Colebrooke, in Buckinghamshire, which his father had bought. Here he passed five years in study, adding a knowledge of Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac to his already wide and accurate scholarship, and revelling in the works of the Italian poets. He had writen poetry from his childhood, his college exercises, Greek and Latin, had been of great merit, but here he composed five at least of his best minor poems, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Arcades, Comus, and Lycidas. The dates of the two last, 1634 and 1637, are known, but the internal evidence of the former leaves no doubt as to their place and time.

In 1638, on the death of his mother, he resolved to travel, and obtaining letters of introduction from his friend Sir H. Wotton, set off for Italy, stopping for a few days in Paris, where he met the celebrated Grotius. But he soon pushed on to Italy, the classic land of poetry and art. All the greatest Italian painters, sculptors, and poets had already lived and died, but the decay was not yet manifest, and for a year he feasted his eyes and stored his imagination with the wealth of beauty there only to be found. His reputation had already reached the ears of the Tuscan and Roman academists, and was enhanced by his intimate acquaintance with their literature and language, and the charms of his manners and conversation. Everywhere was he entertained with true Italian courtesy, and greeted with sonnets and epigrams in Latin or Italian, compliments which he seldom failed to return. He visited Galileo in prison, was a guest of G. B. Manso, Marchese di Villa, a soldier, scholar, and poet, who had been the friend and patron of Torquato Tasso, from whose poetry Milton had drawn delight and inspiration; and made the acquaintance of many lesser poets and scholars. He did not seek controversy, but, contrary to the advice of Wotton, was ever ready to stand up for his religion and his political views if he felt it his duty to defend the truth. Returning by Geneva he formed a lifelong friendship with Giovanni Diodati, the protestant translator of the Bible, who must not be confounded with his nephew Charles Diodati, Milton's schoolfellow, an accomplished scholar and physician, who, though his father was an Italian, was an Englishman by birth and education.

Milton, on arriving in London, took a house in Aldersgate Street, and returned to his studies, when the tempest which was about to break on throne and church aroused the latent energy of his character. From 1641 to the Restoration he was hotly engaged in the strife, wielding a pen far mightier than a sword. He was appointed, in conjunction with Andrew Marvell, Latin secretary to Cromwell, Latin being at that time the language of diplomacy. He wrote On the Question of Divorce, a Tractate on Education; Iconoclastes, an answer to the Eikon Busilike; A Defence of Smectymnuus, or a treatise against Episcopacy, recently published, which derived its quaint title from the initials of its authors, viz.: Stephen Marshall, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young (Milton's friend and tutor), Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstow; The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty; and the Areopagitica, a Defence of Unlicensed Printing, a masterpiece of rhetorical argument in favour of freedom of thought; besides many other pamphlets, among which may be mentioned, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a True Commonwealth, when, after Cromwell's death, he saw events rapidly drifting towards a restoration of monarchy. In 1643 he married Mary Powell, daughter of a spendthrift Royalist, who sought to discharge his pecuniary obligations by handing over her marriage portion to the bridegroom's father. Discreditable to the parents, the match was in every way ill judged and unhappy. The frivolous girl, being allowed to revisit her home within two months of her marriage, refused to return until it was feared that her husband intended to repudiate his duty to maintain her. She forced herself into his presence and was forgiven; and when, soon afterwards, political reverses for a time at least ruined her family, Milton, nobly condoning their behaviour, received them all into his house. After her death in 1656 he married Katherine Woodcock, who died two years later at the birth of her first infant. Milton wrote a touching poem on the deaths of the mother and her child.

On the Restoration, though at first passed over, he was for a short time placed under arrest, but liberated through the

intercession of Sir W. Davenant, who in like circumstances had owed his life to him. Infirm and blind, he married, in his fifty-fifth year, Elisabeth Minshull, who, much younger than himself, kindly tended his waning years. Living in close seclusion he now wrote his immortal epics Paradise Lost and Regained, as well as the grand and pathetic tragedy of Samson Agonistes, all three teeming with imagery drawn from the stores of his memory, since neither wife nor daughters were sufficiently educated to compensate him for the loss of his sight. They may have written at his dictation, but they could not have read the classic and Italian poets whom he presses into his service with a perfectly marvellous skill.

He died in 1674, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. Among his prose works I have not mentioned his controversy with De Saumaise or Salmasius and Morus on the right of the English to depose and execute their king. It was in Latin, and like all polemics of the day full of personalities, in which, however, his opponents indulged to even a greater extent than he

ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF MILTON.

EVEN if Milton had never published a single poem, his name would have been enrolled among those of the greatest thinkers and most powerful writers of his own, or indeed of any age; but he seems to have been impressed from his very boyhood with a deep conviction that he was called to be a poet, and his idea of a poet was the highest that ever entered into the mind of man. To him to be a poet was to be a patriot, priest, and prophet, to share the spirit, to feel the inspiration of the Hebrew singer and seer of old. If he wrote but little minor poetry it was because he believed himself predestined for higher flights, that some day "he should take up the harp and sing an elaborate song to generations," and "perhaps leave something so written to after-times as they should not willingly let die."

He held the gift of poetry to be from God, and burned with îndignation when he saw the poets of the day prostituting their talents at the altar of impurity or wasting them on elegant but contemptible trifles. Even in that thing of quaint conceit and airy fancy, the Mask of Comus, he does not forget his mission; and in the infamous sentiments of the wizard, deliberately putting darkness for light and bitter for sweet, we see a scathing satire on the abuse of the poet's art.

He would have had poetry form a part of his scheme of education, "not as the prosody of a verse among the rudiments of grammar, but as that sublime art which should soon show what despicable creatures our common rhymers and playwriters be; and what religious—what glorious and magnificent -use might be made of poetry both in divine and human things." When a mere boy he pleads with his father that poetry is a holy thing, and that he wrote so little in the glow of his youth and the prime of his manhood was not the result of any conscious inferiority to others, "for after," he says, "I had from my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, been exercised by the tongues, and such sciences as

my age could suffer, by sundry masters and teachers, it was found that whether aught was imposed upon me by them, or betaken to of my own choice, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live; but much latelier, in the private academies of Italy, perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at about twenty, or thereabout, met with acceptance above what was looked for, I began to assent both to them and to divers of my friends at home, and not less to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature that I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times as they should not willingly let die. The accomplishment of these intentions, which have lived with me ever since I could conceive myself anything worth to my country, lies not but in a power above man's to promise; but that none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit that none shall, that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and free leisure will extend."

Some of the productions of his early manhood, his L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, his Lycidas and Comus, and not a few of his sonnets, are simply perfect in their way; but the aim he had put before him was so lofty, the ideal he had formed was so sublime, that he felt himself as yet incapable of fully realizing it, "and that he had not completed to his mind the full circle of his private studies," though he knew "by every instinct and presage of nature which is not wont to be false that what had emboldened other poets to their achievements might with the same diligence as they had used embolden him." He was silent from a sense of the awful responsibility he had taken on himself; his whole life was a preparation for the crowning work of his old age, though we know not when he first determined on the subject of the Paradise Lost, the actual form which the epic was to take. Long years before he had resolved that it was "not to be a work raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invocation of