78

79

In this second Defence he shews that his eloquence is not merely satirical; the rudeness of his invective is equalled by the grossness of his flattery.

'Deserimur, Cromuelle; tu solus superes, ad te summa nostrarum rerum [rerum summa nostrarum] rediit, in te solo consistit, insuperabili tuæ virtuti cedimus cuncti, nemine vel obloquente, nisi qui [aut] æquales inæqualis ipse honores sibi quærit, aut digniori concessos invidet, aut non intelligit nihil esse in societate hominum magis vel Deo gratum, vel rationi consentaneum, esse in civitate nihil æquius, nihil utilius, quam potiri rerum dignissimum. Eum te agnoscunt omnes, Cromuelle, ea tu civis maximus et* gloriosissimus, dux publici consilii, fortissimorum exercituum imperator, pater patriæ gessisti. Sic tu spontanea bonorum omnium et animitus missa voce salutaris'.'

Cæsar when he assumed the perpetual dictatorship had not more servile or more elegant flattery. A translation may shew its servility, but its elegance is less attainable. Having exposed the unskilfulness or selfishness of the former government

'We were left,' says Milton, 'to ourselves; the whole national interest fell into your hands, and subsists only in your abilities. To your virtue, overpowering and resistless, every man gives way, except some who without equal qualifications aspire to equal honours, who envy the distinctions of merit greater than their own, or who have yet to learn that in the coalition of human society nothing is more pleasing to God or more agreeable to reason than that the highest mind should have the sovereign power. Such, Sir, are you by general confession; such are the things atchieved

ander More, of Holland, upon a mistake, notwithstanding he had given him by the ambassador all satisfaction to the contrary: viz. that the booke called Clamor was writt by Peter du Moulin. Well, that was all one; he having writt it, it shuld goe into the world; one of them was as bad as the other.' AUBREY, Brief Lives, ii. 69.

Professor Masson thinks it possible that it was not till after the Restoration that Milton discovered the secret. Morus had done more than 'care for the publication' of the book. He had written the Dedicatory Epistle with its' malignant notice of Milton.' Masson's Milton, v. 214, 222.

Works, v. 258; vi. 435; Masson's Milton, iv. 605.

'The second Defence,' wrote Lamb

to Coleridge, which is but a succession of splendid episodes, slightly tied together, has one passage, which, if you have not read, I conjure you to lose no time, but read it: it is his consolations in his blindness, which had been made a reproach to him. ... It gives so rational, so true an enumeration of his comforts, so human, that it cannot be read without the deepest interest.' Lamb quotes the passage (Works, v. 217; vi. 385). Lamb's Letters, i. 192.

[ It may be doubted whether gloriosissimus be here used with Milton's boasted purity. Res gloriosa is an illustrious thing; but vir gloriosus is commonly a braggart, as in miles gloriosus. JOHNSON.]

by you, the greatest and most glorious of our countrymen, the director of our publick councils, the leader of unconquered armies, the father of your country: for by that title does every good man hail you, with sincere and voluntary praise.'

Next year, having defended all that wanted defence, he found 80 leisure to defend himself: he undertook his own vindication against More, whom he declares in his title to be justly called the author of the Regii Sanguinis clamor1. In this there is no want of vehemence nor eloquence, nor does he forget his wonted wit, 'Morus es? an Momus? an uterque idem est'?' He then remembers that Morus is Latin for a Mulberry-tree, and hints at the known transformation:

'Poma alba ferebat

Quæ post nigra tulit Morus'.'

With this piece ended his controversies*; and he from this time 81 gave himself up to his private studies and his civil employment.

As secretary to the Protector 5 he is supposed to have written 82 the Declaration of the reasons for a war with Spain. His agency was considered as of great importance; for when a treaty with Sweden was artfully suspended, the delay was publickly imputed to Mr. Milton's indisposition; and the Swedish agent was provoked to express his wonder, that only one man in England could write Latin, and that man blind".

3 Ib.

p. 325.

' quae poma alba ferebat, Ut nunc nigra ferat contactu sanguinis arbor.'

