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seen, to Holstein from Florence on the 30th of March, and within the next fortnight he must have set out for Venice, where he spent a month, and so left it in or about the middle of May, so as to reach Geneva by the end of that month or the beginning of June. He must have made some stay in Geneva, as he did not land in England till some time in August.*

When terminating at Geneva the brief account which he gives of his travels, Milton expresses himself in the following terms:-"Here again I take God to witness, that I lived in all those places, where so much license is given, free from and untouched by any kind of vice and infamy, continually bearing in mind that even if I could escape the eyes of men, I could not escape those of God." Even in his Italian poetry, written at Florence, we may discern the same religious tone which characterized his English compositions anterior to his abode at Horton. From his poem to Manso, and from the complimentary verses of his Roman friends, we may perceive that he had formed the intention and made known his resolution of writing an heroic poem, taking his subject from some part of the ancient British history, as narrated by Geoffrey of Monmouth. There is not the slightest reason for supposing that the Fall of Man had as yet presented itself to his mind, as the subject of either an epic poem or a drama.

* We feel a kind of pride at the reflection that our own route in Italy, the only time we have been able to visit it, and the time we spent in its various cities, have several points of coincidence with those of Milton.

THIRD PERIOD.

CIVIL WAR AND COMMONWEALTH.

A. D. 1639-1660. A. ÆT. 31–52.

MILTON's return to England was not, as he himself (by a slip of memory, no doubt) states, *"at the time when Charles, having broken the peace with the Scots, was renewing the second of those wars named Episcopal," but exactly a twelvemonth previous to that time, and about eight months before the meeting of the Short Parliament. It is not improbable that his father had disposed of the house at Horton during his son's absence, and gone to reside with his son Christopher, with whom we find him living in Reading, at a somewhat later period: Milton therefore, who had now a large collection of books, and who expected more every day from Italy, and for this and probably other reasons did not wish to live out of London, hired apartments for himself in that city.

It was probably very soon after his return that he wrote his beautiful Latin poem, the Epitaphium Damonis, to commemorate the virtues of his early friend Charles Diodati, who had died apparently in the preceding spring, while the poet was enjoying the delights

* Defensio Secunda.

of Florence. Though he tells us himself that "he received the intelligence while he was abroad," his biographers assure us that he did not hear of it till his

return.

Milton was now arrived at the close of his thirty-first year; the allowance made him by his father placed him at least in independent circumstances; nature had not qualified him to take an active part in public affairs, for his delight was in the studious shade of retirement; but still, to live entirely to himself in literary selfishness would in his eyes have been a gross dereliction of duty. "Things," says he,t "being in such a disturbed and fluctuating state, I looked about to see if I could get any place that would hold myself and my books, and so I took a house of sufficient size in the city; and there, with no small delight, I resumed my intermitted studies; cheerfully leaving the event of public affairs, first to God, and then to those to whom the people had committed that task." We may here observe, that the house of which he speaks was not his first residence in London after his return from the Continent. His nephew informs us, that he took apartments (probably the whole upper part of the house) in the house of one Russell, a tailor, in St. Bride's churchyard, Fleet-street. As his sister, Mrs. Phillips, had married a second time, and perhaps was not in very affluent circumstances, he kindly undertook to relieve her of the burden of her younger son John, then a smart clever boy of nine years of age, taking him "to his own charge and care," as his other

"Thyrsis, animi causa profectus peregre, de obitu Damonis nuncium accepit. Demum postea reversus, et rem ita esse comperto, se suamque solitudinem hoc carmine deplorat."-Argum. Epit. Damonis. + Defensio Secunda.

nephew expresses it, that is, keeping and educating him at his own expense.

He did not remain long in these lodgings, for finding them too confined, or more probably being, as we shall see, urged by his friends to extend his sphere of usefulness, he left them some time early in 1640, and took what was called a garden-house,-i. e. a house standing detached in an enclosed garden, of which there were many such at that time in London. It stood at the end of an entry in Aldersgate-street, "and therefore," says Phillips, "the fitter for his turn by the reason of the privacy, besides that there were few streets in London more free from noise than that. Here his elder nephew Edward Phillips was, he tells us, "put to board with him ;" and, in addition to his nephews, he was induced to receive a few more pupils, the sons of his intimate friends, for whom we are to suppose he was liberally remunerated. We are not informed of the number or the names of these, but the number of course could not have been large.

*

His course of education was a very extensive one, by far too much so for the ordinary order of minds. But it was also, in our opinion, an erroneous one; as, by putting authors of an inferior order into the hands of youth, the opportunity of forming a pure and correct taste was lost, and by giving the preference to works of science, the culture of the imagination, which is such a source of pure happiness at all periods of life, was nearly altogether neglected. Where a poet was the teacher,

* Mr. Hunter (Milton, p. 26) having given the names of those who lived in the same street, among whom was Milton's old master Dr. Gill and Sir Thomas Cecil, observes that "Milton's house was situated in what, in modern phrase, would be called a genteel part of the town."

one might have expected that Homer, Virgil, "the lofty grave tragedians," Horace, and Ovid, would have stood in the foremost rank. But no; their names do not even occur in the list of authors given by Phillips, as those read by himself and his fellow-pupils under the eye of the author of Comus. These were (credite posteri !), in Latin, the four Scriptores Rei Rusticæ, Cato, Varro, Palladius, and Columella; great part of Pliny's Natural History, the medical work of Celsus, Vitruvius, and the Stratagems of Frontinus: to these prose works were added the philosophic poets Lucretius and Manilius. Such was the Latin course; the Greek was, from its very nature, somewhat better. It consisted of Hesiod (probably only the Works and Days), Aratus, Dionysius' Periegesis, Oppian, Quintus Smyrnæus, and Apollonius Rhodius in poetry; while the prose course contained Plutarch's Placita Philosophorum and On the Education of Children, Xenophon's Cyropædia and Anabasis, Elian's Tactics, and the Stratagems of Polyænus. Surely a more preposterous selection never was made! Some of these works even must have been unintelligible to master and pupils alike; such, for example, were the agricultural writers, which can only be understood by one who has a practical acquaintance with agriculture. It seems strange, by the way, that Virgil's Georgics should not have been included in the course. But in it, with one or two exceptions, there is no poet much above mediocrity, and not a single orator or historian.

But this by no means completed the course. Milton taught his pupils the Hebrew language, and its kindred dialects the Chaldee and the Syriac, so far as to "go through the Pentateuch, and gain an entrance into the

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