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An English translation may run thus—

That an unskilful hand had carved this print
You'd say at once, seeing the living face;
But, finding here no jot of me, my friends,
Laugh at the wretched artist's mis-attempt.

Such was the First Edition of Milton's Miscellaneous Poems, published in 1645, when the author was thirty-seven years of age. The volume seems to have had no great circulation; but it sufficed to keep alive, for the next two-and-twenty years, or till the publication of Paradise Lost in 1667, the recollection that the man who, through this long period, was becoming more and more known for his Revolutionary principles and his connexion with the Commonwealth government, had begun life as a poet.

FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTINUED LONDON CITIZENSHIP:
1645-1660.

During these fifteen years we find Milton still mainly in London, but several times changing his place of residence. In 1647 he removed from his house in the Barbican to a smaller house in Holborn, opening backward into Lincoln's Inn Fields. Here he still continued to take pupils; and here, after the execution of the King and the establishment of the Council of State, he added to his already numerous prose-pamphlets the first of that new series which defended the act of Regicide and the new Government founded on it. This literary service leading to his appointment to the Latin Secretaryship to the Council of State (March 1648-9), he ceased to take pupils, and came to reside nearer the scene of his official duties. From Nov. 1649 to about the middle of 1651 he was accommodated with official lodgings in Scotland Yard, Whitehall; after which he settled in the house in Petty France, Westminster (see Introd. to Paradise Lost, pp. 50-52, and Note there), which he occupied till close on the Restoration. It was in his lodgings in Whitehall, or during the first years of his residence in the house in Petty France, that he wrote the rest of the tracts of his Regicide series, English and

Latin, including those "Defences of the English People" with the fame of which all Europe rang from side to side. It was his labours on these that brought on his blindness, which calamity became total in the year 1652, when he had been but a few months in the house in Petty France. Here also the death of his first wife left him, in 1652 or 1653, a widower with three young daughters; and here took place his second marriage, with one Catharine Woodcock, the daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney-terminated, after a little more than a year of wedded happiness (Nov. 1656-Feb. 1657-8) by her death in childbirth. Before this second marriage Milton's blindness had disabled him for much of his official duty; but he continued to act as Latin Secretary through Cromwell's Protectorate so far as to write the most important of Cromwell's despatches to foreign courts. It was in his comparative leisure towards the end of the Protectorate, as we have seen (Introd. to Paradise Lost, pp. 50—52), that he resumed, in his house in Petty France, his long-deferred poetic designs, and commenced Paradise Lost. Cromwell's death in 1658, and the confusion consequent on his son's Protectorate, interrupted that undertaking; and the last public appearances of Milton before the Restoration were in tracts trying to avert that issue, and induce England to remain a Republic.

Did Milton, during these fifteen years of his continued political activity, and his Latin Secretaryship, abstain from verse entirely until he began his Paradise Lost, or did he pen during this period minor pieces of verse, to be added to the collection published in 1645? A few, but only a few; and most, if not all, of these written before 1658-after which date Milton, having commenced his Paradise Lost, seems to have reserved his whole metrical force for it. The following is a complete list of these new pieces. They may be fancied as written at intervals, if the reader chooses to allocate them by their dates, in the following houses-that in the Barbican (from 1645 to 1647); that in Holborn, open at the back to Lincoln's Inn Fields (from 1647 to Nov. 1649); the official lodgings in Scotland Yard, Whitehall (from Nov. 1649 to July 1651); and the house in Petty France, Westminster (from July 1651 to 1660).

I. ENGLISH:—

Thirteen SONNETS; viz.

"On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain
Treatises" (i.e. his Divorce Pamphlets). Sonnet beginning,
"A Book was writ of late called Tetrachordon." 1645.
"On the same.' Sonnet beginning, "I did but prompt the
age." 1645.

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"To Mr. H. Lawes, on his Airs." Sonnet beginning, "Harry, whose tuneful.” 1646.

"On the Religious Memory of Mrs. Catharine Thomson, my Christian Friend, deceased 16 September, 1646." Sonnet beginning, "When Faith and Love."

"On the Lord General Fairfax." Sonnet beginning, "Fairfax, whose name in arms." 1648.

"To the Lord General Cromwell, May 16, 1652, on the Proposals of certain Ministers at the Committee for Propagation of the Gospel." Sonnet beginning, "Cromwell, our chief of men."

66

'To Sir Henry Vane, the younger." Sonnet beginning, "Vane, young in years."

"On the late Massacre in Piedmont." Sonnet beginning, Avenge, O Lord." 1655.

66

Sonnet on his Blindness, beginning, "When I consider."

To Mr. Lawrence. Sonnet beginning, “Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son."

To Cyriack Skinner.

grandsire."

Sonnet beginning, "Cyriack, whose

Second Sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, beginning, "Cyriack, this

three-years-day." 1655.

