are hushed as at the mutterings of a coming storm. In the Penseroso we feel that Milton gives deliberate and final verdict in favour of the mind and against the natural heart with its vain deluding joys; that both nature and art are henceforth to administer to reflection and religious contemplation, and not to "unreproved pleasures free". Comus contains, under an allegory rich as a picture by Titian, a denunciation of the licentiousness of the court and an exaltation of temperance and chastity. Noble indeed and splendid are his indignation and his eloquence; but one feels that the revealing power that springs from a loving sympathy with nature and with the human heart (and such sympathy the greatest poets have ever possessed) is being overborne by the denunciatory power of the moralist; while the intellect is dazzled by the magnificence of his imagination and the splendour of his verse, the heart sometimes grows cold at the absence of sympathy with its tenderness, its joys, its fears.

In the Lycidas, says Dr. Johnson, "Milton's acquaintance with Italian writers may be discovered by a mixture of longer and shorter verses, and his malignity to the Church by some lines which are interpreted as threatening its extermination". By 1637, the year of the Lycidas, Milton had broken entirely with Church and State-had given up conforming Puritanism and had become Presbyterian. In the Church he saw―or dreamed he saw—as much corruption and licentiousness as in the Court itself. As Puritan he had been scandalized by what he regarded as the Romanizing tendencies of Archbishop Laud and his adherents, and what Dr. Johnson calls his "malignity against the Church" finds in the Lycidas a still more direct and bolder expression than his indignation against court immorality had found in the Comus.

The three years (1634-37) which elapsed between the making of Comus and of Lycidas were devoted to self-preparation. "You ask", he writes to Diodati, "what I am thinking of? So may the good Deity help me- -of im

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mortality. I am pluming my wings and meditating flight." The meditated flight was into the high realm to which many have essayed to soar, but where none but the very greatest poets have sustained their flight. His subject was not yet definitely chosen, but Milton had decided that the lot to which time and heaven's will were leading him was that of an epic or dramatic poet. At first (as we learn from some Latin verses addressed to Manso in 1639) it seems to have been the Arthurian legends that attracted him. But for some years he wavered in his choice. Among the wellknown "Trinity College MSS." we find a list of ninety-nine subjects-some Biblical, others taken from English history -which had occurred to Milton as possible themes for his great drama or epic1; and among these there are four drafts of an epic on the theme of Paradise Lost. But the date of this MS. is probably 1641, so that I am anticipating. As was natural in this eaglet state of mind, he was becoming restless and longing to "leave a place where he was cramped". He made frequent visits to London, and was probably for some time at Oxford, and soon after the death of his mother (in April, 1637) his mind seems to have been set on a visit to foreign lands. During the autumn he was occupied with his Lycidas, and in the following spring he left England. The Thirty Years' War was still raging in Germany. But Germany and her wars had no interest for Milton. It was towards Italy, the home of Dante and Virgil, that he was attracted. He passed rapidly through France and North Italy until he reached Florence, where he spent two months, making the acquaintance of "many noble and learned men", attending the meetings of "private academies" (literary societies, then much in vogue in Italy), receiving and composing laudatory verses, and doubtless visiting the art-treasures and places of interest in the city and its neighbourhood-although we have scarce any record of the im

1 The Address of Satan to the Sun (Paradise Lost, iv. 32 seq.) was written (about 1642) as the opening speech of a drama.

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pression made on him by such things. It is known that he saw the famous Galileo at Arcetri (whom he mentions in Paradise Lost, v.), and it is more than possible that he may have with him gazed "through optic glass" at the "spotty globe" of the moon, as he describes the Tuscan artist doing (Paradise Lost, i.). From a well-known passage in Paradise Lost, i., we may also perhaps infer that he visited Vallombrosa, "where the Etrurian shades High overarch'd embower ”.

From Florence Milton went, by way of Siena, to Rome, "where the antiquity and ancient renown of the city detained him nearly three months". But here again we hear of little but "academies", the interchange of poetical amenities, and acquaintance made with various scholars and celebrities, such as Holstenius, the librarian of the Vatican, and Cardinal Barberini. Perhaps the most interesting record that we possess of his visit to Rome consists in three Latin epigrams in which he expresses his enthusiastic admiration for the singing of Leonora Boroni, the most celebrated songstress of that time, and various Italian sonnets that testify with the passionate fervour of Petrarch himself to an admiration of a more tender nature for some dark-eyed lady of Siren-like voice and beauty. Here we have a lyric note of deep personal feeling, and for this reason these Italian sonnets are more interesting to me than much else that may seem of far greater literary or biographical importance.

