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tion we have as to the mutual position of the two friends at that date, when Milton was in his thirtieth year and Diodati had just passed that age. Diodati, it appears from those letters, had finished his medical education, and was in prac tice somewhere in the north of England; near Chester, it has been supposed, but that is only a guess from the fact that he had been in that neighbourhood in 1626, the date of the Elegia Prima. Milton, on the other hand, was mainly at Horton, but sometimes in London; whence, indeed, his two letters are written. They are full of gossip and affection. "How is it with you, pray?" asks Milton in the first, dated Sept. 2. "Are you in good health? Are there in those parts "any learned folks or so with whom you can willingly associate and chat, as we were wont, together? When do you return? How long do you intend to dwell among those hyperboreans?" Again, in the second, dated Sept. 23, Diodati having replied in the meanwhile, and there having been the usual excuses on both sides for laziness in letter-writing: "Your probity writes with me in your "stead and indites true letters on my inmost heart; your blamelessness of "morals writes to me, and your love of the good; your genius also, by no means a common one, writes to me, and commends you to me more and more. Know that it is impossible for me not to love men like you.' There is added some talk about Milton's doings. He is thinking, he says, of taking chambers in London, in one of the Inns of Court, having begun to find Horton inconvenient. He has been engaged in a continuous course of historical reading, and has reached the medieval period. Could Diodati lend him the History of Venice by Justiniani? And what is Diodati doing? Is he crowing over his medical dignity? Is he troubling himself too much with family matters? Unless this step-motherly war is very bad indeed, worse than Dacian or Sarmatian, may not one hope to see him soon in winter quarters? (Nisi bellum hoc novercale vel Dacico vel Sarmatico infestius sit, debebis profecto maturare, ut ad nos saltem in hiberna concedas.) I can only construe this passage as implying that Diodati had recently received a step-mother, and was not much pleased with the acquisition.

Seven months after Milton had written these letters to Diodati, he went abroad on his Italian journey (April 1638). It is very possible that he and Diodati may have met in the interval, and talked over the intended tour. Diodati, as half an Italian, and acquainted with the Italian traditions and connexions of his family, may have had hints to give to Milton for his use abroad, or even letters of introduction. At all events, we find Milton, while abroad, thinking much of Diodati. He mentions expressly in his Defensio Secunda that, in the second two months he spent at Florence (March and April 1639), he found time for an excursion of "a few days" to Lucca, about forty miles distant; and I suspect that his main motive in the excursion was to see the town whence the Diodati family had derived their origin. Then, again, in one of the Five Italian Love Sonnets, written, as is generally believed, in the north of Italy, towards the end of Milton's Italian tour, we find Diodati directly addressed, and, as it were, taken, though absent, into his friend's confidence in the sudden love-incident that had befallen him (see Introd. to the Italian Sonnets). I feel sure that Milton talked of Diodati, his half-Italian friend at home, to the various groups of Italian wits and literati in the midst of whom he found himself in the different Italian cities he visited, and especially to his acquaintances of the Florentine group, Gaddi, Dati, Frescobaldi, Coltellini, Chimentelli, Francini, and others. It is not a matter of fancy, but of actual information by Milton himself, that, as he parted from these groups of new friends, and took his way at length back from Italy homewards, through

Switzerland and France, it was with a kind of impatience to meet Diodati again, after so long an absence, so as to pour into his ear, in long sittings within-doors, or in walks together through English fields and country lanes, the connected story of all he had done and seen in the wondrous southern land of olives and myrtles, blue skies and soft winds, art and antiquities, poetry and beauty.

All the more terrible was the shock that awaited Milton. His friend Diodati was no longer alive. He had died soon after Milton had left England. “Mr. Charles Deodate, from Mr. Dollam's," is his burial-entry, under date, August 27, 1638, recently discovered by Colonel Chester, in the Registers of the parish of St. Anne, Blackfriars, London; where also, dated the 10th of the same month, there is this previous burial-entry - Mrs. Philadelphia Deodate, from Mr. Dollam's." The inference is that, in consequence of the second marriage of old Dr. Theodore Diodati, young Charles and a sister of his had taken lodgings together at a Mr. Dollam's in Blackfriars, -in which district, Colonel Chester has found, their brother John was then residing, as a married man,— and that here, within seventeen days of each other, they had fallen victims to some epidemic. The rumour may have reached Milton on the Continent, if only at Geneva in June 1639; but not till he was back in England did he learn all the particulars. Whatever they were, they impressed him greatly. For some time he seems to have gone about, between London and Horton, thinking of Charles Diodati's death. His reminiscences of Italy and all the delights of his tour were saddened and spoiled to him by this one irremediable loss. His musings over it take poetic form, and in the late autumn of 1639, or in the winter of 1639-40, he writes his Epitaphium Damonis.

