his emissaries to England is very vivid, and ought to be read in Professor Masson's hexameters, since the gentle Cowper was too squeamish to translate it, and the high-church Johnson to praise it. The academical exercises, especially that on Aristotle's view of Plato's philosophy, show how Milton could clothe with life even the dry bones of metaphysics, just as he afterward clothed those of theology. The lines to his father are not only a fine filial tribute, but are a splendid autobiographical defence of the right of genius to careful culture and to exemption from all sordid incentives to self-exertion. It is as noble a document as can be found in the annals of human intercourse, and should be studied by all who know Latin. Almost as much can be said of the "Mansus," the admirable tribute to that Marquis Manso who has the unique distinction, denied even to Mæcenas, of being the friend of two great epic poets of different tongues, Tasso and Milton. The aged Neapolitan has his name enshrined in Tasso's verses, but he has as sure a title to fame in Milton's tribute. The English reader may indeed bear away from the

poem a deep regret that Milton never carried out his expressed purpose of writing an epic on King Arthur, but he will always remember with pleasure the hale and hearty friend of genius - the Diis dilecte senex. He will pass on, too, to read the beautiful description of Manso's goblets in the "Epitaphium Damonis," and having finished the two noble poems, he will ever after find it impossible to speak of Milton's Latin verses without affection mixed with wonder.

THE genesis of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," perhaps the best known and most heartily admired of all Milton's compositions, is involved in considerable obscurity. They were not printed before 1645, and they do not exist for us in the celebrated bound volume of Milton's Mss. in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, which contains the drafts of all the English poems written between 1633, probably, and 1645; we are therefore compelled, in the absence of other data, to rely upon inferences and internal evidence in determining their time and place of writing. The consensus of critical opinion gives 1632-33 as the time, and Horton as the place. Professor Masson assigns them to the latter half of 1632 There are, however, reasons to make one think that they should probably be placed earlier. The autumn of 1632 seems to be

selected because Horton is usually assumed as the place of composition, and Milton went to reside there in July, 1632. He would naturally, argue the critics, be so impressed with the charms of the spot that he would turn to verse, and "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," and the "Song on May Morning," which we have assigned to the Cambridge period, would be the outcome. But there is no proof that the poems were not written at Cambridge or in London as reminiscential tributes to the pleasures of a vacation spent in the country; and we know from a Latin prolusion or oration delivered, Masson thinks, either in the latter half of 1631 or the first part of 1632, that Milton spent "the last past summer amid rural scenes and sequestered glades," and that he recalled "the supreme delight he had with the Muses." This vacation of 1631 may have been spent at Horton, for there is no proof that the elder Milton had not then acquired that property, and the young poet may have written his poems under the elms that so fascinated him, or have composed them on his return to college.

I incline to the former supposition. As we shall see, he was unquestionably supplied with hints for both his poems by Burton's "Anatomy," surely a likely book for such a student as Milton to take with him on a vacation. Again, no one can read the "Prolusion on Early Rising," almost certainly Milton's, without thinking that much of the raw material of the two poems was in his brain and being expressed during his university life; nor can one read the other prolusions without seeing that Orpheus, the music of the spheres, and Platonism were much in his thoughts. Besides, about 1630, the date of the "Epitaph on Shakspere," Milton was evidently to some extent occupied with his great forerunner, whose genius is honored in the poems, and a year later he was experimenting with the octosyllabic couplet in the "Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester." Finally, it was about this time that he was seriously weighing the reasons pro and con with regard to his choice of a profession, and it might naturally occur to him to contrast in poetic form the pleasures of the more or less worldly and the

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