Florence, 1st Nov. 1647. CARLO DATI [Footnote: The original of this letter is in the possession of Mr. J. Fitchett Marsh of Warrington, who has printed facsimiles of the opening and closing words ("All' Illmo. Sig. Gio. Miltoni, Londra," and "Ser. Devotino. Carlo Dati") in his Milton Papers. To Mr. Marsh's kindness I owe the transcript from which I have made the translation; and the words within brackets, describing the omitted portion in the middle, are Mr. Marsh's own.]
Circumstanced as Milton was when he received this letter, he can hardly have been in a mood to respond sufficiently to its minute and overflowing dilettantismo. The amiability and polite affectionateness, perceptible even yet through the dilettantism, may have been pleasant to him; and he may have noted the subtle and delicate expression of sympathy with his domestic unhappiness which seems to be conveyed in the passages quoted, as if by accident, from Petrarch, Horace, Chiabrera, and Tibullus. Dati may have been there replying to that portion of Milton's letter in which he had vaguely intimated his private melancholy in being doomed to unfit companionship; or he may have heard more particular rumours in Florence of Milton's marriage-mishap and its consequences. At all events, there is no trace of any answer by Milton to this long epistle from Dati, or of any poetical contribution sent by him, as Dati had requested, to the exequies of the interesting Rovai.
About the time when Milton should have been answering Dati's epistle, enclosing the requested tribute to the memory of Rovai, and also the exquisite comments which Dati expected on his quotations from Petrarch, Horace, Chiabrera, and Tibullus, his occupation, we find, was very different. "April, 1648, J. M. Nine of the Psalms done into Metre, wherein all but what is in a different character are the very words of the Text translated from the Original;" such is the heading prefixed by Milton himself to the Translations of Psalms LXXX.-LXXXVIII. which are now included among his Poetical Works. [Footnote: The heading stands so in the Second Edition of Milton's Miscellaneous Poems, published by himself in 1678.] Through some mornings and evenings of that month, therefore, we can see him, in his house in High Holborn, with the Hebrew Bible before him, making it his effort to translate, as literally as possible, these nine Psalms into English verse. On looking at the result, as it now stands among his Poems, with Hebrew words printed occasionally in the margin, and every phrase for which there is not a voucher in the original printed carefully in italics, one has little difficulty in perceiving one of the motives of Milton in this metrical experiment. It was his knowledge of the interest then felt in the chance of some English metrical version of the Psalms that should supersede, for popular purposes and in public worship, the old version of Sternhold and Hopkins. Rous's version, with amendments, had been recommended by the Westminster Assembly, and approved by the Commons (antè, 425); the Lords were still standing out for Barton's competing version (antè, 512); other versions were in the background, but had been heard of. In these circumstances, might not a true poet, attending to all the essential conditions, and especially to the prime one of exactness to the Hebrew original, exhibit at least a specimen of a better version than any yet offered?
Unfortunately, if this was Milton's intention, it cannot be said that he succeeded. By all the critics it is admitted that his version of those Nine Psalms is inferior to what we should have expected from him; nor is it, I think, the mere prejudice of habit that leads those that have been accustomed to one particular revision of Rous's version—that which has been the Scottish authorized Psalter since 1650—to prefer Psalms LXXX.- LXXXVIII. as there given, rude though the versification is, to the Translations of the same Psalms proposed even by Milton. Something of this impression may have prevailed even in 1648, if, as is likely enough, Milton took the trouble of showing his translations to some who were interested in the question of the new Psalter, and wavering between Rous's and Barton's. On the faith of dates, however, there is another interest to us now in these careful translations by Milton of Psalms LXXX.-LXXXVIII. in April 1648. Why did he choose those particular Psalms? Not for metrical experiment only, but also because their mood fitted him. He needed the strong Hebrew of those Psalms himself, and he drank it in afresh from the text that he might reproduce it for himself and others. Petrarch, Tibullus, Horace, Chiabrera! silence all such for the time, and let the Hebrew Psalmist speak! Thus (Psalm LXXX.):—
"Turn us again; thy grace divine
To us, O God, vouchsafe;
Cause thou thy face on us to shine,
And then we shall be safe."
Or again, with reference to the dangers then gathering round
Parliamentary England (Psalm LXXXIII.):—
"For they consult with all their might,
And all as one in mind
Themselves against thee they unite,
And in firm union bind.
The tents of Edom, and the brood
Of scornful Ishmael,
Moab, with them of Hagar's blood
That in the desert dwell,
Gebal and Ammon, there conspire,
And hateful Amalec,
The Philistims, and they of Tyre,
Whose bounds the sea doth check.
With them great Asshur also bands
And doth confirm the knot
All these have lent their armed hands
To aid the sons of Lot.
Do to them as to Midian bold
That wasted all the coast,
To Sisera, and, as is told
Thou didst do to Jabin's host,
When at the brook of Kishon old
They were repulsed and slain,
At Endor quite cut off, and rolled
As dung upon the plain."
Or perhaps, with closer personal reference, such lines as these (Psalm
LXXXVII.):—
"The Lord shall write it in a scroll
That ne'er shall be outworn,
When He the nations doth enroll,
That this man there was born:
Both they who sing and they who dance
With sacred songs are there;
In thee fresh brooks and soft streams glance,
And all my fountains clear."