Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/345

Rh MILTON 327 government by the king and his ministers without parlia ments, under which the country had been groaning since the contemptuous dissolution of Charles s third parliament ten years before. Through Paris, where Milton made but a short stay, receiving polite attention from the English ambassador, Lord Scudamore, and having the honour of an introduction to the famous Hugo Grotius, then ambassador for Sweden at the French court, he moved on rapidly to Italy, by way of Nice. After visiting Genoa, Leghorn, and Pisa, he arrived at Florence, August 1638. Enchanted by the city and its society, he remained there two months, frequenting the chief academies or literary clubs, and even taking part in their proceedings. Among the Florentines with whom he became intimate were Jacopo Gaddi, young Carlo Dati, Pietro Frescobaldi, Agostino Coltellini, the grammarian Benedetto Buommattei, Valerio Chimentelli, and Antonio Francini. It was in the neighbourhood of Florence also that he &quot; found and visited &quot; the great Galileo, then old and blind, and still nominally a prisoner to the Inquisition for his astronomical heresy. From Florence, by Siena, Milton went to Rome. He reached the Eternal City some time in October, and spent about another two months there, not only going about among the ruins and antiquities and visiting the galleries, but mixing also, as he had done in Florence, with the learned society of the academies. Among those with whom he formed acquaintance in Rome were the German scholar, Lucas Holstenius, librarian of the Vatican, and three native Italian scholars, named Cherubini, Salzilli, and Selvaggi. There is record of his having dined once, in company with several other English men, at the hospitable table of the English Jesuit College. The most picturesque incident, however, of his stay in Rome was his presence at a great musical entertainment in the palace of Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Here he had not only the honour of a specially kind reception by the cardinal himself, but also, it would appear, the supreme pleasure of listening to the marvellous Leonora Baroni, the most renowned singer of her age. Late in November he left Rome for Naples. Here also he was fortunate. The great man of the place was the now very aged Giovanni Battista Manso, marquis of Villa, the friend and biographer of the great Tasso, and subsequently the friend and patron of the sweet Marini. By a happy accident Milton obtained an introduction to Manso, and nothing could exceed the courtesy of the attentions paid by the aged marquis to the young English stranger. He had hardly been in Naples a month, however, when there came news from England which not only stopped an intention he had formed of extending his tour to Sicily and thence into Greece, but urged his immediate return home. &quot;The sad news of civil war in England,&quot; he says, &quot; called me back ; for I considered it base that, while my fellow-countrymen were fighting at home for liberty, I should be travelling abroad for intellectual culture.&quot; In December 1638, therefore, he set his face northwards again. His return journey, however, probably because he learnt that the news he had first received was exaggerated or premature, was broken into stages. He spent a second two months in Rome, ascertained to have been January and February 1638-39; during which two months, as he tells us, he was in some danger from the papal police, because the English Jesuits in Rome had taken offence at his habit of free speech, wherever he went, on the subject of religion. Though he did not alter his demeanour in the least in this particular, nothing happened ; and from Rome he got safely to Florence, welcomed back heartily by his Florentine friends, and renewing his meetings with them privately and in their academies. His second visit to Florence, including an excursion to Lucca, extended over two months; and not till April 1639 did he take his leave, and proceed, by Bologna and Ferrara, to Venice. About a month was given to Venice ; and thence, having shipped for England the books he had collected in Italy, he went on, by Verona and Milan, over the Alps, to Geneva. In this Protestant city he spent a week or two in June, forming interesting acquaintanceships there too, and having daily conversations with the great Protestant theologian Dr Jean Diodati, the uncle of his friend Charles Diodati. From Geneva he returned to Paris, and so to England. He was home again in August 1639, having been absent in all fifteen or sixteen months. Milton s Continental tour, and especially the Italian portion of it, remained one of the chief pleasures of his memory through all his subsequent life. Nor was it quite without fruits of a literary kind. Besides two of his Latin Epistolse Familiares, one to the Florentine grammarian Buommattei, and the other to Lucas Holstenius, there have to be assigned to Milton s sixteen months on the Continent his three Latin epigrams Ad Leonoram Romse, Canentem, his Latin scazons Ad Salsillum Poetam Romanum ^Egrotantem, his fine and valuable poem in Latin hexameters entitled Mansus, and his Five Italian Sonnets, with a Canzone, celebrating the charms of some Italian lady he had met in his travels. One sad and marring memory did mingle itself with all that was otherwise so delightful in his Italian reminiscences. His bosom friend and companion from boyhood, the half- Italian Charles Diodati, who had been to him as Jonathan to David, and into whose ear he had hoped to pour the whole narrative of what he had seen and done abroad, had died during his absence. He had died, in Blackfriars, London, in August 1638, not four months after Milton had gone away on his tour. The intelligence had not reached Milton till some months afterwards, probably not till his second stay in Florence; and, though he must have learnt some of the particulars from the youth s uncle in Geneva, he did not know them fully till his return to England. How profoundly they affected him appears from his Epitaphium Damonis, then written in memory of his dead friend. The importance of this poem in Milton s biography cannot be overrated. It is perhaps the noblest of all his Latin poems ; and, though in the form of a pastoral, and even of a pastoral of the most artificial sort, it is unmistakably an outburst of the most passionate personal grief. In this respect Lycidas, artistically perfect though that poem is, cannot be compared with it ; and it is only the fact that Lycidas is in English, while the Epitapliiwm Damonis is in Latin, that has led to the notion that Edward King of Christ s College was peculiarly and pre-eminently the friend of Milton in his youth and early manhood. That Milton, now in his thirty-first year, had been gird ing himself for some greater achievement in poetry than any he had yet attempted, Comus not excepted, we should have known otherwise. What we should not have known, but for an incidental passage in the Ejntaphium Damonis, is that, at the time of his return from Italy, he had chosen a subject for such a high literary effort of a new Miltonic sort. The passage is one in which, after referring to the hopes of Diodati s medical career as so suddenly cut short by his death, Milton speaks of himself as the survivor and of his own projects in his profession of literature. In translation, it may run thus: &quot;I have a theme of the Trojans cruising our southern headlands Shaping to song, and the realm of Imogen, daughter of Pandras, Brennus and Arvirach, dukes, and Bren s bold brother, Belinus ; Then the Annorican settlers under the laws of the Britons, Ay, and the womb of Igraine fatally pregnant with Arthur, Uther s son, whom he got disguised in Gorlois likeness, All by Merlin s craft. then, if life shall be spared me, Thou shalt be hung, my pipe, far off on some dying old pine-tree,