pointed out, Milton was neither Puritan nor Royalist, neither Presbyterian nor Independent. He was disliked and distrusted by all parties. He never learned that there cannot be a republic before there are republicans. He was fighting for the kind of liberty that no one understood then, and that few understand even now the right of man to follow truth wherever it leads him. The restraint of some lawful liberty, which ought to be given men, and is denied them "--that inhibitory power, howsoever and in whomsoever manifested, was the foe against which his sword was ever unsheathed. Of course he was always outnumbered, but he was never defeated. Lofty as were his views, he kept a hold on reality. It was for a better England that he fought. In the " Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church," he declares (as some have declared since) that church revenues would be more wholesomely applied if they were used

To erect in greater number, all over the land, schools, and competent libraries to those schools, where languages and arts may be taught free together, without the needless, unprofitable, and inconvenient removing to another place. So all the land would soon be better civilised, and they who are taught freely at the public cost might have their education given them on this condition that therewith content, they should not gad for preferment out of their own country but continue there thankful for what they received freely, bestowing it as freely on their country, without soaring above the meanness wherein they were born. But how they shall live when they are thus bred and dismissed, will be still the sluggish objection. To which is answered, that those public foundations may be so instituted as the youth therein may be at once brought up to a competence of learning and to an honest trade; and the hours of teaching are so ordered, as their study may be no hindrance to their labour or other calling. This was the breeding of St. Paul, though born of no mean parents, a free citizen of the Roman empire; so little did his trade debase him, that it rather enabled him to use that magnanimity of preaching the gospel through Asia and Europe at his own charges.

But at last came the final ignominy of the Restoration. All was lost except honour and faith. To the blind and prematurely aged man there remained only one stronghold sure, and that was the God who had seen fit to punish the body but had never betrayed the soul that loved Him; and he tried to show in his epics of the Fall and the Redemption that sin, disaster and death are the result of man's pride, passion and weakness, and not the

VOL. 242. NO.493.

L

will of an arbitrary Deity imposed on passive and helpless creatures. The keynote of "Paradise Lost" is Milton's resolve to" assert Eternal Providence, and justify the ways of God to men." These famous words have no meaning except as the utterance of a great man who had fought, suffered, and lost everything through the weakness of those who had forgotten the eternal. Milton's epics are the epilogue of a noble tragedy. Like Samson he had harried the Philistines, even though he perished in the fall of their temple; but in the story there is nothing for tears. The triumph was his, not theirs.

Like Macaulay, we can scarcely tear ourselves from the subject. We had hoped to be able to draw attention to certain remarkable passages in M. Saurat's book, describing Milton's indebtedness in thought and matter to the Zohar and Kabbalah, to Robert Fludd's "De macrocosma historia," and to the curious "Mortalists" who held the doctrine first propounded in " Man's Mortalitie" (a pamphlet of 1643, enlarged, perhaps by Milton himself, in 1655) that man is "a Compound wholly mortal, contrary to that common distinction of Soule and Body: And that the present going of the Soule into Heaven or Hell is a meer Fiction And that at the Resurrection is the beginning of our immortality"; but we think such difficult matters best left to be read in M. Saurat's remarkable volume. In these few pages we have preferred to think of Milton as a great intrepid Englishman, morally and spiritually valiant, whose message to his country is : "Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live."

GEORGE SAMPSON

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISHMEN

IN ITALY

1. Coryat's Crudities. (In Italy, 1608.) 2 Vols. Glasgow: Maclehose.

1905.

2. The Totall of Rare Adventures and Paineful Peregrinations of long Nineteene Yeares Travayles, etc. By WM. LITHGOW. (In Italy, 1609, etc.) Glasgow: Maclehose. 1906.

3. Travailes. By GEORGE SANDYS. (In Italy, 1615?) 5th Ed. London. 1652.

4. Familiar Letters on Important Subjects. By JAMES HOWELL. (In Italy, 1621). Aberdeen: 1753.

5. The Diary of John Evelyn. (In Italy, 1644-6.) 2 Vols. London. 1907. 6. Il Mercurio Italico. By JOHN RAYMOND. (In Italy, 1646-7.) London. 1648.

7. The Voyage of Italy. By RICHARD LASSELS. (In Italy, 1640-50 ?) 2 Vols. Paris: Vincent du Moutier. 1670.

8. Observations. Topographical, Moral, etc., made in a journey through the Low Countries, Germany, Italy and France: with catalogue of plants not native of England found spontaneously growing in these parts and their virtues. By JOHN RAY, F.R.S. (In Italy, 1663.) London. 1673. 9. Some Letters, etc. By GILBERT BURNET. (In Italy, 1685-6.) 3rd. Ed. London. 1708.

10. A New Voyage to Italy.

By MAXIMILIAN MISSON. Done out of French. (In Italy, 1687-8.) 2nd Ed. 2 Vols. London. 1699.