The poem is, beyond all question, the finest, the deepest in feeling, of all that Milton has left us in Latin, and one of the most interesting of all his poems, whether Latin or English. It is purely the accident of its being in Latin that has prevented it from being as well known as Lycidas, and that has transferred to the subject of that English pastoral, Edward King of Christ's College, Cambridge, the honour of being remembered and spoken of as the pre-eminent friend of Milton's youth and early manhood. Not Lycidas but Damon, not the Irish-born Edward King, but the halfItalian Charles Diodati, was Milton's dearest, most intimate, most peculiar friend. The records prove this irresistibly, and a careful perusal of the two poems will add to the impression. Whoever will read the Latin Epitaphium Damonis will perceive in a passionateness of personal grief, an evidence of bursts of tears and sobbings interrupting the act of writing, to which there is nothing equivalent in the English Lycidas, affectionate and exquisitely beautiful as that poem is. Yet the two poems are, in a sense, companions, and ought to be recollected in connexion. Both are pastorals; in both the form is that of a surviving shepherd bewailing the death of a dear fellow-shepherd. In the one case the dead shepherd is named Lycidas, while the surviving shepherd who mourns him is left unnamed, and only seen at the end as the "uncouth swain" who has been singing; in the other the dead shepherd is named Damon, and Milton, under the name of Thyrsis, is avowedly the shepherd who laments him. The reader may here refer to what has been said, in the Introduction to Lycidas, concerning the Pastoral form of Poetry and the objections that have been taken to it. What was said there in defence of the Pastoral form applies especially to the Epitaphium Damonis; for it is a pastoral of the most artificial variety. It is in Latin; and this, in itself, removes it into the realm of the artificial. But, in the Latin, the precedents of the Greek pastoralists, Theocritus, Bion,

and Moschus, as well as of the Latin Virgil, have been studied, and every device of classic pastoralism has been imitated. There are the sheep, the kids, the reeden flutes, the pastures, the shepherds and shepherdesses wondering at the mourner and coming round him to comfort him. The measure used is the Virgilian Hexameter, and the poem is broken into musical parts or bursts by a recurring phrase as in some of the Greek Idylls; the names used for the shepherds and shepherdesses are from the Greek Idyllists or from Virgil; the very title of the poem is an echo of that of the third Idyll of Moschus, Epitaphium Bionis. All the more strange, to those whose notion of the Pastoral has not gone beyond Dr. Johnson's in his criticism of Lycidas, may seem the assertion that in this Latin pastoral, the Epitaphium Damonis, the pastoralism of which is more subtle and artificial in every point than that of the corresponding English poem, Milton will be found, undeniably, and with an earnestness which breaks through the assumed guise and thrills the nerves of the reader, speaking his own heart. For my own part, I risk the assertion and will leave the verification to the reader. To the reader also I will leave the pleasure of finding out what is interesting in this extraordinary poem. Only let him rest a little, for special reasons, over the memorable passage beginning "Ipse etiam" (line 155) and extending to "Orcades undis" (line 178). That passage is an important shred of Milton's autobiography. It tells, more minutely, and in a more emphatic manner, what he had already hinted in his Latin poem to Manso, viz.: that at this period of his life his thoughts were full of the project of an Epic poem founded on British legendary History, and especially on the subject of King Arthur. Combined with this glimpse of what was shaping itself in Milton's mind at that time (163940) is the farther information that he had then also resolved to give up Latin for the purposes of poetry, and to confine himself to English.

AD JOANNEM ROUSIUM,

OXONIENSIS ACADEMIE BIBLIOTHECARIUM.

January 23, 1646-7.

John Rous, M. A. and Fellow of Oriel College, was elected Chief Librarian of the Bodleian May 9, 1620, and he remained in that post till his death in April 1652. Milton may have become acquainted with him in some visit to Oxford during the Cambridge period of his life, or, at all events, in 1635, when, as a Cambridge M. A. of three years' standing, he was incorporated, in the same degree, at Oxford. It is almost certain that ". our common friend Mr. R." mentioned by Sir Henry Wotton in his letter to Milton of April 13, 1638, as having sent to Wotton a copy of Lawes's anonymous edition of Comus of the previous year, bound up with a volume of inferior poetry printed at Oxford, was this John Rous, the Oxford Librarian. In any case, Milton had come to know Rous. Who in those days could avoid doing so that had dealings with books, and was drawn to the sight of such a collection of books as that in the great Bodleian? It may have been a recommendation of Rous in Milton's eyes that, Oxonian though he was, his sympathies were decidedly Parliamentarian. Possibly he was a relative of Francis Rous, the Puritan member of the Long Parliament for Truro.

Milton, at Rous's request. had sent him, for the Bodleian, in 1646, a set n

A

his published writings complete to that date: to wit, his eleven Prose-pamphlets of 1641-4 (the five on the Episcopacy question, the four on Divorce, the Areopagitica, and the tract on Education); and, separately bound, the edition of his Poems in English and Latin published by Moseley in the end of 1645. Of these, however, only the Prose-pamphlets had reached their destination; the Poems had been lost or stolen on their way to Oxford, or had otherwise gone astray. Rous, accordingly, both in his own behalf and in the interest of the Library, begs for another copy, to make the set of Milton's writings complete, as had been intended. Milton complies with the request, and sends a second copy of the Poems. But, amused by the incident of the loss of the first, he composes a Latin Ode on the subject; and a transcript of this Ode, carefully written out on a sheet of paper by himself, or some one else, in an Italian hand, he causes to be inserted in the second copy, between the English and the Latin contents of the volume. Accordingly, there are now in the Bodleian two volumes of Milton's writings, his own gift to the Library. One is the volume of the eleven collected Prose-pamphlets, with an inscription in Milton's undoubted autograph; the other is the supplementary volume of his Poems, sent to Rous, ut cum aliis nostris reponeret" ("that he might replace it beside our other things "), and containing the Ode to Rous in an inserted sheet of MS., generally supposed to be also Milton's autograph, in an unusual form of laboured elegance, but probably, I think, a transcript by some calligraphist whom he employed.

