feet, and was, foredated.1

moreover, abortive (incomplete) and

Or (2) Milton might have fixed on John the Baptist (Baptistes) as his great theme. We know it was one of the many themes specially enlarged by him, and very suitable to tell against the tyranny of Charles I. and Laud, the Herod and High Priest of current politics. And then he discovered that Buchanan had foredated and forestalled him by a dramatic poem with the same name and subject. What put this third hypothesis in my head was the very curious coincidence that Buchanan in his preface to his Baptistes speaks of it as his abortive offspring foetus abortivus). And, stranger still, this Baptistes of Buchanan was translated in 1641 into blank verse by somebody who withheld his name. Peck 2 thinks it was undoubtedly Milton.

Or (3) he may have been thinking of working up and completing that Armada Epic of which he had disjointed portions already among his early papers; and then discovered during his Italian journey some foredated Latin poems on the subject already in possession of the field, e.g., the Naumachiae of John Tolmer, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth in 1588 or others, not to speak again of the aforementioned abortive work of Valmarana, which would clash with the warlike ministry of the Angelic Host in the Armada Epic, or at least cover to some extent the same ground and follow the same method.

Or (4) it may be that Lord Bacon's New Atlantis which was published (imperfect) in 1627 was the abortive and foredated work which nipped Nova Solyma in the bud, at least for a time.

Of this much, however, we may be fairly certain, that the thing which he had to say, and the intentions which had lived within him, ever since he could conceive himself

1 A copy of this book was for sale by Thomason, the bookseller, in 1647, as appears by his catalogue of books brought from Italy published in that year. What if Milton had sold his Italian books procured in 1639 when on his travels, and this one of them?

New Memoirs of Milton (1740, 4to).

THE LADY OF CHRIST'S

27

1

worth anything to his country, have reference to a Latin magnum opus; for it was not until his visit to Italy, where he recited some of his Latin compositions in the audience of the learned dilettanti societies of that country, that he formed the new intention of writing his great work, whatever it might eventually be, in his own vernacular for the glory, example, and edification of his fellow countrymen first of all. This early conceived work of his was, in his own words, a work wherein he was "fed with cheerful and confident thoughts," and one where he felt himself "beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies." Now Nova Solyma, with its Armada Epic and its serious, confident tone, is somewhat such a work as he here describes, and it is in Latin too. Moreover, "the bright countenance of truth" has more affinity with it, than with the great Arthurian myth.

Next we must devote a few lines to

MILTON'S EARLY LOVES

The reason for this is that the two principal love episodes in our Romance seem to be cunningly disguised reminiscences of Milton's own experiences in the tender passion.

It is well known that our great poet in the matter of the master-passion could boast of exceptional selfcontrol, and that from youth to manhood the enticements of Venus failed to lead him astray; in other words, he sowed no wild oats in Cambridge or London or even later on in the more fertile and luxuriant fields of dangerous Italy. He has said so himself, and his fellowstudents indirectly endorsed it when they called him "The Lady of Christ's." But Cupid's darts smote him twice in his youth, once in London, most likely on that Mayday when he was in his nineteenth year, and once near Cambridge when he had been lying asleep under a tree in the country. On the first occasion, described

1 Reason of Church Government (1642), p. 481 (Bohn).

in his seventh elegy, he saw for a moment or two the May Queen (as I suggest), either accompanied through the streets or surrounded in her bower by her satellites. Their eyes met, and he fell, Love's helpless victim, or, as Cowper renders him:

A fever new to me of fierce desire

Now seized my soul, and I was all on fire;
But she the while whom only I adore

Was gone, and vanish'd, to appear no more;

and so the poet is left disconsolate, able to follow her only in thought, murmuring to himself:

Oh, could I once, once more behold the fair!
Speak to her, tell her of the pangs I bear!

