of Derby, at her mansion of Harefield, about 10 m. from Horton. That Milton contributed the words for the entertainment was, almost certainly, owing to his friendship with Henry Lawes, who supplied the music. Next in order among the compositions at Horton may be mentioned the three short pieces, “At a Solemn Music,” “On Time,” and “Upon the Circumcision”; after which comes Comus, the largest and most important of all Milton’s minor poems. The name by which that beautiful drama is now universally known was not given to it by Milton himself. He entitled it, more simply and vaguely, “A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, on Michaelmas night, before John Earl of Bridgewater, Lord President of Wales” (1637). The earl of Bridgewater, the head of the Egerton family, had been appointed president of the council of Wales; among the festivities on his assumption of the office, a great masque was arranged in the hall of Ludlow Castle, his official residence. Lawes supplied the music and was stage manager; he applied to Milton for the poetry; and on Michaelmas night, the 29th of September 1634, the drama furnished by Milton was performed in Ludlow Castle before a great assemblage of the nobility and gentry of the Welsh principality, Lawes taking the part of “the attendant spirit,” while the parts of “first brother,” “second brother” and “the lady,” were taken by the earl’s three youngest children, Viscount Brackley, Mr Thomas Egerton and Lady Alice Egerton.
From September 1634 to the beginning of 1637 is a comparative blank in our records. Straggling incidents in this blank are a Latin letter of date December 4, 1634, to Alexander Gill the younger, a Greek translation of “Psalm CXIV.,” a visit to Oxford in 1635 for the purpose of incorporation in the degree of M.A. in that university, and the beginning in May 1636 of a troublesome lawsuit against his now aged and infirm father. The lawsuit, which was instituted by a certain Sir Thomas Cotton, bart., nephew and executor of a deceased John Cotton, Esq., accused the elder Milton and his partner Bower, or both, of having, in their capacity as scriveners, misappropriated divers large sums of money that had been entrusted to them by the deceased Cotton to be let out at interest.
The lawsuit was still in progress when, on the 3rd of April 1637, Milton’s mother died, at the age of about sixty-five. A flat blue stone, with a brief inscription, visible on the chancel-pavement of Horton church, still marks the place of her burial. Milton’s testimony to her character is that she was “a most excellent mother and particularly known for her charities through the neighbourhood.” The year 1637 was otherwise eventful. It was in that year that his Comus, after lying in manuscript for more than two years, was published by itself, in the form of a small quarto of thirty-five pages. The author’s name was withheld, and the entire responsibility of the publication was assumed by Henry Lawes. Milton seems to have been in London when the little volume appeared. He was a good deal in London, at all events, during the summer and autumn months immediately following his mother’s death. The plague, which had been on one of its periodical visits of ravage through England since early in the preceding year, was then especially severe in the Horton neighbourhood, while London was comparatively free. It was probably in London that Milton heard of the death of Edward King, who had sailed from Chester for a vacation visit to his relatives in Ireland, when, on the 10th of August, the ship in perfectly calm water struck on a rock and went down, he and nearly all the other passengers going down with her. There is no mention of this event in Milton’s two Latin “Familiar Epistles” of September 1637, addressed to his friend Charles Diodati, and dated from London; but in November 1637, and probably at Horton, he wrote his matchless pastoral monody of Lycidas. It was his contribution to a collection of obituary verses, Greek, Latin and English, inscribed to the memory of Edward King by his numerous friends, at Cambridge and elsewhere. The collection appeared early in 1638. The second part contained thirteen English poems, the last of which was Milton’s monody, signed only with his initials “J. M.”
Milton was then on the wing for a foreign tour. He had long set his heart on a visit to Italy, and circumstances now favoured his wish. The vexatious Cotton lawsuit, after hanging on for nearly two years, was at an end, as far as the elder Milton was concerned, with the most absolute and honourable vindication of his character for probity, though with some continuation of the case against his partner, Bower. Moreover, Milton’s younger brother Christopher, though but twenty-two years of age, and just about to be called to the bar of the Inner Temple, had married; and the young couple had gone to reside at Horton to keep the old man company.
Before the end of April 1638 Milton was on his way across the channel, taking one English man-servant with him. At the time of his departure the last great news in England was that of the National Scottish Covenant. To Charles the news of this “damnable Covenant,” as he called it, was enraging beyond measure; but to the mass of the English Puritans it was far from unwelcome, promising, as it seemed to do, for England herself, the subversion at last of that system of “Thorough,” or despotic government by the king and his ministers without parliaments, under which the country had been groaning since the contemptuous dissolution of Charles’s third parliament ten years before. Through Paris, where Milton received polite attention from the English ambassador, Lord Scudamore, and had 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, in 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, founder of an academy called the Svogliati, young Carlo Dati, author of Vite de’ pittori antichi, Pietro Frescobaldi, Agostino Coltellini, the founder of the Academy of the Apatisti, the grammarian Benedetto Buommattei, Valerio Chimentelli, afterwards professor of Greek at Pisa, Antonio Francini and Antonio Malatesti. It was in the neighbourhood of Florence also that he “found and visited” the great Galileo, then old and blind, and still nominally a prisoner to the Inquisition for his astronomical heresy.[1]
By way of Florence and Siena, he reached Rome 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 Alessandro Cherubini, Giovanni Salzilli and a certain Selvaggi. There is record of his having dined once, in company with several other Englishmen, at the hospitable table of the English Jesuit College. The most picturesque incident, however, of his stay in Rome was his presence at 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 he met the aged Giovanni Battista Manso, marquis of Villa (1560–1645), the friend and biographer of Tasso, and subsequently the friend and patron of Marini. 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. “The sad news of civil war in England,” he says, “called me back; for I considered it base that, while my fellow-countrymen were fighting at home for liberty, I should be travelling at my ease for intellectual culture” (Defensio secunda). In December 1638, therefore, he set his face northwards
- ↑ This interview forms the subject of one of W. S. Landor’s Imaginary Conversations.
