Or, had she flourish'd still as when, of old, Rocks, mountains, woods, between my friend and me? Into Charles Diodati's ear Milton had whispered his dream of immortality, said that his Muse rose yet only on tender wings, unequal to the meditated flight. In his poem to Manso, Milton indicated that it was in his mind to write a poem of high strain upon King Arthur. A passage in this "Epitaph of Damon" shows that when he came back to England the design to write an epic upon Arthur took a more definite shape. Had he taken Arthur for his hero, Milton would, like Spenser, have turned him to high spiritual use. He had looked for examples, he said afterwards, to Homer, Virgil, Tasso, to the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, to the odes of Pindar, to the poetical books of the Old and New Testament, as "the mind at home in the spacious circuit of her musing" sought to plan its future work. He had reasoned to himself whether in the writing of an epic poem "the rules of Aristotle herein are to be strictly kept, or nature to be followed, which in them that know art and use judgment is no transgression, but an enriching of art." But still, and for years yet to come, Milton felt that the work to which his soul yearned forward was to be achieved only "by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out His seraphim, with the hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pieases to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs." He knew that only hard work could enable him to make the best use of his genius, hard work and a right life. In the "Apology for Smectymnuus" Milton has written, "I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem." The news that caused Milton to turn back from his longer travel into Greece was news of trouble with the Scots which clearly boded the civil war that soon came on, and that continued to occupy all Englishmen for many years. Soon after his return to England, John Milton settled in London, by taking lodgings for a short time at the house of a tailor in St. Bride's Churchyard, and there he undertook the teaching of his sister Anne's two boys, Edward and John Phillips, aged nine and eight. While teaching his nephews, Milton, in 1640, was sketching plans of sacred dramas, dwelling especially upon "Paradise Lost" as the subject of a drama; suggesting also as themes," Abram from Morea; or, Isaac redeemed," "The Deluge," "Sodom," "Baptistes," noting subjects also from British history. Milton "made no long stay," his nephew tells us, in his lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard: "necessity of having a place to dispose his books in, and other goods fit for the furnishing of a good handsome house, hastening him to take one; and, accordingly, a pretty garden-house he took, in Aldersgate Street, at the end of an entry, and therefore the fitter for his turn, besides that there are few streets in London more free from noise than that." There he worked hard, and had his two nephews to board with him. There also he began, in 1641, the second part of his literary life; put aside, at the age of thirty-two, his high ambition as a poet; and, devoting himself to the duty that lay nearest to his hand, gave the best years of his manhood, the twenty years from thirty-two to fiftytwo, to those questions of his day that touched, as he thought, the essentials of English liberty. CHAPTER VI. FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: SCHOLARS, HISTORIANS, AND MEN OF SCIENCE. 1. Learned Men; James I.-2. Cotton and Bodley.-3. Robert Burton.-4. Lancelot Andrewes.-5. James Usher.-6. John Selden.-7. Sir Henry Wotton; John Hales.-8. John Lightfoot.-9. Sir Henry Spelman.-10. John Hayward.-11. William Camden.-12. Historians; John Speed.-13. Samuel Purchas.-14. Sir Walter Raleigh.-15. Richard Knolles; Alexander Ross.16. Lord Herbert of Cherbury.-17. Spottiswoode; Calderwood.-18. Thomas Fuller.-19. Men of Science; Francis Bacon.-20. John Napier; William Harvey.-21. John Wilkins.-22. Samuel Hartlib.-23. John Wallis. 1. THE First Half of the Seventeenth Century was an age of learned men in England; and at the head of them, it may be appropriate to mention King James I. He had received in early life the best possible instruction from Buchanan and others. He was a clumsy boy, with ungainliness produced by physical defect, a tongue too large for his mouth, and a mind in which all depths that there could ever be must be made artificially. Good workmen dug and shaped; the boy was goodtempered, picked up some shrewdness, lived a creditable life, had respect for knowledge, and good appetite for it, though bad digestion. He had a pleasant type of it before him in cheery, impressible George Buchanan; a Presbyterian, austere but half way through, with a face like a Scotch Socrates, although more apt than Socrates to take offence, familiar