PREFACE

I

HERE present to the English-speaking world, for the

first time, an unknown writer of the seventeenth century of the highest character and interest, and a Latin poet withal of striking imagination as well as of great lyrical sweetness and harmony. This no one can rightly refuse to admit, for the original book carries its own incontrovertible witness with it.

That such a wide-reaching, learned, and varied work should have been allowed to remain unappreciated and utterly ignored for more than two hundred and fifty years is certainly a very surprising literary fact.

But something much more astonishing is to be added, if my contention as to its true authorship be confirmed. For it is here contended, by such evidence and inference as I have been enabled to gather, that the unknown writer is no less a personage than the illustrious John Milton himself.

The author has been careful to conceal himself throughout the book. As he mentions in his Autocriticon (a kind of postscript at the end of his book), he wishes, after the manner of Apelles, to take his stand, out of sight, behind his picture, so as to hear what the passers-by, the critics, and the men of the age, might say about it. He tells us it is, in the main, a work of his fervid youth, and that he had slightly touched it up later on before presenting it to the world, He says he is not yet quite satisfied with it, but he had the work by him, and could not take the trouble

or spare the time to paint it again; but, he adds, if the critics like it, he will be perfectly ready to profit by their hints, and endeavour to present them with a better picture.

The critics seem to have been both blind and deaf. They gave no encouraging praise, and no disheartening condemnation. They simply took no notice. And so this great work of seventeenth-century art vanished from the sight of men. A few copies were put away in college libraries, where they rested for years undisturbed and dustcovered in their original positions, and have so continued to rest for two centuries and a half, lost to the world.

It was a real loss in any case, for in this book, Nova Solyma, we get the intimate personal philosophy of a great and independent mind living in the stirring times just before the Commonwealth.

This, apart from the Miltonic authorship, must be of considerable literary value; but if the mind in question should be the mind of John Milton, then we have a treasure indeed, for, as we well know, Milton was nothing if not autobiographical. All students of Milton's writings are agreed in this, that whether prose or verse was flowing from his pen, John Milton was sure to put as much of himself into his work as he possibly could.

In this very way Milton has betrayed himself again and again in Nova Solyma, although here his object was to remain behind the screen and out of sight. The autobiographical instinct was too strong for him, and, as we shall see, it was constantly making the anonymous author put first one part of himself and then another in evidence beyond the screen.

"Oh! but Milton is an impossible assumption," I seem to hear. "For what important or startling novelty on the subject of Milton can possibly come to the front just now? Professor Masson's monumental work1 effectually bars the way to any such endeavour.

The Life of Milton, by David Masson (Vol. I., 1859, to Vol. VII., 1894, index: Macmillan & Co.).

"In his six thick volumes nothing seems omitted; there is no clue that is not most carefully followed up; every available scrap of paper on which Milton wrote or scribbled has been carefully recorded; even his neglected Latin poems receive their full meed of attention and appreciation. The attempt to add anything worth notice seems impossible, or, at best, only a case of rem actam agere—that is to say, mere repetition; if true, it cannot be new.

"We are veritable Athenians of the market-place if any startling novelty or discovery is brought to light; but there must be an air of sweet reasonableness and probability about such new things, otherwise they are dismissed along with the canards of the pushing newspaper and the eccentricities of the last crank. They tend to waste our precious time, and so we do not care either to listen or to read.

"We are proud of Milton; we are proud of the worldwide admiration which has been shown for his supreme genius; we value the immense biographical and critical literature which is extant concerning him, for, after Shakespeare, he holds by common consent the second place in the English Poet's Corner of the Universal Temple of Fame, the Literary Valhalla of the World, nor would his place be far down if there were but one Poet's Corner for all the human race. We are proud that a countryman of ours has gained a position of such distinction, and has built for himself a monument more lasting than one of brass or marble; but the monument is finished. The headstone of the corner has just been put in position, and patience has had her perfect work in the great sixvolume biography. Therefore there is now no more to be said except ite, ite, consummatum est—that is to say, 'O ye literary workmen, pack up your tools and begone elsewhere; this job is finished.'"

With these imagined words ringing in my ears, I have yet ventured, and to me it is a pleasant task, to introduce to the world of letters in an English dress the four hundred pages of Latin prose and poetry which sprang, as I

contend, from the fertile brain of our illustrious Puritan poet when in his early prime. They were produced, most probably, either during his last years at college or during his peaceful retirement in his father's house at Horton, or possibly in part even slightly earlier. For years we may suppose them lying beside his other carefully preserved manuscripts-close to L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, close to his college exercises, close to his Latin lyrics, withheld, as was his wont, from public gaze. Milton was, as we know, most unwilling to expose the delicate and fragrant flowers of his early fancy to the cold, cruel winds of criticism. Nothing but outside pressure or suggestion could induce him to withdraw them from the scrinia where

they were hoarded up. His friend Lawes, it is true, gained his consent to print the divine Comus in 1637; but how pathetically does the real author deprecate such wanton exposure in his Latin motto on the title-page! Lycidas in 1638 must of course be published with the elegies of the other authors, and even here it is only the half-anonymous J.M. that attests that a poet of the very highest order was dwelling in the land. But all the rest were kept back in their dim and perhaps dusty security. Milton rarely destroyed anything he had once written; some MSS. he kept by him more than forty years, some thirty, some twenty. Indeed, when Humphrey Moseley1 first persuaded him to give a selection of his poems to the world, they were, with few exceptions, nearly twenty years old.

"But what about this wonderful new Romance that you say Milton wrote ?-what about that ? " So seem I to hear the impatient voice of the modern quidnunc dinning

1 Keenest of publishers, and one who really knew a good thing when he saw it. This was in 1645, and when now at last the mask was withdrawn, and Milton's face (terribly mangled by Marshall) was revealed to the public along with his poems, it was not so much the desire for fame in the author as the enterprise and literary judgment of Humphrey Moseley that we have to thank for first safely gathering together the Sibylline leaves inscribed by our great poet.

in my ears.

Well, that "new and audacious" production was lying perdu nearly twenty years, and though it lost many of its finest companions in 1645, it was not "drawn" (for Milton required considerable "badgering ") until 1648, and the man who must be awarded that honour was, I think, Samuel Hartlib. "But what was it all about?" again I hear. Well, it is here to speak for itself, and I have endeavoured to introduce it to the best of my abllity; but some few needful remarks shall be made in limine before the threshold is crossed.

First, then, and principally, this Romance is very full of advanced theories of Education. We meet with University Extension schemes; equal opportunities for all on the Kidd principle; school cavalry-athletics of a military kind, very similar to what has been recently advocated as the result of our experience with the Boers; also an Army Reserve and Volunteer movement; schools for Technical Education for the humbler classes; and many such-like projects three hundred years before their time.

Then it deals with the master-passion Love, which is considered philosophically, Platonically, and realistically, but not quite in the manner of the modern novel, for, more Miltonico, it is not woman's place to be much in evidence in the preliminaries of the tender passion, but rather to accept proposals duly endorsed by parental authority, and to be in subjection to her husband.

But there is one notable exception, and that is the pathetic tale of Philippina's true love. Here we have all the elements of a short modern novel years and years before Pamela first led the way to sentimental fiction of a less archaic stamp. Milton had an emotional nature which he sternly kept in subjection from his youth up, but it burst forth now and again, for the May Queen, for instance, of his seventh elegy, and for the mysterious and beautiful foreign face which bent over him as he lay asleep beneath a tree one summer's day near Cambridge.

And although the love adventures of Nova Solyma may fail to afford that highly spiced excitement which