civilly with cake and wine by the magistrates; Henderson Dickson, and Cant preached in public; but, on the whole, the natural granite of the place was too hard for them, and little impression was made.1

In the month of April, 1638, while the National League and Covenant was still being signed in Scotland, and the words "Covenant" and "Covenanters were just beginning to be in men's mouths in England as implying something strange that was occurring in the northern part of the island, and when, at the same time, the last piece of English news was the termination of Hampden's famous case of ship-money by a decision against him, our poet, whom we left at Horton, was preparing to leave England. A journey on the continent, and, above all, in Italy, had long been one of his wishes; and he had at length procured his father's somewhat unwilling consent.

For young Englishmen going abroad in those days, the first necessity was a passport, which could only be obtained by waiting personally on one of the secretaries of state, answering any questions that might be asked respecting his objects in travelling, and, above all, giving satisfaction respecting his religion. In this matter Milton seems to have had no difficulty. He was able also, through his friends, to take with him unusually good letters of introduction. The following letter, sent to him just before his departure, has an interest independent of its immediate connection with his intended journey. It is from Sir Henry Wotton, Provost of Eton, with whom, as the letter itself explains, Milton, though so long his near neighbor, had just become acquainted when his resolution to travel was taken.

"SIR:

"From the College, this 13th of April, 1638.

"It was a special favor when you lately bestowed upon me here the first taste of your acquaintance, though no longer than to make me know that I wanted more time to value it, and to enjoy it rightly; and in truth, if I could then have imagined your farther stay in these parts [i. e. at Horton, so near Eton], which I understood afterwards by Mr. H. [doubtless Mr. Hales], I would have been bold, in our vulgar phrase, to mend my draught (for you left me with an extreme thirst), and to have begged your conversation again, jointly with your said learned friend, at a poor meal or two, that we might have banded together some good authors of the ancient time; among which I observed you to have been familiar.

1 Spalding's Troubles.

"Since your going, you have charged me with new obligations, both for a very kind letter from you dated the 6th of this month, and for a dainty piece of entertainment [a copy of Lawes's edition of Comus] which came therewith, wherein I should much commend the tragical part [i. e. the Dialogue of Comus] if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Doric delicacy in your songs and odes; whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language. Ipsa mollities! But I must not omit to tell you that I now only owe you thanks for intimating unto me (how modestly soever) the true artificer. For the work itself I had viewed some good while before with singular delight, having received it from our common friend, Mr. R., in the very close of the late R.'s Poems, printed at Oxford; whereunto it is added, as I now suppose, that the accessory might help out the principal, according to the art of stationers, and to leave the reader con la bocca dolce.1

2

"Now, Sir, concerning your travels, wherein I may challenge a little more privilege of discourse with you. I suppose you will not blanch Paris on your way; therefore I have been bold to trouble you with a few lines to Mr. M. B., whom you shall easily find attending the young Lord S., as his governor, and you may surely receive from him good directions for the shaping of your farther journey into Italy, where he did reside by my choice some time for the King, after mine own recess from Venice.

"I should think that your best line will be through the whole length of France to Marseilles, and thence by sea to Genoa, whence the passage into Tuscany is as diurnal as a Gravesend barge. I hasten, as you do, to Florence or Siena the rather to tell you a short story, from the interest you have given me in your safety.

"At Siena, I was tabled in the house of one Alberto Scipioni, an old Roman courtier in dangerous times having been steward to the Duca di Pagliano, who with all his family were strangled, save this only man that escaped by foresight of the tempest. With him I had often much chat of those affairs, into which he took pleasure to look back from his native harbor; and, at my departure towards Rome (which had been the centre of his experience), I had won confidence enough to beg his advice how I might carry myself securely there, without offence of others or of mine own conscience. 'Signor arrigo

1 The most probable explanation of this passage is, that "our common friend Mr. R." who had sent Wotton a copy of Comus, in its anonymous condition, some time before Milton and Wotton had met, was John Rous the Oxford Librarian; and that "the late R.'s Poems," to which this copy of Comus had been somewhat incongruously appended, either by Rous himself or by the stationer who had sold it, were the Poems of the late Thomas Randolph, of Cambridge, edited by a surviving brother, and printed, in 1638, at Oxford, "by L. Litchfield, printer to the University, for Fr. Bowman." As Lawes's edition of Comus came out nearly at the same time with the posthumous edition of Randolph's poems, and as both publications were in small quar

to, but Milton's too thin for separate binding, the conjunction might not be unnatural. Wotton, however, soon distinguishes between the bulkier beginning and the sweet morsel at the end; and it is an agreeable surprise to him to learn that his young neighbor, Mr. Milton, with whom he has just formed an acquaintance, is the author of the piece he has been admiring.

