The world has known many greater scholars in the technical, limited sense than Milton, but few men, if any, who have mastered more things worth mastering in art, letters and scholarship1. It says much for the poet that he was sustained through this period of study, pursued ohne Hast, ohne Rast, by the full consciousness that all would be crowned by a masterpiece which should add one more testimony to the belief in that God who ordains the fates of men. It says also a very great deal for the father who suffered his son to follow in this manner the path of learning2.

True, Milton gave more than one earnest of his future Milton's fame. The dates of the early pieceslyric verse; L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Arcades, Comus its relation to contem- and Lycidas-are not all certain; but proporary life. bably each was composed at Horton before 1638. We must speak of them elsewhere. Here we may note that four of them have great autobiographic value as an indirect commentary, written from Milton's coign of seclusion, upon the moral crisis through which English life and thought were passing, the clash between the careless, pleasure-seeking Cavalier world and the deepening austerity of Puritanism. In L'Allegro the poet holds the balance almost equal between the two opposing tendencies. In Il Penseroso it becomes clear to which side his sympathies are leaning. Comus is a covert prophecy of the downfall of the Court-party, while Lycidas openly "foretells the ruine" of the Established Church. The latter poem is the final utterance of Milton's lyric genius.

1 Milton's poems with their undercurrent of perpetual allusion are the best proof of the width of his reading; but interesting supplementary evidence is afforded by the commonplace book discovered in 1874, and printed by the Camden Society, 1876. It contains extracts from about 80 different authors whose works Milton had studied.

2 Cf. the poem Ad Patrem, 68-72, in which Milton thanks his father for not having forced him to be a merchant or lawyer.

Here he reaches, in Mr Mark Pattison's words, the highwater mark of English verse; and then-the pity of ithe resigns his place among poets, gives himself up to politics, and for nearly twenty years suffers his lyre to hang mute and rusty in the temple of the Muses.

Travels in

Italy; close of the first period in his

life.

Cause of his return to England.

The composition of Lycidas may be assigned to the year 1637. In the spring of the next year Milton started for Italy. He had long made himself a master of Italian, and it was natural that he should seek inspiration in the land where many English poets, from Chaucer to Shelley, have found it. Milton remained abroad some fifteen months. Originally he had intended to include Sicily and Greece in his travels, but news of the troubles in England hastened his return. He was brought face to face with the question whether or not he should bear his part in the coming struggle; whether without self-reproach he could lead any longer this life of learning and indifference to the public weal. He decided as we might have expected that he would decide, though some good critics see cause to regret the decision. Milton puts his position very clearly. "I considered it," he says, "dishonourable to be enjoying myself at my ease in foreign lands, while my countrymen were striking a blow for freedom." And again: "Perceiving that the true way to liberty followed on from these beginnings, inasmuch also as I had so prepared myself from my youth that, above all things, I could not be ignorant what is of Divine and what of human right, I resolved, though I was then meditating certain other matters, to transfer into this struggle all my genius and all the strength of my industry."

The second

period, 1639

The summer of 1639 (July) found Milton back in England. Immediately after his return he wrote the Epitaphium Damonis, the beautiful elegy in which he lamented the death of his school friend, Diodati. Lycidas was the last

1660. Milton abandons poe

try.

of the English lyrics: the Epitaphium, which should be studied in close connection with Lycidas, the last of the long Latin poems. Thenceforth, for a long spell, the rest was silence, so far as concerned poetry. The period which for all men represents the strength and maturity of manhood, which in the cases of other poets produces the best and most characteristic work, is with Milton a blank. In twenty years he composed no more than a bare handful of Sonnets, and even some of these are infected by the taint of political animus. Other interests filled his thoughts-the question of Church-reform, education, marriage, and, above all, politics.

and Educa

tion.

