosities of this celebrated city, which had once grasped the sceptre of Constantine, and where national prosperity and individual. happiness had flourished for some centuries under the controll of a rigid but a regulated and self-balanced aristocracy. Having provided for the safety of the books which be had collected in Italy by procuring a place for them in a vessel bound for England, he pursued his returning course through Verona and Milan, over the Pennine Alps and by the lake Lemanus, to Geneva.

The name of this city, associated in his mind at a later period with the calumnies of his profligate adversary, Morus, induces

y At the name of Venice every thoughtful and generous bosom must heave a sigh of pain and indignation, when the spectacle recurs of her present situation and of its detestable cause. When we see a city, after ages of independence and renown, consigned by unfeeling policy to the dead oppression of a foreign and rigid yoke, can we do otherwise than curse the cruelty of ambition?-than execrate all the parties who were involved in the guilt of the transaction, the power that permitted, the robber who seized, and the thief who accepted the plunder-France, Buonaparte, and the Emperor? The fate of Switzerland is equally to be lamented in its effect and execrated in its cause: but in this age, more than in any former one, the happiness of man seems to be made the sport and victim of individual ambition.

Since this note was written, Venice has passed again into the hands of her first foreign tyrant: and she may be yet reserved to be the subject of many melancholy and mortifying revolutions.

him, in his own relation of his travels, solemnly to invoke God as the witness of his truth when he declares that, residing in a country where much license was admitted, he had preserved himself pure from stain and reproach; perpetually assured that, if offences could escape the observation of man, they must yet lie exposed under the eye of God. His visit indeed to Italy was induced by such motives and occupied with such business as to be nearly insusceptible of any tainting suspicion. It was undertaken after a studious and irreproachable youth, when the first effervescence of the blood was evaporated, and for the purpose of continuing rather than of interrupting his literary pursuits. During his residence in this polished country, his time seems to have been fully engaged with viewing its curiosities and with the conversation of its learned men. His principal delay was in those cities which were the most celebrated for their learning, their arts, or their antiquities; and, while he gave eight months to Rome and Florence,

2 Quæ urbs, cum in mentem mihi hinc veniat Mori calumniatoris, facit ut Deum hic rursus testem invocem, me his omnibus in locis, ubi tam multa licent, ab omni flagitio ac probro integrum atq; intactum vixisse, illud perpetuò cogitantem, si hominum latere oculos possem, Dei certe non posse.

Def. Secun. P. W. v. 282.

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