itself; but we are indebted to Phillips, in his memoir of Milton, for the interesting information that the little girl was the poet's own niece. "One of his sister's children, who died in infancy," are Phillips's words: i.e. she was Phillips's own sister, of whom he had heard as born before himself, and cut off in her babyhood. The circumstances, more particularly, are these :-In the course of 1624, or just before Milton had gone to Cambridge, his only surviving sister, Anne Milton, several years older than himself, had been married to a Mr. Edward Phillips, a native of Shrewsbury, but resident in London, where he held a situation of some responsibility in the Government Office called the Crown Office in Chancery. To this couple there had been born, after about a year's marriage, their first child, a little girl, making the young poet an uncle, and making his father, the scrivener of Bread Street, a grandfather. When in town from Cambridge, Milton had seen the "fair infant," whether in his father's house in Bread Street, or in his sister's own house, which was "in the Strand, near Charing Cross." But the life of the little creature was to be short. The autumn of 1625 was a particularly unhealthy one in London,-the Plague, that intermittent scourge of European towns in old times, then raging in London with such violence that as many as 35,000 persons were said to have died of it during that season within the London Bills of Mortality. There is an allusion to this prevalence of the Plague in the last stanza but one of the poem. Not to the Plague, however, but to the general inclemency of the succeeding winter, did the delicate little blossom fall a victim. She died "of a cough,"-i.e. of some affection of the lungs. This and all the other circumstances of the case,-the cold, snowy winter, after the autumn of Plague, etc.,- are poetically indicated in the beautiful little elegy with which the young Cambridge student sought to console the sorrowing mother at the time, and which has preserved for us the fact of the existence of this "fair infant" at whom the poet had looked with interest.

The poet's sister, Anne Phillips, addressed so affectionately in the last stanza of the poem, had several subsequent children by the same husband, two of whom, Edward and John Phillips, survived to be known in connection with their uncle. After the death of that husband, which happened in 1631, while she was still a young woman, she contracted a second marriage with a Mr. Thomas Agar, who had been bred up in the Crown Office in Chancery with Phillips,

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and who succeeded to Phillips's last and highest post in it as Deputy Clerk of the Crown.

AT A VACATION EXERCISE IN THE COLLEGE.

(First printed in the Edition of 1673.)

The heading prefixed to this piece by Milton is, more completely, as follows:-" Anno ætatis 19: At a Vacation Exercise in the College, part Latin, part English: the Latin Speeches ended, the English thus began." If the phrase "Anno ætatis 19" were to be understood strictly, according to modern custom, as meaning "in his nineteenth year," we should have to refer the piece to some time between Dec. 9, 1626, and Dec. 9, 1627. But here again, just as in the heading of the preceding poem (see Introduction to it), we have to remember Milton's habit of dating not from the current year of his age, but from the year which he had completed. The piece, in fact, was written in 1628, or during Milton's fourth academic year at Cambridge, and, as the title implies, was but a fragment of a much longer and more composite exercise or discourse, the greater part of which was in Latin, written for some ceremonial at Christ's College in the vacation of that year,-i.e. after the close of the Easter Term on the 4th of July.

Can we restore the fragment to its proper place and connexion? Fortunately, we can: fortunately, for otherwise the drift of the piece and various allusions in it would have been unintelligible. The fragment, though printed by Milton himself, as we now have it, separately among his Minor English Poems, was originally a part of one of a few very curious Latin writings of his College-days, which appear in all good collected editions of his prose-works under the title of Prolusiones Oratoria (i.e. Rhetorical Essays), but have been less read than any of his other literary remains. As the history of those Prolusiones Oratoria connects itself intimately with the fragment under notice, it must be here told :

In the year 1674, the last year of Milton's life, when anything bearing the name of the author of Paradise Lost was likely to be a fair speculation for a publisher, a certain London bookseller, Brabazon Aylmer, of "The three Pigeons" in Cornhill, brought out a little volume of Milton's "Epistolæ Familiares," or Latin Letters to

Private Friends. It was Aylmer's intention, and probably Milton's also, to append to these private Latin letters his more important "Letters of State": viz. the Latin Letters to Foreign Princes and Governments which he had drafted in his capacity of Secretary to the Council of State of the Commonwealth, and to Oliver and Richard Cromwell. It was found, however, that the authorities then in power,-to wit, the Government of Charles II.,-would not permit the publication of those questionable documents of the Interregnum. They remained, in fact, unpublished till 1676, two years after Milton's death, when they were piratically printed by a bookseller who had got hold of copies. Aylmer was consequently placed in a difficulty. The nature of this difficulty and the way in which he overcame it are explained by him in a Latin preface in his own name to the little volume which he did publish. "When I "found the Familiar Letters by themselves," he says, "to be some"what too scanty for a volume even of moderate size, I resolved to "treat with the Author through a particular friend of both of us, in "order that, if he chanced to have by him any little matter in the "shape of a treatise, he might not grudge throwing it in, as a make"weight, to counterbalance the paucity of the Letters, or at least to "fill the blank. He, influenced by the adviser, having turned over "his papers, at last fell upon the accompanying juvenile composi"tions, scattered about, some here and others there, and, at my "friend's earnest request, made them over to his discretion. These, "therefore, when I perceived that, as they were sufficiently approved "by the common friend in whom I trusted, so the author did not seem to think he ought to be ashamed of them, I have not hesi"tated, juvenile though they are, to give to the light,-hoping, as it "is very much my interest to do, that they will be found not less "vendible by me than they were originally, when recited, agreeable "to their auditors."