ENGLISH travellers to Italy in the seventeenth century form

a compact little band, from whose writings it is possible to get a clear idea of the country as they saw it. Much of the glamour of the Renaissance still clung round her, even under the Spanish tyranny. Italy still led the way in art and above all, in music, if not in literature. But the danger of the Inquisition naturally tended to thin the numbers of English visitors. And the bitterness of the religious struggle is often reflected in their writings, for example, in those of Bishop Burnet or of Misson the Huguenot tutor of the Earl of Arran; and from the other side, in those of the Catholic priest Lassels, who visited Italy five times as bear-leader to young Catholics of position. The political troubles in England sent some of the best of these travellers abroad, Burnet and Evelyn among them, just as the outbreak of the Civil War brought Milton home.

Not that a discreet man had much to fear. "As there is connivance at the Lutherans, so it is rashness to proclaim one's opinion, weaknesse to disclose it," says Raymond. Manso, the friend of Tasso and Marino, regretted that he could not show Milton more attention at Naples in 1638, "because I would not be more close in the matter of religion" and he was warned that the English Jesuits, with whom he had dined in Rome, were laying snares for him because he had spoken too freely; for he was resolved not, indeed, to raise the question," but if interrogated about my faith, then, whatever the consequences, to dissemble nothing." The fanatical Lithgow was concealed for three days in the roof of the palace of the Earl of Tyrone and then smuggled over the walls of Rome to escape" the blood-sucking Inquisitors, of whom the most part were mine owne country-men." Evelyn, a Royalist, had a number of introductions to priests in Rome. Father Stafford, head of the English Jesuit College, where he was often entertained, was a friend of his, and Cardinal Francesco Barberini, protector of the English, was kind to him, as he had been to Milton, just as Cardinal Howard was to Burnet. The nuns of St. Catherine at Padua sent him "flowers of silk-work" on his birthday. Only in the Spanish dominions had a prudent man much to fear. A Dominican Friar actually warned Coryat to avoid a certain castle on Como, as the Inquisitors might excarnificate me after a very bitter and terrible manner" (tanagliare). Evelyn himself, in spite of his high-sounding letter of introduction from the Spanish ambassador at Padua, fled post haste from Milan after the accident that killed the Protestant Scotch captain in Spanish service, who had escaped detection owing to the connivance of an Irish monk. Coryat ran other risks. So vigorously did he maintain the truth of Christianity in the Ghetto at Venice that had not "our noble Ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton," chanced to pass in his gondola and, espying him somewhat earnestly bickering with them, sent his secretary, Master Bedford, to rescue him from these un-Christian miscreants, it might have gone ill with him.

The delightful Coryat is an Elizabethan to the core, a brother of Fynes Moryson, with a good deal of Pepys about him. So is Lithgow. The others belong to a less spacious day. Evelyn is, on the whole, the best of the batch, and after Milton, much the most cultivated; but Lassels knew Italy far better and his is

certainly the best guide-book. He it is who describes the five routes to Italy, with all of which he was acquainted.

There is first the route by Dunkirk, Bruges, Frankfurt and the Rhine, Munich, Innsbruck, the Brenner and the Trentino; secondly, by Paris, Lyons and Avignon, to Marseilles, whence you coasted in a felucca, generally to Genoa, sometimes further. This route was popular, as it avoided the Alps, though the sea and the seamen were often troublesome. Both Milton and Evelyn took it. Or you might go from Lyons to Geneva and Zurich, through the Grisons, by the Splügen and Chiavenna to Brescia, as Burnet did. Fourthly, you could go from Geneva over the Simplon to Domodossola, take a boat across Lake Maggiore, and so to Milan. Evelyn, who came home this way, becomes quite heated when he describes the horrors of the Simplon and its inhabitants, with whom one of his companions had trouble. Raymond's party paid a guide eight pistoles a head, all included, to take them from Maggiore to Geneva.

Lastly there was the post-road by Lyons, Chambéry and the Mont Cenis into Piedmont. The more energetic rode up to the pass on mules and walked down the other side, but Lassels hired marons "-men who carried one over in chairs for a pistole a head. Travellers had to be careful to bargain to be brought right down to Novalesa, close to Susa. It took two hours to get up. Lassels notes that men were posted down the hill in sledges with great celerity and pleasure.

Once in Italy the roads these tourists took were almost as uniform as a conducted tour to-day. The most favoured routeto give only the chief places-was Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Sienna, Viterbo, Rome. This is how Evelyn and Milton went. Then back by Bologna to Venice, on to Milan and over the Alps home. As these journeys usually lasted a year or two, there was plenty of time, and the smaller places on the way were generally visited.

Fewer travellers went as far as Naples, for Naples was Spanish, and the way thither was beset with brigands, notably the cork-wood beyond Piperno, through which Evelyn was conducted by a guard of thirty firelocks. Raymond saw the quarters of a number of executed bandits exposed there, but by Misson's day there was no danger. The journey took five days from Rome by land, or by sea from Genoa, where there was the risk of the Barbary corsairs. Fewer still went further south. Those who did