placid Muses; and books, which are my life, have me all to themselves. When I am wearied, the pomp of the winding theatre takes me hence, and the garrulous stage calls me to its noisy applauses — whether it be the wary old gentleman that is heard, or the prodigal heir; whether the wooer, or the soldier with his helmet doffed, is on the boards, or the lawyer, prosperous with a ten years' lawsuit, is mouthing forth his gibberish to the unlearned forum. Often the wily servant is abetting the lover-son, and at every turn cheating the very nose of the stiff father; often there the maiden, wondering at her new sensations, knows not what love is, and, while she knows not, loves. Or, again, furious Tragedy shakes her bloody sceptre and rolls her eyes, with dishevelled locks, and it is a pain to look, and yet it is a pleasure to have looked and been pained; for sometimes there is a sweet bitterness in tears. Or the unhappy boy leaves his untasted joys, and falls off, a pitiful object, from his broken love; or the fierce avenger of crime recrosses the Styx from the shades, perturbing guilty souls with his funeral torch. Or the house of Pelops or that of noble Ilium is in grief, or the palace of Creon expiates its incestuous ancestry. But not always within doors, nor even in the city, do we mope; nor does the season of spring pass by unused by us. The grove also planted with thick elms, has our company, and the noble shade of a suburban neighborhood. Very often here, as stars breathing forth mild flames, you may see troops of maidens passing by. Ah! how often have I seen the wonders of a worthy form, which might even repair the old age of Jove! Ah! how often have I seen eyes surpassing all gems and whatever lights revolve round either pole; and necks twice whiter than the arms of living Pelops, and than the way which flows tinged with pure nectar; and the exquisite grace of the forehead; and the trembling hair which cheating love spreads as his golden nets; and the in

viting cheeks, compared with which hyacinthine purple is poor, and the very blush, Adonis, of thy own flower! . . . But for me, while the forbearance of the blind boy allows it, I prepare as soon as possible to leave these happy walls, and, using the help of divine all-heal, to flee far from the infamous dwellings of the sorceress Circe. It is fixed that I do go back to the rushy marshes of Cam, and once more approach the murmur of the hoarse-murmuring school. Meanwhile accept the little gift of your faithful friend, and these few words forced into alternate measures.

To Alexander Gill, Jr. (Familiar Letters, No. III.)

Indeed, every time I recollect your almost constant conversations with me (which even in this Athens, the University itself, I long after and miss), I think immediately, and not without grief, what a quantity of benefit my absence from you has cheated me of,— me who never left your company without a manifest increase and èridoois of literary knowledge, just as if I had been to some emporium of learning. Truly, amongst us here, as far as I know, there are hardly one or two that do not fly off unfeathered to Theology while all but rude and uninitiated in either Philology or Philosophy, -content also with the slightest possible touch of Theology itself, just as much as may suffice for sticking together a little sermon anyhow, and stitching it over with worn patches obtained promiscuously a fact giving reason for the dread that by degrees there may break in among our clergy the priestly ignorance of a former age. For myself, finding almost no real companions in study here, I should certainly be looking straight back to London, were I not meditating a retirement during this summer vacation into a deep literary leisure and a period of hiding, so to speak, in the bowers of the Muses.

But, as this is your own daily practice, I think it almost a crime to interrupt you longer with my din at present. Farewell.

CAMBRIDGE, July 2, 1628.

To Thomas Young. (Familiar Letters, No. IV.)

Having been invited to your part of the country, as soon as spring is a little advanced, I will gladly come, to enjoy the delights of the season, and not less of your conversation, and will withdraw myself from the din of town for a while to your Stoa of the Iceni, as to that most celebrated Porch of Zeno or the Tusculan Villa of Cicero, where you, with moderate means but regal spirit, like some Serranus or Curius, placidly reign in your little farm, and, contemning fortune, hold, as it were, a triumph over riches, ambition, pomp, luxury, and whatever the herd of men admire and are marked by. . . .

CAMBRIDGE, July 21, 1628.

To Charles Diodati,

making a stay in the country, who, having written to the author on the 13th of December, and asked him to excuse his verses, if they were less good than usual, on the ground that, in the midst of the festivities with which he had been received by his friends, he was unable to give a sufficiently prosperous attention to the Muses, had the following reply:

. . . You seem to be enjoying yourself rarely. How well you describe the feasts, and the merry December and preparations for Christmas, and the cups of French wine round the gay hearth! Why do you complain that poesy is absent from these festivities? Festivity and poetry are surely not incom

patible. (One sees the triple influence of Bacchus, Apollo,

and Ceres, in the verses you have sent me. And, then, have you not music the harp lightly touched by nimble hands, and the lute giving time to the fair ones as they dance in the old tapestried room? Believe me, where the ivory keys leap, and the accompanying dance goes round the perfumed hall, there will the Song-god be. But let me not go too far. Light Elegy is the care of many gods, and calls any one of them by turns to her assistance Bacchus, Erato, Ceres, Venus, and little Cupid besides. To poets of this order, therefore, conviviality is allowable; and they may often indulge in draughts of good old wine. But the man who speaks of high matters the heaven of the full-grown Jove, and pious heroes, and demigod leaders of men, the man who now sings the holy counsels of the gods above, and now the subterranean realms guarded by the fierce dog- let him live sparely, after the manner of the Samian master; let herbs afford him his innocent diet, let clear water in a beechen cup stand near him, and let him drink sober draughts from a pure fountain! To this be there added a youth chaste and free from guilt, and rigid morals, and hands without stain. Being such, thou shalt rise up, glittering in sacred raiment and purified by lustral waters, an augur about to go into the presence of the unoffended gods. So is wise Tiresias said to have lived, after he had been deprived of his sight; and Theban Linus; and Calchas the exile; and old Orpheus. So did the scantily-eating, water-drinking Homer carry his hero Ulysses through the monster-teeming hall of Circe, and the straits insidious with the voices of the Syrens, and through thy courts, too, O infernal King, where he is said to have held the troops of shades enthralled by libations of black blood. For the poet is sacred and the priest of the gods; and his breast and his mouth breathe the indwelling Jove.

And now, if you will know what I am myself doing (if indeed

you think it is of so much consequence to know if I am doing anything), here is the fact: we are engaged in singing the heavenly birth of the King of Peace, and the happy age promised by the holy books, and the infant cries and cradling in a manger under a poor roof of that God who rules, with his Father, the Kingdom of Heaven, and the sky with the newsprung star in it, and the ethereal choirs of hymning angels, and the gods of the heathen suddenly fleeing to their endangered fanes. This is the gift which we have presented to Christ's natal day. On that very morning, at daybreak, it was first conceived. The verses, which are composed in the vernacular, await you in close keeping; you shall be the judge to whom I shall recite them.

Prolusiones quædam Oratoriæ

Some University Latin Oratorical Exercises, seven in number, first published in 1674, the year of Milton's death, along with his Familiar Letters (Epistolæ Familiares), 'as a make-weight to counterbalance the paucity of the Letters,' have an autobiographic value; but, with the exception of a small bit, space does not allow the admission of them here. They throw light,' says Masson, upon Milton's career at Cambridge. They illustrate the extent and nature of his reading, his habits and tastes as a student, the relation in which he stood to the University system of his time, and to the new intellectual tendencies which were gradually affecting that system. They also settle in the most conclusive manner the fact that Milton passed through two stages in his career at the University, a stage of decided unpopularity, in his own College at least, which lasted till about 1628, and a final stage of triumph, when his powers were recognized.'

Masson characterizes the seventh oratorical exercise as

D