and wondered what he was doing in his native land. Much news of Milton, however, in Poetry at least, can hardly have reached Manso before his death. He died at Naples, at the age of eighty-four, in 1645, the very year when Milton's first edition of his Poems was published.

EPITAPHIUM DAMONIS.

In the Introductions to the Elegia Prima and the Elegia Sexta the story of Milton's friendship with the half-Italian youth Charles Diodati has been brought down to the end of the year 1629. Since then there had been no interruption of the friendship, but rather a strengthening of it by new ties as the two friends grew older. Two Latin letters of Milton to Diodati, both written in September 1637, and now printed among Milton's Epistolæ Familiares, are the best information we have as to the mutual position of the two friends at that date, when Milton was near his thirtieth year, and Diodati close on the same age. Diodati, it appears from those letters, had finished his medical education, and was in practice somewhere in the north of England; near Chester, it has been supposed, but that is only a guess from the fact that he had been in that neighbourhood in 1626, the date of the Elegia Prima. Milton, on the other hand, was mainly at Horton, but sometimes in London; whence, indeed, his two letters are written. They are full of gossip and affection. "How is it with you, pray?" asks Milton in the first, dated Sept. 2. "Are you in good health? Are there in those parts any learned folks or so with whom you can willingly associate and chat, as we were wont together? When do you return? How long do you intend to dwell among those hyperboreans?" Again, in the second, dated Sept. 23, Diodati having replied in the meanwhile, and there having been the usual excuses on both sides for laziness in letterwriting: "Your probity writes with me in your stead and indites true letters on my inmost heart; your blamelessness of morals writes to me, and your love of the good; your genius also, by no means a common one, writes to me, and commends you to me more and more. Know that it is impossible for me not to love men like you." There is added some talk about Milton's doings. He is thinking, he

says, of taking chambers in London, in one of the Inns of Court, having begun to find Horton inconvenient. He has been engaged in a continuous course of historical reading, and has reached the medieval period. Could Diodati lend him the History of Venice by Justiniani? And what is Diodati doing? Is he crowing over his medical dignity? Is he troubling himself too much with family matters? Unless this stepmotherly war is very bad indeed, worse than Dacian or Sarmatian, may not one hope to see him soon in winter quarters in London? (Nisi bellum hoc novercale vel Dacico vel Sarmatico infestius sit, debebis profecto maturare, ut ad nos saltem in hiberna concedas.) The meaning is that Diodati had recently received a stepmother, by his father's second marriage in his sixty-fourth year, and was not much pleased with the acquisition.

Seven months after Milton had written these letters to Diodati, he went abroad on his Italian journey (April 1638). It is very possible that he and Diodati may have met in the interval, and talked over the intended tour. Diodati, as half an Italian, and acquainted with the Italian traditions and connections of his family, may have had hints to give to Milton for his use abroad, or even letters of introduction. At all events, we find Milton, while abroad, thinking much of Diodati. He mentions expressly in his Defensio Secunda that, in the second two months he spent at Florence (March and April 1639), he found time for an excursion of "a few days" to Lucca, about forty miles distant; and I suspect that his main motive in the excursion was to see the town whence the Diodati family had derived their origin. Then, again, in one of the Five Italian Love Sonnets, written, as is generally believed, in the north of Italy, towards the end of Milton's Italian tour, we find Diodati directly addressed, and, as it were, taken, though absent, into his friend's confidence in the sudden love-incident that had befallen him. I feel sure that Milton talked of Diodati, his half-Italian friend at home, to the various groups of Italian wits and literati in the midst of whom he found himself in the different Italian cities he visited, and especially to his acquaintances of the Florentine group, — Gaddi, Dati, Frescobaldi, Coltellini, Chimentelli, Francini, and others. It is not a matter of fancy either, but of actual information by Milton himself, that, while he was enjoying the society of these Italian

friends, and the other pleasures of his Italian tour, he looked forward to the time when he should meet Diodati again, after so long an absence, and pour into his ear, in long sittings within doors, or in walks together through English fields and country lanes, the connected story of all he had done and seen in the wondrous southern land of olives and myrtles, blue skies and soft winds, art and antiquities, poetry and beauty.

