great friend, Charles Diodati, and gave utterance to the intense sadness of his feelings in the wonderful elegy which he entitled "Epitaphium Damonis." We may be allowed to express our entire concurrence with Pattison, who, in his Memoir of Milton, expresses regret that the poet should have chosen the Latin tongue for a work which, perhaps more than any other, reflects the pathetic emotions expressed in the wonderfully skilful passages which Milton knew so well how to use. His love for Diodati was very tender and true, and in this epitaph he allowed the affection which he bore for his friend to be revealed. The poet must have been a man of very austere and somewhat frigid character, possessing but little affection either for wife, child, or friend, and carefully keeping under control, and within the narrowest limits, all such sympathy or love. For his friend Diodati, however, he had conceived a very deep affection, and if only the Epitaph had been in English, and therefore accessible to the general reader, it would have probably been considered as an expression of the finest pathos of which the language could boast. It is interesting to notice, as Pattison was the first to point out, that this was the last attempt Milton made in serious Latin verse. Henceforward he wrote prose composition in the Classic tongue; but his appeals to his own people in poetry were written in his own language. In July, 1639, the poet was again at Horton, but he left almost at once and came up to London, commencing his long, protracted residence there. Even now he adopted no profession, and his father appears to have been ready to allow his clever son such means as he required for his sustenance. He took lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard, at a tailor's shop, and there he commenced to educate his two nephews, who were the sons of his sister Anne, one of them being his godson. He must have been a somewhat strange tutor, and it would have been interesting had Edward Phillips, to whose work on his uncle we are indebted for so much information, given some details respecting the method adopted by the poet in teaching. Phillips did however lay great stress on the enormous quantity of learning which he and his brother had to accept, and upon the way in which the whole day was filled up with instruction, and that upon subjects of almost inconceivable variety. Milton's residence in lodgings lasted a very short time; perhaps the situation was too noisy, but more probably the ever-increasing store of books drove him to find ampler accommodation, and he took a house in Aldersgate, outside the City walls, in 1640, and there settled down with the two lads. It was at this time that he commenced noting down various ideas and suggestions for the great poem which he intended to write; and the remarkable manuscript at Cambridge reveals to us the schemes for such a work that filled his head. Nearly one hundred different subjects are suggested, over sixty of them being more or less connected with Scripture, and the remainder based on history, almost exclusively that of his own country. It is hardly possible to over-estimate the value of this wonderful manuscript, and when it is remembered that there is practically nothing remaining in the handwriting of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Spenser, we may well be thankful that England possesses in the volume in Trinity College Library so important a record of Milton's work, and be grateful to the Syndics of the University Press for the perfect facsimile by which they have rendered it available to all students. Although, however, a hundred ideas were noted down, a very long time had to elapse before Milton was to perform the life work for which all the earlier part of his career was a preparation. One satisfaction in taking the house in Aldersgate was that he had as near neighbours his old teacher, Dr. Gill, and Dr. Diodati, the father of his dearest friend Charles, and as he was on the very edge of the country he was able quickly to get in to the fields and give up a considerable amount of time to contemplation. It was the period of the Long Parliament, and the political events had been stirring Milton to his depths, until he felt that the time had arrived when he must give utterance to his opinions. In 1641 appeared his first tract "Of Reformation touching Church discipline in England, and the Causes that hitherto have hindered it," issued anonymously against Episcopacy, thundering out charges enunciated in no measured 1 E 208 (3) B. M. |