An Introduction to the Prose and Poetical Works of John Milton / Comprising All the Autobiographic Passages in His Works, the More Explicit Presentations of His Ideas of True Liberty.

by John Milton

INTRODUCTION

Milton's prose works are perhaps not read, at the present day, to the extent demanded by their great and varied merits, among which may be named their uncompromising advocacy of whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report; their eloquent assertion of the inalienable rights of men to a wholesome exercise of their intellectual faculties, the right to determine for themselves, with all the aids they can command, what is truth and what is error; the right freely to communicate their honest thoughts from one to another,—rights which constitute the only sure and lasting foundation of individual, civil, political, and religious liberty; the ever-conscious sentiment which they exhibit, on the part of the poet, of an entire dependence upon 'that Eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases'; the ever-present consciousness they exhibit of that stewardship which every man as a probationer of immortality must render an account, according to the full measure of the talents with which he has been intrusted—of the sacred obligation, incumbent upon every one, of acting throughout the details of life, private or public, trivial or momentous, 'as ever in his great Task-Master's eye.'

Some of his poetical works are extensively 'studied' in the schools, and a style study of some of his prose works is made in departments of rhetoric; but his prose works cannot be said to be much read in the best sense of the word,—that is,

with all the faculties alert upon the subject-matter as of prime importance, with an openness of heart, and with an accompanying interest in the general loftiness of their diction; in short, as every one should train himself to read any great author, with the fullest loyalty to the author—by which is not meant that all his thoughts and opinions and beliefs are to be accepted, but that what they really are be adequately, or ad modum recipientis, apprehended; in other words, loyalty to an author means that the most favorable attitude possible for each and every reader be taken for the reception of his meaning and spirit.

Mark Pattison, in his life of Milton, in the 'English Men of Letters,' while fully recognizing the grand features of the prose works as monuments of the English language, notwithstanding what he calls their 'asyntactic disorder,' undervalues, or rather does not value at all, Milton's services to the cause of political and religious liberty as a polemic prose writer, and considers it a thing to be much regretted that he engaged at all in the great contest for political, religious, and other forms of liberty. This seems to be the one unacceptable feature of his very able life of the poet. 'But for the Restoration,' he says, 'and the overthrow of the Puritans, we should never have had the great Puritan epic.' Professor Goldwin Smith, in his article in the New York Nation on Pattison's 'Milton,' remarks: 'Looking upon the life of Milton the politician merely as a sad and ignominious interlude in the life of Milton the poet, Mr. Pattison cannot be expected to entertain the idea that the poem is in any sense the work of the politician. Yet we cannot help thinking that the tension and elevation which Milton's nature had undergone in the mighty struggle, together with the heroic dedication of his faculties to the most serious objects, must have had not a little to do both with the final choice of his subject and with the

tone of his poem. "The great Puritan epic" could hardly have been written by any one but a militant Puritan.'

Dr. Richard Garnett, in his 'Life of Milton,' pp. 68, 69, takes substantially the same view as does Professor Smith: 'To regret with Pattison that Milton should, at this crisis of the State, have turned aside from poetry to controversy, is to regret that "Paradise Lost" should exist. Such a work could not have proceeded from one indifferent to the public weal. . . . It is sheer literary fanaticism to speak with Pattison of "the prostitution of genius to political party." Milton is as much the idealist in his prose as in his verse; and although in his pamphlets he sides entirely with one of the two great parties in the State, it is not as its instrument, but as its prophet and monitor.'

Milton was writing prose when, Mr. Pattison thinks, he should have been writing poetry, 'and that most ephemeral and valueless kind of prose, pamphlets, extempore articles on the topics of the day. He poured out reams of them, in simple unconsciousness that they had no influence whatever on the current of events.'

But they certainly had an influence, and a very great influence, on the current of events not many years after. The restoration of Charles II. did not mean that the work of Puritanism was undone, and that Milton's pamphlets were to be of no effect. It was in a large measure due to that work and to those pamphlets that in a few years—fourteen only after Milton's death—the constitutional basis of the monarchy underwent a quite radical change for the better,—a change which would have been a solace to Milton, if he could have lived to see it; and he could then have justly felt that he had contributed to the change. He would have been but eighty years old, if he had lived till the revolution of 1688.

A man constituted as Milton was could not have kept

himself apart from the great conflicts of his time. He was a patriot in every fibre of his being. He realized in the cultivation of himself his definition of education, given in his tractate 'Of Education. To Master S. Hartlib': 'I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.' Of course he did not mean that that was all of education. And in his 'Areopagitica,' he says, after defining 'the true warfaring Christian,' 'I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.'

Although the direct subjects of his polemic prose works may not have an interest for the general reader at the present day, they are all, independently of their direct subjects, charged with 'truths that perish never,' most vitally expressed. And this is as true of the 'Treatises on Divorce' as it is of any of the other prose works. They are full of bright gems of enduring truth.

Lord Macaulay's article on Milton, first published in the Edinburgh Review for August, 1825, is a brilliant and, in many respects, a valuable production, but he certainly says some things on the favorableness of an uncivilized age, and the unfavorableness of a civilized and learned age, to poetical creativeness, which are quite remote from the truth, and which Milton would certainly have regarded as abundantly absurd. So, too, he would have regarded what is said of the necessary struggle which a great poet must make against the spirit of his age. All these views are as completely at variance with Milton's own as are those of Mark Pattison in regard to Milton the politician.

Lord Macaulay's article was occasioned by the publication

of an English version, by Rev. Charles Richard Sumner, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, of Milton's 'Treatise on Christian Doctrine,' the existence of which was unknown up to the year 1823, when the original manuscript in Latin was found in a press of the old State Paper office, in Whitehall.

In this essay the author sets forth an opinion, still widely entertained, it may be, by a large number of cultivated people, namely, that as learning and general civilization, and science, with its applications to the physical needs and comforts of life, advance, Poetry recedes, and 'hides her diminished head,' and men become more and more subject to facts as facts, losing sight more and more of the poetical, that is, spiritual, relations of facts.

'Milton knew,' Macaulay tells us, 'that his poetical genius derived no advantage from the civilization which surrounded him, or from the learning which he had acquired; and he looked back with something of regret to the ruder age of simple words and vivid impressions.'

But it appears from Milton's own authority that he did not know this; that, on the contrary, he thought the poet should be master of all human learning, ancient and modern, should know many languages and many literatures; that 'by labour and intense study, which,' he adds, 'I take to be my portion in this life, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.' Some of the autobiographic passages contained in this book will be found a sufficient refutation of what has been quoted from Macaulay.

The view which Milton took of learning, and acted upon, is one which should be kept before the minds of students at the present day, when the tendency is so strong toward learning for its own sake. As well talk of beefsteak for its own sake. Learning was with Milton a means of enlarging his

capacity—a means toward being and doing. Mark Pattison well says, 'He cultivated, not letters, but himself, and sought to enter into possession of his own mental kingdom, not that he might reign there, but that he might royally use its resources in building up a work which should bring honour to his country, and his native tongue.'

'Though we admire,' Lord Macaulay continues, 'those great works of imagination which have appeared in dark ages, we do not admire them the more because they have appeared in dark ages. On the contrary, we hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age. We cannot understand why those who believe in that most orthodox article of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the exception. Surely the uniformity of the phenomenon indicates a corresponding uniformity in the cause.'

Further on he says: 'He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.' The most highly learned and cultured (eternalized), the most fully developed in every direction, are the most childlike, the least knowledge-proud, and the more spiritual vitality they have, the greater will be their humility and simplicity—the gates to true wisdom. 'He [the poet] must take to pieces,' says Macaulay, 'the whole web of his mind.' Rather a difficult piece of unravelling to impose upon the poor fellow! 'He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title of superiority.' Oh, who would be a poet in a civilized age! 'His very talents will be a hindrance to him.' What an irredeemable numskull he would have a poet to be! According to this doctrine, our institutions for feeble-minded children are likely to send forth the best poets into the world. 'His difficulties will be

proportioned to his proficiency in the pursuits which are fashionable among his contemporaries, and that proficiency will in general be proportioned to the vigor and activity of his mind. . . . We have seen in our own time, great talents, intense labor, and long meditation, employed in this struggle against the spirit of the age, and employed, we will not say absolutely in vain, but with dubious success and feeble applause.'

Of all the flimsy theories in regard to the conditions of poetic creativeness that the mind of man could devise, this is certainly the flimsiest. It is only necessary to give a hasty glance at the works of those poets who are regarded as Masters of Song in the various literatures of the ancient and the modern world, to learn the secret of their vitality and power—that secret being, first, that they all possessed the best knowledge and learning of their times and places; and, secondly, that they all held the widest and most intimate relations with their several ages and countries, and drank deepest of, and most intensely reflected, the spirit of those ages and countries. If Shakespeare was not a learned man, he was the best educated man that ever lived. He had a fulness of life, intellectual and spiritual, and an easy command of all his faculties, to which but few of the sons of men have ever attained; and he lived in an age the most favorable in human history for the exercise of dramatic genius, and an age, on the whole, more civilized than any that had ever preceded it.

No true poet could live in any age without imbibing and reflecting its spirit, and that to a much greater degree than other men. For the poetic nature is distinguished from ordinary natures by its greater impressibility and its keener, more penetrating insight, and to suppose that a poet can keep apart from the spirit of his age and the state of society around him is to lose sight of the very differentia of the poetic nature, and implicitly to admit its feebleness. In one respect he may

be said to keep apart from his age, in the sense of rejecting, in having no affinities for, what in it is ephemeral, while appropriating what of vital and eternal is in it. His affinities, by virtue of his poetic nature, are for what is enduring in the transient. And every age must have the vital and eternal in it, as the vital and eternal are omnipresent at all times and in all places.

The great poet is great because he is intensely individual, and there can be no intense individuality, paradoxical as it may appear, that is not subject, in a more than ordinary degree, to impressions of time and place. An individual in the fullest sense of the word, one who legitimates, as it were, in the eyes of his country or his age, his decisive influence over its destiny, is generally characterized, not so much by his rejecting power, though he will always, and necessarily, have this in a high degree, as by his appropriating power. He brings to the special unity of his nature all that that nature, in its healthiest activity, can assimilate, and throws off only the to him non-assimilable dross of things. The more complete his life becomes, the more it is bound up with what surrounds it, and he is susceptible of impressions the more numerous and the more profound.

The greater impressibility (spiritual sensitiveness) and its resultant, the keener, more penetrating insight ('the vision and the faculty divine'), which preëminently distinguish poetic genius from ordinary natures, render great poets the truest historians of their times and the truest prophets. The poetic and dramatic literature of a people is a mirror in which is most clearly reflected their real and essential life. History gives rather their phenomenal life. It is the essential spirit only of an age, the permanent, the absolute, in it, as assimilated and 'married to immortal verse' by a great poet, that can retain a hold upon the interests and sympathies of future generations.

Milton was most emphatically a man of his age, and its clearest reflector, sustaining to it the most intimate and sympathetic and intensely active relationship; and, of all that was enduring in it, his works, both prose and poetical, are the best existing exponent. His intimate relationship with his age has been set forth in Dr. Masson's exhaustive and grandly monumental work, in six large octavo volumes, 'The Life of John Milton: narrated in connexion with the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of his time.' No other poet in universal literature, unless Dante be an exception, ever sustained such a relationship to the great movements of his time and country that an exhaustive biography of him would need to be, to the same extent, 'narrated in connexion with the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of his time.'

Milton might justly and proudly have said of himself, with reference to the fierce political and ecclesiastical conflicts of his time, 'quorum pars magna fui.' And who can doubt that by these conflicts, and even, also, by his loss of sight therein, he was tempered to write the 'Paradise Lost,' the 'Paradise Regained,' and the 'Samson Agonistes'? He might have written some other great work, if he had kept himself apart from these conflicts, as Pattison thinks he ought to have done, but he certainly could not have written the 'Paradise Lost.' Of the principles involved in the great contest for civil and religious liberty his prose works are the fullest exponent. In the 'Paradise Lost' can be seen the influence of his classical and Italian studies. Homer and Virgil and Dante are in it, but its essential, vitalizing, controlling spirit is that of a refined exalted Puritanism, freed from all that was in it of the contingent and the accidental; and thus that spirit will be preserved for ever in the pure amber of the poem.

It was not within the scope of this little book, as a primary introduction to the study of Milton, to include any extended

presentation of the 'Paradise Lost.' But two grand features may be alluded to here. It is, in some respects, one of the most educating of English poems. The grand feature of the poem, that feature which distinguishes it from all other works of genius, both ancient and modern, is its essential, constitutional sublimity. So universally has this feature been recognized as peculiar to the poem, that the word Miltonic has become synonymous with the sublime. The loftiness of the diction, which is without all touch of bombast, every sympathetic reader must feel to be an emanation from the august personality of the poet. There is no perceptible strain anywhere, as there is no perceptible lapse of power, on the part of the poet. He keeps ever up to the height of his great argument. To come into the fullest possible sympathetic relationship with the poem's constitutional sublimity, to be impressed by its loftiness of diction, by the contriving spirit of its eloquence, are educating experiences of the highest order—experiences which imply an exercise, most vitalizing and uplifting, of the reader's higher organs of apprehension and discernment. The theology of the poem need not obstruct for any one these educating influences. They are quite independent of the theology, as are the educating influences of the 'Divina Commedia' independent of its mediæval Catholicism. The absolute man was in the ascendent in both Dante and Milton; and by virtue of that ascendency, they are, and ever will continue to be, great educating personalities, whatever false science and false opinions on various subjects are embodied in their works, and however much the world's faith in things which they most vitally believed may decline and entirely cease to be. Their personalities and their works are consubstantial. This fact—an immortal fact—was, perhaps, not taken sufficient account of by Mark Pattison when he wrote in his 'Life of Milton' that 'the demonology of the poem has

already, with educated readers, passed from the region of fact into that of fiction. Not so universally, but with a large number of readers, the angelology can be no more than what the critics call machinery. And it requires a violent effort from any of our day to accommodate our conceptions to the anthropomorphic theology of "Paradise Lost." Were the sapping process to continue at the same rate for two more centuries, the possibility of epic illusion would be lost to the whole scheme and economy of the poem.' But there is a power in 'Paradise Lost' which is, and ever will be, independent of all manner of obsolete beliefs.

Both the 'Paradise Lost' and the 'Divina Commedia' belong, in a supereminent degree, to what Thomas De Quincey calls, in his 'Essay on Pope,' the literature of power, as distinguished from the literature of knowledge; and, as a consequence, the statement of Mark Pattison that 'there is an element of decay and death in poems which we vainly style immortal,' is not applicable to them. By the literature of power is meant that which is, in whatever form, an adequate embodiment of eternal verities—verities of the human soul and of the divine constitution of things, and their mutual adaptation, however much the former may be estranged from the latter. Such embodiment will maintain its individual existence.

'In that great social order, which collectively we call literature,' says De Quincey, 'there may be distinguished two separate offices that may blend and often do so, but capable severally of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is, first, the literature of knowledge, and, secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move. . . . The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher

understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy. . . . Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking information or gaining knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests, that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds: it exists eternally by way of germ or latent principle in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed, but never to be planted. To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely, power or deep sympathy with truth.'

By the truth which 'is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds,' De Quincey means absolute, eternal truth, inherent in the human soul, as distinguished from relative, temporal truth, the former being more or less 'cabined, cribbed, confined' in all men. As Paracelsus is made to express it, in Browning's poem 'Paracelsus,' 'There is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fulness; . . . and "to know" rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.'

To continue with De Quincey: 'What you owe to Milton [and he has the 'Paradise Lost' specially in his mind] is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards—a step ascending as upon a Jacob's ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas the very

first step in power is a flight—is an ascending into another element where earth is forgotten. . . . The very highest work that has ever existed in the literature of knowledge is but a provisional work: a book upon trial and sufferance, and quamdiu bene se gesserit. Let its teaching be even partially revised, let it be but expanded, nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order, and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the literature of power, surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men. For instance, the "Principia" of Sir Isaac Newton was a book militant on earth from the first. In all stages of its progress it would have to fight for its existence; first, as regards absolute truth; secondly, when that combat is over, as regards its form or mode of presenting the truth. And as soon as a La Place, or anybody else, builds higher upon the foundations laid by this book, effectually he throws it out of the sunshine into decay and darkness; by weapons won from this book he superannuates and destroys this book, so that soon the name of Newton remains as a mere nominis umbra, but his book, as a living power, has transmigrated into other forms. Now, on the contrary, the "Iliad," the "Prometheus" of Æschylus,—the "Othello" or "King Lear,"—the "Hamlet" or "Macbeth,"—and the "Paradise Lost," are not militant, but triumphant forever as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. . . . All the literature of knowledge builds only ground-nests, that are swept away by floods, or confounded by the plough; but the literature of power builds nests in aërial altitudes of temples, sacred from violation, or of forests inaccessible to fraud.'

I would not give these extended quotations from De Quincey were it not that there may be many students who will read this book, and who will not have access to the works of De

Quincey. Those who have, should read all that he says on the subject. The distinction which he makes between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power was never before so clearly and eloquently made, and it is a distinction which needs to be especially emphasized in these days of excessive knowledge-mongery, apart from education. Literature is largely made in the schools a knowledge subject. The great function of literature, namely, to bring into play the spiritual faculties, is very inadequately recognized, and the study of English Literature is made too much an objective job—the fault of teachers, not students. When the literature is studied as a life-giving power, students are always more interested than when everything else except the one thing needful receives attention,—the sources of works of genius, the influences under which they were produced, their relations to history and to time and place, and whatever else may be made to engage the minds of students in the absence of the teacher's ability to bring them into a sympathetic relationship with the informing life of the works 'studied'—with that which constitutes their absolute power.

Another important feature of the 'Paradise Lost' to which I would call attention, and of which much should be made in the study of the poem, as a condition of assimilating its educating power, is the verse, which more fully realizes Wordsworth's definition and notion of harmonious verse, given by Coleridge in the third of his 'Satyrane's Letters,' than any other blank verse in the language. The definition, it is evident, was meant to apply more particularly to non-dramatic blank verse. Wordsworth's definition is, as given by Coleridge, that 'harmonious verse consists (the English iambic blank verse above all) in the apt arrangement of pauses and cadences and the sweep of whole paragraphs,

"with many a winding bout

Of linkèd sweetness long drawn out,"

and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence or antithetic vigor of single lines, which are indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they are introduced for some specific purpose.'

In my 'Primer of English Verse' (Ginn & Co., Boston), I have presented the two grand features of Milton's blank verse, namely: (1) The melodious variety of his cadences closing within verses, this being one of the essentials of 'true musical delight' which Milton mentions, in his remarks on 'The Verse,' 'the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another'; and (2) the melodious and harmonious grouping of verses into what may, with entire propriety, be called stanzas—stanzas which are more organic than the uniformly constructed stanzas of rhymed verse. The latter must be more or less artificial, by reason of the uniformity which is maintained. But the stanzas of Milton's blank verse are waves of melody and harmony which are larger or smaller, and with ever varied cadences, according to the propulsion of the thought and feeling which produces them, which propulsion may be sustained through a dozen verses or more, or may expend itself in two or three. No other blank verse in the language exhibits such a masterly skill in the variation of its pauses—pauses, I mean, where periodic groups, or logical sections of groups, terminate after, or within, it may be, the first, second, third, or fourth foot of a verse. There are five cases where the termination is within the fifth foot.

Stanza is quite exclusively applied to uniform groups of rhymed verses, but it can be with equal propriety applied to the varied groups of blank verses, especially those of the 'Paradise Lost.' For the proper appreciation of the individual verses in Milton's blank verse, they must be read in

groups,—a group sometimes, perhaps generally, beginning within a verse and ending within a verse. These groups are due to the unifying action of feeling, just as much as rhymed stanzas are, and, indeed, often, if not generally, more so.

The autobiographical passages which have been brought together from the prose and poetical works, occupying 103 pages of the book, exhibit the man, Milton, better than could any regular biography of the same extent. The latter could give more of the details of his outward life and experiences, but could not so reflect his personality, his inmost being. He was most emphatically a person. He realized in himself what is expressed in the following verses from Tennyson's 'Œnone':

'Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,

These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

Yet not for power (power of herself

Would come uncalled for), but to live by law,

Acting the law we live by without fear;

And, because right is right, to follow right

Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.'

