brey's “ exceeding fair” must mean a very delicate white and red. Then, he was called “ the lady" in his College - an epithet which implies that, with this unusually delicate complexion, the light brown hair falling to his ruff on both sides of his oval face, and his slender and elegant rather than massive or powerful form, there was a certain prevailing air of the feminine in his look. The feminine, however, was of that peculiar sort -- let connoisseurs determine what it is — which could consist with clear eyes of a dark gray and with a “ delicate and tunable voice,” that could be firm in the low tenor notes and carry tolerably sonorous matter. And, ladylike as he was, there was nothing effeminate in his demeanor. “ His deportment,” says Wood, “was affable, his gait erect and manly, bespeaking courage and undauntedness.” Here Wood apparently follows Milton's own account, where he tells us that in his youth he did not neglect “ daily practice” with his sword, and that he was not so “very slight” (“ exilis admodum”), but that “ armed with it, as he generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match for any one, even were he much the more robust, and of being perfectly at ease as to any injury that any one could offer him, man to man.” (“Eo accinctus, ut plerumque eram, cuivis vel multò robustiori exæquatum me putabam, securus quid mihi quis injuriæ, vir viro, inferre posset.") As to the peculiar blending that there was of the feminine and the manly in the appearance of the “ lady of Christ's,” we have some means of judging for ourselves in a yet extant portrait of him, taken (doubtless to please his father) while he was still a Cambridge student. There could scarcely be a finer picture of pure and ingenuous English youth; and, if Milton had the portrait beside him when, in later life, he had to allude, in reply to his opponents, to the delicate subject of his personal appearance, there must have been a touch of slyness in his statement, that " so far as he knew he had never been thought ugly by any one who had seen him.” In short, the tradition of his great personal beauty in youth requires no abatement."

In this beautiful and well-proportioned body," to use Aubrey's words, there lodged“ a harmonical and ingeniose soul.” In describ

with his widow to preserve.” (2.) The en- of Milton prior to 1640, and not being one of graver Vertue, being engaged, in the year the two above mentioned, would require to 1721, in engraving, for the first time, a head have its authenticity sharply looked to. The of Milton (of whom afterwards he executed question, therefore, is, Are these two indubit80 many engravings), was very anxious to able portraits still extant? Respecting the know that the picture which had been put first — the boy-portrait — there can be no into his hands to be engraved, was an authen- doubt. I have already given full informatio likeness. For this purpose he saw the tion (p. 43) respecting its history since it was poet's youngest and only surviving daugh- in possession of Milton's widow; and, by the ter, Deborah Clarke, then living in Spit- kindness of its proprietor, Mr. Disney, I have alfields. His account of the interview re- the satisfaction of giving in this volume a mains in a letter, dated August 12, 1721, new engraving of it, taken from a photoaddressed to Mr. Charles Christian, and graph made for the purpose. Respecting the now in the British Museum (Add. MS. 5016 other portrait, the following information may * fo. 71). He says, “Pray inform my Lord be interesting. Vertue, whose veracity as an Harley that I have on Thursday last seen engraver was proverbial, and whose care to the daughter of Milton the poet. I car- authenticate a suspicious picture of Milton ried with me two or three different prints put into his hands in 1721 we have already

of Milton's picture, which she immediately seen, did, ten years afterwards (1731), engrave • knew to be like her father (these seem to have a portrait of Milton as a young man, which