The Ode is a curious one, in respect of both its form and its matter.—The form, as Milton takes care to explain in a note (appended in his edition, though now more conveniently prefixed), is peculiarly arbitrary. It is a kind of experiment in Latin, after few classical precedents in that language, of the mixed verse, or verse of various metres, common in the Greek choral odes. Even within that range Milton has taken liberties at the bidding of his own ear, paying regard, as he says, rather to facility of reading than to ancient rule. Altogether, the experiment was very daring. The matter of the Ode is simple enough. It is addressed not directly to Rous, but to the little volume itself. The double contents of the volume, Latin and English, are spoken of in modest terms; the loss of the first copy, mysteriously abstracted from the bundle of its brothers, when they were on their way from London to Oxford, is playfully mentioned, with wonder what had become of it and into what rough hands it may have fallen; Rous's friendly interest, both in having repeatedly applied at first for the whole set of writings and in having applied again for the missing volume, is acknowledged; and there are the due applauses of Oxford and her great Library. In this last connexion there is an amplification of what had been hinted in the inscription in the volume of the Prose-pamphlets. The time would come, he had there hoped, when even his Prose-pamphlets, now procuring him nothing but ill-will and calumny, might be better appreciated. This hope he now repeats more strongly with reference to his Poems The following is Cowper's translation of the Epode, or closing strain :—

"Ye, then, my works, no longer vain
And worthless deemed by me,

Whate'er this sterile genius has produced,
Expect at last, the rage of envy spent,

An unmolested, happy home,

Gift of kind Hermes, and my watchful friend,

Where never flippant tongue profane

Shall entrance find,

And whence the coarse unlettered multitude
Shall babble far remote.

Perhaps some future distant age,

Less tinged with prejudice, and better taught
Shall furnish minds of power

To judge more equally.

Then, malice silenced in the tomb,
Cooler heads and sounder hearts,
Thanks to Rous, if aught of praise

I merit, shall with candour weigh the claim."

EPIGRAMS ON SALMASIUS.

Salmasius is a great name in the Biography of Milton. The person called by it, according to the custom, then common in the scholarly world of Europe, of Latinizing the names of its important members, was Claude de Saumaise, a Frenchman, born in 1588, and therefore Milton's senior by about twenty years. From his earliest youth he had been a prodigious reader; and by a series of publications, partly in France and partly in Germany, some against the Papal power, but others more purely historical and antiquarian, he had acquired the fame of being perhaps the most learned European scholar of his generation. Princes and States contended for the honour of possessing and pensioning him; but, after various travels, he had taken up his residence chiefly at Leyden, in Holland. Thus brought into contact with Charles II. and the English Royalist exiles after the execution of Charles I., he had been employed or induced, in an evil hour for himself, to write a defence of the late King and an attack on the English Commonwealth. It appeared in Holland in 1649, under the title of Defensio Regia pro Carolo I. A book of the kind by a man of his fame was felt in England to be a serious matter; and Milton, then Latin Secretary to the Council of State, was requested to answer it. He did so in his famous Defensio pro Populo Anglicano contra Claudii Salmasii Defensionem Regiam, published in the end of 1650, or beginning of 1651. Soon all Europe rang from side to side with the power of this pamphlet ; and the legend is that Salmasius, who had recently gone to reside at the Court of Sweden on the pressing invitation of the eccentric Queen Christina, was so chagrined at the applause with which the pamphlet was everywhere received, and especially by Christina's consequent coldness to himself, that he soon afterwards died. He did quit Sweden, and return to Holland, where he died Sept. 3, 1653, leaving an unfinished reply to Milton, and the task of continuing the controversy to other persons. Among these was the Gallo-Scot, Alexander More or Morus, already mentioned in the Introduction to the brief epigram De Moro among the Latin Elegies. Milton's Defensio Secunda pro Fopulo Anglicano, published in 1654, was in reply to a treatise of the same year, which More was supposed to have written, but which he had only seen through the press, entitled Regii Sanguinis Clamor adversus Parricidas Anglicanos. In this "Second Defence," though More was the person directly attacked, Milton went back upon his dead opponent Salmasius. Hence, while the first of the two Epigrams against Salmasius now under notice is from the original pamphlet against the living Salmasius (called now, generally, the Defensio Prima), the second is from the Defensio Secunda, in which More receives the direct attack and Salmasius is only recollected for posthumous chastisement.