He also realized in himself what he says in his 'Areopagitica': 'He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.'

What he says of himself in reply to the base and scurrilous and utterly unfounded charges against his private character is more than what Mark Pattison truly characterizes as 'a superb and ingenuous egotism'; is more than an apologia pro vita sua; it was also prompted by the consideration that what he was agonizingly contending for in the cause of civil, political, and religious liberty might suffer, if his private character were not freed from the charges made against it. In the extended autobiographical passage in the 'Second Defence of the People

of England,' he assigns two other reasons for acquitting himself of the charges made against his private character, namely, 'that those illustrious worthies, who are the objects of my praise, may know that nothing could afflict me with more shame than to have any vices of mine diminish the force or lessen the value of my panegyric upon them; and that the people of England, whom fate or duty, or their own virtues, have incited me to defend, may be convinced from the purity and integrity of my life, that my defence, if it do not redound to their honour, can never be considered as their disgrace.'

A noble motive nobly presented!

There are no authors in the literature more distinctly revealed in their writings than is John Milton. His personality is felt in his every production, poetical and prose, and felt almost as much in the earliest as in the latest period of his authorship. And there is no epithet more applicable to his personality than the epithet august. He is therefore one of the most educating of authors, in the highest sense of the word, that is, educating in the direction of sanctified character.

''Tis human fortune's happiest height to be

A spirit melodious, lucid, poised, and whole:

Second in order of felicity

I hold it, to have walked with such a soul.'

The prime value attaching to the prose works of Milton at the present day is their fervent exposition of true freedom,—a freedom which involves a deep sympathy with truth; a freedom which is induced by a willing and, in its final result, a spontaneous obedience to one's higher nature. Without such obedience no one can be truly free. Outward freedom, so called, may only afford an opportunity to one with evil inward tendencies to become, morally, an invertebrate. Lord Byron speaks of his Lara as

'Left by his sire, too young such loss to know,

Lord of himself; that heritage of woe,

That fearful empire which the human breast

But holds to rob the heart within of rest!—

With none to check, and few to point in time

The thousand paths that slope the way to crime.'

There is more outward freedom at the present time than there was ever before, perhaps, in the world's history, and the temptations which it involves can be adequately resisted only by the subjective freedom which Milton so strenuously advocated. His ideas of all kinds of true freedom (explicit expressions of which have been brought together in the second section of this book) need to be instilled into all young minds, first, for their own intrinsic value, and, secondly, as a means—the sole means—of checking the present and ever increasing tendency toward unrestrained desires, toward what many mistake for true freedom, namely, license. Of such, Milton says, in one of his sonnets,

'License they mean when they cry liberty;

For who loves that must first be wise and good.'

The passage on Discipline (pp. [108-111]) from 'The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty,' should be learned by heart (in the vital sense of the phrase, not in the sense of merely memorizing) by all young people in our schools. Everything should be done to induce a sympathetic assimilation on their part of the lofty utterances in this passage on Discipline, 'whose golden surveying rod,' says Milton, 'marks out and measures every quarter and circuit of New Jerusalem.'

The translations (not acknowledged in the text) of the two Latin poems addressed to the poet's Anglo Italian friend, Charles Diodati ('Elegia Prima. Ad Carolum Diodatum,' p. 28, and 'Elegia Sexta. Ad Carolum Diodatum, ruri

commorantem,' p. 31), and of the Familiar Letters ('Epistolæ Familiares'), Nos. III.-X., XII., XIV., XXI., XXIX., and XXXI. are by Dr. Masson. His translations of the latter are much closer to the meaning and tone of the original than those by Robert Fellowes, given in the Bohn edition of the prose works, which hardly warrant the characterization of them by the editor, J. A. St. John, as 'the very elegant translation of Mr. Fellowes, of Oxford, who, in most instances, has happily and with much feeling entered into and expressed the views of Milton.' The translation of No. XV. of the Familiar Letters, 'To Leonard Philaras, Athenian,' is by my colleague, Professor Charles E. Bennett.

Students who are sufficiently good Latin scholars should read Milton's Latin poems in the original, especially the 'In Quintum Novembris: anno ætatis 17,' the 'Ad Patrem,' and the 'Epitaphium Damonis.' The 'In Quintum Novembris' (On the fifth of November, that is, the anniversary of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot) is described by Masson as 'one of the very cleverest and most poetical of all Milton's youthful productions, and certainly one of the most characteristic.' The 'Epitaphium Damonis' has been admirably edited with notes by C. S. Jerram, M.A. Trin. Coll. Oxon., along with 'Lycidas.'

The student should first read carefully all the selections, prose and poetical, without referring to the notes. Notes are a necessary evil, and should not be read until after a requisite general impression has been received from an independent reading; often two or more independent readings should precede any attention to explanatory notes. Even such a poem as Browning's 'The Ring and the Book,' abounding as it does in out of the way allusions, difficult syntactical constructions, etc., requiring explanation, should be so read. The student would thus get a better impression of the poem as a whole, and would derive from it a greater pleasure (the pleasure resulting

from the less interrupted exercise of his higher faculties) than if he should read it at first with the aid of abundant notes explanatory of details. A special attention to the details should be given only after the reader has, in a general way, taken in the articulating thought and the informing life of the poem.

There are thousands of allusions in the 'Paradise Lost' which a reader might not know, and yet be able to read the whole poem for the first time and enjoy it, and, what is all-important, be uplifted by it, without a single explanatory note.

The portrait of Milton is from that first drawn in crayons by William Faithorne, and afterward engraved by him for the poet's 'History of Britain,' published in 1670. Underneath the original engraving is the inscription, 'Joannis Miltoni Effigies Ætat: 62. 1670. Gul. Faithorne ad Vivum Delin. et Sculpsit' (John Milton's effigy at the age of 62. 1670. Drawn from life and engraved by William Faithorne).

Faithorne was the most distinguished portrait artist and engraver of the time. He appears to have especially excelled in crayon-drawing rather than in painting. His numerous engravings are both from his own studies and from those of other artists, especially of Vandyke. 'No one,' says Masson, 'can desire a more impressive and authentic portrait of Milton in his later life. The face is such as has been given to no other human being; it was and is uniquely Milton's. Underneath the broad forehead and arched temples there are the great rings of eye-socket, with the blind, unblemished eyes in them, drawn straight upon you by your voice, and speculating who and what you are; there is a severe composure in the beautiful oval of the whole countenance, disturbed only by the singular pouting round the rich mouth; and the entire expression is that of English intrepidity mixed with unutterable sorrow.'

H. C.

Cascadilla Cottage, July, 1899.

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MILTON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
made up of all the more important autobiographical passages contained in his prose and poetical works

It was found quite impossible to avoid somewhat of a jumble in bringing together the many autobiographic passages scattered throughout Milton's prose and poetical works. The passage in the 'Second Defence of the People of England,' in reply to the scurrilous abuse and utterly unfounded charges against his private character contained in the Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Cœlum, adversus Parricidas Anglicanos, 1652, which occasioned the 'Second Defence,' covers a larger period of Milton's life than any other, extending, as it does, from his birth to the time of his writing the 'Second Defence,' published in 1654, Milton being then in his forty-sixth year; and as there is an autobiographic passage of some importance in the preface to the 'First Defence' (published in 1651), this passage and that in the 'Second Defence' are kept together and given first. In the former he expresses his sense of the honor done him in his having been engaged to reply to the Defensio Regia pro Carolo I., by Salmasius; and he evidently felt, and justly, too, that no abler man could have been engaged for that important function. The extract from 'A Defence of the People of England' is from the translation ascribed by Milton's biographer, John Toland, to Mr. Washington, a gentleman of the Temple, and that from the 'Second Defence,' from the translation by Robert

Fellowes, A.M., Oxon. These are very free translations, and sometimes far from being adequate representations of Milton's thought. It is much to be regretted that Milton did not himself make an English translation, for the general English reader, of these two noble Defences.

The other autobiographic passages are given, as far as may be, in their chronological order,—that is, not always according to the dates of their composition, but according to their order in Milton's life.

From the Preface to 'A Defence of the English People'

Although I fear, lest, if in defending the people of England, I should be as copious in words, and empty of matter, as most men think Salmasius has been in his defence of the king, I might seem to deserve justly to be accounted a verbose and silly defender; yet since no man thinks himself obliged to make so much haste, though in the handling but of any ordinary subject, as not to premise some introduction at least, according as the weight of the subject requires; if I take the same course in handling almost the greatest subject that ever was (without being too tedious in it) I am in hopes of attaining two things, which indeed I earnestly desire: the one, not to be at all wanting, as far as in me lies, to this most noble cause and most worthy to be recorded to all future ages: the other, that I may appear to have myself avoided that frivolousness of matter, and redundancy of words, which I blame in my antagonist. For I am about to discourse of matters neither inconsiderable nor common, but how a most potent king, after he had trampled upon the laws of the nation, and given a shock to its religion, and begun to rule at his own will and pleasure, was at last subdued in the field by his own subjects, who

had undergone a long slavery under him; how afterwards he was cast into prison, and when he gave no ground, either by words or actions, to hope better things of him, was finally by the supreme council of the kingdom condemned to die, and beheaded before the very gates of the royal palace. I shall likewise relate (which will much conduce to the easing men's minds of a great superstition) by what right, especially according to our law, this judgment was given, and all these matters transacted; and shall easily defend my valiant and worthy countrymen (who have extremely well deserved of all subjects and nations in the world) from the most wicked calumnies, both of domestic and foreign railers, and especially from the reproaches of this most vain and empty sophist, who sets up for a captain and ringleader to all the rest. For what king's majesty sitting upon an exalted throne, ever shone so brightly, as that of the people of England then did, when, shaking off that old superstition, which had prevailed a long time, they gave judgment upon the king himself, or rather upon an enemy who had been their king, caught as it were in a net by his own laws, (who alone of all mortals challenged to himself impunity by a divine right,) and scrupled not to inflict the same punishment upon him, being guilty, which he would have inflicted upon any other? But why do I mention these things as performed by the people, which almost open their voice themselves, and testify the presence of God throughout? who, as often as it seems good to his infinite wisdom, uses to throw down proud and unruly kings, exalting themselves above the condition of human nature, and utterly to extirpate them and all their family. By his manifest impulse being set at work to recover our almost lost liberty, following him as our guide, and adoring the impresses of his divine power manifested upon all occasions, we went on in no obscure, but an

illustrious passage, pointed out and made plain to us by God himself. Which things, if I should so much as hope by any diligence or ability of mine, such as it is, to discourse of as I ought to do, and to commit them so to writing, as that perhaps all nations and all ages may read them, it would be a very vain thing in me. For what style can be august and magnificent enough, what man has ability sufficient to undertake so great a task? Since we find by experience, that in so many ages as are gone over the world, there has been but here and there a man found, who has been able worthily to recount the actions of great heroes, and potent states; can any man have so good an opinion of his own talents, as to think himself capable of reaching these glorious and wonderful works of Almighty God, by any language, by any style of his? Which enterprise, though some of the most eminent persons in our commonwealth have prevailed upon me by their authority to undertake, and would have it be my business to vindicate with my pen against envy and calumny (which are proof against arms) those glorious performances of theirs, (whose opinion of me I take as a very great honour, that they should pitch upon me before others to be serviceable in this kind of those most valiant deliverers of my native country; and true it is, that from my very youth, I have been bent extremely upon such sort of studies, as inclined me, if not to do great things myself, at least to celebrate those that did,) yet as having no confidence in any such advantages, I have recourse to the divine assistance; and invoke the great and holy God, the giver of all good gifts, that I may as substantially, and as truly, discourse and refute the sauciness and lies of this foreign declaimer, as our noble generals piously and successfully by force of arms broke the king's pride, and his unruly domineering, and afterwards put an end to both by inflicting a memorable punishment upon himself, and as thoroughly as a single

person did with ease but of late confute and confound the king himself, rising as it were from the grave, and recommending himself to the people in a book published after his death, with new artifices and allurements of words and expressions. Which antagonist of mine, though he be a foreigner, and, though he deny it a thousand times over, but a poor grammarian; yet not contented with a salary due to him in that capacity, chose to turn a pragmatical coxcomb, and not only to intrude in state-affairs, but into the affairs of a foreign state: though he brings along with him neither modesty, nor understanding, nor any other qualification requisite in so great an arbitrator, but sauciness, and a little grammar only. Indeed if he had published here, and in English, the same things as he has now written in Latin, such as it is, I think no man would have thought it worth while to return an answer to them, but would partly despise them as common, and exploded over and over already, and partly abhor them as sordid and tyrannical maxims, not to be endured even by the most abject of slaves: nay, men that have sided with the king, would have had these thoughts of his book. But since he has swoln it to a considerable bulk, and dispersed it amongst foreigners, who are altogether ignorant of our affairs and constitution, it is fit that they who mistake them should be better informed; and that he, who is so very forward to speak ill of others, should be treated in his own kind. If it be asked, why we did not then attack him sooner? why we suffered him to triumph so long, and pride himself in our silence? For others I am not to answer; for myself I can boldly say, that I had neither words nor arguments long to seek for the defence of so good a cause, if I had enjoyed such a measure of health, as would have endured the fatigue of writing. And being but weak in body, I am forced to write by piecemeal, and break off almost every hour, though the subject be such as requires an unintermitted study and intenseness of mind. But though

this bodily indisposition may be a hindrance to me in setting forth the just praises of my most worthy countrymen, who have been the saviours of their native country, and whose exploits, worthy of immortality, are already famous all the world over; yet I hope it will be no difficult matter for me to defend them from the insolence of this silly little scholar, and from that saucy tongue of his, at least. Nature and laws would be in an ill case, if slavery should find what to say for itself, and liberty be mute; and if tyrants should find men to plead for them, and they that can master and vanquish tyrants, should not be able to find advocates. And it were a deplorable thing indeed, if the reason mankind is endued withal, and which is the gift of God, should not furnish more arguments for men's preservation, for their deliverance, and, as much as the nature of the thing will bear, for making them equal to one another, than for their oppression, and for their utter ruin under the domineering power of one single person. Let me therefore enter upon this noble cause with a cheerfulness grounded upon this assurance, that my adversary's cause is maintained by nothing but fraud, fallacy, ignorance, and barbarity; whereas mine has light, truth, reason, the practice and the learning of the best ages of the world, on its side.

From the 'Second Defence of the People of England in Reply to an Anonymous Libel, entitled "The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven against the English Parricides"'

A grateful recollection of the divine goodness is the first of human obligations; and extraordinary favours demand more solemn and devout acknowledgments: with such acknowledgments I feel it my duty to begin this work. First, because I was born at a time when the virtue of my fellow-citizens, far exceeding that of their progenitors in greatness of soul and

vigour of enterprise, having invoked Heaven to witness the justice of their cause, and been clearly governed by its directions, has succeeded in delivering the commonwealth from the most grievous tyranny, and religion from the most ignominious degradation. And next, because when there suddenly arose many who, as is usual with the vulgar, basely calumniated the most illustrious achievements, and when one eminent above the rest, inflated with literary pride, and the zealous applauses of his partisans, had in a scandalous publication, which was particularly levelled against me, nefariously undertaken to plead the cause of despotism, I, who was neither deemed unequal to so renowned an adversary, nor to so great a subject, was particularly selected by the deliverers of our country, and by the general suffrage of the public, openly to vindicate the rights of the English nation, and consequently of liberty itself. Lastly, because in a matter of so much moment, and which excited such ardent expectations, I did not disappoint the hopes nor the opinions of my fellow-citizens; while men of learning and eminence abroad honoured me with unmingled approbation; while I obtained such a victory over my opponent that, notwithstanding his unparalleled assurance, he was obliged to quit the field with his courage broken and his reputation lost; and for the three years which he lived afterwards, much as he menaced and furiously as he raved, he gave me no further trouble, except that he procured the paltry aid of some despicable hirelings, and suborned some of his silly and extravagant admirers to support him under the weight of the unexpected and recent disgrace which he had experienced. This will immediately appear. Such are the signal favours which I ascribe to the divine beneficence, and which I thought it right devoutly to commemorate, not only that I might discharge a debt of gratitude, but particularly because they seem auspicious to the success of my present undertaking. For who

is there, who does not identify the honour of his country with his own? And what can conduce more to the beauty or glory of one's country than the recovery not only of its civil but its religious liberty?

* * * * * * * * *

. . . I can easily repel any charge which may be adduced against me, either of want of courage, or want of zeal. For though I did not participate in the toils or dangers of the war, yet I was at the same time engaged in a service not less hazardous to myself and more beneficial to my fellow-citizens; nor, in the adverse turns of our affairs, did I ever betray any symptoms of pusillanimity and dejection: or show myself more afraid than became me of malice or of death: For since from my youth I was devoted to the pursuits of literature, and my mind had always been stronger than my body, I did not court the labours of a camp, in which any common person would have been of more service than myself, but resorted to that employment in which my exertions were likely to be of most avail. Thus, with the better part of my frame I contributed as much as possible to the good of my country, and to the success of the glorious cause in which we were engaged; and I thought that if God willed the success of such glorious achievements, it was equally agreeable to his will that there should be others by whom those achievements should be recorded with dignity and elegance; and that the truth, which had been defended by arms, should also be defended by reason; which is the best and only legitimate means of defending it. Hence, while I applaud those who were victorious in the field, I will not complain of the province which was assigned me; but rather congratulate myself upon it, and thank the Author of all good for having placed me in a station, which may be an object of envy to others rather than of regret to myself. I am far from wishing

to make any vain or arrogant comparisons, or to speak ostentatiously of myself; but, in a cause so great and glorious, and particularly on an occasion when I am called by the general suffrage to defend the very defenders of that cause, I can hardly refrain from assuming a more lofty and swelling tone than the simplicity of an exordium may seem to justify: and much as I may be surpassed in the powers of eloquence and copiousness of diction by the illustrious orators of antiquity, yet the subject of which I treat was never surpassed, in any age, in dignity or in interest. It has excited such general and such ardent expectation, that I imagine myself, not in the forum or on the rostra, surrounded only by the people of Athens or of Rome, but about to address in this, as I did in my former Defence, the whole collective body of people, cities, states, and councils of the wise and eminent, through the wide expanse of anxious and listening Europe. I seem to survey, as from a towering height, the far extended tracts of sea and land, and innumerable crowds of spectators, betraying in their looks the liveliest interest, and sensations the most congenial with my own. Here I behold the stout and manly prowess of the Germans disdaining servitude; there the generous and lively impetuosity of the French; on this side, the calm and stately valour of the Spaniard; on that, the composed and wary magnanimity of the Italian. Of all the lovers of liberty and virtue, the magnanimous and the wise, in whatever quarter they may be found, some secretly favour, others openly approve; some greet me with congratulations and applause; others, who had long been proof against conviction, at last yield themselves captive to the force of truth. Surrounded by congregated multitudes, I now imagine that, from the columns of Hercules to the Indian Ocean, I behold the nations of the earth recovering that liberty which they so long had lost; and that the people of this island are transporting to other countries a plant of

more beneficial qualities, and more noble growth, than that which Triptolemus is reported to have carried from region to region; that they are disseminating the blessings of civilization and freedom among cities, kingdoms, and nations. Nor shall I approach unknown, nor perhaps unloved, if it be told that I am the same person who engaged in single combat that fierce advocate of despotism; till then reputed invincible in the opinion of many, and in his own conceit; who insolently challenged us and our armies to the combat; but whom, while I repelled his virulence, I silenced with his own weapons; and over whom, if I may trust to the opinions of impartial judges, I gained a complete and glorious victory. That this is the plain unvarnished fact appears from this: that, after the most noble queen of Sweden, than whom there neither is nor ever was a personage more attached to literature and to learned men, had invited Salmasius or Salmatia (for to which sex he belonged is a matter of uncertainty) to her court, where he was received with great distinction, my Defence suddenly surprised him in the midst of his security. It was generally read, and by the queen among the rest, who, attentive to the dignity of her station, let the stranger experience no diminution of her former kindness and munificence. But, with respect to the rest, if I may assert what has been often told, and was matter of public notoriety, such a change was instantly effected in the public sentiment, that he, who but yesterday flourished in the highest degree of favour, seemed to-day to wither in neglect; and soon after receiving permission to depart, he left it doubtful among many whether he were more honoured when he came, or more disgraced when he went away; and even in other places it is clear, that it occasioned no small loss to his reputation; and all this I have mentioned, not from any futile motives of vanity or ostentation, but that I might clearly show, as I proposed in the beginning, what momentous reasons I had for commencing

this work with an effusion of gratitude to the Father of the universe. Such a preface was most honourable and appropriate, in which I might prove, by an enumeration of particulars, that I had not been without my share of human misery; but that I had, at the same time, experienced singular marks of the divine regard; that in topics of the highest concern, the most connected with the exigencies of my country, and the most beneficial to civil and religious liberty; the supreme wisdom and beneficence had invigorated and enlarged my faculties, to defend the dearest interests, not merely of one people, but of the whole human race, against the enemies of human liberty; as it were in a full concourse of all the nations on the earth: and I again invoke the same Almighty Being, that I may still be able, with the same integrity, the same diligence, and the same success, to defend those actions which have been so gloriously achieved; while I vindicate the authors as well as myself, whose name has been associated with theirs, not so much for the sake of honour as disgrace, from unmerited ignominy and reproach.

