7. The Elegy beginning," Nondum blanda tuas leges Amathusis nôram:" 1628. II. The first five of the pieces, in different kinds of verse, forming the so-called "Sylvarum Liber," or "Book of Sylvæ:” viz.: 1. "In Obitum Procancellarii Medici:" 1626. 2. "In quintum Novembris:" 1626. 3. "In Obitum Præsulis Eliensis:" 1626. 4. "Naturam non pati senium:" 1628. 5. "De Ideâ Platonicâ quemadmodum Aristoteles intellexit." III. The first five brief scraps in elegiac verse, in the "Epigrammatum 1. "In Proditionem Bombardicam :" "On the Gunpowder Treason." 2. "In Eandem." 3. "In Eandem." 4. "In Eandem." 5. "In Inventorem Bombardæ:" "On the Inventor of Gunpowder." II. ENGLISH: With the exception of one letter to a friend, all the English remains of this period are in verse. They are fifteen pieces in all, as follows: 1. The Translations of Psalms CXIV. and CXXXVI.: 1624. II. The following miscellaneous poems: 1. "On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a cough:" 1626. 2. "At a Vacation Exercise at College:" 1628. 3. "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," with "The Hymn: " 1629. 10. "On the University Carrier:" 1630–31. 11. "Another on the same:" 1630-31. 12. "An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester: " 1631. III. Sonnet "On his being arrived to the age of twenty-three: " Dec. 1631. These pieces, if printed, would have made a sufficient little volume. Only two of them, however, had as yet found their way into typethe Latin lines "Naturam non pati senium," privately and anonymously printed in Cambridge, for the Commencement of 1628; and the English epitaph "On Shakspeare," prefixed, but without the author's name or initials, to the Folio Shakspeare of 1632. All the rest were still in manuscript; and it was from the perusal of them in that uncomfortable state, that Milton's friends had come to the conclusion which he records. One person naturally demurred to the conclusion, or at least to the practical result of it-the poet's good old father. That his son, the son of his hopes, should now, in his twenty-fourth year, after acquiring all that school and college could give, not only abandon his destined profession of the Church, but propose nothing else for himself instead than a continued life of literature, could hardly but disturb him. There seem to have been conversations on the subject the usual reasonings between the father, who is a man of business, and the son who will be a poet. In this case, however, both father and son were such that the controversy was but a short one, and terminated indulgently. So much we gather from Milton's Latin poem "Ad Patrem," not dated, but certainly written about this time. Here are parts of the poem in prose translation: "Do not, I pray, continue to contemn the sacred Muses, nor think those powers vain and poor by whose gift thou thyself art skilled to compose a thousand sounds to apt metres, and, taught to vary the sounding voice with a thousand modulations, art deservedly the heir of Arion's name. Why now should it surprise thee if it should chance that thou hast begotten a poet in me, and if, joined so near by dear blood, we should follow cognate arts and a kindred study? Phoebus, wishing to part himself between the two, has given me the one set of gifts, has given my father the other; sire and son, we hold between us the whole divided god. Nay, though you profess to hate the tender Muses, I do not believe that you hate them. For thou didst not, my father, bid me go where the broad way is open, the ready mart of exchange where there shines the sure and golden hope of heaping up coin; nor dost thou whirl [present tense, nec rapis"] me on to the laws and the ill-kept rights of nations, and condemn my ears to silly clamours; but desiring rather to enrich my mind by cultivation, thou allowest me, far from the noise of town, and shut up in deep retreats, to wander, a happy companion by Apollo's side, through the leisured sweetness of Aonian glades. ** Go now, gather wealth, whosoever thou art that preferrest the ancestral treasures of the Austrian, the silver realms of Peru! What greater wealth could father have bestowed, or Jove himself, though he had bestowed all, heaven excepted? Better were not the gifts, even had they been safe, of him who entrusted the public light of the world to his stripling son, the chariot of Hyperion, the reins of Day, the tiara glittering round with radiant gleams. Therefore will I, though as yet but the lowest member of the learned throng, take my seat now among the victorious ivy-wreaths and laurels: and no longer shall I be mixed obscure with the inactive crowd; and my footsteps shall avoid the eyes of the profane. Be far off, watchful cares; be far off, all quarrels, and the face of Envy writhing with eye askance! * * But, for thee, dear father, since it is not given me to be able to tell all thy deserts, nor to repay thy gifts by acts, be it enough to have recorded them, and thoroughly to