been prints after Faithorne's picture of him portrait he had the pleasure of knowing to be in later life), and told me her mother-in-law, one of the two that had been mentioned to him by living in Cheshire, had two pictures of him, one the poet's daughter. It was then (1731) in the when he was a school-boy, and the other when he possession of the Right Honorable Arthur was above twenty. She knows of no other pic. Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons, ture of him, because she was several years in who had bought it from the executors of Ireland, both before and after his death. Milton's widow, after her death in 1727. I showed her the painting I have to engrave, " Joannes Milton, atat. 21, ex picturâ archetypå which she believes not to be her father's pic- quæ penes est præhonorabilem Arthurum Onslow, ture, it being of a brown complexion, and Armig. Vertue Sc. 1731," was the inscription on black hair and curled locks. On the con- the quarto copy of the engraving; and there trary, he was of a fair complexion, a little was also an octavo copy in the same year, red in his cheeks, and light brown, lank hair.” with the inscription somewhat varied. There Vertue then continues: "I desire you would were repeated engravings of the same by Ver. acquaint Mr. Prior I was so unfortunate to tue in subsequent years, during Speaker Onswait upon him on Thursday morning last, low's life — Vertue having apparently had a after he was gone out of town. It was this particular liking for the picture. Of some sixintent, to inquire of him if he remembers a teen or eighteen engravings of Milton by Ver. picture of Milton in the late Lord Dorset's tue (see Granger's Biog. Hist. and Bromley's collection, as I am told this was; or, if he Cat. of Brit. Port.), five or six are from this can inform me how I shall inquire or know portrait; one of the last being that engraved the truth of this affair, I should be much for Newton's edition of Milton in 1747. The obliged to him, being very willing to have all same "Onslow portrait,'' as it was called, was certainty on that account before I begin to also engraved by Houbraken in 1741, by Cipengrave the plate, that it may be the more riani in 1760, for Mr. Hollis (see Hollis's Mesatisfactory to the public as well as myself.” moirs), and by other artists; and, indeed, this (3.) As regards these two portraits mentioned is the foundation of all the common prints by Aubrey and by Deborah Clarke, we know of Milton as a youth. The last engraving farther that they were in the possession of known to me as direct from the picture is not Milton's widow at Nantwich, Cheshire, at her a very good one, published in 1794 by Boydell death in 1727; for, in the inventory of her and Nicol, with this inscription, " John Milton, effects, one of the entries includes "Mr. Mil- atai. 21, from the original picture in the posses. ton's pictures."

sion of Lord Onslow, at Clandon in Surrey, purThese two portraits, therefore, are the only chased from the executor of Milton's widow by two belonging to the earlier part of Milton's Arthur Onslow, Esq., Speaker of the House of life, the authenticity of which seems posi- Commons, as certified in his own handwriting on tively guaranteed. There may have been oth- the back of the picture ; W. N. Gardiner, Sculpt," ers; but any portrait claiming to be a portrait (Speaker Onslow had died 1768, and his son

ing that “soul” more minutely, I may be allowed to proceed in a somewhat gradual manner. I may be allowed also to avail myself, as I proceed, of such words of my own in a previous essay on the same subject, as appear to me still to express the truth.

“ The prevailing tone, the characteristic mood and disposition of Milton's mind, even in his early youth, consisted," I have said, “in a deep and habitual seriousness.” I used, and I now use, the word in no special or restricted sense. The seriousness of which I speak was a constitutional seriousness, ratified and nourished by rational reflection, rather than the assumed temper of a sect. From his childhood we see this seriousness in Milton, this tendency to the grave and earnest in his views of things. It continues with him as he grows up. It shows itself at the University, in an unusual, studiousness and perseverance in the graver occupations of the place. It shows itself in an abstinence from many of those jocosities and frivolities which, even in his own judgment, were innocent enough, and quite permissible to those who cared for them. “Festivities and jests in which I acknowledge my faculty to be very slight,” are his own words on the subject. His pleasure in such pastimes was small; and, when he did good-humoredly throw himself into them, it was with an apology for being out of his element. But still more distinctly was the same seriousness of disposition shown in his notion as to where innocence in such things ended. In the nickname of " the lady," as applied to Milton by his Collegefellows, we see, from his own interpretation of it, not only an allusion to his personal appearance, but also a charge of prudery. It was as if they called him “the maid.” He himself understands it so; and there are passages in some of his subsequent writings, in which he seems to regard it as due to himself, and as necessary to a proper appreciation of his whole career, that such references to the innocence of his youth should be interpreted quite literally.

So far, there can be no doubt that the example of Milton contradicts much that is commonly advanced by way of a theory of the poetical character. “Poets and artists,” I have said, “are and ought to be distinguished, it is generally held, by a predominance