* * * * * * * * *

But the conflict between me and Salmasius is now finally terminated by his death; and I will not write against the dead; nor will I reproach him with the loss of life as he did me with the loss of sight; though there are some who impute his death to the penetrating severity of my strictures, which he rendered only the more sharp by his endeavours to resist. When he saw the work which he had in hand proceed slowly on, the time of reply elapsed, the public curiosity subsided, his fame marred, and his reputation lost; the favour of the princes, whose cause he had so ill defended, alienated, he was destroyed, after three years of grief, rather by the force of depression than disease.

* * * * * * * * *

If I inveigh against tyrants, what is this to kings? whom I am far from associating with tyrants. As much as an honest man differs from a rogue, so much I contend that a king differs from a tyrant. Whence it is clear, that a tyrant is so far from being a king, that he is always in direct opposition to a king. And he who peruses the records of history, will find that more kings have been subverted by tyrants than by their subjects. He, therefore, who would authorize the destruction of tyrants, does not authorize the destruction of kings, but of the most inveterate enemies to kings.

* * * * * * * * *

Let us now come to the charges which were brought against myself. Is there anything reprehensible in my manners or my conduct? Surely nothing. What no one, not totally divested of all generous sensibility, would have done, he reproaches me with want of beauty and loss of sight.

'Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum.'

I certainly never supposed that I should have been obliged to enter into a competition for beauty with the Cyclops; but he immediately corrects himself, and says, 'though not indeed huge, for there cannot be a more spare, shrivelled, and bloodless form.' It is of no moment to say anything of personal appearance, yet lest (as the Spanish vulgar, implicitly confiding in the relations of their priests, believe of heretics) any one, from the representations of my enemies, should be led to imagine that I have either the head of a dog, or the horn of a rhinoceros, I will say something on the subject, that I may have an opportunity of paying my grateful acknowledgments to the Deity, and of refuting the most shameless lies. I do not believe that I was ever once noted for deformity, by any one who

ever saw me; but the praise of beauty I am not anxious to obtain. My stature certainly is not tall; but it rather approaches the middle than the diminutive. Yet what if it were diminutive, when so many men, illustrious both in peace and war, have been the same? And how can that be called diminutive, which is great enough for every virtuous achievement? Nor, though very thin, was I ever deficient in courage or in strength; and I was wont constantly to exercise myself in the use of the broadsword, as long as it comported with my habit and my years. Armed with this weapon, as I usually was, I should have thought myself quite a match for any one, though much stronger than myself; and I felt perfectly secure against the assault of any open enemy. At this moment I have the same courage, the same strength, though not the same eyes; yet so little do they betray any external appearance of injury, that they are as unclouded and bright as the eyes of those who most distinctly see. In this instance alone I am a dissembler against my will. My face, which is said to indicate a total privation of blood, is of a complexion entirely opposite to the pale and the cadaverous; so that, though I am more than forty years old, there is scarcely any one to whom I do not appear ten years younger than I am; and the smoothness of my skin is not, in the least, affected by the wrinkles of age. If there be one particle of falsehood in this relation, I should deservedly incur the ridicule of many thousands of my countrymen, and even many foreigners to whom I am personally known. But if he, in a matter so foreign to his purpose, shall be found to have asserted so many shameless and gratuitous falsehoods, you may the more readily estimate the quantity of his veracity on other topics. Thus much necessity compelled me to assert concerning my personal appearance. Respecting yours, though I have been informed that it is most insignificant and contemptible, a perfect mirror of the worthlessness of your character and the malevolence of

your heart, I say nothing, and no one will be anxious that anything should be said. I wish that I could with equal facility refute what this barbarous opponent has said of my blindness; but I cannot do it; and I must submit to the affliction. It is not so wretched to be blind, as it is not to be capable of enduring blindness. But why should I not endure a misfortune which it behooves everyone to be prepared to endure if it should happen; which may, in the common course of things, happen to any man; and which has been known to happen to the most distinguished and virtuous persons in history? Shall I mention those wise and ancient bards, whose misfortunes the gods are said to have compensated by superior endowments, and whom men so much revered, that they chose rather to impute their want of sight to the injustice of heaven than to their own want of innocence or virtue? What is reported of the Augur Tiresias is well known; of whom Apollonius sung thus in his Argonautica:

'To men he dared the will divine disclose,

Nor feared what Jove might in his wrath impose.

The gods assigned him age, without decay,

But snatched the blessing of his sight away.'

But God himself is truth; in propagating which, as men display a greater integrity and zeal, they approach nearer to the similitude of God, and possess a greater portion of his love. We cannot suppose the deity envious of truth, or unwilling that it should be freely communicated to mankind. The loss of sight, therefore, which this inspired sage, who was so eager in promoting knowledge among men, sustained, cannot be considered as a judicial punishment. Or shall I mention those worthies who were as distinguished for wisdom in the cabinet as for valour in the field? And first, Timoleon of Corinth, who delivered his city and all Sicily from the yoke of slavery; than whom

there never lived in any age a more virtuous man or a more incorrupt statesman: Next Appius Claudius, whose discreet counsels in the senate, though they could not restore sight to his own eyes, saved Italy from the formidable inroads of Pyrrhus: then Cæcilius Metellus the high-priest, who lost his sight, while he saved, not only the city, but the palladium, the protection of the city, and the most sacred relics, from the destruction of the flames. On other occasions Providence has indeed given conspicuous proofs of its regard for such singular exertions of patriotism and virtue; what, therefore, happened to so great and so good a man, I can hardly place in the catalogue of misfortunes. Why should I mention others of later times, as Dandolo of Venice, the incomparable Doge; or Zisca, the bravest leader of the Bohemians, and the champion of the cross; or Jerome Zanchius, and some other theologians of the highest reputation? For it is evident that the patriarch Isaac, than whom no man ever enjoyed more of the divine regard, lived blind for many years; and perhaps also his son Jacob, who was equally an object of the divine benevolence. And in short, did not our Saviour himself clearly declare that that poor man whom he restored to sight had not been born blind, either on account of his own sins or those of his progenitors? And with respect to myself, though I have accurately examined my conduct, and scrutinized my soul, I call thee, O God, the searcher of hearts, to witness, that I am not conscious, either in the more early or in the later periods of my life, of having committed any enormity which might deservedly have marked me out as a fit object for such a calamitous visitation. But since my enemies boast that this affliction is only a retribution for the transgressions of my pen, I again invoke the Almighty to witness, that I never, at any time, wrote anything which I did not think agreeable to truth, to justice, and to piety. This was my persuasion then, and I feel the same persuasion

now. Nor was I ever prompted to such exertions by the influence of ambition, by the lust of lucre or of praise; it was only by the conviction of duty and the feeling of patriotism, a disinterested passion for the extension of civil and religious liberty. Thus, therefore, when I was publicly solicited to write a reply to the Defence of the royal cause, when I had to contend with the pressure of sickness, and with the apprehension of soon losing the sight of my remaining eye, and when my medical attendants clearly announced, that if I did engage in the work, it would be irreparably lost, their premonitions caused no hesitation and inspired no dismay. I would not have listened to the voice even of Æsculapius himself from the shrine of Epidaurus, in preference to the suggestions of the heavenly monitor within my breast; my resolution was unshaken, though the alternative was either the loss of my sight, or the desertion of my duty: and I called to mind those two destinies, which the oracle of Delphi announced to the son of Thetis:

'I by my Goddess-mother have been warned,

The silver-footed Thetis, that o'er me

A double chance of destiny impends:

If here remaining, round the walls of Troy

I wage the war, I ne'er shall see my home,

But then undying glory shall be mine:

If I return, and see my native land,

My glory all is gone; but length of life

Shall then be mine, and death be long deferred.'

—Iliad, ix. 410-416.

I considered that many had purchased a less good by a greater evil, the meed of glory by the loss of life; but that I might procure great good by little suffering; that though I am blind, I might still discharge the most honourable duties, the performance of which, as it is something more durable than glory, ought to be an object of superior admiration and esteem; I

resolved, therefore, to make the short interval of sight, which was left me to enjoy, as beneficial as possible to the public interest. Thus it is clear by what motives I was governed in the measures which I took, and the losses which I sustained. Let then the calumniators of the divine goodness cease to revile, or to make me the object of their superstitious imaginations. Let them consider, that my situation, such as it is, is neither an object of my shame nor my regret, that my resolutions are too firm to be shaken, that I am not depressed by any sense of the divine displeasure; that, on the other hand, in the most momentous periods, I have had full experience of the divine favour and protection; and that, in the solace and the strength which have been infused into me from above, I have been enabled to do the will of God; that I may oftener think on what he has bestowed, than on what he has withheld; that, in short, I am unwilling to exchange my consciousness of rectitude with that of any other person; and that I feel the recollection a treasured store of tranquillity and delight. But, if the choice were necessary, I would, sir, prefer my blindness to yours; yours is a cloud spread over the mind, which darkens both the light of reason and of conscience; mine keeps from my view only the coloured surfaces of things, while it leaves me at liberty to contemplate the beauty and stability of virtue and of truth. How many things are there besides which I would not willingly see; how many which I must see against my will; and how few which I feel any anxiety to see! There is, as the apostle has remarked, a way to strength through weakness. Let me then be the most feeble creature alive, as long as that feebleness serves to invigorate the energies of my rational and immortal spirit; as long as in that obscurity, in which I am enveloped, the light of the divine presence more clearly shines, then, in proportion as I am weak, I shall be invincibly strong; and in proportion as I am blind, I shall more clearly see. Oh, that I

may thus be perfected by feebleness, and irradiated by obscurity! And, indeed, in my blindness, I enjoy in no inconsiderable degree the favour of the Deity, who regards me with more tenderness and compassion in proportion as I am able to behold nothing but himself. Alas! for him who insults me, who maligns and merits public execration! For the divine law not only shields me from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack; not indeed so much from the privation of my sight, as from the overshadowing of those heavenly wings which seem to have occasioned this obscurity; and which, when occasioned, he is wont to illuminate with an interior light, more precious and more pure. To this I ascribe the more tender assiduities of my friends, their soothing attentions, their kind visits, their reverential observances; . . . This extraordinary kindness which I experience, cannot be any fortuitous combination; and friends, such as mine, do not suppose that all the virtues of a man are contained in his eyes. Nor do the persons of principal distinction in the commonwealth suffer me to be bereaved of comfort, when they see me bereaved of sight, amid the exertions which I made, the zeal which I showed, and the dangers which I run for the liberty which I love. But, soberly reflecting on the casualties of human life, they show me favour and indulgence, as to a soldier who has served his time, and kindly concede to me an exemption from care and toil. They do not strip me of the badges of honour which I have once worn; they do not deprive me of the places of public trust to which I have been appointed; they do not abridge my salary or emoluments; which, though I may not do so much to deserve as I did formerly, they are too considerate and too kind to take away; and, in short, they honour me as much as the Athenians did those whom they determined to support at the public expense in the Prytaneum. Thus, while both God and man unite in solacing me under the weight of my affliction, let no one lament my loss

of sight in so honourable a cause. And let me not indulge in unavailing grief, or want the courage either to despise the revilers of my blindness, or the forbearance easily to pardon the offence.

* * * * * * * * *

I must crave the indulgence of the reader if I have said already, or shall say hereafter, more of myself than I wish to say; that, if I cannot prevent the blindness of my eyes, the oblivion or the defamation of my name, I may at least rescue my life from that species of obscurity, which is the associate of unprincipled depravity. This it will be necessary for me to do on more accounts than one; first, that so many good and learned men among the neighbouring nations, who read my works, may not be induced by this fellow's calumnies to alter the favourable opinion which they have formed of me; but may be persuaded that I am not one who ever disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, or the maxims of a freeman by the actions of a slave; and that the whole tenor of my life has, by the grace of God, hitherto been unsullied by enormity or crime. Next, that those illustrious worthies, who are the objects of my praise, may know that nothing could afflict me with more shame than to have any vices of mine diminish the force or lessen the value of my panegyric upon them; and, lastly, that the people of England, whom fate, or duty, or their own virtues, have incited me to defend, may be convinced from the purity and integrity of my life, that my defence, if it do not redound to their honour, can never be considered as their disgrace. I will now mention who and whence I am. I was born in London, of an honest family; my father was distinguished by the undeviating integrity of his life; my mother, by the esteem in which she was held, and the alms which she bestowed. My father destined me from a child to the

pursuits of literature; and my appetite for knowledge was so voracious, that, from twelve years of age, I hardly ever left my studies, or went to bed before midnight. This primarily led to my loss of sight. My eyes were naturally weak, and I was subject to frequent headaches; which, however, could not chill the ardour of my curiosity, or retard the progress of my improvement. My father had me daily instructed in the grammar-school, and by other masters at home. He then, after I had acquired a proficiency in various languages, and had made a considerable progress in philosophy, sent me to the University of Cambridge. Here I passed seven years in the usual course of instruction and study, with the approbation of the good, and without any stain upon my character, till I took the degree of Master of Arts. After this I did not, as this miscreant feigns, run away into Italy, but of my own accord retired to my father's house, whither I was accompanied by the regrets of most of the fellows of the college, who showed me no common marks of friendship and esteem. On my father's estate, where he had determined to pass the remainder of his days, I enjoyed an interval of uninterrupted leisure, which I entirely devoted to the perusal of the Greek and Latin classics; though I occasionally visited the metropolis, either for the sake of purchasing books, or of learning something new in mathematics or in music, in which I, at that time, found a source of pleasure and amusement. In this manner I spent five years till my mother's death. I then became anxious to visit foreign parts, and particularly Italy. My father gave me his permission, and I left home with one servant. On my departure, the celebrated Henry Wotton, who had long been king James's ambassador at Venice, gave me a signal proof of his regard, in an elegant letter which he wrote, breathing not only the warmest friendship, but containing some maxims of conduct which I found very useful in my travels. The noble Thomas Scudamore,

king Charles's ambassador, to whom I carried letters of recommendation, received me most courteously at Paris. His lordship gave me a card of introduction to the learned Hugo Grotius, at that time ambassador from the queen of Sweden to the French court; whose acquaintance I anxiously desired, and to whose house I was accompanied by some of his lordship's friends. A few days after, when I set out for Italy, he gave me letters to the English merchants on my route, that they might show me any civilities in their power. Taking ship at Nice, I arrived at Genoa, and afterwards visited Leghorn, Pisa, and Florence. In the latter city, which I have always more particularly esteemed for the elegance of its dialect, its genius, and its taste, I stopped about two months; when I contracted an intimacy with many persons of rank and learning; and was a constant attendant at their literary parties; a practice which prevails there, and tends so much to the diffusion of knowledge, and the preservation of friendship. No time will ever abolish the agreeable recollections which I cherish of Jacopo Gaddi, Carlo Dati, Frescobaldi, Coltellini, Bonmattei, Chimentelli, Francini, and many others. From Florence I went to Siena, thence to Rome, where, after I had spent about two months in viewing the antiquities of that renowned city, where I experienced the most friendly attentions from Lucas Holstenius, and other learned and ingenious men, I continued my route to Naples. There I was introduced by a certain recluse, with whom I had travelled from Rome, to Giovanni Battista Manso, marquis of Villa, a nobleman of distinguished rank and authority, to whom Torquato Tasso, the illustrious poet, inscribed his book on friendship. During my stay, he gave me singular proofs of his regard: he himself conducted me around the city, and to the palace of the viceroy; and more than once paid me a visit at my lodgings. On my departure he gravely apologized for not having shown me more civility, which he said he had

been restrained from doing, because I had spoken with so little reserve on matters of religion. When I was preparing to pass over into Sicily and Greece, the melancholy intelligence which I received of the civil commotions in England made me alter my purpose; for I thought it base to be travelling for amusement abroad, while my fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at home. While I was on my way back to Rome, some merchants informed me that the English Jesuits had formed a plot against me if I returned to Rome, because I had spoken too freely on religion; for it was a rule which I laid down to myself in those places, never to be the first to begin any conversation on religion; but if any questions were put to me concerning my faith, to declare it without any reserve or fear. I, nevertheless, returned to Rome. I took no steps to conceal either my person or my character; and for about the space of two months I again openly defended, as I had done before, the reformed religion in the very metropolis of popery. By the favour of God, I got safe back to Florence, where I was received with as much affection as if I had returned to my native country. There I stopped as many months as I had done before, except that I made an excursion for a few days to Lucca; and, crossing the Apennines, passed through Bologna and Ferrara to Venice. After I had spent a month in surveying the curiosities of this city, and had put on board a ship the books which I had collected in Italy, I proceeded through Verona and Milan, and along the Leman lake to Geneva. The mention of this city brings to my recollection the slandering More, and makes me again call the Deity to witness, that in all those places in which vice meets with so little discouragement, and is practised with so little shame, I never once deviated from the paths of integrity and virtue, and perpetually reflected that, though my conduct might escape the notice of men, it could not elude the inspection of God. At Geneva I held

daily conferences with John Diodati, the learned professor of Theology. Then pursuing my former route through France, I returned to my native country, after an absence of one year and about three months; at the time when Charles, having broken the peace, was renewing what is called the episcopal war with the Scots, in which the royalists being routed in the first encounter, and the English being universally and justly disaffected, the necessity of his affairs at last obliged him to convene a parliament. As soon as I was able, I hired a spacious house in the city for myself and my books; where I again with rapture renewed my literary pursuits, and where I calmly awaited the issue of the contest, which I trusted to the wise conduct of Providence, and to the courage of the people. The vigour of the parliament had begun to humble the pride of the bishops. As long as the liberty of speech was no longer subject to control, all mouths began to be opened against the bishops; some complained of the vices of the individuals, others of those of the order. They said that it was unjust that they alone should differ from the model of other reformed churches; that the government of the church should be according to the pattern of other churches, and particularly the word of God. This awakened all my attention and my zeal. I saw that a way was opening for the establishment of real liberty; that the foundation was laying for the deliverance of man from the yoke of slavery and superstition; that the principles of religion, which were the first objects of our care, would exert a salutary influence on the manners and constitution of the republic; and as I had from my youth studied the distinctions between religious and civil rights, I perceived that if I ever wished to be of use, I ought at least not to be wanting to my country, to the church, and to so many of my fellow-Christians, in a crisis of so much danger; I therefore determined to relinquish the other pursuits in which I was engaged, and to

