The meeting probably occurred at the villa of Arcetri, near Florence, where the aged and blind astronomer was still held in partial confinement by the Inquisition. The painter who has given us the picture of Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters might have found here a subject in which truth need not have been sacrificed to picturesqueness. The meeting of these two great navigators of cosmic space, bound together by a common intrepidity and a common fate, exercises a legitimate spell over the imagination. It is open to question whether Milton ever accepted Galileo's cosmic theories as true; certainly he did not see fit to admit the new astronomy into the scheme of Paradise Lost, except in the tentative form of a discussion of the theory between Adam and Raphael. But that he cherished the august memory of the blind philosopher, in his own days of blindness and defeat, is evidenced by the famous comparison of Satan's shield seen through the "Tuscan artist's optic glass," in Paradise Lost. Another reminiscence of this visit to Arcetri is the comparison of the fallen angels prostrate on the flood, to "autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa."

During February or April, 1639, Milton visited the ancestral home of the Diodati at Lucca. The hope of pleasing his bosom friend with an account of the place, which had prompted the visit, was not to be fulfilled. Diodati's death had already occurred. News of his bereavement reached Milton at Genoa, and conspired with news of the increasing gravity of the political and religious troubles in England to make his home-coming a solemn one. It is a severe loss to English literature that for the noble poem in which he enshrined the memory of his friend Milton chose the Latin instead of his native tongue. Diodati was much nearer to him than King had been; the sincere grief which makes itself felt even across the conventionalized medium of the Epitaphium Damonis testifies that if the poet had waited for a like moment of power, and had then poured his emotion into his native idiom, this and not Lycidas might be held to-day as the greatest of English threnodies. As it is the poem is an exquisite and touching work of art. Its interest is heightened by the autobiographic matter which it contains, especially concerning the projected epic dealing with the early history of Britain. We are informed that the epic is to be in English, the poet having reconciled himself, as Dante did, to the narrower but more susceptible audience thus afforded him; we learn also that it is already begun.

IV

FROM MILTON'S RETURN TO ENGLAND TO THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP,

1639-1649

EACH succeeding biographer of Milton shares Dr. Johnson's feeling of bathos in the fact that after renouncing his cherished schemes of travel in order to be present at those portentous changes in English religion and politics of which he had presentiment, he should have made haste on his return to London to burden himself with the petty duties of a schoolmaster. At first he had under his tutelage only

his two nephews, John and Edward Phillips, but later more pupils were added, including some of eminent family; nor does the pamphlet war into which he soon plunged appear to have interrupted the daily routine of pedagogy. A mere ruin. ous waste of time, we are tempted with Pattison to declare. To see the author of Lycidas putting by his lyre in order to seize the sword of controversy is endurable, but to see him in the schoolroom, pottering over Frontinus's Stratagems and the egregious poet Manilius, without the excuse of pecuniary necessity, begets in us nothing but impatience. The explanation of his action, however, is tolerably obvious. During the ten years between his return to England and his appointment as Latin Secretary to Cromwell's government, Milton was in a state of extraordinary nervous unrest. He had put poetry behind him to embark in a "troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes," but the part which he found to play in the struggle during these years was not eminent enough to satisfy his haughty and exigent nature, thus divorced from its natural consolation. The five pamphlets which during 1641-43 he launched against the Episcopal scheme of church government, influential as they undoubtedly were, and crowded with passages of lofty eloquence which made amends for their lack of a convincing logic, could not offer nepenthe for the restlessness bred of a great task deferred. In such a state of mind, mere busyness is seized upon as a form of self-justification, and incidentally serves as an excellent steadier of the nerves: Minor motives also, in Milton's case, doubtless entered in. That he had a speculative interest in the problems of teaching is attested by his Tractate on Education, with its scheme of training so curiously compounded of practical common-sense and impossible idealism. One may suspect, too, that the attitude of the teacher had, even in this small and concrete form, an attraction for one whose most splendid mental gesture was never quite free from a hint of dogmatism.

Milton's pamphlets on the church question had got him roundly abused by the adherents of Bishop Hall and the extreme prelatical party. The good bishop calls him, among other complimentary things, a "scurrilous Mime, a personated, and, as himself thinks, a grim, lowering, and bitter Fool," and describes the terse familiar Anglo-Saxon with which Milton gave idiomatic flavor to his thunderous periods, as language fit only for fish-wives. These are merely the humors of seventeenth-century controversy; his enemies were soon to have more formidable weapons put into their hands.

