Quite a different pen and more respected."
Young Keck then goes on to assure his fellow-students that, if their eminent Professor Schaller's Dissertation of 1653 in reply to Milton had been duly read and pondered in Great Britain, it would have been of far more use towards a restoration of the Stuarts than camps and cannon; and he ends by congratulating the world on the fact that now young Güntzer, the accomplished young Güntzer, has placed himself by the side of the learned Professor, to wave the same inextinguishable torch of truth.1—In all probability, Milton never heard of such a trifle. It illustrates, however, the kind of rumour of himself and his writings that was circling, in the year 1657, in holes and corners of German Universities. Strasburg, with Elsatz generally, was then within the dominions of Austria; and it was naturally less in Austrian Germany than in other parts of the Continent that there was that especial admiration of Milton which had been growing since the publication of his Defensio Prima, but which, as Aubrey tells us, had reached its height under the Protectorate. "He was mightily importuned," says Aubrey, "to go into France and Italy. Foreigners came much to see him, and much admired him, and offered to him great preferments to come over to them; and the only inducement of several foreigners that came over into England was chiefly to see O. Protector and Mr. J. Milton; and [they] would see the house and chamber where he was born. He was much more admired abroad than at home." This corresponds with all our own evidence hitherto, though we have heard nothing of those invitations and offers of foreign preferment of which Aubrey speaks.
1: The copy I have seen of Güntzer's Dissertatio is in the British Museum Library. The figure "17" is inserted in MS. after the word "die" in the title-page.
In May 1658, three or four months before Cromwell's death, there was published in London a little volume of about 200 pages, with this title-page: "The Cabinet Council; Containing the chief Arts of Empire, and Mysteries of State; Discabineted in Political and Polemical Aphorisms, grounded, on Authority, and Experience; And illustrated with the choicest Examples and Historical Observations. By the Ever-renowned Knight, Sir Walter Raleigh, published by John Milton Esq.-Quis Martem tunicâ tectum Adamantinâ digne scripserit?-London, Printed by Tho. Newcomb for Tho. Johnson at the sign of the Key in St. Pauls Churchyard, near the West-end, 1658." Prefixed to the body of the volume, which is divided into twenty-six chapters, is a note "To the Reader," as follows: "Having had the manuscript of this Treatise, written by Sir Walter Raleigh, many years in my hands, and finding it lately by chance among other books and papers, upon reading thereof I thought it a kind of injury to withhold longer the work of so eminent an author from the public: it being both answerable in style to other works of his already extant, as far as the subject would permit, and given me for a true copy by a learned man at his death, who had collected several such pieces.-JOHN MILTON."1
1: There were subsequent reprints of Raleigh's Cabinet Council from this 1658 edition by Milton, with changes of title. See Bohn's Lowndes under Raleigh
By far the most interesting fact, however, in Milton's literary life under the Second Protectorate is that he had certainly, before its close, resumed his design of a great English poem, to be called Paradise Lost. Phillips's words might even imply that he had resumed this design before the end of the First Protectorate. For, after having mentioned that, in the comparative leisure in which he was left by the conclusion of his controversy with Morus (Aug. 1655), he resumed those two favourite hack-occupations on which he always fell back when he had nothing else to do,—his History of England and his compilations for a Latin Dictionary,—Phillips adds, "But the highth of his noble fancy and invention began now to be seriously and mainly employed in a subject worthy of such a muse: viz. a Heroic Poem, entitled Paradise Lost, the noblest," &c. In this passage, however, Phillips is throwing together, in 1694, all his recollections of the four years of his uncle's life between Aug. 1655 and Aug. 1659; and Aubrey's earlier information (1680), originally derived from Phillips himself, is that Paradise Lost was begun "about two years before the King came in," i.e. about May 1658. This would fix the date somewhere in the two or three months immediately following the death-of Milton's second wife. In such a matter exact certainty is unattainable; and it is enough to know for certain that the resumption of Paradise Lost was an event of the latter part of Cromwell's Second Protectorate, and that some portion of the poem was actually written in the house in Petty France, Westminster, while Milton was in communication with Cromwell and writing letters for him. In the rooms of that house, or in the garden that stretched from the house into St. James's Park across part of what is now the ground of Wellington Barracks, the subject of the epic first took distinct shape in Milton's mind, and here he began the great dictation.
Eighteen years had elapsed since Milton, just settled in London after his return from Italy, had first fastened on the subject, preferred it by a sure instinct to all the others that occurred in competition with it, and sketched four plans for its treatment in the form of a sacred tragedy, one with the precise title Paradise Lost, and another with the title Adam Unparadised (Vol. II. pp. 106-108, and 115-119). Through all the distractions of those eighteen years the grand subject had not ceased to haunt him, nor the longing to return to it and to his poetic vocation. Nay there had hung in his memory all this while certain lines he had actually written and destined for the opening of the intended tragedy. They were the ten lines that now form lines 32-41 of the fourth book of our present Paradise Lost. He had imagined, for the opening of his tragedy, Satan already arrived within our Universe out of Hell, and alighted on our central Earth near Eden, and gazing up to Heaven and the Sun blazing there in meridian splendour. He had imagined Satan, in this pause of his first advent into the Universe he was to ruin, thus addressing the Sun as its chief visible representative:—
"O thou that with surpassing glory crowned,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the god
Of this new World,—at whose sight all the stars