transfer the whole force of my talents and my industry to this one important object. I accordingly wrote two books to a friend concerning the reformation of the church of England. Afterwards, when two bishops of superior distinction vindicated their privileges against some principal ministers, I thought that on those topics, to the consideration of which I was led solely by my love of truth, and my reverence for Christianity, I should not probably write worse than those who were contending only for their own emoluments and usurpations. I therefore answered the one in two books, of which the first is inscribed, Concerning Prelatical Episcopacy, and the other Concerning the Mode of Ecclesiastical Government; and I replied to the other in some Animadversions, and soon after in an Apology. On this occasion it was supposed that I brought a timely succour to the ministers, who were hardly a match for the eloquence of their opponents; and from that time I was actively employed in refuting any answers that appeared. When the bishops could no longer resist the multitude of their assailants, I had leisure to turn my thoughts to other subjects; to the promotion of real and substantial liberty; which is rather to be sought from within than from without; and whose existence depends, not so much on the terror of the sword, as on sobriety of conduct and integrity of life. When, therefore, I perceived that there were three species of liberty which are essential to the happiness of social life—religious, domestic, and civil; and as I had already written concerning the first, and the magistrates were strenuously active in obtaining the third, I determined to turn my attention to the second, or the domestic species. As this seemed to involve three material questions, the conditions of the conjugal tie, the education of the children, and the free publication of the thoughts, I made them objects of distinct consideration. I explained my sentiments, not only concerning the solemnization of the marriage,

but the dissolution, if circumstances rendered it necessary; and I drew my arguments from the divine law, which Christ did not abolish, or publish another more grievous than that of Moses. I stated my own opinions, and those of others, concerning the exclusive exception of fornication, which our illustrious Selden has since, in his Hebrew Wife, more copiously discussed; for he in vain makes a vaunt of liberty in the senate or in the forum, who languishes under the vilest servitude, to an inferior at home. On this subject, therefore, I published some books which were more particularly necessary at that time, when man and wife were often the most inveterate foes, when the man often staid to take care of his children at home, while the mother of the family was seen in the camp of the enemy, threatening death and destruction to her husband. I then discussed the principles of education in a summary manner, but sufficiently copious for those who attend seriously to the subject; than which nothing can be more necessary to principle the minds of men in virtue, the only genuine source of political and individual liberty, the only true safeguard of states, the bulwark of their prosperity and renown. Lastly, I wrote my Areopagitica, in order to deliver the press from the restraints with which it was encumbered; that the power of determining what was true and what was false, what ought to be published and what to be suppressed, might no longer be entrusted to a few illiterate and illiberal individuals, who refused their sanction to any work which contained views or sentiments at all above the level of the vulgar superstition. On the last species of civil liberty, I said nothing, because I saw that sufficient attention was paid to it by the magistrates; nor did I write anything on the prerogative of the crown, till the king, voted an enemy by the parliament, and vanquished in the field, was summoned before the tribunal which condemned him to lose his head. But when, at

length, some Presbyterian ministers, who had formerly been the most bitter enemies to Charles, became jealous of the growth of the Independents, and of their ascendency in the parliament, most tumultuously clamoured against the sentence, and did all in their power to prevent the execution, though they were not angry, so much on account of the act itself, as because it was not the act of their party; and when they dared to affirm, that the doctrine of the protestants, and of all the reformed churches, was abhorrent to such an atrocious proceeding against kings; I thought that it became me to oppose such a glaring falsehood; and accordingly, without any immediate or personal application to Charles, I showed, in an abstract consideration of the question, what might lawfully be done against tyrants; and in support of what I advanced, produced the opinions of the most celebrated divines; while I vehemently inveighed against the egregious ignorance or effrontery of men, who professed better things, and from whom better things might have been expected. That book did not make its appearance till after the death of Charles; and was written rather to reconcile the minds of the people to the event, than to discuss the legitimacy of that particular sentence which concerned the magistrates, and which was already executed. Such were the fruits of my private studies, which I gratuitously presented to the church and to the state; and for which I was recompensed by nothing but impunity; though the actions themselves procured me peace of conscience, and the approbation of the good; while I exercised that freedom of discussion which I loved. Others, without labour or desert, got possession of honours and emoluments; but no one ever knew me either soliciting anything myself or through the medium of my friends; ever beheld me in a supplicating posture at the doors of the senate, or the levees of the great. I usually kept myself secluded at home, where my own property, part

of which had been withheld during the civil commotions, and part of which had been absorbed in the oppressive contributions which I had to sustain, afforded me a scanty subsistence. When I was released from these engagements, and thought that I was about to enjoy an interval of uninterrupted ease, I turned my thoughts to a continued history of my country, from the earliest times to the present period. I had already finished four books, when, after the subversion of the monarchy, and the establishment of a republic, I was surprised by an invitation from the council of state, who desired my services in the office for foreign affairs. A book appeared soon after, which was ascribed to the king, and contained the most invidious charges against the parliament. I was ordered to answer it; and opposed the Iconoclast to his Icon. I did not insult over fallen majesty, as is pretended; I only preferred queen Truth to king Charles. The charge of insult, which I saw that the malevolent would urge, I was at some pains to remove in the beginning of the work; and as often as possible in other places. Salmasius then appeared, to whom they were not, as More says, long in looking about for an opponent, but immediately appointed me, who happened at the time to be present in the council. I have thus, sir, given some account of myself, in order to stop your mouth, and to remove any prejudices which your falsehoods and misrepresentations might cause even good men to entertain against me. I tell thee then, thou mass of corruption, to hold thy peace; for the more you malign, the more you will compel me to confute; which will only serve to render your iniquity more glaring, and my integrity more manifest.

To Charles Diodati, Milton's schoolfellow at St. Paul's School, and his dearest friend

At length, dear friend, your letter has reached me, and the messenger-paper has brought me your words—brought me them from the western shore of Chester's Dee, where with prone stream it seeks the Vergivian wave. Much, believe me, it delights me that foreign lands have nurtured a heart so loving of ours, and a head so faithfully mine; and that a distant part of the country now owes me my sprightly companion, whence, however, it means soon, on being summoned, to send him back. Me at present that city contains which the Thames washes with its ebbing wave; and me, not unwilling, my father's house now possesses. At present it is not my care to revisit the reedy Cam; nor does the love of my forbidden rooms yet cause me grief (nec dudum vetiti me laris angit amor). Nor do naked fields please me, where soft shades are not to be had. How ill that place suits the votaries of Apollo! Nor am I in the humour still to bear the threats of a harsh master (duri minas perferre magistri), and other things not to be submitted to by my genius (cæteraque ingenio non subeunda meo). If this be exile (si sit hoc exilium), to have gone to my father's house, and, free from cares, to be pursuing agreeable relaxations, then certainly I refuse neither the name nor the lot of a fugitive (non ego vel profugi nomen sortemque recuso), and gladly I enjoy the condition of exile (lætus et exilii conditione fruor). Oh that that poet, the tearful exile in the Pontic territory had never endured worse things! Then had he nothing yielded to Ionian Homer, nor would the supreme reputation of having surpassed him be yours, O Maro! For it is in my power to give my leisure up to the

placid Muses; and books, which are my life, have me all to themselves. When I am wearied, the pomp of the winding theatre takes me hence, and the garrulous stage calls me to its noisy applauses—whether it be the wary old gentleman that is heard, or the prodigal heir; whether the wooer, or the soldier with his helmet doffed, is on the boards, or the lawyer, prosperous with a ten years' lawsuit, is mouthing forth his gibberish to the unlearned forum. Often the wily servant is abetting the lover-son, and at every turn cheating the very nose of the stiff father; often there the maiden, wondering at her new sensations, knows not what love is, and, while she knows not, loves. Or, again, furious Tragedy shakes her bloody sceptre and rolls her eyes, with dishevelled locks, and it is a pain to look, and yet it is a pleasure to have looked and been pained; for sometimes there is a sweet bitterness in tears. Or the unhappy boy leaves his untasted joys, and falls off, a pitiful object, from his broken love; or the fierce avenger of crime recrosses the Styx from the shades, perturbing guilty souls with his funeral torch. Or the house of Pelops or that of noble Ilium is in grief, or the palace of Creon expiates its incestuous ancestry. But not always within doors, nor even in the city, do we mope; nor does the season of spring pass by unused by us. The grove also planted with thick elms, has our company, and the noble shade of a suburban neighborhood. Very often here, as stars breathing forth mild flames, you may see troops of maidens passing by. Ah! how often have I seen the wonders of a worthy form, which might even repair the old age of Jove! Ah! how often have I seen eyes surpassing all gems and whatever lights revolve round either pole; and necks twice whiter than the arms of living Pelops, and than the way which flows tinged with pure nectar; and the exquisite grace of the forehead; and the trembling hair which cheating love spreads as his golden nets; and the

inviting cheeks, compared with which hyacinthine purple is poor, and the very blush, Adonis, of thy own flower! . . . But for me, while the forbearance of the blind boy allows it, I prepare as soon as possible to leave these happy walls, and, using the help of divine all-heal, to flee far from the infamous dwellings of the sorceress Circe. It is fixed that I do go back to the rushy marshes of Cam, and once more approach the murmur of the hoarse-murmuring school. Meanwhile accept the little gift of your faithful friend, and these few words forced into alternate measures.

To Alexander Gill, Jr. (Familiar Letters, No. III.)

. . . Indeed, every time I recollect your almost constant conversations with me (which even in this Athens, the University itself, I long after and miss), I think immediately, and not without grief, what a quantity of benefit my absence from you has cheated me of,—me who never left your company without a manifest increase and ἐπίδοσις of literary knowledge, just as if I had been to some emporium of learning. Truly, amongst us here, as far as I know, there are hardly one or two that do not fly off unfeathered to Theology while all but rude and uninitiated in either Philology or Philosophy,—content also with the slightest possible touch of Theology itself, just as much as may suffice for sticking together a little sermon anyhow, and stitching it over with worn patches obtained promiscuously: a fact giving reason for the dread that by degrees there may break in among our clergy the priestly ignorance of a former age. For myself, finding almost no real companions in study here, I should certainly be looking straight back to London, were I not meditating a retirement during this summer vacation into a deep literary leisure and a period of hiding, so to speak, in the bowers of the Muses.

But, as this is your own daily practice, I think it almost a crime to interrupt you longer with my din at present. Farewell.

Cambridge, July 2, 1628.

To Thomas Young. (Familiar Letters, No. IV.)

. . . Having been invited to your part of the country, as soon as spring is a little advanced, I will gladly come, to enjoy the delights of the season, and not less of your conversation, and will withdraw myself from the din of town for a while to your Stoa of the Iceni, as to that most celebrated Porch of Zeno or the Tusculan Villa of Cicero, where you, with moderate means but regal spirit, like some Serranus or Curius, placidly reign in your little farm, and, contemning fortune, hold, as it were, a triumph over riches, ambition, pomp, luxury, and whatever the herd of men admire and are marked by. . . .

Cambridge, July 21, 1628.

To Charles Diodati,

making a stay in the country, who, having written to the author on the 13th of December, and asked him to excuse his verses, if they were less good than usual, on the ground that, in the midst of the festivities with which he had been received by his friends, he was unable to give a sufficiently prosperous attention to the Muses, had the following reply:

. . . You seem to be enjoying yourself rarely. How well you describe the feasts, and the merry December and preparations for Christmas, and the cups of French wine round the gay hearth! Why do you complain that poesy is absent from these festivities? Festivity and poetry are surely not

incompatible. . . . One sees the triple influence of Bacchus, Apollo, and Ceres, in the verses you have sent me. And, then, have you not music—the harp lightly touched by nimble hands, and the lute giving time to the fair ones as they dance in the old tapestried room? Believe me, where the ivory keys leap, and the accompanying dance goes round the perfumed hall, there will the Song-god be. But let me not go too far. Light Elegy is the care of many gods, and calls any one of them by turns to her assistance—Bacchus, Erato, Ceres, Venus, and little Cupid besides. To poets of this order, therefore, conviviality is allowable; and they may often indulge in draughts of good old wine. But the man who speaks of high matters—the heaven of the full-grown Jove, and pious heroes, and demigod leaders of men, the man who now sings the holy counsels of the gods above, and now the subterranean realms guarded by the fierce dog—let him live sparely, after the manner of the Samian master; let herbs afford him his innocent diet, let clear water in a beechen cup stand near him, and let him drink sober draughts from a pure fountain! To this be there added a youth chaste and free from guilt, and rigid morals, and hands without stain. Being such, thou shalt rise up, glittering in sacred raiment and purified by lustral waters, an augur about to go into the presence of the unoffended gods. So is wise Tiresias said to have lived, after he had been deprived of his sight; and Theban Linus; and Calchas the exile; and old Orpheus. So did the scantily-eating, water-drinking Homer carry his hero Ulysses through the monster-teeming hall of Circe, and the straits insidious with the voices of the Syrens, and through thy courts, too, O infernal King, where he is said to have held the troops of shades enthralled by libations of black blood. For the poet is sacred and the priest of the gods; and his breast and his mouth breathe the indwelling Jove.

And now, if you will know what I am myself doing (if indeed

you think it is of so much consequence to know if I am doing anything), here is the fact: we are engaged in singing the heavenly birth of the King of Peace, and the happy age promised by the holy books, and the infant cries and cradling in a manger under a poor roof of that God who rules, with his Father, the Kingdom of Heaven, and the sky with the new-sprung star in it, and the ethereal choirs of hymning angels, and the gods of the heathen suddenly fleeing to their endangered fanes. This is the gift which we have presented to Christ's natal day. On that very morning, at daybreak, it was first conceived. The verses, which are composed in the vernacular, await you in close keeping; you shall be the judge to whom I shall recite them.

Prolusiones quædam Oratoriæ

Some University Latin Oratorical Exercises, seven in number, first published in 1674, the year of Milton's death, along with his Familiar Letters (Epistolæ Familiares), 'as a make-weight to counterbalance the paucity of the Letters,' have an autobiographic value; but, with the exception of a small bit, space does not allow the admission of them here. 'They throw light,' says Masson, 'upon Milton's career at Cambridge. They illustrate the extent and nature of his reading, his habits and tastes as a student, the relation in which he stood to the University system of his time, and to the new intellectual tendencies which were gradually affecting that system. They also settle in the most conclusive manner the fact that Milton passed through two stages in his career at the University,—a stage of decided unpopularity, in his own College at least, which lasted till about 1628, and a final stage of triumph, when his powers were recognized.'

Masson characterizes the seventh oratorical exercise as

'one of the finest pieces of Latin prose ever penned by an Englishman.'

The following is a passage, in Masson's close translation, from this exercise, which exhibits what continued to be Milton's attitude through life:

'I regard it, my hearers, as known and accepted by all, that the great Maker of the Universe, when he had constituted all things else as fleeting and corruptible, did mingle up with Man, in addition to that of him which is mortal, a certain divine breath, as it were part of Himself, immortal, indestructible, free from death and extinction; which, after it had sojourned purely and holily for some time in the earth as a heavenly guest, should flutter aloft to its native heaven, and return to its proper home and fatherland: accordingly, that nothing can deservedly be taken into account as among the causes of our happiness that does not somehow or other regard both that everlasting life and this civil life below.'

'When his earlier writings,' says Masson, 'are compared with those of his coevals at the University, what strikes one most, next to their vastly greater merit altogether, is their more ideal tone. As, more than any of them, he was conscious of the os magna soniturum, the mouth formed for great utterances, so all that he does utter has a certain character and form of magnitude.'

Milton's Latin poem, 'Ad Patrem' (To Father), was occasioned, as may be seen in the poem, by an expressed dissatisfaction on the part of his father with his continued devotion, after leaving the University, to his favorite studies and the Muses, to the exclusion of all consideration of a profession. He had, while yet at the University, fully decided that the Church, for which he was destined by his parents, was not for him, bowing, as it was, beneath the galling 'yoke of prelaty'; and to the legal profession he must have been equally, if not more, averse.

Such a tribute of filial affection and gratitude, as is this poem, certainly overcame all objections the father may have expressed in regard to his course of life at the time.

We learn from this poem, which was no doubt composed soon after Milton's final return to his father's house at Horton, in 1632, he being then in his twenty-fourth year, that, along with the Latin and the Greek, he had acquired, and by his father's advice, a knowledge of the French, Italian, and Hebrew. We also learn of the father's musical genius, both instrumental and vocal, and of the son's lofty estimate of the power of poesy. He ascribes to it a divine nature which evidences man's heavenly origin, and bespeaks him illuminated from above.

I give the translation by the poet Cowper, which, while being somewhat free, is, I think, altogether the best and most poetical that has been made. That by Masson, in hexameters, is closer to the original, but has in it a dactylic dance which is not so much in harmony with the tone of the original as is Cowper's blank-verse translation.

To Father

Oh, that Pieria's spring would thro' my breast

Pour its inspiring influence, and rush

No rill, but rather an o'erflowing flood!

That, for my venerable father's sake,

All meaner themes renounced, my muse, on wings 5

Of duty borne, might reach a loftier strain.

For thee, my father! howsoe'er it please,

She frames this slender work, nor know I aught

That may thy gifts more suitably requite;

Though to requite them suitably would ask 10

Returns much nobler, and surpassing far

The meagre stores of verbal gratitude;

But, such as I possess, I send thee all.

This page presents thee in their full amount

With thy son's treasures, and the sum is nought; 15

Nought, save the riches that from airy dream

In secret grottos and in laurel bowers

I have, by golden Clio's gift, acquired.

Verse is a work divine; despise not thou

Verse, therefore, which evinces (nothing more) 20

Man's heavenly source, and which, retaining still

Some scintillations of Promethean fire,

Bespeaks him animated from above.

The gods love verse; the infernal Powers themselves

Confess the influence of verse, which stirs 25

The lowest deep, and binds in triple chains

Of adamant both Pluto and the Shades.

In verse the Delphic priestess, and the pale

Tremulous Sibyl make the future known;

And he who sacrifices, on the shrine 30

Hangs verse, both when he smites the threatening bull,

And when he spreads his reeking entrails wide

To scrutinize the Fates enveloped there.

We, too, ourselves, what time we seek again

Our native skies, and one eternal now 35

Shall be the only measure of our being,

Crowned all with gold, and chaunting to the lyre

Harmonious verse, shall range the courts above,

And make the starry firmament resound;

And, even now, the fiery spirit pure 40

That wheels yon circling orbs, directs, himself,

Their mazy dance with melody of verse

Unutterable, immortal, hearing which

Huge Ophiuchus holds his hiss suppressed,

Orion, softened, drops his ardent blade, 45

And Atlas stands unconscious of his load.

Verse graced of old the feasts of kings ere yet

Luxurious dainties, destined to the gulph

Immense of gluttony, were known, and ere

Lyæus deluged yet the temperate board. 50

Then sat the bard a customary guest

To share the banquet, and, his length of locks

With beechen honours bound, proposed in verse

The characters of heroes, and their deeds

To imitation, sang of Chaos old, sword, belt, and club; 55

Of nature's birth, of gods that crept in search

Of acorns fallen, and of the thunder bolt

Not yet produced from Etna's fiery cave.

And what avails, at last, tune without voice,

Devoid of matter? Such may suit perhaps 60

The rural dance, but such was ne'er the song

Of Orpheus, whom the streams stood still to hear

And the oaks followed. Not by chords alone

Well touched, but by resistless accents more

To sympathetic tears the ghosts themselves 65

He moved; these praises to his verse he owes.

Nor thou persist, I pray thee, still to slight

The sacred Nine, and to imagine vain

And useless, powers by whom inspired thyself

Art skilful to associate verse with airs 70

Harmonious, and to give the human voice

A thousand modulations, heir by right

Indisputable of Arion's fame.

Now say, what wonder is it if a son

Of thine delight in verse, if so conjoined 75

In close affinity, we sympathize

In social arts and kindred studies sweet?

Such distribution of himself to us

Was Phœbus' choice; thou hast thy gift and I

Mine also; and between us we receive, 80

Father and son, the whole inspiring god.

No! howsoe'er the semblance thou assume

Of hate, thou hatest not the gentle Muse,

My Father! for thou never bad'st me tread

The beaten path and broad that leads right on 85

To opulence, nor didst condemn thy son

To the insipid clamours of the bar,

To laws voluminous and ill observed;

But, wishing to enrich me more, to fill

My mind with treasure, ledst me far away 90

From city din to deep retreats, to banks

And streams Aonian, and, with free consent,

Didst place me happy at Apollo's side.

