and literati in the midst of whom he found himself in the different Italian cities he visited, and especially to his acquaintances of the Florentine group, Gaddi, Dati, Frescobaldi, Coltellini, Chimentelli, Francini, and others. It is not a matter of fancy, but of actual information by Milton himself, that, as he parted from these groups of new friends, and took his way at length back from Italy, homewards, through Switzerland and France, it was with a kind of impatience to meet Diodati again, after so long an absence, so as to pour into his ear, in long sittings within-doors, or in walks together through English fields and country lanes, the connected story of all he had done and seen in the wondrous southern land of olives and myrtles, blue skies and soft winds, art and antiquities, poetry and beauty.

All the more terrible was the shock that awaited Milton. His friend Diodati was no longer alive. He had died very soon after Milton had left England, or in the summer of 1638, though no news of the fact had reached Milton till the Italian part of his tour was completed, or all but completed, and he was on his way back. The news did reach him while he was still on the Continent, and most probably at Geneva, in June 1639; for he tells us that, while there, on his return, he was much in the company of the celebrated theologian, Jean Diodati, the uncle of Charles Diodati (see Introd. to Elegia Prima), and it is natural to suppose that the uncle had heard of his nephew's death. Not till Milton was in England, however, did he fully ascertain the particulars. Of these he might be informed by Diodati's father, old Dr. Theodore, or by the surviving brother, young Dr. Theodore. Whatever they were, they impressed Milton greatly. For some time he seems to have gone about, between London and Horton, thinking of little else than Charles Diodati's death. His return to England, his reminiscences of Italy and all the delights of his tour, were saddened and spoiled to him by this one irremediable loss. At length his musings over it take poetic form, and some time in the late autumn of 1639, or in the winter of 1639-40, he writes his Epitaphium Damonis.

The poem is, beyond all question, the finest, the deepest in feeling, of all that Milton has left us in Latin, and one of the most interesting of all his poems, whether Latin or English. It

is purely the accident of its being in Latin that has prevented it from being as well known as Lycidas, and that has transferred to the subject of that English pastoral, Edward King of Christ's College, Cambridge, the honour of being remembered and spoken of as the preeminent friend of Milton's youth and early manhood. We have already, in the Introduction to Lycidas, cautioned against that impression; and the caution must now be repeated even more strongly. Not Lycidas but Damon, not the Irish-born Edward King, but the half-Italian Charles Diodati, was Milton's dearest, most intimate, most peculiar friend. The records prove this irresistibly, and a careful perusal of the two poems will add to the impression. Whoever will read the Latin Epitaphium Damonis will perceive in it a passionateness of personal grief, an evidence of bursts of tears and sobbings interrupting the act of writing, to which there is nothing equivalent in the English Lycidas, affectionate and exquisitely beautiful as that poem is. Yet the two poems are, in a sense, companions, and ought to be recollected in connexion. Both are pastorals; in both the form is that of a surviving shepherd bewailing the death of a dear fellow-shepherd. In the one case the dead shepherd is named Lycidas, while the surviving shepherd who mourns him is left unnamed, and only seen at the end as the "uncouth swain" who has been singing; in the other the dead shepherd is named Damon, and Milton, under the name of Thyrsis, is avowedly the shepherd who laments him. The reader may here refer to what has been said, in the Introduction to Lycidas, concerning the Pastoral form of Poetry and the objections that have been taken to it. What was said there in defence of the Pastoral form, or in explanation of its real nature, is even more necessary here; for not only is the Epitaphium Damonis also a pastoral, but it is a pastoral of the most artificial variety. It is in Latin; and this, in itself, removes it into the realm of the artificial. But, in the Latin, the precedents of the Greek pastoralists, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, as well as of the Latin Virgil, have been studied, and every device of classic pastoralism has been imitated. There are the sheep, the kids, the reeden flutes, the pastures, the shepherds and shepherdesses wondering at the mourner and coming round him to comfort him; the measure used is the Virgilian Hexameter, and the poem is broken

into musical parts or bursts by a recurring phrase as in some of the Greek Idylls; the names used for the shepherds and shepherdesses are from the Greek Idyllists or from Virgil; the very title of the poem is an echo of that of the third Idyll of Moschus, Epitaphium Bionis. All the more strange, to those whose notion of the Pastoral has not gone beyond Dr. Johnson's in his criticism of Lycidas, may seem the assertion that in this Latin pastoral, the Epitaphium Damonis, the pastoralism of which is more subtle and artificial in every point than that of the corresponding English poem, Milton will be found, undeniably, and with an earnestness which breaks through the assumed guise and thrills the nerves of the reader, speaking his own heart. For my own part, I risk the assertion and will leave the verification to the reader. To the reader also I will leave the pleasure of finding out what is interesting in this extraordinary poem. Only, while he notes the keen and varied expression of Milton's grief and affection for his lost friend, and the mingling of this grief and affection with his recollections of Italy and the new friends he had made there, especially those of the Florentine group and the Neapolitan Manso, let him rest a little, for special reasons, over the memorable passage beginning "Ipse etiam" (line 155) and extending to "Orcades undis" (line 178). That passage is an important shred of Milton's autobiography. It tells, more minutely, and in a more emphatic manner, what he had already hinted in his Latin poem to Manso, viz. that at this period of his life his thoughts were full of the project of an Epic poem founded on British legendary History, and especially on the subject of King Arthur. Combined with this glimpse of what was shaping itself in Milton's mind at that time (1639-40) is the farther information that he had then also resolved to give up Latin for the purposes of Poetry, and to confine himself to English.

