The Sixteenth Sonnet (Masson): ‘To the Lord General Cromwell, May, 1652: On the Proposals of Certain Ministers at the Committee for Propagation of the Gospel.’ Printed by Philips, Life of Milton, 1694. In defence of the principle of Religious Voluntaryism, and against the intolerant Fifteen Proposals of John Owen and the majority of the Committee.
[XIV]
The Eighteenth Sonnet (Masson). ‘Written in 1655,’ says Masson, and referring ‘to the persecution instituted, in the early part of the year, by Charles Emmanuel II., Duke of Savoy and Prince of Piedmont, against his Protestant subjects of the valleys of the Cottian Alps.’ In January, an edict required them to turn Romanists or quit the country out of hand; it was enforced with such barbarity that Cromwell took the case of the sufferers in hand; and so vigorous was his action that the Edict was withdrawn and a convention was signed (August 1655) by which the Vaudois were permitted to worship as they would. Printed in 1673.
[XV]
The Nineteenth Sonnet (Masson) ‘may have been written any time between 1652 and 1655,’ the first years of Milton's blindness, ‘but it follows the Sonnet on the Piedmontese Massacre in Milton's own volume of 1673.’
[XVI], [XVII]
From the choric parts of Samson Agonistes (i.e. the Agonist, or Wrestler), first printed in 1671.
[XVIII]
Of uncertain date; first printed by Watson 1706–11. The version given here is Emerson's (which is shorter than the original), with the exception of the last stanza, which is Napier's (Montrose, i. Appendices). Napier is at great pains to prove that the ballad is allegorical, and that Montrose's ‘dear and only love’ was that unhappy King whose Epitaph, the famous Great, Good, and Just, he is said—falsely—to have written with his sword. Be this as it may, the verses have a second part, which has dropped into oblivion. For the Great Marquis, who reminded De Retz of the men in Plutarch's Lives, was not averse from the practice of poetry, and wrote, besides these numbers, a prayer (‘Let them bestow on every airth a limb’), a ‘pasquil,’ a pleasant string of conceits in praise of woman, a set of vehement and fiery memorial stanzas on the King, and one copy of verses more.