I speak not now, on more important themes

Intent, of common benefits and such 95

As nature bids, but of thy larger gifts,

My Father! who, when I had opened once

The stores of Roman rhetoric, and learned

The full-toned language of the eloquent Greeks,

Whose lofty music graced the lips of Jove, 100

Thyself didst counsel me to add the flowers

That Gallia boasts, those, too, with which the smooth

Italian his degenerate speech adorns,

That witnesses his mixture with the Goth;

And Palestine's prophetic songs divine. 105

To sum the whole, whate'er the heaven contains,

The earth beneath it, and the air between,

The rivers and the restless deep, may all

Prove intellectual gain to me, my wish

Concurring with thy will; Science herself, 110

All cloud removed, inclines her beauteous head,

And offers me the lip, if, dull of heart,

I shrink not and decline her gracious boon.

Go now and gather dross, ye sordid minds

That covet it; what could my Father more? 115

What more could Jove himself, unless he gave

His own abode, the heaven, in which he reigns?

More eligible gifts than these were not

Apollo's to his son, had they been safe,

As they were insecure, who made the boy 120

The world's vice-luminary, bade him rule

The radiant chariot of the day, and bind

To his young brows his own all-dazzling wreath.

I, therefore, although last and least, my place

Among the learned in the laurel grove 125

Will hold, and where the conqueror's ivy twines,

Henceforth exempt from the unlettered throng

Profane, nor even to be seen by such.

Away then, sleepless Care, Complaint away,

And Envy, with thy 'jealous leer malign!' 130

Nor let the monster Calumny shoot forth

Her venomed tongue at me. Detested foes!

Ye all are impotent against my peace,

For I am privileged, and bear my breast

Safe, and too high for your viperean wound. 135

But thou, my Father! since to render thanks

Equivalent, and to requite by deeds

Thy liberality, exceeds my power,

Suffice it that I thus record thy gifts,

And bear them treasured in a grateful mind! 140

Ye, too, the favourite pastime of my youth

My voluntary numbers, if ye dare

To hope longevity, and to survive

Your master's funeral, not soon absorbed

In the oblivious Lethæan gulph 145

Shall to futurity perhaps convey

This theme, and by these praises of my sire

Improve the Fathers of a distant age!

An English letter to a friend (unknown), who, it appears, had been calling him to account for his apparent indifference as to his work in life

This letter has an exceptional autobiographic value. The sonnet, which is inserted, appears to have been independently written some time before, and was originally published in 1645, with the heading 'On his having arrived at the age of twenty-three.'

'Sir,—Besides that in sundry respects I must acknowledge me to profit by you whenever we meet, you are often to me, and were yesterday especially, as a good watchman to admonish that the hours of the night pass on (for so I call my life, as yet obscure and unserviceable to mankind), and that the day with me is at hand, wherein Christ commands all to labor, while there is light. Which, because I am persuaded you do to no other purpose than out of a true desire that God should be honoured in every one, I therefore think myself bound, though unasked, to give you an account, as oft as occasion is, of this my tardy moving, according to the precept of my conscience, which I firmly trust is not without God. Yet now I will not strain for any set apology, but only refer myself to what my mind shall have at any time to declare herself at her best ease.

But if you think, as you said, that too much love of learning is in fault, and that I have given up myself to dream away my years in the arms of studious retirement, like Endymion with the moon, as the tale of Latmus goes, yet consider that, if it were no more but the mere love of learning, whether it proceed from a principle bad, good, or natural, it could not have held out thus long against so strong opposition on the other side of every kind. For, if it be bad, why should not all the fond hopes that forward youth and vanity are fledge with, together with gain, pride, and ambition, call me forward more powerfully than a poor, regardless, and unprofitable sin of curiosity should be able to withhold me; whereby a man cuts himself off from all action, and becomes the most helpless, pusillanimous, and unweaponed creature in the world, the most unfit and unable to do that which all mortals most aspire to, either to be useful to his friends or to offend his enemies? Or, if it be to be thought a natural proneness, there is against that a much more potent inclination inbred, which about this time of a man's life solicits most—the desire of house and family of his own; to which nothing is esteemed more helpful than the early entering into credible employment, and nothing hindering than this affected solitariness. And, though this were enough, yet there is another act, if not of pure, yet of refined nature, no less available to dissuade prolonged obscurity—a desire of honour and repute and immortal fame, seated in the breast of every true scholar; which all make haste to by the readiest ways of publishing and divulging conceived merits—as well those that shall, as those that never shall, obtain it. Nature, therefore, would presently work the more prevalent way, if there were nothing but this inferior bent of herself to restrain her. Lastly, the love of learning, as it is the pursuit of something good, it would sooner follow the more excellent and supreme good

known and presented, and so be quickly diverted from the empty and fantastic chase of shadows and notions, to the solid good flowing from due and timely obedience to that command in the Gospel set out by the terrible feasing of him that hid the talent.

It is more probable, therefore, that not the endless delight of speculation, but this very consideration of that great commandment, does not press forward, as soon as many do, to undergo, but keeps off, with a sacred reverence and religious advisement how best to undergo, not taking thought of being late, so it give advantage to be more fit; for those that were latest lost nothing when the master of the vineyard came to give each one his hire. And here I am come to a streamhead, copious enough to disburden itself, like Nilus, at seven mouths into an ocean. But then I should also run into a reciprocal contradiction of ebbing and flowing at once, and do that which I excuse myself for not doing—preach and not preach. Yet, that you may see that I am something suspicious of myself, and do take notice of a certain belatedness in me, I am the bolder to send you some of my nightward thoughts some while since, because they come in not altogether unfitly, made up in a Petrarchian stanza, which I told you of:

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

My hasting days fly on with full career;

But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.

Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth 5

That I to manhood am arrived so near;

And inward ripeness doth much less appear,

That some more timely-happy spirits indu'th.

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,

It shall be still in strictest measure even 10

To that same lot, however mean or high,

Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven.

All is, if I have grace to use it so,

As ever in my great Task-Master's eye.

By this I believe you may well repent of having made mention at all of this matter; for, if I have not all this while won you to this, I have certainly wearied you of it. This, therefore, alone may be a sufficient reason for me to keep me as I am, lest, having thus tired you singly, I should deal worse with a whole congregation and spoil all the patience of a parish; for I myself do not only see my own tediousness, but now grow offended with it, that has hindered me thus long from coming to the last and best period of my letter, and that which must now chiefly work my pardon,—that I am

Your true and unfeigned friend, etc.'

To Alexander Gill, Jr. (Familiar Letters, No. V.)

If you had presented to me a gift of gold, or of preciously embossed vases, or whatever of that sort mortals admire, it were certainly to my shame not to have some time or other made you a remuneration in return, as far as my faculties might serve. Your gift of the day before yesterday, however, having been such a sprightly and elegant set of Hendecasyllabics, you have, just in proportion to the superiority of that gift to anything in the form of gold, made us the more anxious to find some dainty means by which to repay the kindness of so pleasant a favour. We had, indeed, at hand some things of our own of this same kind, but such as I could nowise deem fit to be sent in contest of equality of gift with yours. I send, therefore, what is not exactly mine, but belongs also to the truly divine poet, this ode of whom, only last week, with no deliberate

intention certainly, but from I know not what sudden impulse before daybreak, I adapted, almost in bed, to the rule of Greek heroic verse: with the effect, it seems, that, relying on this coadjutor, who surpasses you no less in his subject than you surpass me in art, I should have something that might have a resemblance of approach to a balancing of accounts. Should anything meet you in it not coming up to your usual opinion of our productions, understand that, since I left your school, this is the first and only thing I have composed in Greek,—employing myself, as you know, more willingly in Latin and English matters; inasmuch as whoever spends study and pains in this age on Greek composition runs a risk of singing mostly to the deaf. . . .

From our suburban residence (E nostro suburbano), December 4, 1634.

To Charles Diodati. (Familiar Letters, No. VI.)

Now at length I see plainly that what you are driving at is to vanquish me sometimes in the art of obstinate silence; and, if it is so, bravo! have that little glory over us, for behold! we write first. All the same, if ever the question should come into contention why neither has written to the other for so long, do not think but that I shall stand by many degrees the more excused of the two,—manifestly so indeed, as being one by nature slow and lazy to write, as you well know; while you, on the other hand, whether by nature or by habit, are wont without difficulty to be drawn into epistolary correspondence of this sort. It makes also for my favour that I know your method of studying to be so arranged that you frequently take breath in the middle, visit your friends, write much, sometimes make a journey, whereas my genius is such that no delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything, holds me aside

until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period of my studies. . . .

London, September 2, 1637.

To Charles Diodati. (Familiar Letters, No. VII.)

. . . What besides God has resolved concerning me I know not, but this at least: He has instilled into me, if into any one, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labour, as the fables have it, is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpina as it is my habit day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful, as for a certain image of supreme beauty, through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the shapes of things divine), and to follow it as it leads me on by some sure traces which I seem to recognize. Hence it is that, when any one scorns what the vulgar opine in their depraved estimation of things, and dares to feel and speak and be that which the highest wisdom throughout all ages has taught to be best, to that man I attach myself forthwith by a kind of real necessity, wherever I find him. If, whether by nature or by my fate, I am so circumstanced that by no effort or labour of mine can I myself rise to such an honour and elevation, yet that I should always worship and look up to those who have attained that glory, or happily aspire to it, neither gods nor men, I reckon, have bidden nay.

But now I know you wish to have your curiosity satisfied. You make many anxious inquiries, even as to what I am at present thinking of. Hearken, Theodotus, but let it be in your private ear, lest I blush; and allow me for a little to use big language with you. You ask what I am thinking of? So may the good Deity help me, of immortality! And what am I doing? Growing my wings and meditating flight; but as

yet our Pegasus raises himself on very tender pinions. Let us be lowly wise!

* * * * * * * * *

I have by continuous reading brought down the affairs of the Greeks as far as the time when they ceased to be Greeks. I have been long engaged in the obscure business of the state of Italians under the Longobards, the Franks, and the Germans, down to the time when liberty was granted them by Rodolph, King of Germany: from that period it will be better to read separately what each City did by its own wars. . . .

London, September 23, 1637.

To Benedetto Bonmattei of Florence. (Familiar Letters, No. VIII.)

. . . I, certainly, who have not wet merely the tips of my lips with both those tongues, but have, as much as any, to the full allowance of my years, drained their deeper draughts, can yet sometimes willingly and eagerly go for a feast to that Dante of yours, and to Petrarch, and a good few more; nor has Attic Athens herself, with her pellucid Ilissus, nor that old Rome with her bank of the Tiber, been able so to hold me but that I love often to visit your Arno and these hills of Fæsule. See now, I entreat, whether it has not been with enough of providential cause that I have been given to you for these few days, as your latest guest from the ocean, who am so great a lover of your nation that, as I think, there is no other more so. . . .

Florence, September 10, 1638.

Mansus

Milton's Latin poem addressed to Manso, Marquis of Villa, in grateful acknowledgment of the distinguished attention which had been shown him by the aged Marquis, during his stay in Naples, contains the first intimation in his writings of his contemplating an epic poem to be based on the legendary or mythical history of Britain, with King Arthur for its hero.

The following is Masson's quite literal prose translation of vv. 70-100:

. . . 'Oh that my lot might yield me such a friend, one who should know as well how to decorate Apollo's children, if perchance I shall ever call back into verse our native kings, and Arthur stirring wars even under the earth that hides him, or speak of the great-souled heroes, the knights of the unconquered Table, bound in confederate brotherhood, and (Oh may the spirit be present to me!) break the Saxon phalanxes under the British Mars. Then, when, having measured out the period of a not silent life, and full of years, I shall leave the dust its due, he would stand by my bed with wet eyes; it would be enough if I said to him standing by "Let me be thy charge;" he would see that my limbs, slacked in livid death, were softly laid in the narrow coffin; perchance he would bring out from the marble our features, wreathing the hair either with the leaf of Paphian myrtle or with that of Parnassian laurel; but I should repose in secure peace. Then, too, if faith is aught, if there are assured rewards of the good, I myself, withdrawn into the ether of the heaven-housed gods, whither labour and the pure mind and the fire of virtue carry us, shall behold these things from some part of the unseen world, as far as the fates allow, and, smiling serene, with soul entire, shall feel my face suffused with the purple light, and applaud myself the while in the joy of ethereal Olympus.'

From the 'Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing. To the Parliament of England'

And lest some should persuade ye, lords and commons, that these arguments of learned men's discouragement at this your order are mere flourishes, and not real, I could recount what I have seen and heard in other countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among their learned men, (for that honour I had,) and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness, that other nations were so persuaded of her liberty.

Yet was it beyond my hope, that those worthies were then breathing in her air, who should be her leaders to such a deliverance, as shall never be forgotten by any revolution of time that this world hath to finish. When that was once begun, it was as little in my fear, that what words of complaint I heard among learned men of other parts uttered against the Inquisition, the same I should hear, by as learned men at home, uttered in time of parliament against an order of licensing; and that so generally, that when I had disclosed myself a companion of their discontent, I might say, if without envy, that he whom an honest quæstorship had endeared to the Sicilians, was not more by them importuned against Verres, than the favourable opinion

which I had among many who honour ye, and are known and respected by ye, loaded me with entreaties and persuasions, that I would not despair to lay together that which just reason should bring into my mind, towards the removal of an undeserved thraldom upon learning.

To Lucas Holstenius in the Vatican at Rome. (Familiar Letters, No. IX.)

Although I both can and often do remember many courteous and most friendly acts done me by many in this my passage through Italy, yet, for so brief an acquaintance, I do not know whether I can justly say that from any one I have had greater proofs of goodwill than those which have come to me from you. For, when I went up to the Vatican for the purpose of meeting you, though a total stranger to you,—unless perchance anything had been previously said about me to you by Alexander Cherubini,—you received me with the utmost courtesy. Admitted at once with politeness into the Museum, I was allowed to behold the superb collection of books, and also very many manuscript Greek authors set forth with your explanations,—some of whom, not yet seen in our age, seemed now, in their array, like Virgil's

penitus convalle virenti

Inclusæ animæ superumque ad lumen ituræ, (vi. 679)

to demand the active hands of the printer, and a delivery into the world, while others, already edited by your care, are eagerly received everywhere by scholars:—dismissed, too, richer than I came, with two copies of one of these last presented to me by yourself. Then, I could not but believe that it was in consequence of the mention you made of me to the most excellent Cardinal Francesco Barberini that, when he, a few days after,

gave that public musical entertainment with truly Roman magnificence (ἀκρόαμα illud musicum magnificentiâ vere Romanâ publice exhiberet), he himself, waiting at the doors, and seeking me out in so great a crowd, almost seizing me by the hand, indeed, admitted me within in a truly most honourable manner. Further, when, on this account, I went to pay my respects to him next day, you again were the person that both made access for me and obtained me an opportunity of leisurely conversation with him—an opportunity such as, with so great a man,—than whom, on the topmost summit of dignity, nothing more kind, nothing more courteous,—was truly, place and time considered, too ample rather than too sparing. . . .

Florence, March 30, 1639.

Epitaphium Damonis

The 'Epitaphium Damonis' is a pastoral elegy, occasioned by the death of Charles Diodati, which occurred in the summer or autumn of 1638, while Milton was on his continental tour. As an expression of the poet's grief for the loss of his boyhood's and early manhood's dearest, most intimate, and sympathetic friend, it has a general autobiographic character; but it contains one passage (vv. 161-178), having a special interest of the kind, in which he again alludes to his contemplated epic poem, to be based on the legendary history of Britain.

The following is Masson's translation of the Argument and of vv. 161-178:

'Thyrsis and Damon, shepherds of the same neighbourhood, following the same pursuits, were friends from their boyhood, in the highest degree of mutual attachment. Thyrsis, having set out to travel for mental improvement, received news when abroad of Damon's death. Afterwards at length returning, and finding the matter to be so, he deplores himself and his solitary

condition in the following poem. Under the guise of Damon, however, is here understood Charles Diodati, tracing his descent on the father's side from the Tuscan city of Lucca, but otherwise English—a youth remarkable, while he lived, for his genius, his learning, and other most shining virtues.'

'Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating.

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. Oh 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.'

From 'Of Reformation in England'

Oh, sir, I do now feel myself inwrapped on the sudden into those mazes and labyrinths of dreadful and hideous thoughts, that which way to get out, or which way to end, I know not, unless I turn mine eyes, and with your help lift up my hands to that eternal and propitious Throne, where nothing is readier than grace and refuge to the distresses of mortal suppliants: and it were a shame to leave these serious thoughts less piously than the heathen were wont to conclude their graver discourses.

Thou, therefore, that sittest in light and glory unapproachable, Parent of angels and men! next, thee I implore, omnipotent King, Redeemer of that lost remnant whose nature thou didst assume, ineffable and everlasting Love! and thou, the third subsistence of divine infinitude, illumining Spirit, the joy and solace of created things! one Tripersonal godhead! look upon this thy poor and almost spent and expiring church, leave her not thus a prey to these importunate wolves, that wait and think long till they devour thy tender flock; these wild boars that have broke into thy vineyard, and left the print of their polluting hoofs on the souls of thy servants. Oh! let them not bring about their damned designs, that stand now at the entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watchword to open and let out those dreadful locusts and scorpions, to reinvolve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, where we shall never more see the sun of thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful dawn, never more hear the bird of morning sing. Be moved with pity at the afflicted state of this our shaken monarchy, that now lies labouring under her throes, and struggling against the grudges of more dreaded calamities.

O thou, that, after the impetuous rage of five bloody

inundations, and the succeeding sword of intestine war, soaking the land in her own gore, didst pity the sad and ceaseless revolution of our swift and thick-coming sorrows; when we were quite breathless, of thy free grace didst motion peace, and terms of covenant with us; and having first well nigh freed us from antichristian thraldom, didst build up this Britannic empire to a glorious and enviable height, with all her daughter-islands about her; stay us in this felicity, let not the obstinacy of our half-obedience and will-worship bring forth that viper of sedition, that for these fourscore years hath been breeding to eat through the entrails of our peace; but let her cast her abortive spawn without the danger of this travailing and throbbing kingdom: that we may still remember in our solemn thanksgivings, how for us, the northern ocean even to the frozen Thule was scattered with the proud shipwrecks of the Spanish armada, and the very maw of hell ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that horrible and damned blast.

Oh how much more glorious will those former deliverances appear, when we shall know them not only to have saved us from greatest miseries past, but to have reserved us for greatest happiness to come! Hitherto thou hast but freed us, and that not fully, from the unjust and tyrannous claim of thy foes; now unite us entirely, and appropriate us to thyself, tie us everlastingly in willing homage to the prerogative of thy eternal throne.

And now we know, O thou our most certain hope and defence, that thine enemies have been consulting all the sorceries of the great whore, and have joined their plots with that sad intelligencing tyrant that mischiefs the world with his mines of Ophir, and lies thirsting to revenge his naval ruins that have larded our seas: but let them all take counsel together, and let it come to nought; let them decree, and do thou cancel it; let them gather themselves, and be scattered; let them embattle

themselves, and be broken; let them embattle, and be broken, for thou art with us.

Then, amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, some one may perhaps be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty measures, to sing and celebrate thy divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages; whereby this great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the fervent and continual practice of truth and righteousness, and casting far from her the rags of her old vices, may press on hard to that high and happy emulation to be found the soberest, wisest, and most Christian people at that day, when thou, the eternal and shortly-expected King, shalt open the clouds to judge the several kingdoms of the world, and distributing national honours and rewards to religious and just commonwealths, shalt put an end to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming thy universal and mild monarchy through heaven and earth; where they undoubtedly, that by their labours, counsels, and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of religion and their country, shall receive above the inferior orders of the blessed, the regal addition of principalities, legions, and thrones into their glorious titles, and in supereminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, shall clasp inseparable hands with joy and bliss, in overmeasure for ever.

From 'Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence,' etc.

