offering bread to our Lord. The Tempter indeed is an aged man, like the Tempter of Milton, in Vischer's cuts to the Bible, as noticed by Mr. Thyer; and in Salvator Rosa's fine painting of the Temptation, as noticed by Mr. Dunster. See the Life of Milton in the first volume. The Devil is also represented in a monastick habit by Luca Giordano, in a picture of the Temptation, which made a part of the Dusseldorp collection. But poetry likewise seems to have painted, not seldom, the gray dissimulation of the Tempter in similar colours. Giles Fletcher exhibits him disguised, as a hermit, approaching our Saviour:

"At length an aged sire far off he [our Saviour] saw
"Come slowly footing, &c."

And this description is probably indebted to Spenser's Archimago, whose character and appearance might also be in Milton's remembrance. See Faer. Qu. i. i. 29.

"At length they chaunst to meet upon the way

"An aged sire, in long blacke weeds yclad, &c."

See also F. Q. i. vi. 35. Milton draws the Tempter in the habit of an aged Franciscan in his admirable verses In Quint. Novembris. In the Trag. Hist. of Dr. Faustus, 1616, the magician thus addresses the Devil :

"Goe, and returne an old Franciscan fryer;
"That holy shape becomes a Deuill best!"

There is a poem entitled "Monachos mentiti Dæmones,” in Wierus De Præstigiis Dæmonum, Basil, 1583, p. 84. in which the assumed disguise is somewhat similar:

"Ecce per obscuræ tenebrosa crepuscula noctis
"Obtulit ignoti se noua forma viri.

"Atro tectus erat monachum simulante cucullo,

Vtque solent raso vertice tonsus erat."

In Ross's description of the Temptation, Christiados, lib. viii. ed. 1638. p. 178, he is also thus painted, by the adaptation of Virgilian phrases:

"His actis, deserta petit spælea ferarum :

"Hic inter vastas rupes, atque horrida lustra,

Vsque quater denis jejunia longa diebus

Pertulit, et totidem sine victu noctibus ullo :

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“Hic ad radices scopuli defessus Iësus
Consedit, Stygiis expectans sedibus hostem
“interea [Satan] sese transformat in ora
"Terribili squalore senis, cui plurima mento
"Canities inculta jacet, &c.

"Sordidus ex humero nodo dependet amictus,
"Et frontem obscenam rugis arat."

There is an Italian poem, which I have not seen, entitled Il Digiuno di Christo nel Deserto by Giovanni Nizzoli, dated in 1611. And I observe also among the works of P. Antonio Glielmo (who died in 1644), enumerated by Crasso in his "Elogii d' huomini letterati," Il Calvario Laureato, Poema: a kindred subject perhaps with that of Paradise Regained; the mention of which Italian title induces us to acknowledge, with gratitude, the existence of a Calvary in our own poetry; of which the plan is the faultless plan of a Paradise Regained; the spirit is truly Miltonick; and the language, at the same time, original. By the observation of an eminent Englishman we may indeed be led to suppose that Italy suggested, in some degree, the idea of Paradise Regained, as well as of * Paradise Lost; for thus the writer speaks, at no great lapse of time from Milton's death, in describing + Florence:

"Hinc quoque Miltoni deductum Nobile Carmen,

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Atque Paradisi forma resumpta sui." TODD.

See the reasons for supposing Italy to have excited Milton's design of writing Paradise Lost, in the Inquiry into the Origin of that Poem, in the present edition.

† From H. Newton's (the Envoy Extraordinary to the court of Tuscany, at the commencement of the last century,) Epistolæ, Orationes, et Carmina, &c. 4to. Lucæ, 1710. Carm. p. 13. In Mortem Stephani Waller, &c. Elegia, 1707. See this book noticed in the List of Italian translations of Milton's poetry in the present edition.