Provost of Eton College, and been kindly received on a visit he paid to that most courteous of old scholars and statesmen in his rooms in the College, he had signified his sense of the courtesy by sending Sir Henry a copy of Lawes's Edition of the Comus, with an acknowledgment of the poem as his own. Sir Henry, it seems, was already familiar with the thing, having read it some time before, "with singular delight," in a copy that had come to him bound up with the poetical remains of some deceased Oxonian. Accordingly, in that most polite and precious letter, dated from Eton College 13th April 1638, which the old diplomatist despatched to Milton at Horton by an express messenger, that it might be sure to reach him before he set out for his continental tour, all that remained to be done, besides giving Milton advices for his tour and enclosing one valuable letter of introduction, was to thank him for the second copy of the Comus, and mingle an expression of pleasure in now knowing who the author of that poem was with an expression of regret that his tour would interrupt for some time a too short acquaintanceship to which this information had lent a double zest. Sir Henry's opinion of the Comus was worth having. “A dainty piece of entertainment,” he calls it, "wherein I should much commend the tragical part, if the "lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Doric delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language." No harsh gust of wind on Milton's flowers, had any such been really feared, this letter, at all events, of the good old Sir Henry Wotton! Milton valued it highly, and probably took it with him across the Channel.

66

When he returned to England in the autumn of 1639, after his fifteen months or so of travel and residence abroad, he brought with him, to be added to his former stock of poetical manuscripts, only those few new scraps in Latin and Italian verse, composed here and there in Italy, of which there is a list in pp. 12-13 of our MEMOIR. The most important of these, and hardly to be called a scrap, was his poem in Latin hexameters entitled Mansus, addressed to the venerable Neapolitan sage, Giovanni Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa, whose acquaintance he had made in Naples. His first poetical employment after his return, adding yet another poem to his former stock, was the composition of that long pastoral entitled Epitaphium Damonis, also in Latin hexameters, which commemorates the poignancy of his grief over the loss, by unexpected death during his absence, of

the bosom-friend of his boyhood and youth, the half-Italian Charles Diodati. This, which is indubitably the finest of all Milton's Latin poems, is also the most interesting autobiographically. Here it is that, communing with the shade of his dead friend, of whom there remained no more for him in this world than fond recollection and the sight of his premature grave in a London churchyard, he repeats an intimation about his own literary intentions and schemings which he had hinted more vaguely in his poem to Manso. The lines conveying this intimation come in near the end of the poem, where they are introduced in a very subtle manner, with hesitations on account of what may seem their bold egotism. They may be translated thus::

"I have a theme of the Trojans cruising our southern headlands
Shaping to song, and the realm of Imogen, daughter of Pandras,
Brennus and Arvirach, dukes, and Bren's bold brother, Belinus;
Then the Armorican settlers under the laws of the Britons;
Ay, and the womb of Igraine, fatally pregnant with Arthur,
Uther's son, whom he got disguised in Gorlois' likeness,
All by Merlin's craft. O then, if life shall be spared me,

Thou shalt be hung, my pipe, far off on some brown dying pine-tree,

Much forgotten of me; or else your Latian music

Changed for the British war-screech! What then? For one to do all things,
One to hope all things, fits not! Prize sufficiently ample

Mine, and distinction great (unheard of ever thereafter

Though I should be, and inglorious, all through the world of the stranger),
If but yellow-haired Ouse shall read me, the drinker of Alan,
Humber, which whirls as it flows, and Trent's whole valley of orchards,
Thames, my own Thames, above all, and Tamar's western waters,
Tawny with ores, and where the white waves swinge the far Orkneys."

In other words, Milton had no care now for extended publicity for any of his poetical productions hitherto, whether in Latin or in English. He had taken final farewell of Latin for such things, content that the population of his own native British Island, from the Channel to the Orkneys, should be his audience for the future in poetry, even if he should never be heard of abroad; he was absorbed for the present in the design of one great English poem, fit to be addressed to such an audience, and of such a kind and such dimensions that, if he succeeded in it, posterity would not willingly let it die; and he had resolved, moreover, that this poem should be an epic on King Arthur, involving the whole cycle of the Arthurian

legends. Of what worth was all that he had yet done in verse in comparison with the possibility of such a great Arthurian epic? Might not Lawes's 1637 Edition of the Comus, together with the Lycidas as it had been printed in the Cambridge collection of 1638, be still a sufficient representation, for the needs of the British public generally, of that new Miltonic vein in English Poetry which the projected Arthurian epic would illustrate on a larger scale?

