66 as they have done since the death of this worthy man. I say, Mr. "Hobson kept a stable of forty good cattle, always ready and fit for 66 travelling; but, when a man came for a horse, he was led into the "stable, where there was great choice; but he obliged him to take "the horse which stood next the stable-door; so that every customer was alike well served according to his chance, and every horse "ridden with the same justice: from whence it became a proverb, "when what ought to be your election was forced upon you, to say "Hobson's Choice'!" Sometimes a horse of Hobson's was let for the whole journey to London and back; and on such occasions, when Hobson, standing at the stable-door, saw a college-man go off at a rate which he thought too fast for the horse, he is said to have had one phrase in his mouth. "You will get to London time enough," he used to say, "if you don't ride too fast,”—a saying which looks like another version of that which Bacon, in his Essay On Despatch, quotes from a wise man of his acquaintance. "I knew a wise man,” Bacon there says, "that had it for a by-word, when he saw men "hasten to a conclusion, 'Stay a little, that we may make an end the 66 sooner. With all his wit, wealth, and prudence, Hobson could not last for ever. Till his eighty-sixth year the hale old man had persisted in driving his carrier's waggon himself. But, in April or May 1630, a stop had been put to his journeys. The Plague, after an interval of five years, was again in England; it was rife in Cambridge this time, so that the colleges had been prematurely closed and all University exercises brought to an end; and one of the precautions taken was to interdict the continued passage of Hobson, with his letters and parcels, between Cambridge and London. Though many of his neighbours among the townspeople died of the Plague, the tough old carrier escaped that distemper. But the compulsory idleness of some months was too much for him. Some time in November or December 1630, just as the colleges had reassembled, and, the Plague having abated, he might have resumed his journeys, he sickened and took to his bed. On the 1st of January 1630-31, he died, aged eighty-six. Before he died he had executed a will, in which he left a large family of sons, daughters, and grandchildren (one of his daughters married to a Warwickshire baronet), well provided for. Nor had he forgotten the town in which he had made his fortunes. Besides other legacies for public purposes to the town of Cambridge, he left money for the perpetual maintenance of the town-conduit; and to this day the visitor to Cambridge sees a handsome conduit, called after Hobson's name, in the centre of the town, and runnels of clear water flowing, by Hobson's munificence, along the sides of the footways in the main streets. In some respects, Hobson is still the genius loci of Cambridge. In London also Hobson was long remembered. At the Bull Inn, in Bishopsgate Street, where he used to put up, there was to be seen, in Steele's time, and long afterwards, an effigy of the old Cambridge carrier, with a money-bag under his arm. There are engravings of this effigy. Little wonder that the death of such a worthy as old Hobson made a stir among the Cambridge dons and undergraduates, and that many copies of verses were written on the occasion. Several such copies of verses have been recovered; but none so remarkable as Milton's. Milton seems to have had a fondness for the old man, whose horses he must have often hired, and by whom he must often have sent and received parcels. The title of Milton's two pieces is "On the University Carrier, exact to the circumstances of the case. who sickened in the time of his vacancy, being forbid to go to London by reason of the Plague." The gist of the poems themselves, too,—in which, through all their punning facetiousness, there is a vein of kindliness, is that Hobson died of ennui. Both pieces must have been written in or about January 1630-31. The second of them, according to Todd, appeared in a small book published in London in 1640 under the title of A Banquet of Jests, the first words being altered from "Here lieth one" to "Here Hobson lies," so as to make the piece intelligible without its companion. AN EPITAPH ON THE MARCHIONESS OF WINCHESTER. (Editions of 1645 and 1673.1) The date of the composition of this poem is determined by that 1 I have seen a draft, apparently of earlier date, in a MS. volume of poems transcribed for private use by some lover of poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century. The volume is among the Ayscough MSS. in the British Museum, and is numbered 1446 in that collection; and this particular poem occurs at pp. 72-74, and has this superscription, "On the Marchionesse of Winchester, whoe died in childbedd, April 15, 1631," and this subscription, "Jo. Milton, of Chr. Coll. Cambr." 