singing of the then famous vocalist, Leonora Baroni. From Rome, Milton, aged thirty, went to Naples, where he was kindly received by Manso, Marquis of Villa, then an old man of seventy-seven, the friend and biographer of Tasso. At his departure he paid his respect to Manso in a Latin poem addresson to him. Milton was about to pass on through Sicily to Greece, when, as he wrote afterwards in his "Second Defence of the People of England," "the melancholy intelligence which I received of the civil commotions in England made me alter my purpose; for I thought it base to be travelling for amusement abroad while my fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at home." He retraced his steps, dwelt on his way back another two months at Rome. At Florence, also, he again staid for two months; he visited Lucca, Bologna, Ferrara; gave a month to Venice; from Venice he shipped to England the books he had bought in Italy; then he went through Verona and Milan to Geneva, where he was in daily converse with Giovanni Diodati, uncle of his old school-friend. From Geneva, Milton passed through France, and was at home again in July or August, 1639, after an absence of about fifteen months. When he returned he found his friend Charles Diodati dead, and poured out his sorrow in a Latin pastoral, "Epitaphium Damonis," with the refrain, as Cowper translates it:

"Go seek your home, my lambs; my thoughts are due

To other cares than those of feeding you."

The flocks, the dappled deer, the fishes, and the birds can find the fit companion in every place:

"We only, an obdurate kind, rejoice,
Scorning all others, in a single choice;

We scarce in thousands meet one kindred mind,
And if the long sought good at last we find,
When least we fear it, Death our treasure steals,

And gives our heart a wound that nothing heals.

Go, go, my lambs, unpastur'd as ye are,
My thoughts are all now due to other care.
Ah, what delusion lur'd me from my flocks,

To traverse Alpine snows, and rugged rocks?
What need so great had I to visit Rome,
Now sunk in ruins, and herself a tomb?

Or, had she flourish'd still as when, of old,
For her sake Tityrus forsook his fold,
What need so great had I t' incur a pause
Of thy sweet intercourse for such a cause;
For such a cause to place the roaring sea,
Rocks, mountains, woods, between my friend and me?
Else had I grasp'd thy feeble hand, compos'd
Thy decent limbs, thy drooping eyelids clos'd,
And, at the last, had said-'Farewell- ascend-
Nor even in the skies forget thy friend.'"

-

Into Charles Diodati's ear Milton had whispered his dream of immortality, said that his Muse rose yet only on tender wings, unequal to the meditated flight. In his poem to Manso, Milton indicated that it was in his mind to write a poem of high strain upon King Arthur. A passage in this "Epitaph of Damon" shows that when he came back to England the design to write an epic upon Arthur took a more definite shape. Had he taken Arthur for his hero, Milton would, like Spenser, have turned him to high spiritual use. He had looked for examples, he said afterwards, to Homer, Virgil, Tasso, to the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, to the odes of Pindar, to the poetical books of the Old and New Testament, as "the mind at home in the spacious circuit of her musing" sought to plan its future work. He had reasoned to himself whether in the writing of an epic poem "the rules of Aristotle herein are to be strictly kept, or nature to be followed, which in them that know art and use judgment is no transgression, but an enriching of art." But still, and for years yet to come, Milton felt that the work to which his soul yearned forward was to be achieved only "by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out His seraphim, with the hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs." He knew that only hard work could enable him to make the best use of his genius, hard work and a right life. In the "Apology for Smectymnuus" Milton has written, "I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem.”

The news that caused Milton to turn back from his longer travel into Greece was news of trouble with the Scots which clearly boded the civil war that soon came on, and that continued to occupy all Englishmen for many years. Soon after his return to England, John Milton settled in London, by taking lodgings for a short time at the house of a tailor in St. Bride's Churchyard, and there he undertook the teaching of his sister Anne's two boys, Edward and John Phillips, aged nine and eight. While teaching his nephews, Milton, in 1640, was sketching plans of sacred dramas, dwelling especially upon "Paradise Lost as the subject of a drama; suggesting also as themes, "Abram from Morea; or, Isaac redeemed," "The Deluge," "Sodom," "Baptistes," noting subjects also from British history. Milton "made no long stay," his nephew tells us, in his lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard: "necessity of having a place to dispose his books in, and other goods fit for the furnishing of a good handsome house, hastening him to take one; and, accordingly, a pretty garden-house he took, in Aldersgate Street, at the end of an entry, and therefore the fitter for his turn, besides that there are few streets in London more free from noise than that." There he worked hard, and had his two nephews to board with him. There also he began, in 1641, the second part of his literary life; put aside, at the age of thirty-two, his high ambition as a poet; and, devoting himself to the duty that lay nearest to his hand, gave the best years of his manhood, the twenty years from thirty-two to fiftytwo, to those questions of his day that touched, as he thought, the essentials of English liberty.