appreciate them in my grateful mind as I rehearse them, and to lay them up in faithful remembrance. And ye, youthful verses, my sport and amusement, if ye might but dare to hope for perpetual existence, and to survive the pyre of your master and behold the light, not dragged into black oblivion under thick Orcus, perhaps ye will preserve to a late age, for an example to others, these praises of my father, and his name thus sung!" From certain words of Milton's, already quoted, it appears that the fellows of Christ's College would have been glad if he had continued to reside amongst them, so as to carry on his studies with those facilities of access to books and the like which the University afforded. By this time, however, his father had retired from business altogether, and was living on his modest fortune in the little village of Horton in Buckinghamshire; and thither Milton removed, to fulfil in greater seclusion his design of preparing himself for some part in contemporary British literature. It will be the purpose of the next chapter to describe the element on which he had determined to embark. CHAPTER VI. SURVEY OF BRITISH LITERATURE. 1632. As, in political history, we reckon by the reign of the kings, so in our literary history, for the last two hundred and fifty years, we may reckon by the reigns of the laureates. The year 1632 was (nominally) the thirteenth year of the laureateship of Ben Jonson. He had succeeded to the honorary post in 1619, on the death of Samuel Daniel, who is considered to have held it, or something equivalent to it, from Spenser's death in 1599. In the case of Ben, however, the office had been converted into something more definite and substantial than it had been before. Prior to his appointment, a pension of a hundred merks a-year had been conferred on him by James. This pension had come to be regarded as his official income as laureate, and, as such, had been raised to a hundred pounds by Charles in 1630. With the office of laureate, or court poet, thus enhanced in value, Ben conjoined that of chronologer to the city of London, having been appointed by the Corporation on the death of Thomas Middleton in 1628, at a yearly salary of a hundred nobles.1 It is not always, whether in the civil commonwealth, or in the republic of letters, that the right by title accords, so well as it did in Ben's case, with the right by merit. It was now some six-andthirty years since, returning from his campaign in Flanders, a bigboned youth of two-and-twenty, he had attached himself to the cluster of dramatists and playwrights who then constituted the professional literary world of London, and begun to cobble plays, like the rest of them, at from £5 to £10 each. Borrowing, as most of them had to do, a pound or five shillings at a time from Henslowe and other managers on the faith of work in progress, "the bricklayer," as he was called (and yet he had been Camden's favorite pupil at Westminster School, and had been at Cambridge!), had made his way gradually, always with a quarrel on his hands; 1 Memoir of Middleton, prefixed to Mr. Dyce's edition of his works. till at length, having shown what he could do in one way, by killing one of Henslowe's players in a duel in Hoxton Fields, and being "almost at the gallows" for it, and what he could do in another by writing his "Every Man in his Humor," and four standard plays besides, he had fairly, even while Elizabeth was yet alive, taken his place as, next to Shakspeare, the great dramatist of the age. This position he had retained till Shakspeare's death in 1616; confirming it by six or seven more of his plays, including "Volpone," "The Alchemist," and "Bartholomew Fair," and by seventeen or eighteen of his masques at court. During these first thirteen years of James's reign, indeed, others of the Elizabethan seniors besides Shakspeare had divided public attention with him, and younger candidates for dramatic applause had appeared in Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, and Massinger. Jonson's place among these rivals had by no means been unquestioned. Some of his plays had had but a moderate success; in all of them there had been a vein of dogmatism, a spirit of satire and social invective, and a parade of a new and scholarly art of construction, which had prevented them from being thoroughly popular on the stage; and, conscious of this, Ben had invariably, either in the plays themselves or in prefaces to them when they were published, announced himself as a man of a new school, taken the public by the throat as a blatant beast that knew not the right or the wrong in poetry or in anything else, and appealed in the high Odi profanum vulgus strain from their judgment to that of the learned. Thus, in the opening of "Every Man out of bis Humor" (1599): Again, in the lines appended to "The Poetaster," when that merciless attack on Decker, Marston, and others, was published in 1602: "That these base and beggarly conceits |