Edward Phillips informs us that his uncle left home suddenly in May, 1643, without stating the object of his journey, and returned a month later with a young wife and a train of bridal guests. The solemn house in Aldersgate Street was filled with merry-making for a time; then the bride's friends departed, and Milton was left with his seventeen-year old wife to discover at leisure that he had made a monstrous blunder. Mary Powell was the daughter of a Cavalier Squire holding the seat of Forest Hill, near Oxford, a gentleman of some social pretension, though burdened with debts and a large family. A considerable portion of this debt had long been held against him by the Miltons, father and son. Whether

Milton's visit to Forest Hill was on this business, or whether he knew Mary Powell previously, we shall probably never know. Precipitancy in such a matter on the poet's part will surprise no one who has studied his character with attention. A great part of the stern self-control which belongs to the Milton of tradition was an outcome of the bitter consequences of this very marriage. He was from youth more than ordinarily susceptible to the charm of women; boyishly, as we see in the first and seventh Latin elegies; with a youth's wistful expectancy, as in the Sonnet to the Nightingale; with a young man's chivalrous ardor, as in the Italian sonnets and this susceptibility was greatly heightened by the austerity of a life which left the springs of concrete emotion untouched. Mary Powell was probably the first young woman with whom he came into intimate contact; the freedom of a large household and the beguiling influences of country life were fuel to the fire; and if a doubt arose concerning the parity of their taste and temper, it was natural both to the lover and to the idealist to believe in the power of masculine will to shape a helpmeet to its own image. He succeeded so well that before the honeymoon was over, the girl-wife returned to her home, ostensibly on a visit, but really in lasting rebellion against her husband's authority; and the husband sat down in a white passion to write the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, on the thesis that a man has the right to put away his wife for incompatibility of temper. The majority of Milton's biographers, catching at certain phrases of this tract, "a mute and spiritless mate," ," "bound fast to an image of earth and phlegm," -have laid the rupture to the girl's hebetude. Others, notably Mr. Saintsbury, throw the weight of blame on the other side, pointing out that Milton held in the most uncompromising form the doctrine of the inferiority of woman, and that, as Dr. Garnett says, "his famous "He for God only, she for God in him,' condenses every fallacy concerning woman's relation to her husband and to her Maker." The truth doubtless lies between. She, accustomed to the gaiety of a large household near a Cavalier garrison, was terror-stricken at the silence which fell about her in her husband's sober Puritan house. He, twice her age and full of thoughts which she could not even guess at, was at no pains to fondle and coax her into con tentment with this twilight life. If he did not go so far as an anonymous pamphleteer charged him with going, to consider "no woman to due conversation accessible, except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, and dispute against the canon law," he was doubtless unwisely exigent and perhaps cruelly in tolerant of the unfurnished mind which he had found in the place of that “sweet and gladsome society" of his love-dream.

The first pamphlet on divorce bears evidence of being written at a white heat. Both in its qualities and its defects it is a peculiarly Miltonic utterance. As in his Tractate on Education he had "legislated for a college of Miltons," here he legis. lates for a society of seraphim. Every man is to have power to loose and bind. No law shall have authority to "force a mixture of minds that cannot unite," nor make irremediable "that melancholy despair which we see in many wedded per sons." It is the positive side of his doctrine, however, which is most eloquently

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put forth. Marriage as an ideal institution," the unexpressive nuptial song," has rarely been more nobly conceived than in these pages, and the pleading against violations of the spirit by the letter of wedlock rises at times to passionate poetry. There are few English sentences as full of virile tenderness as that in which Miltor says, “Then" (in case his tract is listened to) "I doubt not with one gentle stroking to wipe away ten thousand tears out of the life of men." The second edition, published after his wife's refusal to return, according to her word, at Michaelmas of 1643, is strengthened with formal arguments and addressed boldly to the Parliament. The Tract was publicly denounced by Mr. Herbert Palmer in a sermon before the Houses of Parliament, a sermon which had the more weight because of the excitement then reigning in that body over the general growth of "heresy and schism," of which Milton's pamphlet was held to be one of the blackest examples. One of the most signal, at least, it certainly was, indicative of that terrible spirit of question which was abroad in the land, to make a modern England out of the England of the Stuarts. The Areopagitica, or speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing, the pamphlet of Milton's which has alone held an audience to our day, followed as another startling manifesto of his radical thought. Broadly viewed, it is a plea for universal toleration of opinion, exactly what distracted England most needed, if she could only have known it.

