written in March 1625, he acknowledges the gift of a Hebrew Bible which Young had sent him.

It is not to be supposed that the literature of his own country remained a closed field to a youth so fond of study, and who had already begun to have dreåms for himself of literary excellence. Accordingly there is evidence that Milton in his boyhood was a diligent reader of English books, and that before the close of his school-time in 1624 he had formed some general acquaintance, at least, with the course of English literature from its beginnings to his own time.

Such a task, it is to be remembered, was by no means so formidable in the year 1624 as a corresponding task would be now. strike off from the body of English literature, as it now presents itself to us, all that portion of it which has been added during the last two centuries and a quarter, that which would remain as the total literature of England at the time when Milton began to take a retrospect of it, would by no means alarm by its bulk. It distributed itself in the retrospect into three periods. (1.) There was the period of the infancy of our literature, ending with the life of Chaucer, in 1400. Of the relics of this period, whether in prose or in verse, there were few, with the exception of the works of Chaucer himself, which any one, not studying our literature in an expressly antiquarian spirit, would care much about. (2.) Passing to the period next in order - which may be considered as extending from Chaucer's death in 1400 to the middle of the reign of Elizabeth, or the year 1580 — there were not very many writers of this period with whom the lover of pure literature, as such, was bound to be acquainted. The characteristic of this age of English literature is the absence of any writer, whether in poetry or prose, that could with propriety be named as a successor of Chaucer. The literary spirit seemed, for the time, to have passed to the Scottish side of the Tweed, and there to have incarnated itself in a short series of Scottish poets, who did inherit somewhat of Chaucer's genius – James I., Dunbar, Douglas, Sir David Lyndsay, etc. These, however, were beyond the pale of that literature which an English reader would regard as properly his own. In lieu of them he could reckon on his list such names as Lydgate, Sir Thomas More, Ascham, Skelton, Surrey, and Wyat. They were by no means insignificant names; and when one remembered that the age of More and Surrey and Wyat had also been the age of the Reformers Tyndal, Cranmer, Latimer, and their associates, and of the scholars Lilly, Leland, Cheke, and others, one could look back upon that age with a conviction that, if its relics in the form of vernacular poetry and in other forms of pure literature had not been numerous, this was not on account of any lack of intellectual activity in the age, but because its intellectual activity had been expended in controversial writing and in the business of war, statecraft, and revolution. Still, to any one looking back, in the spirit of a literary enthusiast, rather than in that of a theologian or a student of history, the age could not but seem unusually barren. (3.) Very different was it when, passing forward from the stormy reign of Henry VIII. through the short reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, one advanced into those golden days when Elizabeth sat securely on the throne. The latter part of this Queen's reign, dating from about 1580, opens, as all know, the era of the literary splendor of England. It may be considered as having extended over about forty-five years in all, or to the death of James I. in 1625 — almost the exact point of time with which we are now concerned. Fancying Milton, therefore, as a youth of sixteen, looking back upon the past literary course of his own country, we can see that by far the richest part of that course, the part most crowded with names and with works of interest, would be the forty-five years nearest his own day. In other words, if we allow for the great figure of Chaucer seen far in the background, and for a minor Wyat or Surrey and the like breaking the long interval between Chaucer and more recent times, the whole literature of England would be represented to Milton, in the year 1624, by that cluster of conspicuous men, some of them still alive and known familiarly in English society, who had been already named “the Elizabethans.” In prose there were the names of Sidney, Hooker, Raleigh, Bacon, Bishop Andrews, and others, not to speak of chroniclers and historians, such as Hollinshed, Stow, and Speed, or of scholars and antiquarians, like Camden and Selden. Bacon's works had all, or nearly all, by this time been given to the world. Then, in the region of poetry, what a burst of stars! First in time and in magnitude among the non-dramatic poets, or the poets best known out of the drama, was Spenser, England's true second son in the Muses after Chaucer. As contemporaries or successors of Spenser might be enumerated such men as Sackville, Warner, Daniel, Drayton, and Chapman; Harrington, the translator of Ariosto, Fairfax, the translator of Tasso, and Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas; and the metaphysical, religious, and lyrical poets, Donne, Davies, Phineas Fletcher, Giles Fletcher, Wither, Carew, and Browne. And so with that still more brilliant constellation of dramatists with which these men were historically associated and in

part personally intermixed. The earlier Elizabethan dramatists, Greene, Peele, Marlowe, and others, had passed away before Milton was born; but the later Elizabethans, Shakspeare, Webster, Middleton, Decker, Marston, Heywood, and Ben Jonson, lived into the reign of James, and were among the men whom Milton might himself have seen ; while to these had been added, almost within his own memory, such younger dramatists as Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. In a few cases, the whole works of certain dramatists had been collected. In 1616 Ben Jonson had published, in folio, a collection of his works prior to that date; and the admirer of Ben had but to purchase, in addition, such separate dramas and masques as he had issued since, in order to have the whole of him. More notable still, it was in 'the year 1623 that Shakspeare's executors, Heminge and Condell, performed their important service to the world, by publishing the first folio edition of his works. “Buy the book; whatever you do, buy," was the advice of the editors, in their quaint preface; and among the first persons to follow the advice might have been the scrivener Milton.

