the few facts we know must be given rapidly here. Stopping for a brief space at Paris, he met Grotius, and then proceeded by Nice, Genoa, Leghorn, and Pisa, to Florence. Here he was introduced to the most cultured representatives of that day of Italy's decline, and frequented their academies, and paid as good Latin compliments as he received. He impressed all who met him by his beauty, his grace, his mental and spiritual attainments, and if the tributes paid him were extravagant, they nevertheless retain even to this day a note of sincerity. We do not know whether the sightless Galileo thought him an angel or an Angle, but it is easy to agree with Dr. Garnett that "the meeting between the two great blind men of their century is one of the most picturesque in history; it would have been more pathetic still if Galileo could have known that his name would be written in 'Paradise Lost,' or Milton could have foreseen that within thirteen years he too would see only with the inner eye, but that the calamity which disabled the astronomer would restore inspiration to the poet."

From Florence Milton went, via Siena, to Rome, where he remained two months, and was treated with consideration in spite of his imprudent habit of discussing religious matters in public. He was fascinated by the singing of Leonora Baroni, on whom he wrote three Latin epigrams, but he is silent, so critics have observed, about the effects of antiquity and of modern plastic art upon his spirit.1 His natural aptitude was for music, and perhaps when later, his Puritan controversies put by, he took up poetry once more, his loss of sight inclined him to leave unsung the glories of arts he could no longer appreciate. It was different with nature, whose effects he could still feel and whose beauty he was bound by the scheme of his work to describe.

Naples was the next stage of his journey, and there tidings reached him of the distracted political state of his native land. He gave up at once his intention of proceeding to Sicily and Greece, but was leisurely enough in his return. He again spent two months at Rome

1 He tells us expressly that he viewed the antiquities of Rome, and the company of Lucas Holstein, the Vatican librarian, and other scholars would indicate that he did not waste his time.

and an equal period at Florence, barring a visit to Lucca, and proceeded to Venice by way of Bologna, where an Italian lady is said to have fascinated him. The sonnets written in her native language lend some color to this statement, which would at least furnish additional proof of Milton's lack of essential English narrowness; but the whole affair is shadowy, and the sonnets may have been mere exercises in a strange tongue. It is better perhaps to lay stress on the actual friendship formed at Naples with the venerable Marquis Manso, the protector of Tasso and Marini, and upon the noble Latin verses in which Milton repaid the generosity of his host and announced his own hope of some day acquiring perennial fame through an epic upon King Arthur and his Table Round. It would be too painful to lay stress upon the anguish of his spirit when he reached Geneva from Venice, via Verona and Milan, and there probably heard for the first time of the death of the friend of his boyhood and of his riper years, the man who had first brought him in touch with the beautiful land he was just leaving, - Charles Diodati.

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CHAPTER II

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS (1640–1660)

MILTON once more set foot on English soil toward the end of July, 1639. His first act of any moment was one of piety. He wrote his greatest and practically his last Latin poem, the "Epitaphium Damonis," in honor of Diodati

a tribute the exquisite sincerity of which its foreign medium of expression cannot impair, but unfortunately obscures to those of his race whose classical education has been neglected. It was also, with the exception of a pair of sonnets, to be the last of his elegiac poems, for his father's death eight years later, just as his mother's, two years previously, called forth no poetical expression of grief. For Diodati, the returned traveller could not but mourn in the language in which they had exchanged their innermost feelings, and which linked them both with the land from which

one sprang and to which the other was still turning regretful eyes.

His elegy finished, he set himself to a less congenial but in every way honorable task - he began to teach his two nephews, Edward and John Phillips, sons of his elder sister Anne, now a Mrs. Agar. He lived at first in lodgings, his younger brother Christopher continuing to reside with their father at Horton; but in a short time he found it convenient to take a house in the somewhat suburban Alders

gate Street. Here he taught his pupils and watched the course of public events.

Milton as a schoolmaster may suggest to some the veriest profanation of genius, to others that irony of fate at which we smile or jest; but no one who has read the tractate entitled "Of Education," or rightly gauged the poet's character, or comprehended the true dignity of the teacher's office, will ever regret the quiet months devoted to pedagogical pursuits and the "intermitted studies." So, too, no one not a hopeless partisan of the Stuarts, or biassed like Mark Pattison in favor of the scholarly life, will regret that Milton took in