O thou the ever-begotten Light and perfect Image of the Father! thou hast opened our difficult and sad times, and given us an unexpected breathing after our long oppressions: thou hast done justice upon those that tyrannized over us, while some men wavered and admired a vain shadow of wisdom in a tongue nothing slow to utter guile, though thou hast taught us to admire only that which is good, and to count that only

praiseworthy, which is grounded upon thy divine precepts. Thou hast discovered the plots, and frustrated the hopes, of all the wicked in the land, and put to shame the persecutors of thy church: thou hast made our false prophets to be found a lie in the sight of all the people, and chased them with sudden confusion and amazement before the redoubled brightness of thy descending cloud, that now covers thy tabernacle. Who is there that cannot trace thee now in thy beamy walk through the midst of thy sanctuary, amidst those golden candlesticks, which have long suffered a dimness amongst us through the violence of those that had seized them, and were more taken with the mention of their gold than of their starry light; teaching the doctrine of Balaam, to cast a stumbling-block before thy servants, commanding them to eat things sacrificed to idols, and forcing them to fornication? Come, therefore, O thou that hast the seven stars in thy right hand, appoint thy chosen priests according to their orders and courses of old, to minister before thee, and duly to press and pour out the consecrated oil into thy holy and ever-burning lamps. Thou has sent out the spirit of prayer upon thy servants over all the land to this effect, and stirred up their vows as the sound of many waters about thy throne. Every one can say, that now certainly thou hast visited this land, and hast not forgotten the utmost corners of the earth, in a time when men had thought that thou wast gone up from us to the furthest end of the heavens, and hadst left to do marvellously among the sons of these last ages. Oh perfect and accomplish thy glorious acts! for men may leave their works unfinished, but thou art a God, thy nature is perfection: shouldst thou bring us thus far onward from Egypt to destroy us in this wilderness, though we deserve, yet thy great name would suffer in the rejoicing of thine enemies, and the deluded hope of all thy servants. When thou hast settled peace in the church, and righteous judgment in the kingdom,

then shall all thy saints address their voices of joy and triumph to thee, standing on the shore of that Red Sea into which our enemies had almost driven us. And he that now for haste snatches up a plain ungarnished present as a thank-offering to thee, which could not be deferred in regard of thy so many late deliverances wrought for us one upon another, may then perhaps take up a harp, and sing thee an elaborate song to generations. In that day it shall no more be said as in scorn, this or that was never held so till this present age, when men have better learnt that the times and seasons pass along under thy feet to go and come at thy bidding: and as thou didst dignify our fathers' days with many revelations above all the foregoing ages, since thou tookest the flesh; so thou canst vouchsafe to us (though unworthy) as large a portion of thy Spirit as thou pleasest: for who shall prejudice thy all-governing will? seeing the power of thy grace is not passed away with the primitive times, as fond and faithless men imagine, but thy kingdom is now at hand, and thou standing at the door. Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O Prince of all the kings of the earth! put on the visible robes of thy imperial majesty, take up that unlimited sceptre which thy Almighty Father hath bequeathed thee; for now the voice of thy bride calls thee, and all creatures sigh to be renewed.

From 'The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty'

For me, I have determined to lay up as the best treasure and solace of a good old age, if God vouchsafe it me, the honest liberty of free speech from my youth, where I shall think it available in so dear a concernment as the church's good. For if I be, either by disposition or what other cause, too inquisitive, or suspicious of myself and mine own doings, who can

help it? But this I foresee, that should the church be brought under heavy oppression, and God have given me ability the while to reason against that man that should be the author of so foul a deed; or should she, by blessing from above on the industry and courage of faithful men, change this her distracted estate into better days, without the least furtherance or contribution of those few talents, which God at that present had lent me; I foresee what stories I should hear within myself, all my life after, of discourage and reproach. Timorous and ungrateful, the church of God is now again at the foot of her insulting enemies, and thou bewailest. What matters it for thee, or thy bewailing? When time was, thou couldst not find a syllable of all that thou hast read, or studied, to utter in her behalf. Yet ease and leisure was given thee for thy retired thoughts, out of the sweat of other men. Thou hast the diligence, the parts, the language of a man, if a vain subject were to be adorned or beautified; but when the cause of God and his church was to be pleaded, for which purpose that tongue was given thee which thou hast, God listened if he could hear thy voice among his zealous servants, but thou wert dumb as a beast; from henceforward be that which thine own brutish silence hath made thee. Or else I should have heard on the other ear: Slothful, and ever to be set light by, the church hath now overcome her late distresses after the unwearied labours of many her true servants that stood up in her defence; thou also wouldst take upon thee to share amongst them of their joy: but wherefore thou? Where canst thou shew any word or deed of thine which might have hastened her peace? Whatever thou dost now talk, or write, or look, is the alms of other men's active prudence and zeal. Dare not now to say or do anything better than thy former sloth and infancy; or if thou darest, thou dost impudently to make a thrifty purchase of boldness to thyself, out of the painful merits of other men;

what before was thy sin is now thy duty, to be abject and worthless. These, and such-like lessons as these, I know would have been my matins duly, and my even-song. But now by this little diligence, mark what a privilege I have gained with good men and saints, to claim my right of lamenting the tribulations of the church, if she should suffer, when others, that have ventured nothing for her sake, have not the honour to be admitted mourners. But if she lift up her drooping head and prosper, among those that have something more than wished her welfare, I have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and my heirs. Concerning therefore this wayward subject against prelaty, the touching whereof is so distasteful and disquietous to a number of men, as by what hath been said I may deserve of charitable readers to be credited, that neither envy nor gall hath entered me upon this controversy, but the enforcement of conscience only, and a preventive fear lest the omitting of this duty should be against me, when I would store up to myself the good provision of peaceful hours: so, lest it should be still imputed to me, as I have found it hath been, that some self-pleasing humour of vain-glory hath incited me to contest with men of high estimation, now while green years are upon my head; from this needless surmisal I shall hope to dissuade the intelligent and equal auditor, if I can but say successfully that which in this exigent behoves me; although I would be heard only, if it might be, by the elegant and learned reader, to whom principally for a while I shall beg leave I may address myself. To him it will be no new thing, though I tell him that if I hunted after praise, by the ostentation of wit and learning, I should not write thus out of mine own season when I have neither yet completed to my mind the full circle of my private studies, although I complain not of any insufficiency to the matter in hand; or were I ready to my wishes, it were a folly to commit anything elaborately composed to the careless

and interrupted listening of these tumultuous times. Next, if I were wise only to my own ends, I would certainly take such a subject as of itself might catch applause, whereas this hath all the disadvantages on the contrary, and such a subject as the publishing whereof might be delayed at pleasure, and time enough to pencil it over with all the curious touches of art, even to the perfection of a faultless picture; whenas in this argument the not deferring is of great moment to the good speeding, that if solidity have leisure to do her office, art cannot have much. Lastly, I should not choose this manner of writing, wherein knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand. And though I shall be foolish in saying more to this purpose, yet, since it will be such a folly, as wisest men go about to commit, having only confessed and so committed, I may trust with more reason, because with more folly, to have courteous pardon. For although a poet, soaring in the high reason of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him, might, without apology, speak more of himself than I mean to do; yet for me sitting here below in the cool element of prose, a mortal thing among many readers of no empyreal conceit, to venture and divulge unusual things of myself, I shall petition to the gentler sort, it may not be envy to me. I must say, therefore, that after I had for my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, (whom God recompense!) been exercised to the tongues, and some sciences, as my age would suffer, by sundry masters and teachers, both at home and at the schools, it was found that whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or betaken to of mine own choice in English, or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly by this latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live. But much latelier in the private academies of Italy, whither I

was favoured to resort, perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at under twenty or thereabout, (for the manner is, that every one must give some proof of his wit and reading there,) met with acceptance above what was looked for; and other things, which I had shifted in scarcity of books and conveniences to patch up amongst them, were received with written encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps; I began thus far to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study, (which I take to be my portion in this life,) joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die. These thoughts at once possessed me, and these other; that if I were certain to write as men buy leases, for three lives and downward, there ought no regard be sooner had than to God's glory, by the honour and instruction of my country. For which cause, and not only for that I knew it would be hard to arrive at the second rank among the Latins, I applied myself to that resolution, which Ariosto followed against the persuasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end, (that were a toilsome vanity,) but to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect. That what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I, in my proportion, with this over and above, of being a Christian, might do for mine; not caring to be once named abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, but content with these British islands as my world; whose fortune hath hitherto been, that if the Athenians, as some say, made their small deeds great and renowned by

their eloquent writers, England hath had her noble achievements made small by the unskilful handling of monks and mechanics.

Time serves not now, and perhaps I might seem too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model: or whether the rules of Aristotle herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be followed, which in them that know art, and use judgment, is no transgression, but an enriching of art: and lastly, what king or knight, before the conquest, might be chosen in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian hero. And as Tasso gave to a prince of Italy his choice whether he would command him to write of Godfrey's expedition against the Infidels, or Belisarius against the Goths, or Charlemagne against the Lombards; if to the instinct of nature and the emboldening of art aught may be trusted, and that there be nothing adverse in our climate, or the fate of this age, it haply would be no rashness, from an equal diligence and inclination, to present the like offer in our own ancient stories; or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign, shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a nation. The Scripture also affords us a divine pastoral drama in the Song of Solomon, consisting of two persons, and a double chorus, as Origen rightly judges. And the Apocalypse of St. John is the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy, shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies: and this my opinion the grave authority of Pareus, commenting that book, is sufficient to confirm. Or if occasion shall lead, to imitate those magnific odes and hymns,

wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy, some others in their frame judicious, in their matter most an end faulty. But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made appear over all the kinds of lyric poesy to be incomparable. These abilities, wheresoever they be found, are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, but yet to some (though most abuse) in every nation; and are of power, beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and what he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his church; to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general relapses of kingdoms and states from justice and God's true worship. Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thoughts from within; all these things with a solid and treatable smoothness to paint out and describe. Teaching over the whole book of sanctity and virtue, through all the instances of example, with such delight to those especially of soft and delicious temper, who will not so much as look upon truth herself, unless they see her elegantly dressed; that whereas the paths of honesty and good life appear now rugged and difficult, though they be indeed easy and pleasant, they will then appear to all men both easy and pleasant, though they were rugged and difficult indeed. And what a benefit this would be to our youth and gentry, may be soon guessed

by what we know of the corruption and bane which they suck in daily from the writings and interludes of libidinous and ignorant poetasters, who having scarce ever heard of that which is the main consistence of a true poem, the choice of such persons as they ought to introduce, and what is moral and decent to each one; do for the most part lay up vicious principles in sweet pills to be swallowed down, and make the taste of virtuous documents harsh and sour. But because the spirit of man cannot demean itself lively in this body, without some recreating intermission of labour and serious things, it were happy for the commonwealth, if our magistrates, as in those famous governments of old, would take into their care, not only the deciding of our contentious law-cases and brawls, but the managing of our public sports and festival pastimes; that they might be, not such as were authorized a while since, the provocations of drunkenness and lust, but such as may inure and harden our bodies by martial exercises to all warlike skill and performance; and may civilize, adorn, and make discreet our minds by the learned and affable meeting of frequent academies, and the procurement of wise and artful recitations, sweetened with eloquent and graceful enticements to the love and practice of justice, temperance, and fortitude, instructing and bettering the nation at all opportunities, that the call of wisdom and virtue may be heard everywhere, as Solomon saith: 'She crieth without, she uttereth her voice in the streets, in the top of high places, in the chief concourse, and in the openings of the gates.' Whether this may not be, not only in pulpits, but after another persuasive method, at set and solemn paneguries, in theatres, porches, or what other place or way may win most upon the people to receive at once both recreation and instruction, let them in authority consult. The thing which I had to say and those intentions which have lived within me ever since I could conceive myself anything worth to my country,

I return to crave excuse that urgent reason hath plucked from me, by an abortive and foredated discovery. And the accomplishment of them lies not but in a power above man's to promise; but that none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit that none shall, that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and free leisure will extend; and that the land had once enfranchised herself from this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery, no free and splendid wit can flourish. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by the invocation of dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases: to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs; till which in some measure be compassed, at mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as many as are not loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges that I can give them. Although it nothing content me to have disclosed thus much beforehand, but that I trust hereby to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, put from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful

studies, to come into the dim reflection of hollow antiquities sold by the seeming bulk, and there be fain to club quotations with men whose learning and belief lies in marginal stuffings, who, when they have, like good sumpters, laid ye down their horse-loads of citations and fathers at your door, with a rhapsody of who and who were bishops here or there, ye may take off their packsaddles, their day's work is done, and episcopacy, as they think, stoutly vindicated. Let any gentle apprehension, that can distinguish learned pains from unlearned drudgery imagine what pleasure or profoundness can be in this, or what honour to deal against such adversaries. But were it the meanest under-service, if God by his secretary conscience enjoin it, it were sad for me if I should draw back; for me especially, now when all men offer their aid to help, ease, and lighten the difficult labours of the church, to whose service, by the intentions of my parents and friends, I was destined of a child, and in mine own resolutions: till coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that would retch, he must either straight perjure, or split his faith; I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing. Howsoever, thus church-outed by the prelates, hence may appear the right I have to meddle in these matters, as before the necessity and constraint appeared.

From 'Apology for Smectymnuus'

If, readers, to that same great difficulty of well-doing what we certainly know, were not added in most men as great a carelessness of knowing what they and others ought to do, we

had been long ere this, no doubt but all of us, much further on our way to some degree of peace and happiness in this kingdom. But since our sinful neglect of practising that which we know to be undoubtedly true and good, hath brought forth among us, through God's just anger, so great a difficulty now to know that which otherwise might be soon learnt, and hath divided us by a controversy of great importance indeed, but of no hard solution, which is the more our punishment; I resolved (of what small moment soever I might be thought) to stand on that side where I saw both the plain authority of scripture leading, and the reason of justice and equity persuading; with this opinion, which esteems it more unlike a Christian to be a cold neuter in the cause of the church, than the law of Solon made it punishable after a sedition in the state.

And because I observe that fear and dull disposition, lukewarmness and sloth, are not seldomer wont to cloak themselves under the affected name of moderation, than true and lively zeal is customably disparaged with the term of indiscretion, bitterness, and choler; I could not to my thinking honour a good cause more from the heart, than by defending it earnestly, as oft as I could judge it to behove me, notwithstanding any false name that could be invented to wrong or undervalue an honest meaning. Wherein although I have not doubted to single forth more than once such of them as were thought the chief and most nominated opposers on the other side, whom no man else undertook; if I have done well either to be confident of the truth, whose force is best seen against the ablest resistance, or to be jealous and tender of the hurt that might be done among the weaker by the entrapping authority of great names titled to false opinions; or that it be lawful to attribute somewhat to gifts of God's imparting, which I boast not, but thankfully acknowledge, and fear also lest at my certain

account they be reckoned to me rather many than few; or if lastly it be but justice not to defraud of due esteem the wearisome labours and studious watchings, wherein I have spent and tired out almost a whole youth, I shall not distrust to be acquitted of presumption: knowing, that if heretofore all ages have received with favour and good acceptance the early industry of him that hath been hopeful, it were but hard measure now if the freedom of any timely spirit should be oppressed merely by the big and blunted fame of his elder adversary; and that his sufficiency must be now sentenced, not by pondering the reason he shews, but by calculating the years he brings.

However, as my purpose is not, nor hath been formerly, to look on my adversary abroad, through the deceiving glass of other men's great opinion of him, but at home, where I may find him in the proper light of his own worth, so now against the rancour of an evil tongue, from which I never thought so absurdly, as that I of all men should be exempt, I must be forced to proceed from the unfeigned and diligent inquiry of my own conscience at home, (for better way I know not, readers,) to give a more true account of myself abroad than this modest confuter, as he calls himself, hath given of me. Albeit, that in doing this I shall be sensible of two things which to me will be nothing pleasant; the one is, that not unlikely I shall be thought too much a party in mine own cause, and therein to see least: the other, that I shall be put unwillingly to molest the public view with the vindication of a private name; as if it were worth the while that the people should care whether such a one were thus, or thus. Yet those I entreat who have found the leisure to read that name, however of small repute, unworthily defamed, would be so good and so patient as to hear the same person not unneedfully defended.

I will not deny but that the best apology against false

accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words. And that I could at this time most easily and securely, with the least loss of reputation, use no other defence, I need not despair to win belief; whether I consider both the foolish contriving and ridiculous aiming of these his slanderous bolts, shot so wide of any suspicion to be fastened on me, that I have oft with inward contentment perceived my friends congratulating themselves in my innocence, and my enemies ashamed of their partner's folly: or whether I look at these present times, wherein most men, now scarce permitted the liberty to think over their own concernments, have removed the seat of their thoughts more outward to the expectation of public events: or whether the examples of men, either noble or religious, who have sat down lately with a meek silence and sufferance under many libellous endorsements, may be a rule to others, I might well appease myself to put up any reproaches in such an honourable society of fellow-sufferers, using no other defence.

And were it that slander would be content to make an end where it first fixes, and not seek to cast out the like infamy upon each thing that hath but any relation to the person traduced, I should have pleaded against this confuter by no other advocates than those which I first commended, silence and sufferance, and speaking deeds against faltering words. But when I discerned his intent was not so much to smite at me, as through me to render odious the truth which I had written, and to stain with ignominy that evangelic doctrine which opposes the tradition of prelacy, I conceived myself to be now not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded, and whereof I had declared openly to be a partaker. Whereupon I thought it my duty, if not to myself, yet to the religious cause I had in hand, not to leave on my garment the least spot or blemish in good name, so long as

God should give me to say that which might wipe it off; lest those disgraces which I ought to suffer, if it so befall me, for my religion, through my default religion be made liable to suffer for me. And, whether it might not something reflect upon those reverent men, whose friend I may be thought in writing the Animadversions, was not my last care to consider: if I should rest under these reproaches, having the same common adversary with them, it might be counted small credit for their cause to have found such an assistant, as this babbler hath devised me. What other thing in his book there is of dispute or question, in answering thereto I doubt not to be justified; except there be who will condemn me to have wasted time in throwing down that which could not keep itself up. As for others, who notwithstanding what I can allege have yet decreed to misinterpret the intents of my reply, I suppose they would have found as many causes to have misconceived the reasons of my silence.

* * * * * * * * *

Thus having spent his first onset, not in confuting, but in a reasonless defaming of the book, the method of his malice hurries him to attempt the like against the author; not by proofs and testimonies, but 'having no certain notice of me,' as he professes, 'further than what he gathers from the Animadversions,' blunders at me for the rest, and flings out stray crimes at a venture, which he could never, though he be a serpent, suck from anything that I have written, but from his own stuffed magazine and hoard of slanderous inventions, over and above that which he converted to venom in the drawing. To me, readers, it happens as a singular contentment; and let it be to good men no light satisfaction, that the slanderer here confesses he has 'no further notice of me than his own conjecture.' Although it had been honest to have inquired,

before he uttered such infamous words, and I am credibly informed he did inquire; but finding small comfort from the intelligence which he received, whereon to ground the falsities which he had provided, thought it his likeliest course, under a pretended ignorance, to let drive at random, lest he should lose his odd ends, which from some penurious book of characters he had been culling out and would fain apply. Not caring to burden me with those vices, whereof, among whom my conversation hath been, I have been ever least suspected; perhaps not without some subtlety to cast me into envy, by bringing on me a necessity to enter into mine own praises. In which argument I know every wise man is more unwillingly drawn to speak, than the most repining ear can be averse to hear.

Nevertheless, since I dare not wish to pass this life unpersecuted of slanderous tongues, for God hath told us that to be generally praised is woeful, I shall rely on his promise to free the innocent from causeless aspersions: whereof nothing sooner can assure me, than if I shall feel him now assisting me in the just vindication of myself, which yet I could defer, it being more meet, that to those other matters of public debatement in this book I should give attendance first, but that I fear it would but harm the truth for me to reason in her behalf, so long as I should suffer my honest estimation to lie unpurged from these insolent suspicions. And if I shall be large, or unwonted in justifying myself to those who know me not, for else it would be needless, let them consider that a short slander will ofttimes reach further than a long apology; and that he who will do justly to all men, must begin from knowing how, if it so happen, to be not unjust to himself. I must be thought, if this libeller (for now he shows himself to be so) can find belief, after an inordinate and riotous youth spent at the university, to have been at length 'vomited out thence.' For which commodious lie, that he may be encouraged in the

trade another time, I thank him; for it hath given me an apt occasion to acknowledge publicly with all grateful mind, that more than ordinary favour and respect, which I found above any of my equals at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the fellows of that college wherein I spent some years: who, at my parting, after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways how much better it would content them that I would stay; as by many letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time, and long after, I was assured of their singular good affection towards me. Which being likewise propense to all such as were for their studious and civil life worthy of esteem, I could not wrong their judgments and upright intentions, so much as to think I had that regard from them for other cause, than that I might be still encouraged to proceed in the honest and laudable courses, of which they apprehended I had given good proof. And to those ingenuous and friendly men, who were ever the countenancers of virtuous and hopeful wits, I wish the best and happiest thing that friends in absence wish one to another.

