till 1673, the copy probably having gone astray at the time he was first publishing his collected poems. In the edition of 1673 it was printed, the last but one of the original poems; but in the errata, directions are given to place it immediately after the verses on the Death of a Fair Infant, which is set as the second of the original poems in that volume,-a proof that the poet aimed at somewhat of chronologic arrangement in his compositions. The heading of it is "At a Vacation Exercise in the College, part Latin, part English. The Latin speeches ended, the English thus began." Among our poet's Prolusions is one which was pronounced " In Feriis æstivis Collegii, sed concurrente, ut solet, tota fere Academiæ juventute," the subject of which is "Exercitationes nonnunquam ludicras Philosophiæ Studiis non obesse," and this is probably the Latin speech to which he alludes; for he was very careful in preserving all his compositions. Whatever the speech was, it is evident from v. 12 of the poem, that he rated it below the English compositions which followed it. n He commences with an address to his "Native Language," in which he manages to bring in some of the most attractive subjects of ancient poetry; and then he introduces the Ens, with his two sons the Predicaments, "whereof the eldest stood for Substance with his canons." Ens addresses his son Substance in a speech in the commencement highly poetic, and then really humorous. "The next, Quantity and Quality spake in prose; then Relation was called by his name." This is followed by an address, in verse, to the principal rivers of England, of which we freely confess, with Warton, that we cannot see the relevance or the connection with the subject. The rest was prose.". The verses are all heroic couplets, such as he had already employed in his translation of the 114th Psalm. EPITAPH ON THE MARCHIONESS OF WINCHESTER. The subject of this pleasing poem was Jane, first wife of John, Marquis of Winchester, a Catholic nobleman, afterwards so conspicuous for his fidelity to Charles I., and his gallant defence of his house at Basingstoke, in Hants, against the troops of the Parliament. She was daughter to Thomas Viscount Savage, of Rock-Savage, in Cheshire, by Elizabeth, daughter and coheiress of Thomas Darcy, Earl of Rivers.* She died in childbed of her second son, in her twenty-third year; the year of her death is uncertain, but, as it will appear, it could not have been later than 1628. 31 This lady appears to have been a highly accomplished person. Warton quotes a letter of Howell's to her, dated, he tells us, March 15, 1626, in which he says that he had assisted her in learning Spanish, and that Nature and the Graces had exhausted all their treasure and skill in "framing this exact model of female perfection." The death, then, of so eminent a person probably caused what is termed a sensation, and, in the manner usual at the time, it became the theme of poetry. Warton says he had heard, but doubted if it was the case, that there was a Cambridge collection of verses on her death. Todd however informs us that in a volume *Collins' Peerage, ii. 379. Hence Milton says- While Beaumont speaks of her "father's earldom." The former therefore seems to confound her with her mother, and the latter to mistake her father for her grandfather. of manuscript poems in the British Museum, this epitaph occurs, with the date 1631, and at the bottom, "Jo. Milton, of Chr. Coll., Cambr." Mr. Hunter also informs us that in a contemporary collection of Peers' Pedigrees, in his possession, the same year is the date of the Marchioness' death. We have here then a clear proof of how little such documents are to be relied on, for this date is indubitably erroneous, as in the poems of Sir John Beaumont, published posthumously in 1629, there is one to the memory of this lady, so that, as we have said, she must have died in 1628, at latest. We regard however the fact of there having been a Cambridge collection as certain; and those who set the matter on foot, whether the University authorities or not, probably sought the aid of Milton, who, although he had as yet written hardly anything in English, had in the close of 1626 distinguished himself by his Latin poems on the death of eminent personages. It is not at all likely that he would of his own accord have made the theme of his verse a lady of whom he could have known nothing but what common fame told. Warton however gives on this occasion a curious specimen of his sycophancy to the Egerton family. "It is natural to suppose," says he, "that her family was well acquainted with the family of Lord Bridgewater, belonging to the same county, for whom Milton wrote the Mask of Comus. It is therefore not improbable that Milton wrote this elegy, another poetical favour, in consequence of his acquaintance with the Egerton family." He actually would thus seem to make it posterior in order of composition to Comus! But 'mark now how a plain tale shall put him down.' Milton's acquaintance with the Egerton family, if any, which we doubt, is allowed to have originated in his S father's acquisition of the house at Horton, on the estate of Lord Bridgewater; but this poem, as we have seen, could not have been written later than 1628, when Milton was in his twentieth year, and there seems to be no reason for supposing that his father had as yet gone to live at Horton. Critics in general are agreed in acknowledging this to be a most pleasing poem. Hallam indeed qualifies his praise by saying that "the first lines are bad, and the last much worse;" and Dunster wishes that the poem had ended at the sixty-eighth verse, as "what follows seems only to weaken it, and the last verse is an eminent instance of the bathos." With this criticism we cannot quite agree. The first lines are a simple exposition of the subject, telling who the person celebrated was; and as to the bathos of the last verse, No Marchioness, but now a Queen, Milton had probably in his mind those passages of Scripture in which the pious departed are spoken of as kings, and as reigning with Christ, and he therefore naturally, when the subject was a female, employed the term queen to express that degree of spiritual exaltation. The verse is in four-foot measure. It is probably his first employment of this species of verse, which he afterwards used with so much success in L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Comus. Respecting this verse an error seems generally to prevail among critics. Observing that it consists of lines of seven as well as of eight syllables, ex. gr. This rich marble doth inter The honoured wife of Winchester, they call the former a trochaic, the latter an iambic verse.* Such however is not the case. The trochaic line was at that time unknown to English poetry, and, if we mistake not, continued to be so till Percy used it in his translations of some Spanish romances; for though some preceding poems, such as Shenstone's Princess Elizabeth and Glover's Hosier's Ghost, appear to be trochaic, they are not such in reality, but will, if accurately considered, be found to be iambics with the first foot monosyllabic, and the last hypermetric, as in But hail, thou goddess sage and holy, Hail, divinest Melancholy! Trochaic verse was familiar to the Greeks and Romans, who seem to have transmitted it to the Provençals and Spaniards, from whom it was borrowed by We will here observe, once for all, that we use these metric terms, as applied to modern verse, because the ictus, or metric accent, is the same as in the classic verses of these names. Modern verse does not attend much to quantity. In these poems the lines will generally be found to commence with monosyllables, while trochaic verse usually is fond of dissyllables. The movement of genuine trochaic verse is also different from that of these poems, more light and tripping. It is not easy, in fact, to compose genuine trochaic verse in English. The popular verse of the Romans ran thus :— Ec'ce Cæ'sar núnc triumphat, Quí subégit Gálliás.-Suet. Jul. 49; Dísce míles militáre, Gálba est nón Gætúlicús.- Id. Galba, 6 : which is just the measure of the Spanish romances :— Núnca fuéra cáballéro De dámas tán bién servído Cómo fuéra Lánzaróte Cuándo dé Bretaña víno. The Spanish verse, as we may see in the second line, admits the iamb in the first two feet. Conde however (see Ticknor, Hist. of Span. Lit. i. 100) says, “In the versification of our Castilian ballads (romances) and seguidillas, we have received from the Arabs an exact type of their verses." We doubt the fact. |