with Latin as with his native tongue, full of anecdote and good talk, familiar also with languages and people round about, and liking Scotland all the better for experience in other lands. But for James the horizon did not widen as he climbed the hill of knowledge, his heart did not swell as he rose to higher sense of harmony and beauty; he hammered at the big lumps about him, and was proud of being so far up. In 1585, when his age was but nine teen, he published at Edinburgh "The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie." In preliminary sonnets of compliment, the Muses, through various courtly representations, sought to The " "Tell how he doeth in tender yearis essay Above his age with skill our arts to blaise, The crowne he wan for his deserved praise. The glorie and grace he hath proclaimed abrod." Essayes opened with twelve sonnets of invocation to the gods, namely, Jove, Apollo, each of the four Seasons, Neptune, Tritons and their kind, Pluto, Mars, Mercury, and finally, for the twelfth sonnet: "In short, you all forenamed gods I pray For to concur with one accord and will I shall tread downe the grasse on Parnass hill After these twelve sonnets of invocation, the king placed a translation of "The Heavenly Muse" of Du Bartas; then a dim allegory, in Chaucer's stanza, "Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix," with a preface of eighteen bad lines, arranged first as shaped verse, in the form of a lozenge upon a little pedestal, then as a compound acrostic. Then followed a short bit of translation out of the fifth book of Lucan; and then, lastly, "Ane Schort Treatise, containing some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie." In 1591, was published "His Majesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres;" and in 1616, appeared a collected edition, in folio, of his prose-writings, consisting of theological and metaphysical discussions, and containing his most famous production, "A Counterblaste to Tobacco." 2. Robert Bruce Cotton, born at Denton, Huntingdonshire, in 1570, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, was knighted by James I. In 1611, when his Majesty had invented the rank of baronet, and began to trade in the new article, Sir Robert Cotton became one of his first customers. King James was aided in his controversies by Sir Robert Cotton's learning; and the treasures of literature rescued by him from the scattered waste of the monasteries, were at the service of all who could make good use of them. It was in the reign of James I., that an older man, Sir Thomas Bodley, founded the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He was born at Exeter, in 1544, the son of that John Bodley who, in exile at Geneva, had been a chief promoter of the translation known as the Geneva Bible. Thomas Bodley had come to England at Elizabeth's accession, entered at Magdalene College, Oxford, became fellow of Merton, had been employed by the queen on embassies, was for nine years ambassador at the Hague; but in 1597 he retired from public life, and made it the work of his last years to give to the University of Oxford a library in place of that which it had lost. In 1602 he refitted the dismantled room which had been used for the library founded by Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, and furnished it with ten thousand pounds' worth of books. In July, 1610, he laid the foundation-stone of a new library building; and died in 1612, about a year before the building was completed. 3. Robert Burton became a clergyman, and had the livings of St. Thomas, Oxford, and Segrave, in Leicestershire; but he lived a quiet scholar's life at his college, Christ Church, Oxford; and in 1621, he published "The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Democritus Junior." This discussion of all forms of melancholy, and their remedies, is very quaint and ingenious in thought and expression, and so crammed with pleasant erudite quotations that the book has been to many later writers, who desired to affect knowledge of books they had never seen, the storehouse of their second-hand learning. Although an original book, its manner was in the fashion of the time; and it is said to have made the fortune of its Oxford publisher. It went through five editions before its author's death, in 1640. 4. Lancelot Andrewes was, in knowledge of church history and of patristic writings, the most learned churchman of the days of James I. He was born in London, in 1555, educated at Merchant-Tailors' School, sent for his ability to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (Spenser's College), obtained a fellowship, studied and taught divinity with great success, and was consulted as a profound casuist. Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, took him to the North of England; and there he persuaded |