As for the common approbation or dislike of that place, as now it is, that I should esteem or disesteem myself, or any other the more for that, too simple and too credulous is the confuter, if he think to obtain with me, or any right discerner. Of small practice were that physician, who could not judge by what both she and her sister hath of long time vomited, that the worser stuff she strongly keeps in her stomach, but the better she is ever kecking at, and is queasy. She vomits now out of sickness; but ere it will be well with her, she must vomit by strong physic. In the meantime, that suburb sink, as this rude scavenger calls it, and more than scurrilously taunts it with the plague, having a worse plague in his middle entrail, that suburb wherein I dwell shall be in my account a more honourable place than his university. Which as in the time of

her better health, and mine own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, so now much less. But he follows me to the city, still usurping and forging beyond his book notice, which only he affirms to have had; 'and where my morning haunts are, he wisses not.' It is wonder that, being so rare an alchymist of slander, he could not extract that, as well as the university vomit, and the suburb sink which his art could distil so cunningly; but because his lembec fails him, to give him and envy the more vexation, I will tell him.

Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not sleeping, or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring, in winter often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour or to devotion; in summer as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its full fraught: then, with useful and generous labours preserving the body's health and hardiness to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion, and our country's liberty, when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations, rather than to see the ruin of our protestation, and the inforcement of a slavish life.

These are the morning practices: proceed now to the afternoon; 'in playhouses,' he says, 'and the bordelloes.' Your intelligence, unfaithful spy of Canaan? He gives in his evidence, that 'there he hath traced me.' Take him at his word, readers; but let him bring good sureties ere ye dismiss him, that while he pretended to dog others, he did not turn in for his own pleasure: for so much in effect he concludes against himself, not contented to be caught in every other gin, but he must be such a novice as to be still hampered in his own hemp. In the Animadversions, saith he, I find the mention of old cloaks, false beards, night-walkers, and salt

lotion; therefore, the animadverter haunts playhouses and bordelloes; for if he did not, how could he speak of such gear? Now that he may know what it is to be a child, and yet to meddle with edged tools, I turn his antistrophon upon his own head; the confuter knows that these things are the furniture of playhouses and bordelloes, therefore, by the same reason, 'the confuter himself hath been traced in those places.' Was it such a dissolute speech, telling of some politicians who were wont to eavesdrop in disguises, to say they were often liable to a night-walking cudgeller, or the emptying of a urinal? What if I had writ, as your friend the author of the aforesaid mime, 'Mundus alter et idem,' to have been ravished like some young Cephalus or Hylas, by a troop of camping housewives in Viraginea, and that he was there forced to swear himself an uxorious varlet; then after a long servitude to have come into Aphrodisia, that pleasant country, that gave such a sweet smell to his nostrils among the shameless courtezans of Desvergonia? Surely he would have then concluded me as constant at the bordello, as the galley-slave at his oar.

But since there is such necessity to the hearsay of a tire, a periwig, or a vizard, that plays must have been seen, what difficulty was there in that? when in the colleges so many of the young divines, and those in next aptitude to divinity, have been seen so often upon the stage, writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, buffoons, and bawds; prostituting the shame of that ministry, which either they had, or were nigh having, to the eyes of courtiers and court ladies, with their grooms and mademoiselles. There, while they acted and overacted, among other young scholars, I was a spectator; they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and, to make up the Atticism, they were out, and I hissed. Judge

now whether so many good textmen were not sufficient to instruct me of false beards and vizards, without more expositors; and how can this confuter take the face to object to me the seeing of that which his reverend prelates allow, and incite their young disciples to act? For if it be unlawful to sit and behold a mercenary comedian personating that which is least unseemly for a hireling to do, how much more blameful is it to endure the sight of as vile things acted by persons either entered, or presently to enter, into the ministry; and how much more foul and ignominious for them to be the actors!

But because as well by this upbraiding to me the bordelloes, as by other suspicious glancings in his book, he would seem privily to point me out to his readers, as one whose custom of life were not honest, but licentious, I shall entreat to be borne with, though I digress; and in a way not often trod, acquaint ye with the sum of my thoughts in this matter, through the course of my years and studies: although I am not ignorant how hazardous it will be to do this under the nose of the envious, as it were in skirmish to change the compact order, and instead of outward actions, to bring inmost thoughts into front. And I must tell ye, readers, that by this sort of men I have been already bitten at; yet shall they not for me know how slightly they are esteemed, unless they have so much learning as to read what in Greek ἀπειροκαλία is, which, together with envy, is the common disease of those who censure books that are not for their reading. With me it fares now, as with him whose outward garment hath been injured and ill-bedighted; for having no other shift, what help but to turn the inside outwards, especially if the lining be of the same, or, as it is sometimes, much better? So if my name and outward demeanour be not evident enough to defend me, I must make trial if the discovery of my inmost thoughts can: wherein of two

purposes, both honest and both sincere, the one perhaps I shall not miss; although I fail to gain belief with others, of being such as my perpetual thoughts shall here disclose me, I may yet not fail of success in persuading some to be such really themselves, as they cannot believe me to be more than what I feign.

I had my time, readers, as others have, who have good learning bestowed upon them, to be sent to those places where, the opinion was, it might be soonest attained; and as the manner is, was not unstudied in those authors which are most commended. Whereof some were grave orators and historians, whose matter methought I loved indeed, but as my age then was, so I understood them; others were the smooth elegiac poets, whereof the schools are not scarce, whom both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing, which in imitation I found most easy, and most agreeable to nature's part in me, and for their matter, which what it is, there be few who know not, I was so allured to read, that no recreation came to me better welcome. For that it was then those years with me which are excused, though they be least severe, I may be saved the labour to remember ye. Whence having observed them to account it the chief glory of their wit, in that they were ablest to judge, to praise, and by that could esteem themselves worthiest to love those high perfections, which under one or other name they took to celebrate; I thought with myself by every instinct and presage of nature, which is not wont to be false, that what emboldened them to this task, might with such diligence as they used embolden me; and that what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share, would herein best appear, and best value itself, by how much more wisely, and with more love of virtue I should choose (let rude ears be absent) the object of not unlike praises. For albeit these thoughts to some will seem virtuous and commendable, to others only pardonable, to a third sort

perhaps idle; yet the mentioning of them now will end in serious.

Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a reward, as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life have sometimes preferred: whereof not to be sensible when good and fair in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and withal an ungentle and swainish breast. For by the firm settling of these persuasions, I became, to my best memory, so much a proficient, that if I found those authors anywhere speaking unworthy things of themselves, or unchaste of those names which before they had extolled; this effect it wrought with me, from that time forward their art I still applauded, but the men I deplored; and above them all, preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts, without transgression. And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy. These reasonings, together with a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness, and self-esteem either of what I was, or what I might be, (which let envy call pride,) and lastly that modesty, whereof, though not in the title-page, yet here I may be excused to make some beseeming profession; all these uniting the supply of their natural aid together, kept me still above those low descents of mind, beneath which he must deject and plunge himself, that can agree to saleable and unlawful prostitutions.

Next, (for hear me out now, readers,) that I may tell ye

whither my younger feet wandered; I betook me among those lofty fables and romances, which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from hence had in renown over all Christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he should defend to the expense of his best blood, or of his life, if it so befell him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron; from whence even then I learned what a noble virtue chastity sure must be, to the defence of which so many worthies, by such a dear adventure of themselves, had sworn. And if I found in the story afterward, any of them, by word or deed, breaking that oath, I judged it the same fault of the poet, as that which is attributed to Homer, to have written indecent things of the gods. Only this my mind gave me, that every free and gentle spirit, without that oath, ought to be born a knight, nor needed to expect the guilt spur, or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder to stir him up both by his counsel and his arms, to secure and protect the weakness of any attempted chastity. So that even these books, which to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose living, I cannot think how, unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so many incitements, as you have heard, to the love and steadfast observation of that virtue which abhors the society of bordelloes.

Thus, from the laureat fraternity of poets, riper years and the ceaseless round of study and reading led me to the shady spaces of philosophy; but chiefly to the divine volumes of Plato, and his equal Xenophon: where, if I should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and love, I mean that which is truly so, whose charming cup is only virtue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy; (the rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion, which a certain sorceress, the abuser of love's name, carries about;) and how the first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul, producing

those happy twins of her divine generation, knowledge and virtue. With such abstracted sublimities as these, it might be worth your listening, readers, as I may one day hope to have ye in a still time, when there shall be no chiding; not in these noises, the adversary, as ye know, barking at the door, or searching for me at the bordelloes, where it may be he has lost himself, and raps up without pity the sage and rheumatic old prelatess with all her young Corinthian laity, to inquire for such a one.

Last of all, not in time, but as perfection is last, that care was ever had of me, with my earliest capacity, not to be negligently trained in the precepts of the Christian religion: this that I have hitherto related, hath been to show, that though Christianity had been but slightly taught me, yet a certain reservedness of natural disposition, and moral discipline, learnt out of the noblest philosophy, was enough to keep me in disdain of far less incontinences than this of the bordello. But having had the doctrine of holy scripture unfolding those chaste and high mysteries, with timeliest care infused, that 'the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body;' thus also I argued to myself, that if unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much more deflouring and dishonourable; in that he sins both against his own body, which is the perfecter sex, and his own glory, which is in the woman; and, that which is worst, against the image and glory of God, which is in himself. Nor did I slumber over that place expressing such high rewards of ever accompanying the Lamb with those celestial songs to others inapprehensible, but not to those who were not defiled with women, which doubtless means fornication; for marriage must not be called a defilement.

Thus large I have purposely been, that if I have been justly taxed with this crime, it may come upon me, after all this my confession, with a tenfold shame: but if I have hitherto deserved no such opprobious word, or suspicion, I may hereby engage myself now openly to the faithful observation of what I have professed.

* * * * * * * * *

I had said, that because the Remonstrant was so much offended with those who were tart against the prelates, sure he loved toothless satires, which I took were as improper as a toothed sleekstone. This champion from behind the arras cries out, that those toothless satires were of the Remonstrant's making; and arms himself here tooth and nail, and horn, to boot, to supply the want of teeth, or rather of gums in the satires; and for an onset tells me, that the simile of a sleekstone 'shows I can be as bold with a prelate as familiar with a laundress.' But does it not argue rather the lascivious promptness of his own fancy, who, from the harmless mention of a sleekstone, could neigh out the remembrance of his old conversation among the viragian trollops? For me, if he move me, I shall claim his own oath, the oath ex officio, against any priest or prelate in the kingdom, to have ever as much hated such pranks as the best and chastest of them all. That exception which I made against toothless satires, the confuter hopes I had from the satirist, but is far deceived: neither have I ever read the hobbling distich which he means.

For this good hap I had from a careful education, to be inured and seasoned betimes with the best and elegantest authors of the learned tongues, and thereto brought an ear that could measure a just cadence, and scan without articulating: rather nice and humorous in what was tolerable, than

patient to read every drawling versifier. Whence lighting upon this title of 'toothless satires,' I will not conceal ye what I thought, readers, that sure this must be some sucking satyr, who might have done better to have used his coral, and made an end of teething, ere he took upon him to wield a satire's whip. But when I heard him talk of 'scouring the rusty swords of elvish knights,' do not blame me if I changed my thought, and concluded him some desperate cutler.

* * * * * * * * *

But now, readers, we have the port within sight; his last section, which is no deep one, remains only to be forded, and then the wished shore. And here first it pleases him much, that he had descried me, as he conceives, to be unread in the councils. Concerning which matter it will not be unnecessary to shape him this answer: that some years I had spent in the stories of those Greek and Roman exploits, wherein I found many things both nobly done, and worthily spoken: when, coming in the method of time to that age wherein the church had obtained a Christian emperor, I so prepared myself, as being now to read examples of wisdom and goodness among those who were foremost in the church, not elsewhere to be paralleled; but to the amazement of what I expected I found it all quite contrary: excepting in some very few, nothing but ambition, corruption, contention, combustion; insomuch that I could not but love the historian, Socrates, who, in the proem to his fifth book professes, 'he was fain to intermix affairs of state; for that it would be else an extreme annoyance to hear, in a continued discourse, the endless brabbles and counterplottings of the bishops.'

Finding, therefore, the most of their actions in single to be weak, and yet turbulent, full of strife and yet flat of spirit; and the sum of their best council there collected, to be most

commonly in questions either trivial or vain, or else of short and easy decision, without that great bustle which they made; I concluded that if their single ambition and ignorance was such, then certainly united in a council it would be much more; and if the compendious recital of what they there did was so tedious and unprofitable, then surely to set out the whole extent of their tattle in a dozen volumes would be a loss of time irrecoverable. Besides that which I had read of St. Martin, who for his last sixteen years could never be persuaded to be at any council of the bishops. And Gregory Nazianzen betook him to the same resolution, affirming to Procopius, 'that of any council or meeting of bishops he never saw good end; nor any remedy thereby of evil in the church, but rather an increase. For,' saith he, 'their contentions and desire of lording no tongue is able to express.'

I have not, therefore, I confess, read more of the councils, save here and there; I should be sorry to have been such a prodigal of my time; but, that which is better, I can assure this confuter, I have read into them all. And if I want anything yet I shall reply something toward that which in the defence of Murena was answered by Cicero to Sulpitius the lawyer. 'If ye provoke me (for at no hand else will I undertake such a frivolous labour) I will in three months be an expert councilist.' For, be not deceived, readers, by men that would overawe your ears with big names and huge tomes that contradict and repeal one another, because they can cram a margin with citations. Do but winnow their chaff from their wheat, ye shall see their great heap shrink and wax thin, past belief.

* * * * * * * * *

But this which comes next in view, I know not what good vein or humour took him when he let drop into his paper; I

that was erewhile the ignorant, the loiterer, on the sudden by his permission am now granted 'to know something.' And that 'such a volley of expressions' he hath met withal, 'as he would never desire to have them better clothed.' For me, readers, although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained in those rules which best rhetoricians have given, or unacquainted with those examples which the prime authors of eloquence have written in any learned tongue; yet true eloquence I find to be none, but the serious and hearty love of truth: and that whose mind soever is fully possessed with a fervent desire to know good things, and with the dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of them into others, when such a man would speak, his words, (by what I can express,) like so many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command, and in well-ordered files, as he would wish, fall aptly into their own places.

To Carlo Dati, Nobleman of Florence. (Familiar Letters, No. X.)

When I came upon that passage where you write that you had sent me three letters before, which I now know to have been lost, then, in the first place, that sincere gladness of mine at the receipt of this one began to be infected and troubled with a sad regret, and presently a something heavier creeps in upon me, to which I am accustomed in very frequent grievings over my own lot: the sense, namely, that those whom the mere necessity of neighbourhood, or something else of a useless kind, has closely conjoined with me, whether by accident or by the tie of law (sive casu, sive lege, conglutinavit), they are the persons, though in no other respect commendable, who sit daily in my company, weary me, nay, by heaven, all but plague me to death whenever they are jointly in the humour for it, whereas those whom habits, disposition, studies, had so

handsomely made my friends, are now almost all denied me either by death or by most unjust separation of place, and are so for the most part snatched from my sight that I have to live well nigh in a perpetual solitude. As to what you say that from the time of my departure from Florence you have been anxious about my health and always mindful of me, I truly congratulate myself that a feeling has been equal and mutual in both of us, the existence of which on my side only I was perhaps claiming to my credit. Very sad to me also, I will not conceal from you, was that departure, and it planted stings in my heart which now rankle there deeper, as often as I think with myself of my reluctant parting, my separation as by a wrench, from so many companions at once, such good friends as they were, and living so pleasantly with each other in one city, far off indeed, but to me most dear. I call to witness that tomb of Damon, ever to be sacred and solemn to me, whose adornment with every tribute of grief was my weary task, till I betook myself at length to what comforts I could, and desired again to breathe a little—I call that sacred grave to witness that I have had no greater delight all this while than in recalling to my mind the most pleasant memory of all of you, and of yourself especially. This you must have read for yourself long ere now, if that poem reached you, as now first I hear from you it did. I had carefully caused it to be sent, in order that, however small a proof of talent, it might, even in those few lines introduced into it emblem-wise, be no obscure proof of my love towards you. My idea was that by this means I should lure either yourself or some of the others to write to me; for, if I wrote first, either I had to write to all, or I feared that, if I gave the preference to any one, I should incur the reproach of such others as came to know it, hoping as I do that very many are yet there alive who might certainly have a claim to this attention from me. Now, however, you first of all, both by this most friendly call

of your letter, and by your thrice repeated attention of writing before, have freed the reply for which I have been somewhile since in your debt from any expostulation from the others. There was, I confess, an additional cause for my silence in that most turbulent state of our Britain, subsequent to my return home, which obliged me to divert my mind shortly afterwards from the prosecution of my studies to the defence anyhow of life and fortune. What safe retirement for literary leisure could you suppose given one among so many battles of a civil war, slaughters, flights, seizures of goods? Yet, even in the midst of these evils, since you desire to be informed about my studies, know that we have published not a few things in our native tongue; which, were they not written in English, I would willingly send to you, my friends in Florence, to whose opinions, I attach very much value. The part of the Poems which is in Latin I will send shortly, since you wish it; and I would have done so spontaneously long ago, but that, on account of the rather harsh sayings against the Pope of Rome in some of the pages, I had a suspicion they would not be quite agreeable to your ears. Now I beg of you that the indulgence you were wont to give, I say not to your own Dante and Petrarch in the same case, but with singular politeness to my own former freedom of speech, as you know, among you, the same you, Dati, will obtain (for of yourself, I am sure) from my other friends whenever I may be speaking of your religion in our peculiar way.

London, April 21, 1647.

On his Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present 5

My true account, lest He, returning, chide;

'Doth God exact day labour, light denied?'

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, 'God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best 10

Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state

Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait.'

To the most distinguished Leonard Philaras, of Athens, Ambassador from the Duke of Parma to the King of France. (Familiar Letters, No. XII.)

Your good will toward me, most honoured Leonard Philaras, as well as your high opinion of our Defence for the English People, I learnt from your letters, written partly on that subject, to Mr. Augier, a man illustrious among us for his remarkable fidelity in diplomatic business for this republic: after which I received, through the same, your kind greeting, with your portrait, and the accompanying eulogium, certainly most worthy of your virtues,—and then, finally, a most polite letter from yourself. Be assured that I, who am not in the habit of despising the genius of the Germans, or even of the Danes or Swedes, cannot but value very much such an opinion of me from you, a native of Attic Athens, who have besides, after happily finishing a course of literary studies among the Italians, reached such ample honours by great handling of affairs. For, as the great Alexander himself, when carrying on war in the remotest parts of the earth, declared that he had undergone such great labours for the sake of the good opinion of the

Athenians, why should not I congratulate myself, and think myself honoured to the highest, in having received praises from one in whom singly at this day the Arts of the old Athenians and all their celebrated excellencies appear, after so long an interval, to revive and rebloom? Remembering how many men of supreme eloquence were produced by that city, I have pleasure in confessing that whatever literary advance I have made I owe chiefly to steady intimacy with their writings from my youth upwards. But, were there in me, by direct gift from them, or a kind of transfusion, such a power of pleading that I could rouse our armies and fleets for the deliverance of Greece, the land of eloquence, from her Ottoman oppressor,—to which mighty act you seem almost to implore our aid—truly there is nothing which it would be more or sooner in my desire to do. For what did even the bravest men of old, or the most eloquent, consider more glorious or more worthy of them than, whether by pleading or by bravely acting, to make the Greeks free and self-governing? There is, however, something else besides to be tried, and in my judgment far the most important: namely, that some one should, if possible, arouse and rekindle in the minds of the Greeks, by the relation of that old story, the old Greek valour itself, the old industry, the old patience of labour. Could some one do that—and from no one more than yourself ought we to expect it, looking to the strength of your feeling for your native land, and the combination of the same with the highest prudence, skill in military affairs, and a powerful passion for the recovery of the ancient political liberty—then, I am confident, neither would the Greeks be wanting to themselves, nor any other nation wanting to the Greeks. Farewell.