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The compositions with which Milton thus obliged Aylmer in his difficulty, and which were published in the same volume with the Epistola Familiares, were certain Latin College-exercises which had remained among his papers for more than forty years. “Ejusdem, jam olim in Collegio adolescentis, Prolusiones Quædam Oratoriæ," is the title given to them in the volume,-i.e. "Some Rhetorical Essays of the same Author long ago when he was a youth at College." The Essays or Prolusiones are seven in number, and are all interesting as

throwing light on Milton's career at the University, and as specimens of his Latinity, and proofs of his success in those public debates and discussions on scholastic and philosophical topics which formed in those days so important a part of College and University training. "Utrum Dies an Nox præstantior sit" ("Whether Day or Night is the more excellent ") is the thesis of the first of the Essays; "De Sphærarum Concentu" ("Of the Music of the Spheres ") is the title of the second; and so on. But the one with which we are immediately concerned here is the sixth, entitled "In Feriis Estivis Collegii, sed concurrente, ut solet, totâ fere Academia juventute, Oratio: Exercitationes nonnunquam ludicras Philosophic studiis non obesse"; which may be translated thus, "In the Summer Vacation of the College, but in the presence, as usual, of a concourse of nearly the whole youth of the University, an Oration to this effect: That occasional sportive exercises are not inconsistent with philosophical studies."

The Essay, as the heading informs us, was an actual speech delivered by Milton in the hall of Christ's College, Cambridge, on an occasion of periodical revel, when not only his fellow-collegians, but a crowd of students from other colleges, were present. Milton had then nearly completed his undergraduate course, and had his degree of B.A. in prospect; and he was probably chosen to lead the revels on account of his pre-eminent reputation among the undergraduates of Christ's. "The revels," we say; for, in reading the speech itself, we become aware that the circumstances were those of some annual academic saturnalia, when the college hall was a scene of festivity, practical joking, and fun of all kinds, and when the president,— styled, in academic phrase, "the Father" for the nonce,-was expected to enliven the proceedings with a speech full of jests and personalities, and to submit in turn to interruptions, laughter, and outcries from his noisy "sons." Milton, though confessing in the course of his speech that fun was hardly his element, and that his "faculty in festivities and quips" was very slight, seems to have acquitted himself in his character of "Father," or elected master of the revels, with unusual distinction. At all events he took trouble enough. His entire discourse must have taken at least an hour and a half for the delivery. As originally delivered, it consisted of three parts: first, a serio-comic essay, in Latin prose, on the theme "That sportive exercises on occasion are not inconsistent with the studies of Philosophy"; secondly, a more expressly comic harangue, also in

Latin prose, in which he assumes the character of Father of the meeting, addresses his sons jocularly, and leads off the orgy; and, thirdly, a conclusion in English, partly verse and partly prose, consisting of dramatic speeches.-(1) In the opening Latin essay, besides an interesting discussion of the theme selected, we find Milton thanking his fellow-collegians for the honour done him in making him president on the occasion,-an honour which he appreciates the more because he had had reason to fancy that until then he had not been altogether popular with the majority of them. There is also an expression of his exultation, and yet his diffidence, in finding himself in so conspicuous a place in an assembly of "so many men eminent for erudition, and nearly the whole University." (2) In the middle part, or Latin comic harangue, we find, amid many coarse jocosities, and now unintelligible personal allusions to individual fellow-students, the following passage explanatory of what is to follow: "I turn me, therefore, as Father, to my sons, of whom "I behold a goodly number; and I see too that the mischievous "little rogues acknowledge me to be their father by secretly bobbing their heads. Do you ask what are to be their names? I "will not, by taking the names of dishes, give my sons to be eaten by

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you, for that would be too much akin to the ferocity of Tantalus "and Lycaon; nor will I designate them by the names of parts of "the body, lest you should think that I had begotten so many bits "of men instead of whole men; nor is it my pleasure to call them "after the kinds of wine, lest what I should say should be not "according to Bacchus. I wish them to be named according to the "number of the Predicaments, that so I may express their dis'tinguished birth and their liberal manner of life." The meaning of the passage seems to be that it was the custom at such meetings for the "Father" to confer nicknames for the nonce on such of his fellowstudents as were more particularly associated with him as his "sons," and, as such, had perhaps to take a prominent part under him in the proceedings, and that Milton, instead of following old practice, and calling his sons by such rigmarole names as Beef, Mutton, Pork, etc. (names of dishes), or Head, Neck, Breast, etc. (names of parts of the body), or Sack, Rhenish, Sherris, etc. (names of wines), proposed to call them after the famous Ten Predicaments or Categories of Aristotle. These Predicaments or Categories,-viz. varieties of cogitable existence, or different heads under one or other of which