How the project of an Arthurian epic was abandoned, and how Milton, first in temporary lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard, and then in the "pretty garden-house" which he had taken in Aldersgate Street, and where his two nephews lived with him and had their daily lessons, passed from the year 1639 into 1640, and from 1640 into 1641, with no subject yet definitely fixed for his intended great English poem, but inclining to the dramatic form now rather than the epic, and making out lists of scores of possible subjects for Tragedies, mostly from Biblical History, but partly from the History of Britain before the Conquest,—among which scores of subjects the most distinctly schemed, and apparently the most attractive to him, was Paradise Lost: of all this some account has been given already in our MEMOIR, and a more circumstantial account will be given in the Introductions to Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. What has to be remembered here is that all these great ruminations came to nothing, interrupted as they were by Milton's interest in the great political and ecclesiastical revolution which the meeting of the Long Parliament in November 1640 had set astir in England. For some time he had resisted the fascination of the political ferment, leaving the conduct of affairs to those who were in public charge of them, and persisting quietly in his own studies and poetic dreams. But in 1641 the Church Question came on, and then Milton could remain silent no longer. From that moment, bidding his poetic projects wait till he should be at leisure to resume them, he plunged into the stormy element around him, and converted himself into a prose polemic and pamphleteer. To his five Anti-Episcopal or Root-and-Branch pamphlets of 1641-2 there succeeded, in 1643, 1644, and 1645, his four pamphlets expounding and defending his more peculiar and private Doctrine of Divorce, this last series varied in 1644 by the interjection of his Tract on Education and his Areopagitica. Eleven laborious prose-pamphlets in four years, with nothing of separate verse all the while but three casual

sonnets! Strange that the man who had been so timid or so dilatory about the publication of his poems, about bringing the wind among his flowers, should so exult in the publicity inevitable in such prose-pamphleteering as his was, should care nothing for even a hurricane among his thistles! For what was the character of the publicity he had obtained by his eleven prose-pamphlets? Admiration, doubtless, for some of them in many quarters, and perhaps for all of them in some quarters; but, on the whole, and more particularly by his Divorce pamphlets, infamy and execration! Denounced from pulpits and in books as a heretic and blasphemer, watched by the Westminster Assembly of Divines as a sectary to be struck down if possible by the power of the civil arm, complained of by the corporation of the London Stationers for systematic contempt of the press-laws, brought to question more than once before the Parliament itself in consequence of these complaints or of private manœuvres by the Presbyterian clergy, detested by the Anglicans for his attacks on the Bishops and invectives against Episcopal ChurchGovernment, and with little countervailing applause or sympathy except among the extreme Independents and other free opinionists,such was the position into which Milton's pamphleteering activity had brought him in 1645, when he was in the thirty-seventh year of his age, still residing in Aldersgate Street, his wife absent from him now for two years, but his old father now domiciled with him as well as his two nephews. If Milton had won fame by his prose-writings, it was such fame as Eolus the Wind-God conferred in Chaucer's House of Fame when the goddess ordered him to lay aside his golden trumpet and blow a blast with his black one:-

"What did this Eolus, but he

Took out his blackè trumpe of brass,

That fouler than the Devil was,

And gan this trumpè for to blow

As all the world should overthrow.

Throughout every regioun
Went this foulè trumpè's soun,
As swift as pellet out of gun
When fire is in the powder run;
And such a smokè gan out-wend
Out of the foulè trumpè's end,
Black, blue, greenish, swartish, red,
As doeth where that men melt lead.
Lo! all on hie from the tewelle.

And thereto one thing saw I well,-
That, the farther that it ran,
The greater waxen it began,
As doth the river from a well;
And it stank as the pit of Hell.”

He

Any recollection that there may have anywhere been of Milton's earlier aspirations and performances of the purely poetical order, any recollection of his Comus in Lawes's Edition of it in 1637, or of his Lycidas in the Cambridge collection of obituary verses in 1638 to the memory of Edward King, had been obliterated, of course, by the fiercer impress of his new prose-reputation. What could a few copies of one small volume lying here and there on library-shelves, and another shorter piece included in similarly scattered copies of another volume, avail against the eleven tremendous prose-pamphlets? This consideration seems to have given Milton no great concern. did intend to return to Poetry as soon as the Revolution in which he was assisting, and which he regarded as a struggle for English Liberty, should be happily over; the struggle was lasting longer than he had at first expected; but he would fight through it so long as might be necessary, in expectation of that time of triumph and calm, sooner or later, when he should be able to resume his postponed schemes of some great poem or two that should impart a new strain to the language and the literature of England. Meanwhile why trouble himself with the resuscitation of his Comus and his Lycidas, or with the publication of the little collection of other pieces of verse which he had beside him in manuscript?

If Milton thought so, he fortunately yielded to better advice. The advice came from a certain Humphrey Moseley, and it took effect late in 1645, just when Milton had removed, or was removing, from his house in Aldersgate Street to the larger house he had taken in the adjacent Barbican for the accommodation of the increasing number of those sons of private friends who came to him as pupils. His wife, a reconciliation between them having been brought about at last, entered the new house along with him, as well as the father and the two nephews; and no more was to be heard publicly of the Divorce speculation.

Who was Humphrey Moseley? He was a London bookseller, with a shop in St. Paul's Churchyard, where he had begun, some years before, a line of his own in the publishing business, from which