Now we have only to read two or three pages at the very beginning of Nova Solyma, and we come at once to a scene where the circumstances and the effects are of a very similar kind-the Daughter of Zion in her vinecovered arbour taking the place of the May Queen in her bower. I will only add that I cannot help thinking that we have here a distinct Miltonic reminiscence of the great poet's first young dream of Love, rather than the ordinary invention of some unknown romancer. There is this also to help the hypothesis; for just as Milton, when he published this love elegy in later life (1645), put in a disclaimer of such youthful folly in some verses which he appended to it; exactly the same kind of disclaimer occurs more than once in our anonymous Romance, as will appear by the notes at the proper passages. And the reasons for these changed opinions about love which Milton expressed in his maturer years, are just the reasons which Joseph gives in Nova Solyma, and they are not the reasons that would occur to the ordinary mind. Let us compare these.

Milton, in his disclaimer of 1645, the postscript to his seventh elegy, says:

"Such vain trophies of worthless levity (nequitia) did I long ago set up, for wrong conceptions seized and impelled

MILTON AND THE FOREIGN LADY 29

me then.... My intractable youth was a bad guide for me until the shady groves of the Academy" (I agree with Masson that Milton here means not the University, but Plato's philosophy) "offered to my sight its Socratic streams, and (as I drank) that yoke fell from my neck."

What Joseph, the hero of the Romance of 1648, says is to be found in Book V., Chapter II., when Politian, "meeting Joseph one day by chance, asked him by what power he was able to resist such a universal conqueror as Love. I am,' answered Joseph, 'under the power of Love far more than you think; but it is the Love which is Heavenly and Divine which possesses me body and soul. Nor am I a laggard or faint-hearted herein, but ardent and sanguine. You shall hear, if you will, a poetic outburst of the sacred flame.""

Then follows that fine Latin Ode to the Love which is Divine and Eternal, which is, in the elegance of its language, its purity, and its sublimity, well worthy of Milton at his best, and when we consider it was written "in the heat of youth," as the author admits, it is more wonderful still. This, if I may be permitted to say it, I consider another high trump card to help me to win my game.

The card that now follows is a much lower one. For the other love-passage in Milton's youthful days is not told us anywhere in his works, but seems to have been a tradition about him, possibly apocryphal, and indeed Professor Masson calls it a "myth." It runs thus: Milton one summer's day, while taking a long walk out of Cambridge, rested for a while at the foot of a tree and fell asleep. A foreign lady passing the spot was so struck with his beauty that she wrote some Italian verses in pencil, and placed them in his hand. When he awoke, and had read them, he was so eager to find out the fair incognita that he travelled to Italy with the hope of meeting her. The verses were concerning his beautiful eyes.

The parallel love-passage in Nova Solyma is where the disguised Philander relates how he first fell in love. From

the result of a hunting accident, he was lying in a dead faint on the ground, when a girl, a foreigner, taking a walk, saw the accident and came with all speed to help him, bent over him with every attention, and at last brought him back from his "Lethean sleep." When his eyes gazed upon the face that was bending over him, then love took possession of his heart. Perhaps being semiconscious helped the illusion and made him an easy prey, at least he said so when he told the tale; and after some further complicated adventures, the final result is that Philander leaves home and country to seek for his true love. I mention this as a possible reminiscence of some event in Milton's life which caused the traditional myth; but as a piece of evidence I attach no importance It is curious that there should be such a myth connected with Milton, and that there should be such a tale in our Romance. That is all-the parallel is not sufficiently close to be worth much.

As to the general relations of Milton to the fair sex, Mark Pattison has a few excellent remarks to which I thoroughly subscribe. "With Milton, as with the whole Calvinistic and Puritan Europe, woman was a creature of an inferior and subordinate class. Man was the final cause of God's creation, and woman was there to minister to this nobler being. The Puritan had thrown off chivalry as being parcel of Catholicism, and had replaced it by the Hebrew ideal of the subjection and seclusion of

"Milton, in whose soul Puritan austerity was as yet (ie. in his younger days) only contending with the more genial currents of humanity, had a far greater than average susceptibility to the charms of woman. Even at the latter date of Paradise Lost, voluptuous thoughts, as Mr. Hallam has observed, are not uncongenial to him. And at an earlier age his poems, candidly pure from the lascivious innuendoes of his contemporaries, have preserved the record of the rapid impression of the momentary passage of beauty upon his susceptible mind."1 1 Milton, by Mark Pattison (London, 1883, pp. 53, 54).