P his college. But let it be recollected that in his time there was only one fellowship in his college tenable by a layman, and that, as he had now determined against entering into the church for reasons which, hallowed by conscience, are entitled to our respect, the attainment of a common fellowship, to be held only for a very limited term, could not be among the objects of his life. The competence also, of which he was assured from his father, would place him above the wish of any thing to be obtained by solicitation; and it is not impossible that, associating the idea of a fellow of a college, as the governor of a community, with that of some duty to be discharged by residence, he would decline a situation which must preclude him from the range of the world. The five years, which he passed under his father's roof, may justly be regarded as the १ • Founded by Edward VI. Two other lay-fellowships have since been founded by sir John Finch, and sir Thomas Baines. P-"perceiving, that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withall, which unless he took with a conscience that could retch, he must either strain perforce or split his faith; I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing." Reasons of Church Gov. P. W. i. 123. This house, as Mr. Todd says on the authority of the rector of Horton, was pulled down about fourteen years ago. happiest of his life. In literary leisure and the company of an intelligent and beloved father; with a select correspondence and an occasional intercourse with the society, the sciences and the arts of the metropolis, the temperance of his enjoyment must have been completely satisfied; and the fruition of the tranquil present was not disturbed by any alarming prescience of the dark and stormy future. In a passage of his spirited poem to his father, written, as it is probable, about this time, he seems conscious of his high destiny, and magnanimously exults over those evils which he knew, by the experience of all ages, to be inseparably attached to it. Este procul vigiles curæ! procul este querelæ, Paterno rure, quo is transigendæ senectutis causâ concesserat, evolvendis Græcis Latinisque scriptoribus summum per otium totus vacavi; ità tamen ut nonnunquam rus urbe mutarem, aut cöemendorum gratiâ librorum, aut novum quidpiam in Mathematicis vel in Musicis, quibus tum oblectabar, addiscendi. Defen. secund. P. W. v. 230. "Anguiferos rictûs," is certainly an inaccurate expression. Vipereos rictus, if the verse had permitted it, would have been unexceptionable. "Calumnia" is, I fear, the property of prose rather than of poetry. It occurs frequently in Cicero, and some. times as a forensic word; but never in Virgil, nor, as I believe, in any of the Augustan poets. Many of Milton's expressions in his Latin poems are not supported by high classical authority. In me triste nihil fœdissima turba potestis, Hence wakeful Cares and pining Sorrows fly! No harm can touch me from your hateful band: But he could only calculate the contingencies, not fasten his sight, (if the expression may be allowed to me,) on the realities of futurity. If some minister of the divine wrath, commissioned to disclose the vision of our poet's advancing life, had at this instant exhibited to him the Milton of later days, sacrificing his prime of manhood to the sullen and fiery demon of religious and civil discord; exposed to rancorous and savage calumny; making a cheerful surrender of his sight to the cause, as he deemed it, of his country and his species, yet afterwards abandoned and persecuted; with his public objects lost, his private fortune ruined, his society avoided, his name pronounced with execration, his life itself saved only by a kind of miracle from an ignominious and a torturing execution, and his old age, more deeply clouded also by the unkindness of children, finally closing amid dangers and alarms, in solitude and darkness-if this scene, I say, in its full deformity had been exposed to our poet's eye in his happy retreat at Horton, the cup of joy would have fallen from his hand; his fortitude, strong as we know it to have been, would probably have yielded to the shock; and, prostrate before the Father of mercies, he would have poured his soul in solicitous supplication for the refuge of an early grave. But of the world of destiny, as it was passing, one spot alone was discovered to him; and all that was unknown was peopled by hope with her own gay and beautiful progeny. While he passed his hours in converse with the mighty dead, or with the wise and virtuous living; while, unmolested by any agitating or painful passions, he penetrated science with his intellect or traversed fairy regions with his fancy, he enjoyed an interval of happiness on which, amid the asperities of his later years, he must frequently have looked back with emotions nearly similar to those of the traveller, who, wandering over the moors of Lapland and beaten by an arctic storm, reflects on the blue skies, the purple clusters and the fragrant orange groves of Italy. To this favoured period of our author's life are we indebted for some of the most exquisite productions of his genius. The Comus, in 1634, and the Lycidas, in 1637, were unquestionably written at Horton; and there is the strongest internal evidence to prove that the Arcades, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso were also composed in this rural scene and this season of delightful leisure. It is probable, indeed, that the composition of the “Arcades" preceded that of the “ Comus," as the countess dowager of Derby,' for whom it was written, seems, from her residence at Harefield in the vicinity of Horton and from her double alliance with the family of Egerton, to have been the connecting link between the author and the earl of Bridgewater,' the immediate patron of Comus. These pieces have been so frequently made the subjects of critical remark, that a long suspension of our narrative would not • Alice, countess dowager of Derby, was the sixth daughter of sir John Spencer of Althorpe in Northamptonshire, and married lord Strange, who by the death of his father in 1594 became earl of Derby, and died in the following year. She afterwards married the lord chancellor Egerton, who died in 1617: her daughter, Frances, married the chancellor's son, John earl of Bridgewater lord president of Wales. She was of the same family with Spenser the poet; and had been his patroness and his theme of praise before she was celebrated by the Muse of Milton. The earl of Bridgewater was the proprietor also of Horton. H |