OVID, Metam. iv. 51. For his defence in this work of his abuse see Works, v. 329; Masson's Milton, v. 210.

* He had entered on them unwillingly. Following the fine passage quoted ante, MILTON, 47, he wrote:

I leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes.' Works,

i. 123.

His controversies did not wholly end. In 1658 he published a revised edition of his Defensio Prima. Masson's Milton,v. 572. See also post,MILTON, 95, for his attack on Dr. Griffith. 5 Under date of Sept. 1654, Professor Masson writes (iv. 642) :'Milton was to be Cromwell's Foreign Secretary more and more distinctly to the very end of the Protectorate.' See also ib. v. 623, 674.

"Works, vi. 90. For an English version see ib. v. 12. See Masson's Milton, v. 243, for an examination of the question how far Milton was helped in it.

7 On April 8, 1656, the Swedish ambassador asked to have the treaty drawn up in Latin. On May 3, he complained that it was fourteen days they made him stay for that translation, and sent it to one Mr. Milton, a blind man, to put the articles into Latin.... It seemed strange

83 Being now forty-seven years old, and seeing himself disencumbered from external interruptions, he seems to have recollected his former purposes1, and to have resumed three great works which he had planned for his future employment: an epick poem3, the history of his country, and a dictionary of the Latin tongue.

84

85

To collect a dictionary seems a work of all others least practicable in a state of blindness, because it depends upon perpetual and minute inspection and collation. Nor would Milton probably have begun it after he had lost his eyes, but, having had it always before him, he continued it, says Philips, 'almost to his dying-day; but the papers were so discomposed and deficient, that they could not be fitted for the press ". The compilers of the Latin dictionary printed at Cambridge had the use of those collections in three folios; but what was their fate afterwards is not known.

To compile a history from various authors, when they can only be consulted by other eyes, is not easy nor possible, but with more skilful and attentive help than can be commonly obtained'; and it was probably the difficulty of consulting and comparing

to him, there should be none but a blind man capable of putting a few articles into Latin.' Whitelocke's Memorials of the English Affairs, 1732, pp. 640, 645.

2

Ante, MILTON, 47.

Phillips' Milton, p. 34.

3 Milton did not write his Paradise Lost till he had outlived his politics. With all his parts, and noble sentiments of liberty, who would remember him for his barbarous prose?' HORACE WALPOLE, Letters, v. 203.

Hume describes his prose writings as 'disagreeable, though not altogether defective in genius.' In another edition he had written, 'devoid of genius.' Hist. of Engl. vii. 343.

'He wrote likewise a System of Divinity. It was in the hands of Cyriack Skinner, and where at present is uncertain.' Toland's Milton, p. 148.

Aubrey (ii. 71) recorded in the catalogue of Milton's writings:'Idea Theologiae in MS. in the hands of Mr. Skinner.' Ante, MILTON, 43. For its publication see post, MILTON, 166 n.

5 'Even very near to his dying

day; but the papers after his death were so discomposed and deficient that it could not be made fit for the press.' Phillips' Milton, p. 34.

Ib.; Aubrey's Brief Lives, ii. 66; Toland's Milton, p. 148. The editors of Linguae Romanae Dictionarium, &c., Cambridge, 1693, write :-'We had by us, and made use of, a manuscript collection in three large folios, digested into an alphabetical order, which the learned Mr. John Milton had made,' &c. N.&Q. 2 S. iv. 183. 7 Prescott recorded, when he was nearly blind :-'Johnson says that no man can compile a history who is blind. But although I should lose the use of my vision altogether, by the blessing of God, if my ears are spared me, I will disprove the assertion, and my chronicle shall not be wanting in accuracy and research.' Ticknor's Life of Prescott, 1864, p. 74. In the Preface to Ferdinand and Isabella he says:This remark of the great critic, which first engaged my attention in the midst of my embarrassments, although discouraging at first, in the end stimulated my desire to overcome them.'

that stopped Milton's narrative at the Conquest'; a period at which affairs were not yet very intricate nor authors very numerous.

