It certainly never meant treaty, though it may have meant negotiation. When it did it implied the meeting face to face of the principals. On the verses
"And some flowers and some bays
For thy hearse to strew the ways,"
he has a note to tell us that hearse is not to be taken "in our sense of a carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a tomb or framework over a tomb," though the obvious meaning is "to strew the ways for thy hearse." How could one do that for a tomb or the framework over it?
[374] A passage from Dante (Inferno, XI. 96-105), with its reference to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of "Nature taught art," which seems to puzzle him. A study of Dante and of his earlier commentators would also have been of great service in the astronomical notes.
[375] Almost every combination of two vowels might in those days be a diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of elision was confirmed and sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study of the Italians, with whose usage in this respect he closely conforms.
[376] Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791.
[377] So Dante:—
"Ma sapienza e amore e virtute."
So Donne:—
"Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives."
[378] Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand with the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been trained, but seems to have learned something from Abbott's "Shakespearian Grammar" in the interval between writing his notes and his Introduction. Walker's "Shakespeare's Versification" would have been a great help to him in default of original knowledge.
[379] Milton has a verse in Comus where the e is elided from the word sister by its preceding a vowel:—
"Heaven keep my sister! again, again, and near!"