Theological books of which we now know little or nothing would then be in high esteem in a Puritan family; but there is evidence in Milton's earliest writings that his juvenile readings had ranged widely beyond those, and backwards in the series of more classic English writers, and especially of English poets. There are traces of his acquaintance with Ben in his very earliest poems; and if he did not have a copy of the folio Shakspeare within reach on its publication in 1623, it is certain, as we shall see, that he had one in his possession, and had made good use of it before 1630. By the universal consent of Milton's biographers, however, whatever other English poets he may have read prior to his seventeenth year, there were at least two with whom he was then familiar. These were Spenser, and Sylvester the translator of Du Bartas. IIumphrey Lownes, a printer, living in the same street with his father,” says Todd,“ supplied him at least with Spenser and Sylvester's Du Bartas."1 For this statement, which is repeated by all subsequent biographers, I have not found any sufficient authority. It is not necessary, surely, to suppose that Milton was indebted for his acquaintance with Spenser to the kindness of any neighbor. Cowley, at the age of eleven (Anno 1628), read Spenser with delight; and if Cowley's introduction to the poet was owing to the circumstance that his works “were wont to lie in his mother's parlor,” Milton might not have had far to go for his copy. In the case of Sylves

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ter's Du Bartas the notion that Lownes may have supplied the book is more plausible; for all the editions of the book had issued from Lownes's press, and the printer himself had a more than professional affection for it. Seeing, also, that so much has been made by Milton's commentators of his supposed obligations both in his earlier and his later poetry to Du Bartas and Sylvester, it may not be amiss here to give some account of the once popular but now obsolete work with which their names are associated.

Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur du Bartas, was perhaps the most famous French poet of the sixteenth century. Born in 1544, and a zealous adherent of the Calvinistic party in the French civil wars, he was a follower of Henry IV. while that champion of Protestantism was struggling for the throne, and served him both in camp and in council. At his death in 1590, he left behind him, as the fruit of his occasional months of solitude, a long religious poem, partly didactic and partly descriptive, entitled The Divine Weeks and Works. The popularity of the poem, both in France and in other countries, was immense. Thirty editions of the original were sold within six years; and it was translated into all the languages of Europe, as well as into Latin.

Sylvester, the English translator of Du Bartas, was a man qualified to do him justice. Born in 1563, and by profession a "merchant-adventurer,” or mercantile agent, travelling between London and the Continent, he had acquired a knowledge of foreign tongues, which led him to employ his leisure in translating foreign poetry. Iris Calvinistic leanings drew him strongly to Du Bartas. In 1590 he published the first specimen of Du Bartas in English, at the press of “Richard Yardley, on Bread-street-hill, at the signe of the Starre, printer” – Yardley being then the occupant of the premises afterwards occupied by Lownes. Farther, in 1598, there was printed at the same office – Yardley having, in the meantime, been succeeded there by one Peter Short - a more extensive specimen of Sylvester's skill in the shape of a version of part of Du Bartas's main work. It was not, however, till 1605 - by which time Short had, in his turn, been succeeded by Humphrey Lownes — that Sylvester's complete translation of The Divine Weeks and Works of Du Bartas was issued from the same press. The volume was so popular that fresh editions were issued by Lownes in 1611 and 1613. At this time "silver-tongued Sylvester,” partly in virtue of this translation, partly in virtue of his original writings -- among which may be mentioned a singular poem against tobacco, written about 16151 — was a man of no small reputation in the London cluster of wits and poets. He died in Holland in 1618, at the age of fiftyfive. A new edition of his translation being required in 1621, Lownes took the opportunity of collecting his fugitive pieces, so as to include the translation in a folio containing all Sylvester's works. To this volume Lownes prefixed an “ Address to the Reader ” in his own name, in which he speaks of Sylvester as “that divine wit” and “that worthy spirit," and particularly dwells on the fact that in his later years he had “ confined his pen to none but holy and religious ditties." The printer was not wrong in anticipating continued popularity for his favorite. Fresh editions of Sylvester's works being the sixth and seventh of his Du Bartas, were called for in 1633 and 1641 ; and we have Dryden's testimony to the high esteem in which Sylvester's Du Bartas was held as late as 1650. “I remember, when I was a boy,” says Dryden, “I thought inimitable Spenser a mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's Du Bartas, and was rapt into ecstasy when I read these lines :

'Now when the winter's keener breath began
To crystallize the Baltic ocean,
To glaze the lakes and bridle up the floods,
And periwig with wool the bald-pate woods.”

To these words Dryden adds, as his more mature impression, “I am much deceived now if this be not abominable fustian;" a sentence which may be considered as having sealed poor Sylvester's fate. After 1660, he ceased to be read, and was only referred to, like his original in France, as a pedantic and fantastic old poet, disfigured by gross images and bad taste. Of late, partly on Milton's account, the interest in him has somewhat revived; and critics, who can relish poetry under an uncouth guise, find merit in him.

When Milton was a boy at St Paul's School, everybody was reading Sylvester's Du Bartas. The first part of the Poem entitled “The First Week, or the Birth of the World,” occupies nearly two