London, June, 1652.

To Henry Oldenburg, agent for the city of Bremen in Lower Saxony with the Commonwealth. (Familiar Letters, No. XIV.)

Your former letter, Honoured Sir, was given to me when your messenger, I was told, was on the point of return; whence it happened that there was no opportunity of reply at that time. While I was afterwards purposing an early reply, some unexpected business took me off; but for which I should certainly not have sent you my book, Defence though it is called, in such a naked condition, without accompanying excuse. And now I have your second letter, in which your thanks are quite disproportioned to the slenderness of the gift. It was in my mind, too, more than once, to send you back English for your Latin, in order that, as you have learnt to speak our language more accurately and happily than any other foreigner of my acquaintance, you should not lose any opportunity of writing the same; which I believe you could do with equal accuracy. But in this, just as henceforward the impulse may be, let your own choice regulate. As to the substance of your communication, you plainly think with me that a 'Cry' of that kind 'to Heaven' transcends all bounds of human sense; the more impudent, then, must be he who declares so boldly he has heard it. You throw in a scruple after all as to who he is: but, formerly, whenever we talked on this subject, just after you had come hither from Holland, you seemed to have no doubt whatever but Morus was the author, inasmuch as that was the common report in those parts and no one else was named. If, then, you have now at last any more certain information on the point, be so good as to inform me. As to the treatment of the argument, I should wish (why should I dissemble?) not to differ from you, if only because I would fain know what there is to which one would more readily yield

than the sincere judgment of friendly men, like yourself, and praise free from all flattery. To prepare myself, as you suggest, for other labours,—whether nobler or more useful I know not, for what can be nobler or more useful in human affairs than the vindication of Liberty?—truly, if my health shall permit, and this blindness of mine, a sorer affliction than old age, and lastly the 'cries' of such brawlers as there have been about me, I shall be induced to that easily enough. An idle ease has never had charms for me, and this unexpected contest with the Adversaries of Liberty took me off against my will when I was intent on far different and altogether pleasanter studies: not that in any way I repent of what I have done, since it was necessary; for I am far from thinking that I have spent any toil, as you seem to hint, on matters of inferior consequence. But of this at other time: meanwhile, learned Sir, not to detain you too long, farewell, and reckon me among your friends.

Westminster, July 6, 1654.

To Leonard Philaras, Athenian. (Familiar Letters, No. XV.)

Though from boyhood I have ever been devoted to all things Greek, and especially to your native city, Athens, yet, in addition to this, I have ever cherished the conviction that sometime that city would make a fair return to me for my devotion; and in very truth that ancient genius of your most glorious land has fulfilled my prophecy; for it has given me you, a genuine son of Attica, and a true friend of mine; who, though I was known to you only by my writings, yet addressed me most kindly by letter when separated by long distance, and later, coming unexpectedly to London, visited me in my blindness, and, in that misfortune which has made me to no one more distinguished, to many less so, you honour me still with the same kindness.

Inasmuch as you urge me not to abandon all hope of

recovering my sight, and write that you have at Paris a friend and relative who is a physician, Thevenot by name, a man of special eminence in treating eyes, whom you propose to consult with regard to mine, if you only learn from me enough to enable him to understand the causes and symptoms of the disease;—in view of this I will do what you suggest, in order that I may not seem to reject the possibility of any help that may come from God's hand.

It is now, I should say, ten years, more or less, since I found my sight growing dim and weak; at the same time my spleen was affected and my internal organs were troubled with flatulency; in the morning whenever I began to read anything in accordance with my usual custom, my eyes at once began to pain me and to shrink from the task, though they would experience relief after a brief period of bodily exercise; whenever I looked at a lamp, a halo would seem to encircle it. Not long after this, at the left extremity of the left eye (for that eye lost its sight some years before the other), there gradually came on a dimness, which took from my view all objects situated on that side; objects directly in front of it, too, were seen less clearly whenever I happened to close the right eye. During the last three years the other eye has gradually lost its sight; but some months before my blindness became complete, everything that I saw, even though I was perfectly still, seemed to swim about, moving now to the right, now to the left. My forehead and temples suffer from constant burning sensations. This often affects my eyes with a certain drowsiness, from breakfast till evening; so that I often think of the words of Phineus the seer of Salmydessus, in the Argonautica:

κάρος δέ μιν ἀμφεκάλυψεν

Πορφύρεος· γαῖαν δε πέριξ ἐδόκησε φέρεσθαι

νειόθεν, ἀβληχρῷ δ' ἐπὶ κώματι κέκλιτ' ἄναυδος.

But I must not omit to say that, while there still remained some little sense of sight, whenever I lay down in bed, and reclined on either side, bright lights in abundance would flash from my eyes even when closed; subsequently, as my power of sight grew daily less, dull colours would dart forth in the same way, accompanied with throbbings and noises within my head. But now the brightness seems to be dispelled, and, at times, absolute blackness, or blackness veined with an ashy grayness, as it were, is often wont to spread over my eyes. Yet the dimness which is there, both night and day, seems always more like something white than like anything black, which, as the eye turns, allows the merest particle of light to enter, as through a tiny crack. But even though from this circumstance the physician might gather some little hope, yet I am resigned as to an absolutely incurable affliction; and I often reflect that, though to each one of us are allotted many days of darkness, as the Wise Man reminds us, my darkness as yet, by God's special grace, passed, as it is, amid leisure and studies, and the voices of friends and their greetings, is far pleasanter than the darkness of death. But if, as it is written, 'man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,' what reason is there why any one should not find comfort also in the reflection that one sees not by the eyes only, but by the light of God's guidance and providence. So long, at least, as He himself looks out for me, and provides for me, as He does, and so long as He leads and guides me with His hand through all the ways of life, I shall gladly bid my eyes keep their long holiday, since it has so seemed best to Him. But you, my dear Philaras, whatever be the issue, I greet with as stout and firm a heart as if I were Lynceus himself.

Westminster, September 28, 1654.

To Cyriac Skinner

Cyriack, this three years' day, these eyes, though clear

To outward view, of blemish or of spot,

Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot;

Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear

Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year, 5

Or man or woman. Yet I argue not

Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot

Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer

Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?

The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied 10

In Liberty's defence, my noble task,

Of which all Europe talks from side to side,

This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask

Content, though blind, had I no better guide.

On his deceased wife

Methought I saw my late espoused saint

Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,

Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,

Rescued from Death by force, though pale and faint.

Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint 5

Purification in the Old Law did save,

And such as yet once more I trust to have

Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,

Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.

Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight 10

Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined

So clear as in no face with more delight.

But, oh! as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

To the most accomplished Emeric Bigot. (Familiar Letters, No. XXI.)

. . . Many have made a figure by their published writings whose living voice and daily conversation have presented next to nothing that was not low and common: if then, I can attain the distinction of seeming myself equal in mind and manners to any writings of mine that have been tolerably to the purpose, there will be the double effect that I shall so have added weight personally to my writings, and shall receive back by way of reflection from them credit, how small soever it may be, yet greater in proportion. For, in that case, whatever is right and laudable in them, that same I shall seem not more to have derived from authors of high excellence than to have fetched forth pure and sincere from the inmost feelings of my own mind and soul. I am glad, therefore, to know that you are assured of my tranquillity of spirit in this great affliction of loss of sight, and also of the pleasure I have in being civil and attentive in the reception of visitors from abroad. Why, in truth, should I not bear gently the deprivation of sight, when I may hope that it is not so much lost as revoked and retracted inwards, for the sharpening rather than the blunting of my mental edge? Whence it is that I neither think of books with anger, nor quite intermit the study of them, grievously though they have mulcted me,—were it only that I am instructed against such moroseness by the example of King Telephus of the Mysians, who refused not to be cured in the end by the weapon that had wounded him. . . .

Westminster, March 24, 1658.

To Henry Oldenburg. (Familiar Letters, No. XXIX.)

. . . Of any such work as compiling the history of our political troubles, which you seem to advise, I have no thought whatever [longe absum]: they are worthier of silence than of commemoration. What is needed is not one to compile a good history of our troubles, but one who can happily end the troubles themselves; for, with you, I fear lest, amid these our civil discords, or rather sheer madnesses, we shall seem to the lately confederated enemies of Liberty and Religion a too fit object of attack, though in truth, they have not yet inflicted a severer wound on Religion than we ourselves have been long doing by our crimes. But God, as I hope, on His own account, and for His own glory, now in question, will not allow the counsels and onsets of the enemy to succeed as they themselves wish, whatever convulsions Kings and Cardinals meditate and design. . . .

Westminster, December 20, 1659.

The following extract from the Prefatory address to the Parliament (the restored Rump) shows no misgivings, on the part of Milton, in regard to the stability of the Commonwealth. But he must have been secretly hopeless. Cromwell had died the previous year, on September 3, and his son Richard, his successor, had abdicated on the 25th of the following May. A state of things little short of anarchy had set in before the publication of Milton's pamphlet. But as late as near the end of February, 1660, he published 'The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth,' still, as it appears, unable to believe, desperate as was the state of things, that the Commonwealth was in its death throes. On the 29th of the following May, Charles II. entered London amid the wildest

acclamations of the people; and the commonwealth, for which Milton had fought to the bitter end, was no more, and he himself was in concealment. But he must have been assured that the principles for which he had fought would sooner or later assert themselves in spite of all opposition that could be brought against them, though he could hardly have thought that these principles would assert themselves so soon as they did. Fourteen years after his death, James II. was driven from the throne, and the constitutional basis of the monarchy underwent a quite radical change—a change largely, if not wholly, due to the work of Puritanism, which, it was generally supposed, at the Restoration of Charles II., had been completely undone. 'It was,' says John Richard Green, 'from the moment of its (Puritanism's) seeming fall that its real victory began.'

From 'Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to remove Hirelings out of the Church.' (August, 1659)

Owing to your protection, Supreme Senate! this liberty of writing, which I have used these eighteen years on all occasions to assert the just rights and freedoms both of church and state, and so far approved, as to have been trusted with the representment and defence of your actions to all Christendom against an adversary of no mean repute; to whom should I address what I still publish on the same argument, but to you, whose magnanimous councils first opened and unbound the age from a double bondage under prelatical and regal tyranny; above our own hopes heartening us to look up at last, like men and Christians, from the slavish dejection, wherein from father to son we were bred up and taught; and thereby deserving of these nations, if they be not barbarously ingrateful, to be acknowledged, next under God, the authors

and best patrons of religious and civil liberty, that ever these islands brought forth? The care and tuition of whose peace and safety, after a short but scandalous night of interruption, is now again, by a new dawning of God's miraculous providence among us, revolved upon your shoulders. And to whom more appertain these considerations, which I propound, than to yourselves, and the debate before you, though I trust of no difficulty, yet at present of great expectation, not whether ye will gratify, were it no more than so, but whether ye will hearken to the just petition of many thousands best affected both to religion and to this your return, or whether ye will satisfy, which you never can, the covetous pretences and demands of insatiable hirelings, whose disaffection ye well know both to yourselves and your resolutions? That I, though among many others in this common concernment, interpose to your deliberations what my thoughts also are; your own judgment and the success thereof hath given me the confidence: which requests but this, that if I have prosperously, God so favouring me, defended the public cause of this commonwealth to foreigners, ye would not think the reason and ability, whereon ye trusted once (and repent not) your whole reputation to the world, either grown less by more maturity and longer study, or less available in English than in another tongue; but that if it sufficed some years past to convince and satisfy the unengaged of other nations in the justice of your doings, though then held paradoxal, it may as well suffice now against weaker opposition in matters, except here in England with a spirituality of men devoted to their temporal gain, of no controversy else among protestants. Neither do I doubt, seeing daily the acceptance which they find who in their petitions venture to bring advice also, and new models of a commonwealth, but that you will interpret it much more the duty of a Christian to offer what his

conscience persuades him may be of moment to the freedom and better constituting of the church: since it is a deed of highest charity to help undeceive the people, and a work worthiest your authority, in all things else authors, assertors, and now recoverers of our liberty, to deliver us, the only people of all protestants left still undelivered, from the oppressions of a simonious decimating clergy, who shame not, against the judgment and practice of all other churches reformed, to maintain, though very weakly, their popish and oft-refuted positions; not in a point of conscience wherein they might be blameless, but in a point of covetousness and unjust claim to other men's goods; a contention foul and odious in any man, but most of all in ministers of the gospel, in whom contention, though for their own right, scarce is allowable. Till which grievances be removed, and religion set free from the monopoly of hirelings, I dare affirm that no model whatsoever of a commonwealth will prove successful or undisturbed; and so persuaded, implore divine assistance on your pious counsels and proceedings to unanimity in this and all other truth.

—John Milton.

Autobiographic passages in the 'Paradise Lost'

'Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born!

Or of the Eternal coeternal beam

May I express thee unblamed? since God is light,

And never but in unapproachèd light

Dwelt from eternity—dwelt then in thee, 5

Bright effluence of bright essence, increate!

Or hearest thou rather pure Ethereal stream,

Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the Sun,

Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voice

Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest 10

The rising World of waters dark and deep,

Won from the void and formless Infinite!

Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,

Escaped the Stygian Pool, though long detained

In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight, 15

Through utter and through middle Darkness borne,

With other notes than to the Orphéan lyre

I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,

Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture down

The dark descent, and up to reascend, 20

Though hard and rare. Thee I revisit safe,

And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou

Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain

To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;

So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs, 25

Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the more

Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt

Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,

Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief

Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath, 30

That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,

Nightly I visit: nor sometimes forget

Those other two equalled with me in fate,

So were I equalled with them in renown,

Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides, 35

And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old:

Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move

Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird

Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,

Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year 40

Seasons return; but not to me returns

Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,

Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,

Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;

But cloud instead and ever-during dark 45

Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men

Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair,

Presented with a universal blank

Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,

And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out. 50

So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,

Shine inward and the mind through all her powers

Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence

Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

Of things invisible to mortal sight.' 55

—Paradise Lost, Book iii. 1-55.

'Descend from Heaven, Urania, by that name

If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine

Following, above the Olympian hill I soar,

Above the flight of Pegasean wing!

The meaning, not the name, I call; for thou 5

Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top

Of old Olympus dwell'st; but, heavenly-born,

Before the hills appeared or fountain flowed,

Thou with Eternal Wisdom didst converse,

Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play 10

In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased

With thy celestial song. Up led by thee,

Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed,

An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air,

Thy tempering. With like safety guided down, 15

Return me to my native element;

Lest, from this flying steed unreined (as once

Bellerophon, though from a lower clime)

Dismounted, on the Aleian field I fall,

Erroneous there to wander and forlorn. 20

Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound

Within the visible Diurnal Sphere.

Standing on Earth, not rapt above the pole,

More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged

To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days, 25

On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,

In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,

And solitude; yet not alone, while thou

Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn

Purples the East. Still govern thou my song, 30

Urania, and fit audience find, though few.

But drive far off the barbarous dissonance

Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race

Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard

In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears 35

To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned

Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend

Her son. So fail not thou who thee implores;

For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.'

—Paradise Lost, Book vii. 1-39.

'No more of talk where God or Angel Guest

With Man, as with his friend, familiar used

To sit indulgent, and with him partake

Rural repast, permitting him the while

Venial discourse unblamed. I now must change 5

Those notes to tragic—foul distrust, and breach

Disloyal, on the part of man, revolt

And disobedience; on the part of Heaven,

Now alienated, distance and distaste,

Anger and just rebuke, and judgment given, 10

That brought into this World a world of woe,

Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery,

Death's harbinger. Sad task! yet argument

Not less but more heroic than the wrath

Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued 15

Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage

Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;

Or Neptune's ire, or Juno's, that so long

Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son;

If answerable style I can obtain 20

Of my celestial Patroness, who deigns

Her nightly visitation unimplored,

And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires

Easy my unpremeditated verse,

Since first this subject for heroic song 25

Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late,

Not sedulous by nature to indite

Wars, hitherto the only argument

Heroic deemed, chief mastery to dissect

With long and tedious havoc fabled knights 30

In battles feigned (the better fortitude

Of patience and heroic martyrdom

Unsung), or to describe races and games,

Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields,

Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds, 35

Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights

At joust and tournament; then marshalled feast

Served up in hall with sewers and seneshals:

The skill of artifice or office mean;

Not that which justly gives heroic name 40

To person or to poem! Me, of these

Nor skilled nor studious, higher argument

Remains, sufficient of itself to raise

That name, unless an age too late, or cold

Climate, or years, damp my intended wing 45

Depressed; and much they may if all be mine,

Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear.'

—Paradise Lost, Book ix. 1-47.

The following verses addressed to the seraph Abdiel, Milton, at the time he wrote them, might justly have taken to himself:

'Servant of God, well done! Well hast thou fought

The better fight, who single hast maintained

Against revolted multitudes the cause

Of truth, in word mightier than they in arms,

And for the testimony of truth hast borne

Universal reproach, far worse to bear

Than violence; for this was all thy care—

To stand approved in sight of God, though worlds

Judged thee perverse.'

—Paradise Lost, Book vi. 29-37.

Milton regarded himself as an Abdiel (i.e. as the name signifies in Hebrew, Servant of God), in the past struggle for civil and religious liberty; like Abdiel,

'Among innumerable false, unmoved,

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,

His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;

Nor number nor example with him wrought

To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind,

Though single.'

—Paradise Lost, Book v. 898-903.

The following, from 'Paradise Regained,' Book i. 196-208, Milton might have written of himself:

'Oh, what a multitude of thoughts at once

Awakened in me swarm, while I consider

What from within I feel myself, and hear

What from without comes often to my ears,

Ill sorting with my present state compared!

When I was yet a child, no childish play

To me was pleasing; all my mind was set

Serious to learn and know, and thence to do,

What might be public good; myself I thought

Born to that end, born to promote all truth,

All righteous things. Therefore, above my years,

The Law of God I read, and found it sweet;

Made it my whole delight.'

The following letter reveals the difficulties under which Milton, in his blindness, was, at times, obliged to write.

To the very distinguished Peter Heimbach, Councillor to the Elector of Brandenburg. (Familiar Letters, No. XXXI.)

Small wonder if, in the midst of so many deaths of my countrymen, in a year of such heavy pestilence, you believed, as you write you did, on the faith of some special rumour, that I also had been cut off. Such a rumour among your people is not displeasing, if it was the occasion of making known the fact that they were anxious for my safety, for then I can regard it as a sign of their good will to me. But, by the blessing of God, who had provided for my safety in a country retreat, I am still both alive and well, nor useless yet, I hope, for any duty that remains to be performed by me in this life.—That after so long an interval I should have come into your mind is very agreeable; although, from your exuberant expression of the matter, you seem to afford some ground for

suspecting that you have rather forgotten me, professing as you do such an admiration of the marriage-union in me of so many different virtues. Truly, I should dread a too numerous progeny from so many forms of the marriage-union as you enumerate, were it not an established truth that virtues are nourished most and flourish most in straitened and hard circumstances; albeit I may say that one of the virtues of your list has not very handsomely requited me the hospitable reception she had. For what you call policy, but I would rather have you call loyalty to one's country,—this particular lass, after inveigling me with her fair name, has almost expatriated me, so to speak. The chorus of the rest, however, makes a very fine harmony. One's country is wherever it is well with one.—And now I will conclude, after first begging you, if you find anything incorrectly written or without punctuation here, to impute that to the boy who has taken it down from my dictation, and who is utterly ignorant of Latin, so that I was forced, while dictating, not without misery, to spell out the letters of the words one by one. Meanwhile, I am glad that the merits of one whom I knew as a young man of excellent hope have raised him to so honourable a place in his Prince's favour; and I desire and hope all prosperity for you otherwise. Farewell!

London, August 15, 1666.

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