everything must fall that can be made an object of thought or predication by man at all,—were all regarded as subdivisions of the one supreme category of ENS or BEING. This ENS was subdivided into the two general categories of Ens per se or Substance, and Ens per accidens or Accident; and then, by further divisions and subdivisions, Accident was made to split itself into nine subordinate categories,Quantity, Quality, Relation, Action, Passion, Place where, Time when, Posture, and Habit. Prefix to these nine categories, developed out of Accident, the one unbroken category of Substance, and you have the Ten Aristotelian Categories or Predicaments, once so famous in the schools. What Milton said, therefore, was virtually this-I, as Father, choose to represent myself as ENS or Being in general, undivided Being; and you, my sons, Messrs. So and So and So and So (to wit, certain students of Christ's acting along with Milton in the farce), are to regard yourselves as respectively Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Action, Passion, Place, Time, Posture, and Habit. Thus I have assigned you your parts in what is to follow of our proceedings. (3) We have here, then, the key to the dramatic speeches in English with which Milton's address was wound up. After apologising for having detained the audience so long with his Latin harangue, he announces that he is about to break the University statutes (which ordained that all academic discourses, etc., should be in the learned tongues) by "running across" from Latin to English. At this point, therefore, he suddenly exclaims "Hail! native language, that by sinews weak Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak, He continues this episodic address to his native speech through a goodly number of lines, but then remembers that it is a divergence from the business on hand, and that his Sons are waiting to hear him speak in the character of ENS. Accordingly, he does speak in this character, calling up the eldest of his ten sons, Substance, and addressing him in fit terms. Whether Substance made any reply we are not informed; but the next two Predicaments, Quantity and Quality, did speak in their turn,—not in verse, however, but in prose. It seems most natural to conclude that these speeches were made by the students of Christ's who represented the Predicaments in question,-Milton himself speaking only in his paramount character as ENS. In this character, at all events, he finally calls "by name" on the student who represented the fourth category,— i.e. Relation; and with this speech of ENS to Relation, the fragment, as we now have it, abruptly ends. "The rest was prose," we are informed; which means that whatever was said by Relation, and whatever was said to or by the six remaining Predicaments, was in prose form and has not been preserved. For some further elucidations, see our Notes on the fragment, and in particular the Note on the words "RIVERS, arise" in line 91, where an account is given of a neat little discovery by which it has been ascertained what was the name of that fellow-student of Milton at Christ's College who acted the part of Relation in the performance. This is a somewhat long introduction to so brief a piece. But the piece is so curious in its kind, and has remained so obscure hitherto, that the introduction is not unnecessary. Let the reader observe, in conclusion, how it happened that the piece came to be detached from the Latin Prolusio with which it originally stood connected. There can be no doubt that, though the volume containing the Epistolæ Familiares and the Prolusiones Oratoria bears date 1674, the printing of the volume had begun in 1673, when Milton had also at press the second edition of his Minor Poems. Milton, we can see, was engaged on this new edition of his Minor Poems when the publisher Aylmer, brought to a stop in the other volume by the impossibility of adding, as was originally intended, the "Letters of State" to the "Familiar Letters," applied to him through a friend for something else that might fill up the blank. Willing to oblige Aylmer, and searching among his papers, he finds his old College Prolusiones Oratoriæ; and these he makes over to Aylmer, with but one exception. The exception is that he clips off from the sixth Prolusio its English ending, preferring to insert that bit, because it is English and mainly in verse, in the edition of his Minor Poems then in the hands of another publisher, Thomas Dring. As it is too late, however, to insert the newly found old metrical bit in its proper chronological place in Dring's volume,—which would have been at p. 21,-he inserts it at p. 64, remedying the mischance by a direction among the Errata. Convenient though this partition of the sixth Prolusio between Aylmer's volume and Dring's may have been to Milton at the time, the dissociation of the English metrical fragment from the Latin prose essay to which it originally belonged has been the chief cause why the metrical fragment has been hitherto such a puzzle to modern readers. ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY. (Editions of 1645 and 1673.) This magnificent Ode, called by Hallam "perhaps the finest in the English language," was composed, as we learn from Milton's own heading of it in the edition of 1645, in the year 1629. Milton was then twenty-one years of age, in his sixth academic year at Cambridge, and a B.A. of a year's standing. There is an interesting allusion to the ode by Milton himself, when he was in the act of composing it, in the sixth of his Latin Elegies. In that elegy, addressed to his friend Charles Diodati, then residing in some country place, in answer to a metrical epistle which Diodati had sent to him on the 13th of December 1629, there occurs the following passage: "At tu siquid agam scitabere (si modo saltem Esse putas tanti noscere si quid agam). Dona quidem dedimus Christi natalibus illa; Illa sub auroram lux mihi prima tulit. Te quoque pressa manent patriis meditata cicutis; Here we have a distinct description of the Ode on the Nativity, as then finished or nearly so, and ready to be shown to Diodati, together with the express information that it was begun on Christmas-day 1629,-information according with that given in the first line of the ode itself: "This is the month and this the happy morn." No farther introduction to the poem is here necessary, unless we may ask the reader to note particularly the treatment of the gods of heathen mythology in the closing stanzas of the "Hymn." It is curious to observe how Milton's imagination was possessed thus THE PASSION: MAY MORNING: ON SHAKESPEARE 125 early with an idea which he was afterwards to develop so fully in his Paradise Lost. He had already, we can see, been strongly fascinated by that fancy of the theologians which assumed the identity of the gods of the various heathen religions with the devils or fallen angels of Scripture, holding that these had been permitted, after the human race had become corrupt, to leave their "infernal jail" under the earth, and to range the upper world of land and air in the guise and office of gods for the misbelieving nations. THE PASSION. (Editions of 1645 and 1673.) This piece, as the opening stanza implies, grew out of the Ode on the Nativity, and is a kind of sequel to it. It was probably written for Easter 1630. It is but the fragment of an intended. larger poem, for which, after the young writer had proceeded so far, he thought his powers insufficient. SONG ON MAY MORNING. (Editions of 1645 and 1673.) This little piece is also assigned, but only conjecturally, to the year 1630. If this is correct, the exact date is May 1, 1630. There is some reason for thinking, however, that this date is too early, and that the piece may possibly belong to May 1633, Milton's first May at Horton. ON SHAKESPEARE. (Editions of 1645 and 1673; and earlier printed copy prefixed, anonymously, to the second folio edition of Shakespeare in 1632.) This famous little piece is sometimes spoken of as Milton's "Sonnet on Shakespeare"; but it is not even laxly a Sonnet, as it consists of sixteen lines. In its anonymous printed form among the commendatory verses prefixed to the Shakespeare Folio of 1632 (see ante, p. 78), it is entitled "An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatick Poet, W. Shakespeare." That it was written two years before its publication in so distinguished a place appears from the date "1630" appended to its shorter title in the original editions of Milton's Poems. It seems to me not improbable that Milton originally wrote the lines in a copy of the First Folio Shakespeare in his possession, and furnished them thence to the publisher of the Second Folio. They are the first thing of Milton's known to have been given to the public in print; and, but for his having reclaimed them thirteen years later by inserting them among his Minor Poems, one might have been reading them now in copies of the Second Folio Shakespeare without any knowledge of their authorship. ON THE UNIVERSITY CARRIER. (Editions of 1645 and 1673.) The two pieces on this subject are chiefly remarkable as specimens of Milton's muse in that facetious style in which, according to his own statement in his Sixth Prolusio, he was hardly at home. They celebrate an incident which must have been of considerable interest to all Cambridge men of Milton's time, the death of old Thomas Hobson, the Cambridge University carrier. Born in 1544, or twenty years before Shakespeare, Hobson had for more than sixty years been one of the most noted characters in Cambridge. Every week during this long period he had gone and come between Cambridge and the Bull Inn, Bishopsgate Street, London, driving his own wain and horses, and carrying letters and parcels, and sometimes stray passengers, both ways. All the Heads and Fellows of Colleges, all the students, and all the townspeople, knew him. By his business as a carrier, and also by letting out horses, he had become one of the wealthiest citizens of Cambridge,owner of houses in the town and of other property. He had also such a reputation for shrewdness and humour that, rightly or wrongly, all sorts of good sayings were fathered upon him. Thus, the well-known saying "Hobson's choice; this or nothing," is referred, on Steele's authority in the Spectator (No. 509), to Hobson, the Cambridge carrier. "Being a man of great ability and invention," says Steele, "and one that saw where there might good profit arise, though the "duller men overlooked it, this ingenious man was the first in this "island who let out hackney-horses. He lived in Cambridge; and, observing that the scholars rid hard, his manner was to keep a "large stable of horses, with boots, bridles, and whips, to furnish the "gentlemen at once, without going from college to college to borrow, 66 |