On his way to Naples he fell in with an Eremite Friar, who introduced him to the old Marquis of Villa, Manso, celebrated as the patron and biographer of Tasso. (It was in Manso's house that Tasso finished his Gerusalemme Conquistata.) After enjoying his hospitality for two months,

1 The only clue that Milton gives to her name is (Sonnet i) that "it honours the grassy vale of Rhine and the noble pass". But in Sonnet iv. 14 he uses the word "Alba" evidently in two senses, i.e. for "dawn" and as his lady's name (the line means both "till rosy morn appears", and "till my Alba comes crown'd with roses"): I suggest therefore that the lady's real name was Alba, or its diminutive, the name of the "noble pass "Albula (the Albula flows into the Rhine near Coire in Switzerland), though this upsets Professor Masson's theory that Sonnet i was addressed to some other beauty.

Milton purposed extending his travels to Sicily and Greece, but he changed his mind at the news of the outbreak of hostilities in England. "I thought", he says, "it disgraceful, while my countrymen were fighting for liberty, that I should be travelling abroad for pleasure." His desire to take his share in the struggle for liberty did not, however, prevent his lingering four months at Rome and Florence. He then passed on to Venice, whence he sent home by sea his collection of books and music. From Venice he travelled over the Alps to Geneva, which, as the home of Calvinism, he "probably considered" (says Dr. Johnson) "as the metropolis of orthodoxy". Here he seems to have spent a week, mostly in the company of Charles Diodati's uncle, the Genevan pastor before mentioned. From him he seems to have learnt of the death of his bosom-friend, who had some years before set up as a doctor in Cheshire (perhaps, later, in London). It was a blow which Milton felt very deeply. The elegy in which he bewailed his loss, the Epitaphium Damonis, gives expression to a grief far intenser than is perceptible in the Lycidas, notwithstanding that it is written in Latin and is, even more than Lycidas, “an absolute pastoral”, as Mr. Stopford Brooke says, "deliberately and minutely worked out after the manner of the Sicilian poets", or, as Dr. Johnson is pleased to express it, "a poem written with the common but childish imitation of pastoral life". It is also of interest from the literary point of view, for in it Milton speaks of the old British legends which were yet occupying his mind as a possible subject for his great epic, and of his resolve to hang up his Latin pastoral pipe, and henceforth to use his "strident" native tongue alone.

The next twenty years-from the Epitaphium to the Restoration-form what may be called the second period of Milton's life. This period was, as regards poetry, almost entirely barren. Except about a dozen sonnets he seems to have written no verse. I resolved," he says, "though then meditating other matters" (his eagle-flight being, doubtless,

one great matter of meditation), "to transfer into this struggle all my genius and all the strength of my industry."

It is worse than useless to indulge in barren speculation as to what may have happened if Milton had fallen on other days, or had withdrawn himself from the turmoil of political and religious controversy. According to Mr. Pattison and others of his school, "we have reached in Lycidas the highwater mark of English Poesy and of Milton's own productions"; and we are told that Milton "never fulfilled the promise with which Lycidas concludes". We are asked to conceive Milton choosing a course more in keeping with the critic's ideas of what was necessary for the true development of poetic genius, and to imagine something far greater than the Paradise Lost-something to which the modern critic might vouchsafe his unrestricted approbation. Whatever we may opine as to the wisdom of Milton's choice, he himself had no doubts on the matter; he followed what he believed to be the will of heaven with but little thought as to the "soon or slow" and "mean or high", conscious that true fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, nor in broad rumour lies, and that He who pronounces lastly on each deed is someone other than the literary critic.

If there is anything for us to regret in Milton's decision it is, not that he sacrificed poetical possibilities to what he believed to be the cause of liberty (for of this we cannot judge), but that his bitterness and abusive violence as a political and ecclesiastical controversialist disclose traits in his character which cannot but pain and repel those who would fain offer him, as they offer to all truly great men, the tribute of love as well as that of admiration.

Edward Phillips tells us that there was some talk about Milton accepting a military post on his return to England. If so, it came to nothing. The part that he was to take in the struggle was not of this nature. Nor did he attempt to plunge at once into the fray. Resolved to serve, he was content to stand and wait, "cheerfully leaving the event of