In the last but one of his four pamphlets on divorce, Tetrachordon, Milton gave hint of his intention to marry again, in the significant words, "If the Law make not a timely provision, let the Law, as reason is, bear the censure of the consequences." He even went so far, according to Phillips, as to select Mary Powell's successor, a Miss Davis, to whom in all likelihood the sonnet To a Virtuous Young Lady was addressed. Frightened by rumors of this match, and further induced by the increasingly desperate condition of the Cavalier cause, the Powells made overtures for a reconciliation. Milton was brought, without warning, face to face with his truant bride at the home of his kinsman, Mr. Blackborough, in St. Martin's le Grand Lane. The passage in Samson Agonistes in which the blind captive repulses his "hyena " wife, and that in Paradise Lost where Adam raises up and comforts remorseful Eve, have been often pointed out as having a probable autobiographic bearing on this episode. Whether from repentance or a broken spirit, the girl-wife seems to have lived the remaining years of her short life meekly enough. During the seven years until her death, in 1652, she bore Milton three daughters and a son, the son dying in infancy, the daughters surviving to be their father's trial and reproach. Measured against her mute acceptance of the situation, there is something unpleasantly saturnine in the two sonnets with which Milton took leave of the divorce subject. The first of these, on Tetrachordon, is the only instance in which he deigned to degrade poetry into doggerel; for the first and last time, in verse, he threw aside his lyre of song and grasped the bastinado of contemporary satire a fact which at least testifies eloquently to the harassed

condition of his mind.

During the lull in politics following the defeat of the King at Naseby, in July,

1645, Milton got together the poems which he had written up to that time, and gave them for publication to Humphrey Moseley, a printer of disinterested enthu siasm for pure literature, to whom seventeenth-century poetry stands much indebted. It was high time that such a collection should be made. In his pamphlets Milton had made more than one reference to his vocation as poet, to the work which he hoped to accomplish, and which his nation "would not willingly let die." Such words had begun to fall upon incredulous ears, for with the exception of an unsigned edition of Comus published by Lawes, the Cambridge memorial volume containing Lycidas, and a stray piece or two in the miscellanies, none of Milton's poems were in print. The motto which he chose for the volume,

"Baccare frontem

Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro,"

(Wreathe his brow with laurel, and let no grudging tongue harm the future poet), gracefully combined modesty of claim for his present performance with a proud confidence in what was to come. As frontispiece to this famous edition of 1645 there is prefixed a portrait of the author, a spiritless and bungled engraving, as "grim, lowering, and bitter" as good Bishop Hall could have desired. When the picture was shown to Milton by the engraver, one Marshall, he made no objection to it, but gravely wrote out a Greek motto to be added beneath, which the luckless artist as gravely copied on his plate, innocent of the fact that he was handing down to posterity a biting lampoon upon his own handiwork. It was a clever practical joke, and reminds us of a remark of Dryden's, years after, that Milton's manner of pronouncing the letter r, the "dog-letter," betrayed a "satiric wit." The cleverness of the joke makes ill amends for its saturninity. The poet had moved many leagues from the golden clime of his birth before he permitted himself that diversion. To be sure, he had moved under bitter stress; some of the sweet saps of his youthful nature may well have been turned to satiric acids.

It is pleasant, after this, to read the sonnet to Henry Lawes, written after Milton was installed with his wife and pupils in a large house which he had taken in the Barbican; for the placid and gracious lines show returning calmness of spirit. The halcyon season, however, when the friends might please themselves with “immortal notes and Tuscan air," was short. Soon the surrender of Oxford drove the Powells in a body from Forest Hill to the house in the Barbican. The birth of a daughter, Anne, who was from the first "a kind of cripple," added to the disturbed condition of the household. The departure of the Powell family was followed by the death of Milton's father, and the poet, wearied out with the strain of the past months, resolved to give up teaching and remove to a smaller house in High Holborn, near Lincoln's Inn Fields.

His inheritance from his father had now placed him in easy financial circumstances, and the triumph of the Independent party had left his mind comparatively free. Why did he not turn now to that great task of poetic creation of which he had thought so long, and for which, as his preserved notebooks show, he had already made exhaustive study? It is impossible to say. Perhaps, in spite of the