In both Milton's editions of his Poems the Epitaphium Damonis is treated with special typographical respect. In the edition of 1645 it comes last in the volume, and with the title and argument, at the beginning, printed on a right-hand page, so as to separate the poem from the preceding contents. In the edition of 1673 there is the same distinction of title and argument on a separate right-hand page, though in that volume some

additional matter follows the Epitaphium. There is proof that the memory of Diodati never faded from Milton's mind. In a Latin letter, among his Epistola Familiares, dated "London, April 21, 1647," and addressed to his Florentine friend Carlo Dati, the death of Diodati, then nine years past, is mentioned, with peculiar solemnity, as still in his thoughts and ever to be sacredly present there. The similarity of the names of the Carlo Dati so addressed and the Charles Diodati spoken of is very curious; but the reader ought to remember them as two perfectly distinct persons in Milton's Biography.

AD JOANNEM ROUSIUM,

OXONIENSIS ACADEMIE BIBLIOTHECARIUM.

JANUARY 23, 1646-7.

(Edition of 1673.)

John Rous, M.A. and Fellow of Oriel College, was elected Chief Librarian of the Bodleian May 9, 1620, and he remained in that post till his death in April 1652. Milton may have become acquainted with him in some visit to Oxford during the Cambridge period of his life, or, at all events, in 1635, when, as a Cambridge M.A. of three years' standing, he was incorporated, in the same degree, at Oxford. It is almost certain that "our common friend Mr. R." mentioned by Sir Henry Wotton in his letter to Milton of April 13, 1638, as having sent to Wotton a copy of Lawes's anonymous edition of Comus of the previous year, bound up with a volume of inferior poetry printed at Oxford, was this John Rous, the Oxford Librarian. In any case, Milton had come to know Rous. Who in those days could avoid doing so that had dealings with books, and was drawn to the sight of such a collection of books as that in the great Bodleian? It may have been a recommendation of Rous in Milton's eyes that, Oxonian though he was, his sympathies were decidedly Parliamentarian. Possibly he was a relative of Francis Rous, the Puritan member of the Long Parliament for Truro.

Milton's present verses to Rous are dated by himself “Jan. 23, 1646" (i.e. Jan. 23, 1647, as we should now write); and, in his

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own extended title, they are designated “Ad Joannem Rousium, Oxoniensis Academia Bibliothecarium: De Libro Poematum amisso, quem ille sibi denuo mitti postulabat, ut cum aliis nostris in Bibliothecâ publicâ reponeret: Ode." ("To John Rous, Librarian of the University of Oxford: concerning a lost Book of Poems, of "which he asked a fresh copy to be sent him, that he might replace it with others of ours in the public Library: An Ode.") The circumstances here indicated may be explained exactly :There is still in the Bodleian an old bound volume containing all Milton's pamphlets that had been published before 1645, and the following inscription, indubitably in Milton's own hand, on a blank leaf at the beginning: "Doctissimo viro, proboque librorum æstimatori, Joanni Rousio, Oxoniensis Academia Bibliothecario, gratum hoc sibi fore testanti, Joannes Miltonus opuscula hæc sua, in Bibliothecam antiquissimam atque celeberrimam adsciscenda libens tradit, tanquam in memoriæ perpetuæ fanum, emeritamque, uti sperat, invidiæ calumniæque vacationem, si Veritati Bonoque simul Eventui satis litatum sit. Sunt autem :-De Reformatione Anglia, Lib. 2; De Episcopatu Prælatico, Lib. 1; De Ratione Politiæ Ecclesiastica, Lib. 2; Animadversiones in Remonstrantis Defensionem, Lib. 1; Apologia, Lib. 1 ; Doctrina et Disciplina Divortii, Lib. 2 ; Judicium Buceri de Divortio, Lib. 1; Colasterion, Lib. 1; Tetrachordon, in aliquot præcipua Scripturæ loca de Divortio Instar, Lib. 4; Areopagitica, sive de Libertate Typographia Oratio; De Educatione Ingenuorum Epistola; Poemata Latina et Anglicana, seorsim.” (“To "the most learned man and good judge of Books, John Rous, "Librarian of the University of Oxford, on his testifying that this "would be agreeable to him, John Milton gladly gives these "small works of his, to be taken into the most ancient and "celebrated library, as into a temple of perpetual memory, "and so, as he hopes, into a merited freedom from ill-will "and calumny, if satisfaction enough be paid to Truth and at "the same time to Good Fortune. They are 'Of Reformation "in England,' two Books; 'Of Prelatical Episcopacy,' one "Book; "Of the Reason of Church Government,' two Books; "Animadversions on the Remonstrant's Defence,' one Book; "Apology against the same,' one Book; 'The Doctrine and "Discipline of Divorce,' two Books; 'The Judgment of Bucer