prefixed to the Amsterdam edition of Milton's Prose Works in 1698. Speaking there of the numerous persons of note, foreign and English, who used to visit Milton in the house in Petty France, Westminster, where he lived for the eight years immediately preceding the Restoration (1652—1660), Toland adds: “Andrew Marvell, who by "his parts and probity made himself so much known since that time "in England, used to frequent him the oftenest of anybody; and "whether it was he or Milton (for both are named for it) that made "the verses sent with Cromwell's picture to the Queen of Sweden I am uncertain; but, whoever the author was, they deserve a room "in this place." Toland then goes on to quote the Latin lines, appending an English metrical version; and it is the text of the lines so given in Toland's memoir that has been transferred into the editions of Milton's Poems.

The passage in Toland's memoir certainly shows that as early as 1698, notwithstanding the insertion of the lines as Marvell's in the edition of Marvell's Miscellaneous Poems seventeen years before, there was a doubt whether they were not really Milton's. Is it right now to be more sure on the point than Toland then felt himself entitled to be, and to claim the authorship for Milton positively?

Newton, Dunster, Todd, and others, declare in favour of Milton's claim; Warton, on the other hand, thinks the lines may be fairly assigned to Marvell. On the whole, I am inclined to agree with Warton, for these reasons :-(1) So far as we know, the doubt as to the authorship which existed as early as 1698 was founded only on that argument from external probability which is still relied on in Milton's favour. The writing of such a scrap, it was fancied then as now, belonged almost officially to the duties of the Latin Secretaryship to Cromwell; but, in 1654, when the lines were written, Milton was still Latin Secretary, and Marvell was not appointed to be his assistant in the Secretaryship till 1657. This argument, however, is not so strong as it looks. Although Marvell was not associated with Milton in the Secretaryship till 1657, there is proof that he was hanging on about Milton's office with hopes of some such appointment as early as 1653. The proof is in the interesting form of a letter of Milton's (not in his own hand, but dictated by him) of date Feb. 21, 1652-3, addressed to President Bradshaw. "There will be "with you to-morrow, upon some occasion of business," Milton there writes to Bradshaw, "a gentleman whose name is Mr. Marvell :

a man, both by report and the converse I have had with him, of singular desert for the State to make use of; who also offers him"self, if there be any employment for him. His father was the "minister of Hull, and he hath spent four years abroad, in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, to very good purpose, as I believe, and "the gaining of those four languages: besides, he is a scholar and "well read in the Latin and Greek authors; and, no doubt, of an "approved conversation, for he comes now lately out of the house. "of the Lord Fairfax, who was General, where he was intrusted to give some instructions in the languages to the lady his daughter. "If, upon the death of Mr. Weckerlyn, the Council shall think that "I shall need any assistant in the performance of my place (though, "for my part, I find no encumbrance of that which belongs to me, "except it be in point of attendance at conferences with ambassadors, "which I must confess in my condition I am not fit for), it would. "be hard for them to find a man so fit every way for that purpose "as this gentleman." Although this letter of Milton's took no immediate effect, and it was not Marvell but another person that was employed to help him in his duties for the next three years, it yet exhibits Marvell as quite at hand in 1654 for any such voluntary specimen of his Latinity as the lines in Cromwell's name to Christina. Milton, anxious to have him for his assistant, would even be likely to throw such a little opportunity in his way. (2) If the lines were Milton's, how could they have been published so authoritatively as Marvell's in his Miscellaneous Poems three years after his death? It would be necessary to suppose that Marvell, in the course of his growing intimacy with Milton, obtained from him. a copy of the lines, and transcribed them in his own hand, and that this transcript, bearing no indication of being a mere transcript, when it was found among Marvell's papers, was assumed to be an original of his. But this, in the face of the fact that there is no proof of any such thing having come down among Milton's papers, is a very forced supposition. True, there are some verbal differences between the copy of the lines in Marvell's Poems and the copy cited by Toland and appropriated as Milton's; and so we may fancy that Toland cited a copy which was floating about, and was not taken directly from Marvell's printed volume. But may not such a copy have been but a derivation from Marvell's original, either before or after its appearance in print in 1681, and may not a copy so floating about without

Marvell's name have been ascribed laxly to Milton? (3) The form in which the lines appear in Marvell's Poems, and their accompaniments there, make them almost certainly Marvell's. For they do not appear there as a detached and solitary scrap, but in a little group of Latin pieces, all in the same elegiac verse, connected both by time and by meaning. See Marvell's works, edit. 1776, vol. III. pp. 417-422. First comes a long piece of elegiacs, headed "Doctori Ingelo, cum Domino Whitlocke ad Reginam Sueciæ delegato a Protectore residenti, Epistola": i.e. "Epistle to Dr. Ingeloe, residing with Lord Whitlocke, ambassador from the Protector to the Queen of Sweden." Ingeloe, who was, in fact, one of Whitlocke's chaplains through his embassy, appears to have been a personal friend of Marvell's; and the poem opens with kind inquiries how his delicate friend is faring in the cold Swedish climate.