2 The "young Lord S." has been supposed to be Lord Scudamore, son of the ambassador at Paris, of which, however, I am not sure; and "Mr. M. B.," his governor, is Michael Branthwait, mentioned elsewhere by Wotton as "heretofore his Majesty's agent in Venice, a gentleman of approved confidence and sincerity."- See Todd's Milton, VI. 183.

mio,' says he, 'I pensieri stretti et il viso sciolto (Thoughts close, looks loose') will go safely over the whole world.' Of which Delphian oracle (for so I have found it) your judgment doth not need no commentary; and therefore, Sir, I will commit you with it to the best of all securities, God's dear love, remaining "Your friend, as much at command

"As any of longer date,

"HENRY WOTTON."

"SIR:

POSTSCRIPT.

"I have expressly sent this my foot-boy to prevent your departure without some acknowledgment from me of the receipt of your obliging letter, having myself, through some business, I know not how, neglected the ordinary conveyance [between Eton and Horton ?]. In any part where I shall understand you fixed, I shall be glad and diligent to entertain you with home-novelties; even for some fomentation of our friendship, too soon interrupted in the cradle." 2

It cannot have been more than a day or two after Sir Henry's foot-boy delivered this gratifying letter (which makes us like the courteous old Provost better than ever), when Milton was on his way across the Channel. On one circumstance connected with his departure I am able to afford some new information. As Milton's father was now an aged man and a widower, one does not like to fancy that he was left alone at Horton during his eldest son's absence; and on this point, I believe, the fact accords with what one would wish. Milton's younger brother Christopher had by this time nearly finished his law studies at the Inner Temple, and, at the age of two-and-twenty, was about to be called to the bar. More precocious in love matters than his elder brother, he had not waited for the completion of his law studies before taking the important step of matrimony. His wife was Thomasine or Thomasina Webber, the daughter of a London citizen; and I have found evidence in the registers of Horton parish proving almost certainly, that the marriage took place before Milton's departure in April 1638, and also that, after their marriage, the young couple resided with the old man at Horton. They resided there, I fear,

1 The story of Scipioni and his maxim was a favorite one with Wotton-always told by him, in particular, to young friends and pupils going abroad. See it in another letter of his (Reliquia Wottonianæ, edit. 1672, p. 356).

2 Prefixed by Milton himself to Comus in the first edition of his minor poems, in 1645; and printed also by Izaak Walton, in his Reliquia Wottoniana.

3 It is not the marriage entry of Christopher Milton that I have found in the Horton Register, but the burial entry of what I take to

have been his first child, and the baptism entry of what I take to have been his second. The first stands thus:-"1639: An infant sonne of Christopher Milton, gent., buried March ye 26th." It is a fair calculation that the marriage took place a year previously, which would be a mouth and a half before Milton's departure. The second entry stands thus:"1640: Sarah, ye daughter of Christopher and Thomasin Milton, baptized Aug. 11th." The poet had, by that time, returned to Eng. land.

at his expense; and it says much for the excellent man's love of his children, and something also for the extent of his means, that, while consenting to this arrangement on behalf of his younger son, he cheerfully incurred also the additional expense of sending his eldest son abroad, according to his wish. The poet took one man-servant with him, and intended perhaps to be several years absent; and the expense to which his father consented cannot have been less than about £200 a-year of the money of that day.' Till Milton was over thirty-two years of age, he did not, so far as I know, earn a penny for himself.

CHAPTER VIII.

CONTINENTAL JOURNEY.

1638-1639.

RICH in event and in emotion as was that struggle between Prerogative and Popular Liberty, between Prelacy and Puritanism, which had been the main fact in England since Milton was born, and of great and world-wide effect as was to be the shock to which it was leading, it was still, from the point of view of general history, but a strong and rather peculiar eddy, in one angle of Europe, of an agitation which extended contemporaneously, in the manner of a polarizing force, over the whole face of the European map. Since the year 1618, when Milton was in his early boyhood, there had been moving on in slow progression, in various parts of the continent, that complex and yet continuous course of events to which subsequent historians, viewing it in its totality (1618-1648), have affixed the name of "The Thirty Years' War.". To us Britons now, shut up so long in our own affairs, and looking so reluctantly backward, this "Thirty Years' War" is little more, in our popular representations of it, than a dim period of continental battles and sieges, of absurd marchings and countermarchings, of famines and mutual massacres, out of which may be derived convenient calculations of the millions that may be spent on gunpowder, and other statistics illustrating the horrors of war and the folly of religious differences. All this may have been in the "Thirty Years' War;" but this is not what it really was, nor what it seemed to our forefathers. That war of the Thirty Years, say our more instructed historians, was the last war of religion in Europe. The statement may be too positive. Is not our phrase, "the folly of religious differences," but a beggarly one after all; are not the speculative forces even now mustering afresh in an organized duality, which only a crash can solve; and is there not yet to come the prophetic Armageddon? But if the Thirty Years' War was not the last war of religion in Europe, it was the last for a long time at once the consummation politically and the attenuation spiritually of the movement begun in Europe by the Lutheran Reformation.