To the Memory of his Second Wife. Sonnet beginning,

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Lines entitled, "ON THE NEW Forcers oF CONSCIENCE UNDER
THE LONG PARLIAMENT."

TRANSLATIONS :

Some scraps of verse, translated from classic and other writers,
to garnish the text of some of the prose-pamphlets.

"The Fifth Ode of Horace, Lib. I., Quis multa gracilis, &c., ren-
dered almost word for word, without rhyme, according to the
Latin measure, as near as the language will permit."
"Nine of the Psalms done into metre, wherein all but what is in
a different character are in the very words of the text, trans-
lated from the original :" April 1648. To wit, Psalms
LXXX.-LXXXVIII.

Eight more of the Psalms, translated Aug. 1653; to wit, Psalms

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II. LATIN:

"AD JOANNEM ROUSIUM, Oxoniensis Academiæ Bibliotheca-
rium De libro Poematum amisso, quem ille sibi denuo
mitti postulabat, ut cum aliis nostris in Bibliothecâ publicâ
reponeret, Ode." (Among the Sylvæ.) Jan. 23, 1646–7.
"APOLOGUS DE RUSTICO ET HERO." (Among the Elegies.)
A scrap or two of Latin Epigram, introduced into his Latin
prose-pamphlets; also Epigram, “AD CHRISTINam, Sue-
CORUM REGINAM, NOMINE CROMWELLI," if that be really
Milton's, and not Marvell's.

LAST FOURTEEN YEARS OF MILTON'S LIFE: 1660-1674. SECOND EDITION OF THE POEMS (1673).

The incidents of Milton's life from the eve of the Restoration in 1660 to the publication of his Paradise Lost in 1667 have already been sketched in the Introduction to that Poem (pp. 50 et seq.). They comprised his flight from his house in Petty France, and his temporary concealment; his reappearance, when danger was over, in a house in Holborn, near Red Lion Fields; his removal thence, in 1661, to Jewin Street, in his old and favourite neighbourhood of Aldersgate Street, where he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull; and his final removal, in 1663 or 1664, to the last of all his residences on earth—that in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. It was thence that Paradise Lost, which he had begun in 1658, was given to the world in 1667.

Paradise Lost was followed, in 1671, by Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published together; and the popularity of these three great poems of Milton's later years seems to have reawakened so much demand for his earlier Poems as to make a new edition of them desirable. Accordingly, in 1673, or eighteen years after Moseley had published the first edition, a second edition of the Minor Poems did appear, under Milton's own superintendence. This second edition, which, like the first, was a small octavo, bore the following title :

"Poems, &c., upon Several Occasions. By Mr. John Milton: both English and Latin, &c. Composed at several times. With a small Tractate of Education. To Mr. Hartlib. London, Printed for Tho. Dring, at the White Lion, next Chancery Lane End, in Fleet Street. 1673." [So in copies which I have

seen; but in a copy now before me the latter part of the imprint runs thus:"London: Printed for Tho. Dring, at the Blew Anchor next Mitre Court over against Fetter Lane in Fleet Street. 1673."]

In this second edition, as compared with the first, the following particulars are to be noted: (1) There are certain additions. The chief of these (not to mention the reprint, at the end, of the small prose Tract on Education which had been originally published in 1644), are, of course, those English and Latin pieces of which we have just given a list as having been written by Milton after the first edition was published. But all these pieces, written between 1645 and 1673, were not included in the new edition. The few English and Latin scraps already printed in the prose-writings were not here reprinted; and, for reasons obvious enough, Milton did not think it advisable, at that date, to publish his sonnets to Fairfax, Vane, and Cromwell, nor that second one to Cyriack Skinner in which he speaks with exultation of his own services in the Republican cause. With these exceptions, however, all the pieces written since 1645 were now published by Milton himself in this second edition. But there were also included in this edition those two English pieces, which, though written long before the publication of the first edition, had not appeared in it (see p. 167)-viz. the Elegy "On the death of a fair Infant dying of a Cough," written in 1626, and the fragment, "At a Vacation Exercise in the College," written in 1628. Copies of these two pieces had apparently been recovered by Milton, and their insertion in the new edition was certainly a gain to that edition. (2) To some copies of this second edition of the Poems there was prefixed a new portrait of Milton at the age of sixty-three, by W. Dolle, after Faithorne, superseding the caricature by Marshall prefixed to the first edition. But the jocular Greek lines on Marshall's portrait which had appeared in the first edition were still preserved. They were printed among the Sylvæ in the new edition, with the title "In Effigiei ejus Sculptorem." (3) From the new edition were omitted Moseley's Preface to the first edition, and also the two pieces of English prose which had been specially inserted in the first as introductions to the Comus-viz. Lawes's Dedication of the Comus to Lord Brackley in 1637, and Sir Henry Wotton's letter of 1638. Milton probably thought that these

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