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Quid facis, arctoi charissime transfuga cœli,
Ingele, proh serò cognite, rapte citò?
Num satis hybernum defendis pellibus astrum,

Qui modo tam mollis, nec bene firmus, eras?"

The greater portion of the poem, however, consists of a eulogy on Queen Christina, almost comparable, for its extravagance, to Milton's prose eulogy in his Defensio Secunda. The writer has seen her portrait, and this is his impression :

"Vidimus effigiem, mistasque coloribus umbras:
Sic quoque Sceptripotens, sic quoque visa Dea.
Augustum decorant (rarò concordia !) frontem
Majestas et Amor, Forma Pudorque simul.
Ingens virgineo spirat Gustavus in ore;
Agnoscas animos fulmineumque patrem.

Nulla suo nituit tam lucida stella sub axe;

Non ea quæ meruit crimine Nympha polum."

Here, besides the general fact that Marvell, at the time of Whitlocke's Swedish embassy, was interested in Queen Christina as much as Milton was, and writing about her, observe the similarity of the phraseology to that of the lines in dispute. In the lines Christina is "bellipotens virgo" and "arctoi lucida stella poli"; and here she is "sceptripotens" and "lucida stella sub suo axe,"-actually the same thing. Observe also that Marvell has been looking at a portrait of Christina, and connect this circumstance with the tenor of the two

subsequent and shorter pieces of the same group. distich :

IN EFFIGIEM OLIVERI CROMWELLI.

"Hæc est quæ toties inimicos umbra fugavit,
At sub quâ cives otia lenta terunt."

One is this

In other words, about the same time that Marvell saw a portrait of Christina he saw a portrait of Cromwell; and, as he had given his impression of the one, so he here gives his impression of the other. Not completely, however; for he reverts to the subject in another piece of eight lines. They are the eight lines which have caused all this inquiry; and here is the fashion in which they appear in Marvell's Works :

IN EANDEM, REGINE SUECIÆ TRANSMISSAM.

"Bellipotens Virgo, Septem Regina Trionum,

Christina, arctoi lucida stella poli,
Cernis quas merui durâ sub casside rugas;
Sicque senex armis impiger ora fero;
Invia fatorum dum per vestigia nitor,
Exequor et populi fortia jussa manu :
At tibi submittit frontem reverentior umbra,
Nec sunt hi vultus regibus usque truces."

Except for the sicque instead of utque and the fero instead of tero in the fourth line, and the At instead of Ast in the seventh, we have here the identical piece which has been claimed as Milton's. But, unless the two other pieces of the group are also Milton's (which no one has ventured to assert), how much more naturally do they now suggest themselves as Marvell's! He has been writing in Latin elegiacs about the Swedish Queen, and especially describing her portrait; he has also written a Latin elegiac distich "ON THE PORTRAIT OF OLIVER CROMWELL"; what more natural than that, when he heard that this portrait was to be sent to Christina, he should, asked or unasked, write a sequel "ON THE SAME, SENT TO THE QUEEN OF SWEDEN"? In short, unless we are prepared to deprive Marvell of all the three pieces of the group, it seems hard to take the third away from him.as Milton was totally blind in

-Add this final consideration, that, 1654, lines about a portrait would

hardly then be expected from him, even though he was Latin Secretary.

With this long explanation (too long for the mere trifle that has occasioned it, but involving particulars about Milton's life which it is well that readers of his Poems should have in their possession), we let the lines Ad Christinam, Suecorum Reginam, nomine Cromwelli, stand in this volume, as they have done so long in other editions of Milton.A word or two more on Christina's subsequent history. Alas! it was the sheerest bathos. At the time of Whitlocke's

embassy, as is indicated by Milton's words at the end of his encomium on Christina in his Defensio Secunda, she was arranging her abdication of the Swedish crown. The abdication was finally completed in June 1654, when she resigned the crown to her cousin, known as Charles X. of Sweden. Christina was then but twentyeight years of age; and she did not die till 1689, when she was sixty-three, having outlived her successor Charles X (1654—1660), and seen his successor, Charles XI., on the Swedish throne. The thirty-five years of her life after her abdication were years of wandering through the world, and of the wildest behaviour wherever she went. Immediately after her abdication, she abjured Protestantism at Brussels; shortly afterwards she declared herself a Roman Catholic at Innspruck; and thenceforward people heard of her as flashing here and there through Europe,-at Rome, in France, back in Sweden for a time, back in France, and back in Rome last of all,-everywhere with a train of the queerest composition, herself in a costume which was neither man's nor woman's, restlessly trying to assert her continued concern in the politics and the speculations of the times, quarrelling to that effect with Kings and Popes, and otherwise performing the oddest antics. Some thought her a splendid eccentric, and perhaps she was; more thought her crazed; all remembered, in pity, that she was the daughter of the great Gustavus. Both Milton and Marvell, ere they died, may have blushed in recollecting what they had written about her while she was still the young mystery of Sweden.