Milton's first treatise upon the government of the Pamphlets Established Church (Of Reformation touchon the Church ing Church-Discipline in England) appeared in 1641. Others followed in quick succession. The abolition of Episcopacy was the watchword of the enemies of the Anglican Church-the great rallyingcry of Puritanism, and no one enforced the point with greater eloquence than Milton. During 1641 and 1642 he wrote five pamphlets on the subject. Meanwhile he was studying the principles of education. On his return from Italy he had undertaken the training of his nephews1. This led to consideration of the best educational methods; and in the Tractate on Education, 1644, Milton assumed the part of educational theorist. In the previous year, May, 1643, he married?. Marriage. The marriage proved, at the time, unfortunate. Its immediate outcome was the pamphlets on 1 Edward and John Phillips, sons of Milton's only sister. Both subsequently joined the Royalist party. To Edward Phillips we owe a memoir of the poet.

2 His wife (who was only seventeen) was Mary Powell, eldest daughter of Richard Powell, of Forest Hill, a village some little distance from Oxford. She went to stay with her father in July 1643, and refused to return to Milton; why, it is not certain. She was reconciled to her husband in 1645, bore him four children, and died in 1652, in her twenty-seventh year.

Divorce. Clearly he had little leisure for literature proper.

was

Political

Pamphlets. Appointment to Latin Secretaryship.

The finest of Milton's prose works, the Areopagitica, a plea for the free expression of opinion, was published in 1644. In 16451 he edited the first collection of his poems. In 1649 his advocacy of the anti-royalist cause recognised by the offer of a post under the newly appointed Council of State. His bold vindication of the trial of Charles I., The Tenure of Kings, had appeared earlier in the same year. Milton accepted the offer,

No doubt, the scene in Paradise Lost x. 909-946, in which Eve begs forgiveness of Adam, reproduced the poet's personal experience, while many passages in Samson Agonistes must have been inspired by the same cause.

1 i.e. old style. The volume was entered on the registers of the Stationers' Company under the date of October 6th, 1645. It was published on Jan. 2, 1646, with the following titlepage:

"Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, compos'd at several times. Printed by his true Copies. The Songs were set in Musick by Mr. Henry Lawes, gentleman of the King's Chappel, and one of His Majesties private Musick.

-Baccare frontem

Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro.' VIRG. Ecl. 7. Printed and publish'd according to Order. London, Printed by Ruth Raworth, for Humphrey Moseley, and are to be sold at the signe of the Princes Arms in Pauls Churchyard. 1645."

From the prefatory Address to the Reader it is clear that the collection was due to the initiative of the publisher. Milton's own feeling is expressed by the motto, where the words "vati futuro" show that, as he judged, his great achievement was yet to come. The volume was divided into two parts, the first containing the English, the second the Latin poems. Comus was printed at the close of the former, with a separate title-page to mark its importance.

The advantage of the post.

becoming Latin1 Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs. There was nothing distasteful about his duties. He drew up the despatches to foreign governments, translated state-papers, and served as interpreter to foreign envoys. Had his duties stopped here his acceptance of the post would, I think, have proved an unqualified gain. It brought him into contact with the first men in the state, gave him a practical insight into the working of national affairs and the motives of human action; in a word, furnished him with that experience of life which is essential to all poets who aspire to be something more than "the idle Its disad- singers of an empty day." But unfortunately vantage. the secretaryship entailed the necessity of defending at every turn the past course of the revolution and the present policy of the Council. Milton, in fact, held a perpetual brief as advocate for his party. Hence the endless and unedifying controversies into which he drifted; controversies which wasted the most precious years of his life, warped, as some critics think, his nature, and eventually cost him his eyesight.

Milton's writings on behalf of the Commonwealth.

Between 1649 and 1660 Milton produced no less than eleven pamphlets. Several of these arose out of the publication of the famous Eikon Basilike. The book was printed in 1649 and created so great an impression in the king's favour that Milton was asked to reply to it. This he did with

1 A Latin Secretary was required because the Council scorned, as Edward Phillips says, “to carry on their affairs in the wheedling, lisping jargon of the cringing French." Milton's salary was £288, in modern money about £900.

2 There is no proof that Milton ever had personal intercourse with Cromwell, and Mr Mark Pattison implies that he was altogether neglected by the foremost men of the time. Yet it seems unlikely that the Secretary of the Committee should not have been on friendly terms with some of its members, Vane, for example, and Whitelocke.