In Ephraim's and Benjamin's do thou stir up thy might. Lord, turn us; cause thy face to shine, and then full safe we are. SCOTTISH AUTHORIZED VERSION. Hear, Israel's Shepherd! like a flock Shine forth, O thou that dost between the cherubims abide. In Ephraim's and Benjamin's, and in Manasseh's sight, O come for our salvation; stir up thy strength and might. Turn us again, O Lord our God, and upon us vouchsafe To make thy countenance to shine, Or take the beginning of Psalm LXXXIV.:— MILTON'S VERSION. How lovely are thy dwellings fair, O Lord of Hosts! how dear The pleasant tabernacles are Where thou dost dwell so near! My soul doth long, and almost die, My heart and flesh aloud do cry, There even the sparrow, freed from wrong, Hath found a place of rest; The swallow there, to lay her young, Hath built her brooding nest; Even by thy altars, Lord of Hosts, They find their safe abode, And hence they fly from round the coasts ROUS'S VERSION: ED. 1646. How dear thy tents are, Lord of Hosts! For God's courts; for the living God Sparrows an house, swallows a nest, SCOTTISH AUTHORIZED VERSION. How lovely is thy dwelling-place, Behold, the sparrow findeth out hath purchased a nest; Even thine own altars, where she safe O thou Almighty Lord of Hosts, PSALMS I.-VIII.: DONE INTO VERSE. (Edition of 1673.) The former experiment of a close translation of Nine of the Psalms into ordinary Service metre had been made by Milton in April 1648, when he was living in High Holborn, not yet blind, and (Charles I. being still alive) not yet Latin Secretary to the 1 For an interesting account of competing English Versions of the Psalms in the middle of the seventeenth century see Mr. David Laing's "Notices regarding the Metrical Versions of the Psalms received by the Church of Scotland," printed in the Appendix to his edition of Baillie's Letters and Journals (1842). Commonwealth, nor with any prospect of being such. More than five years had elapsed since then, and Milton was living in Petty France, quite blind, and occupied with the duties of his Secretaryship, when something led him to recur to Psalm-translation. On a few successive days of August 1653 he dictated metrical versions of the first Eight of the Psalms. These versions, however, were done on a new principle. They did not profess to be close to the original, nor were they in the ordinary Service metre. On the contrary, very various metres were employed, some of them quite uncommon; and no two of the Eight Psalms were rendered in the same metre. Perhaps the main intention was to try the effect of such a freedom of metre. Little else, at all events, needs to be pointed out in connexion with this small exercise of Milton's. In his edition of 1673 he places it before his Versions of Psalms LXXX.-LXXXVIII.; but the chronological order of the Translations ought to be observed now, rather than the numerical order of the Psalms translated. SCRAPS OF TRANSLATED VERSE FROM THE PROSE Writings. It was Milton's laudable habit, and one rather unusual in his day, not to trouble the readers of his English pamphlets and other writings with quotations in Latin and Greek, but, where he did have occasion to quote a Latin or Greek author, either to give the English sense of the passage, or to annex the English sense to the quoted bit of Latin or Greek. So with Italian. Hence, when he wanted to quote a line or two from a Latin, Greek, or Italian poet, or a passage of Latin verse occurring in a prose author, he generally took the trouble to translate it offhand himself at the moment. In such cases blank verse came easiest, and all the scraps of the kind in his prose writings are in blank verse. did not think it worth while to collect these for either the first or the second edition of his Poems; but they have very properly been sought out and placed in later editions. In Pickering's Edition of Milton's whole Works in 1851, indeed, there was a blunder by excess in this direction. In that edition, besides the original Latin of Milton's Defensio pro Populo Anglicano contra Salmasium, there was published an English version of the He same, done by a Mr. Washington of the Temple, and published in 1692. In this English version some scraps of Latin and Greek verse, occurring in the original, and among them a Latin Epigram on Salmasius by Milton himself, are translated into English rhymes. So far good; it was very proper for Mr. Washington to translate the scraps. But unfortunately these very scraps of English rhyme, done by Mr. Washington eighteen years after Milton was dead, are given as Milton's own, among his English Poems in another volume of the same edition. The blunder must have arisen from the fact that the English version of the Defensic was given with no indication of its authorship, so that the compiler of the edition, going over Milton's English writings for his translated scraps of verse, included the translation of the Defensio among those writings. In the present edition only the scraps that came from Milton's own pen are retained. It will be sufficient introduction to each individually to put over it a reference to the place of the original passage and the title of the pamphlet or other writing of Milton where the translation occurs. 318 INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS SEVERALLY. PART II. THE LATIN POEMS. BOTH in the Edition of 1645 and in that of 1673 the Latin and Greek Poems come after the English in a little mass by themselves, separately paged, and with a distinct title-page and other prefatory matter. In the earlier edition they fill (the prefatory matter not counted) 77 pages, while the English Poems fill 120 pages; i.e. in that edition the bulk of the Latin and Greek portion is nearly two-thirds that of the English. In the later edition the proportion of the Latin and Greek is somewhat less, there being 84 pages of Latin and Greek Verse after 165 of English; i.e. the English is nearly twice as much as the Latin and Greek. This change of proportion is rather symptomatic. Although, long before Milton's birth, the vernacular had asserted itself in England, beyond all rivalry, as the true language for poetry and all popular literature, Latin retaining its ground chiefly for the purposes of scholarship and speculation and for writings meant for a European constituency, yet there lingered, to an extent which it is difficult now to fancy, a habit of Latin metrical composition. Nay, not of Latin metrical composition merely, but of genuine poetry in Latin. Among University men, in particular, this was the case. Not only was Latin the language of learning and of all systematic discussion; not only did men recollect in Latin, reason in Latin, fight in Latin, exerting their |