66 of the event to which it refers,-the death, in child-birth, of Jane, wife of John Paulet, fifth Marquis of Winchester. This lady, who was but twenty-three years of age when she died, and was much spoken of for her beauty and accomplishments, was a daughter of Thomas, Viscount Savage, of Rock-Savage, Cheshire, by his wife, Elizabeth, the eldest daughter and co-heir of Thomas Darcy, Earl of Rivers. Her husband, the Marquis of Winchester, who had succeeded to the title in 1628, was a Roman Catholic; he subsequently attained great distinction by his loyalty during the civil wars; and he did not die till 1674, forty-three years after he had been made a widower by the death of this, his accomplished (first) wife. That event occurred on the 15th of April 1631, in circumstances thus communicated in a contemporary news-letter,1 dated the 21st of the same month "The Lady Marquis of Winchester, daughter to the "Lord Viscount Savage, had an imposthume upon her cheek lanced; "the humour fell down into her throat, and quickly despatched her, being big with child: whose death is lamented, as well in respect of other her virtues as that she was inclining to become a "Protestant." An unusual amount of public regret seems to have been caused by the lady's melancholy death. It was the subject of a long elegy by the poet-laureate, Ben Jonson, printed in his "Underwoods"; and there were verses on the occasion by Davenant and other poets.2 How Milton, then in his twenty-third year, and still at Cambridge, came to be so interested in the event as to make it the subject of a poem, is not known. Warton had been told that there was a Cambridge collection of verses on the occasion, and that Milton's elegiac ode first appeared among these; and some expressions in the ode might countenance the tradition; but no such volume has been found. Whether Milton was the only Cantab who wrote on the subject, or whether he wrote in conjunction with others, the poem which he did write will not suffer in comparison with even that of the veteran poet-laureate on the same occasion. Here is a portion of Ben Jonson's corresponding elegy:- 1 Letter, of date "London, April 21, 1631," from John Pory to Sir Thomas Puckering, Bart., of Priory, Warwickshire; quoted in the Court and Times of Charles I., vol. ii. p. 106. 2 Care must be taken not to confound this Marchioness with another Marchioness of Winchester, who would have been this one's mother-in-law had she been still alive, but who had died as early as 1614. Verses on her death have been quoted, by mistake, as verses on the death of Milton's Marchioness. VOL. I K "What gentle ghost, besprent with April dew, You seem a fair one. O that you had breath Stiff, stark, my joints 'gainst one another knock ! Alas! I am all marble! write the rest Thou would'st have written, Fame, upon my breast: It is a large fair table, and a true; And the disposure will be something new, At least may bear the inscription to her tomb. Of Winchester (the heralds can tell this), Earl Rivers' grandchild! 'Serve not forms, good Fame; Her sweetness, softness, her fair courtesy, A reverend state she had, an awful eye, How did she leave the world! with what contempt ! Just as she in it lived, and so exempt From all affection! When they urged the cure Of her disease, how did her soul assure Her sufferings, as the body had been away, And to the torturers, her doctors, say :- 'Stick on your cupping-glasses; fear not; put And I into the world all soul was sent !'" It will not be difficult to decide whether Ben Jonson's rough strength here, or the simple and sweet delicacy of Milton's lines, was the more appropriate to the occasion. But how did it appear to the family? The widowed young Marquis was pretty sure to see Ben Jonson's lines. Did he ever see Milton's? When Milton first printed them in his volume of 1645, the Marquis was again married, and all England was ringing with the fame of his obstinate Catholicism, and his resolute loyalty to Charles, turned into ruin at last by the storming and sacking of his magnificent house of Basing in Hampshire by Cromwell's army in October 1645. From that date he lived on, magnificently Royalist and Catholic as ever; and, in 1673, when the Elegy on his young first Marchioness was reprinted in the second edition of Milton's Poems, he was still alive, with a third Marchioness beside him, children by the second around him, and the image of his young first bride dim in the distance of more than forty years. L'ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO. (Editions of 1645 and 1673.) These were written as companion-pieces, and are to be read together. There is some doubt as to the time of their composition, there being no drafts of them among the Cambridge MSS. In the edition of 1645 they follow immediately after the pieces on Hobson, and precede the Arcades, with the intervention, however, of the ten Sonnets printed in that edition. With great probability they are assigned to the period immediately subsequent to Milton's studentlife at Cambridge, i.e. to the time of his studious seclusion in his father's country-house at Horton in Buckinghamshire, near Windsor. Milton retired thither in 1632, after taking his degree of M.A., and he mainly resided there till the beginning of 1638. If the pieces were written at Horton, they were probably written in the autumn of 1632, just after he had settled there. That they were written in some peaceful country neighbourhood, amid the sights and sounds of quiet English landscape and English rural life, is rendered likely by their nature. A claim has been put in for Forest-hill near Oxford as the place of their composition; and the scenery in that neighbourhood is insisted on as according with the scenery of the poems and furnishing hints for it. But, though Milton's family connexions with Oxford were of old date, and he had probably visited that neighbourhood several times, it was not till 1643 that his |