CHAPTER VI.

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: SCHOLARS, HISTORIANS, AND MEN OF

SCIENCE.

1. Learned Men; Janres I.-2. Cotton and Bodley.-3. Robert Burton.-4. Lance lot Andrewes.-5. James Usher.-6. John Selden.-7. Sir Henry Wotton; John Hales.-8. John Lightfoot. — .-9. Sir Henry Spelman.-10. John Hayward.-11. William Camden.-12. Historians; John Speed.-13. Samuel Purchas.-14. Sir Walter Raleigh.—15. Richard Knolles; Alexander Ross. — 16. Lord Herbert of Cherbury.-17. Spottiswoode ; Calderwood.-18. Thomas Fuller. 19. Men of Science; Francis Bacon.-20. John Napier; William Harvey.-21. John Wilkins.-22. Samuel Hartlib.-23. John Wallis.

1. THE First Half of the Seventeenth Century was an age of learned men in England; and at the head of them, it may be appropriate to mention King James I. He had received in early life the best possible instruction from Buchanan and others. He was a clumsy boy, with ungainliness produced by physical defect, a tongue too large for his mouth, and a mind in which all depths that there could ever be must be made artificially. Good workmen dug and shaped; the boy was goodtempered, picked up some shrewdness, lived a creditable life, had respect for knowledge, and good appetite for it, though bad digestion. He had a pleasant type of it before him in cheery, impressible George Buchanan; a Presbyterian, austere but half way through, with a face like a Scotch Socrates, although more apt than Socrates to take offence, familiar with Latin as with his native tongue, full of anecdote and good talk, familiar also with languages and people round about, and liking Scotland all the better for experience in other lands. But for James the horizon did not widen as he climbed the hill of knowledge, his heart did not swell as he rose to higher sense of harmony and beauty; he hammered at the big lumps about him, and was proud of being so far up. In 1585, when his age was but nine

teen, he published at Edinburgh "The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie." In preliminary sonnets of compliment, the Muses, through various courtly representations, sought to

The "

"Tell how he doeth in tender yearis essay

Above his age with skill our arts to blaise,
Tell how he doeth with gratitude repay

The crowne he wan for his deserved praise.
Tell how of Jove, of Mars, but more of God

The glorie and grace he hath proclaimed abrod.”

Essayes" opened with twelve sonnets of invocation to the gods, namely, Jove, Apollo, each of the four Seasons, Neptune, Tritons and their kind, Pluto, Mars, Mercury, and finally, for the twelfth sonnet:

"In short, you all forenamed gods I pray

For to concur with one accord and will
That all my works may perfyte be alway;
Which if ye doe, then swear I for to fill
My works immortall with your praises still;
I shall your names eternall ever sing,

I shall tread downe the grasse on Parnass hill
By making with your names the world to ring;
I shall your names from all oblivion bring;
I lofty Virgill shall to life restoir."

After these twelve sonnets of invocation, the king placed a translation of "The Heavenly Muse" of Du Bartas; then a dim allegory, in Chaucer's stanza, "Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix," with a preface of eighteen bad lines, arranged first as shaped verse, in the form of a lozenge upon a little pedestal, then as a compound acrostic. Then followed a short bit of translation out of the fifth book of Lucan; and then, lastly, "Ane Schort Treatise, containing some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie." In 1591, was published "His Majesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres;" and in 1616, appeared a collected edition, in folio, of his prose-writings, consisting of theological and metaphysical discussions, and containing his most famous production, "A Counterblaste to Tobacco.”

2. Robert Bruce Cotton, born at Denton, Huntingdonshire, in 1570, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, was knighted by James I.