For the subject of his epick poem, after much deliberation, 86 'long chusing, and beginning late?,' he fixed upon Paradise Lost; a design so comprehensive that it could be justified only by success. He had once designed to celebrate King Arthur, as he hints in his verses to Mansus 3; but 'Arthur was reserved,' says Fenton, 'to another destiny".'

It appears by some sketches of poetical projects left in manu- 87 script, and to be seen in a library at Cambridge, that he had digested his thoughts on this subject into one of those wild dramas which were anciently called Mysteries; and Philips had seen what he terms part of a tragedy, beginning with the first ten lines of Satan's address to the Sun'. These Mysteries consist of

His MS. notes (post, MILTON, 87) show that in 1639-40, in preparing for his projected epic on King Arthur, he had studied the history before the Conquest. Masson's Milton, ii. 105. See also ib. iii. 670.

2 Paradise Lost, ix. 26; post, MILTON, 110.

3

Sylvarum Liber. Mansus, 1. 80. See also Epitaphium Damonis,l. 162. In Paradise Lost, ix. 27, he describes himself as

'Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroic deem'd, chief mast'ry to
dissect

With long and tedious havock fa-
bled knights
In battels feign'd.'

'Id est, to be the subject of an heroic poem by Blackmore.' Johnson's Works, vii. 90 n. See post, BLACKMORE, II. For Dryden's projected epic see post, DRYDEN, 140, and for Pope's, post, POPE, 241.

5 Trinity College. See Facsimile of the MS. of Milton's Minor Poems, &c., 1899, pp. 33, 38, for a facsimile

of all these sketches. In Dr. Aldis Wright's opinion (Pref. p. 3) they were written in 1640-2. See also Masson's Milton, ii. 106, 117, 121 n.

6

See Spence's Anec. p. 397, for an extraordinary Mystery which he saw in Turin in 1739.

2 Paradise Lost, iv. 32. 'In the 4th booke of Paradise Lost, there are about six verses of Satan's exclamation to the sun, which Mr. E. Philips remembers about 15 or 16 yeares before ever his poem was thought of. Which verses were intended for the beginning of a tragoedie which he had designed, but was diverted from it by other businesse.' AUBREY, Brief Lives, ii. 69.

Phillips (p. 35) says that ten verses (iv. 32-41) were shown to him.

Milton, in his Animadversions (ante, MILTON, 48), seems to allude to some great poem, when, addressing 'the ever-begotten Light,' he says:'When thou hast settled peace in the Church, and righteous judgment in the Kingdom, then shall all thy saints address their voices of joy and triumph to thee, standing on the shore of that Red Sea into which our enemies had almost driven us. And he that now for haste snatches up a plain ungarnished present as a thank-offering to thee, may then perhaps take up a harp, and sing thee an elaborate song to generations.' Works, i. 184.

...

allegorical persons, such as Justice, Mercy, Faith'.

tragedy or mystery of Paradise Lost there are two plans:

"The Persons.

Michael.

Chorus of Angels.
Heavenly Love.
Lucifer.

Adam, with the

Eve, } Serpent.

Conscience.
Death.

The Persons.

Moses.

Of the

Divine Justice, Wisdom, [Mercy], Heavenly Love.

The Evening Star, Hes-
perus.

Chorus of Angels.
Lucifer.

Adam.
Eve.

88

Paradise Lost.

The Persons.

'Moses πрoλoуíce, recounting how he assumed his true body: that it corrupts not, because it is [of his being] with God in the mount; declares the like of Enoch and Elijah [Eliah]; besides the purity of the place, that certain pure winds, dews, and clouds preserve it from corruption; whence exhorts to the sight of God; tells they cannot see Adam in the state of innocence, by reason of their sin.

Justice,

Mercy,

Wisdom,

debating what should become of man, if he fall.

Chorus of Angels singing [sing] a hymn of the Creation.

Heavenly Love.

ACT II.

Evening Star.

Chorus sing the marriage-song and describe Paradise.

''The dramas in which Justice, Mercy, Faith, &c. were introduced

were moralities, not mysteries.' MALONE, Johnson's Works, vii. 91 n.