All the more terrible was the shock that awaited Milton. His friend Diodati was no longer alive. He had died in August 1638, very soon after Milton had left England. The news had reached Milton very slowly. It did reach him while he was still on the Continent,—if not at Florence on his second visit in March 1639, at latest at Geneva on his return homewards in June 1639; for he tells us that, while at Geneva on his return, he was much in the company of the celebrated theologian, Jean Diodati, the uncle of Charles Diodati, and it is natural to suppose that the uncle had heard of his nephew's death. Not till Milton was in England, however, did he fully ascertain the particulars. They eluded

all modern research till August 1874, when the present editor received the following conclusive information in a letter from the late Colonel J. L. Chester, whose great work, The Westminster Abbey Registers, is only a sample of the stores of antiquarian and genealogical knowledge he had accumulated by his labours among English parish registers and collections of archives after he had settled among us from America, and whose contribution of facts to Milton's biography we have had occasion already to mention specially: -"Charles Diodati was buried at St. Anne, Blackfriars, London, 27 Aug. 1638. The entry in the Register is simply 'Mr. Charles Deodate, from Mr. Dollam's.' Seventeen days before, viz. 10 Aug. 1638, was also buried there 'Mrs. Philadelphia Deodate, from Mr. Dollam's.' On the 29th of June 1638 was baptized ‘Richard, son of John and Isabell Deodate'; and on the 23d of June in the same year was buried Isabell, wife to John Deodate.' These are all the entries of the name that occur in the Register of St. Anne, Blackfriars." -The interpretation of these facts and dates is not difficult. Since 1637, as we have seen, the second

1 First published by me in the preface to the Cambridge Edition of Milton's Poetical Works in September 1874.

marriage of the naturalized London physician, Dr. Theodore Diodati, had rather alienated from him the children of his first marriage. Accordingly, in 1638, and probably before Milton had gone abroad, the two brothers, John and Charles Diodati, had left their father's house in Little St. Bartholomew, and were domiciled in Blackfriars,—John a married man, and apparently in a house of his own, and Charles unmarried, and boarding, it seems, together with his sister (?) Philadelphia, in the house of a Mr. Dollam. In June 1638, John Diodati was made a widower by the death of his wife, Isabell, just after she had given birth to a son, Richard; and in August 1638 Charles Diodati and his sister (?) Philadelphia were carried to their graves from Mr. Dollam's house, within three weeks of each other, the victims perhaps of some epidemic in the neighbourhood. The widower, John Diodati, it has been ascertained by Colonel Chester, took out letters of administration to the effects of his deceased brother Charles on the 3d of October 1638.— All this, and much more, Milton must have learnt in detail on his return to London in July or August 1639. One of his first visits must have been to the house of Mr. Dollam in Blackfriars, whence there had been the funeral a year before.

For some time after his return Milton seems to have gone about, between London and Horton, thinking of little else than Charles Diodati's melancholy death. His return, his reminiscences of Italy, and all the other delights of his foreign tour, were saddened and spoiled for him by this one irremediable loss. At length his musings over it took poetic form, and some time in the autumn of 1639, or in the winter of 1639-40, he wrote his Epitaphium Damonis.

The poem is, beyond all question, the finest, the deepest in feeling, of all that Milton has left us in Latin, and one of the most interesting of all his poems, whether Latin or English. It is purely the accident of its being in Latin that has prevented it from being as well known as Lycidas, and that has transferred to the subject of that English pastoral, Edward King of Christ's College, Cambridge, the honour of being remembered and spoken of as the pre-eminent friend of Milton's youth and early manhood. That is a mistake. Not Lycidas but Damon, not the Irish-born Edward King, but the half-Italian Charles Diodati, was Milton's dearest, most intimate, most peculiar friend. The records prove this

irresistibly, and a careful perusal of the two poems will add to the impression. Whoever will read the Latin Epitaphium Damonis will perceive in it a passionateness of personal grief, an evidence of bursts of tears and sobbings interrupting the act of writing, to which there is nothing equivalent in the English Lycidas, affectionate and exquisitely beautiful as that poem is. Yet the two poems are, in a sense, companions, and ought to be recollected in connexion. Both are pastorals; in both the form is that of a surviving shepherd bewailing the death of a dear fellow-shepherd. In the one case the dead shepherd is named Lycidas, while the surviving shepherd who mourns him is left unnamed, and only seen at the end as the "uncouth swain" who has been singing; in the other the dead shepherd is named Damon, and Milton, under the name of Thyrsis, is avowedly the shepherd who laments him. The Epitaphium Damonis indeed is a pastoral of the most artificial variety. It is in Latin; and this, in itself, removes it into the realm of the artificial. But, in the Latin, the precedents of the Greek pastoralists, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, as well as of the Latin Virgil, have been studied, and every device of classic pastoralism has been imitated. There are the sheep, the kids, the reeden flutes, the pastures, the shepherds and shepherdesses wondering at the mourner and coming round him to comfort him. The measure used is the Virgilian Hexameter, and the poem is broken into musical parts or bursts by a recurring phrase, as in some of the Greek Idylls; the names used for the shepherds and shepherdesses are from the Greek Idyllists or from Virgil; the very title of the poem is an echo of that of the third Idyll of Moschus, Epitaphium Bionis. All the more strange, to those whose notion of the Pastoral has not gone beyond Dr. Johnson's in his criticism of Lycidas, may seem the assertion that in this Latin pastoral, the Epitaphium Damonis, the pastoralism of which is more subtle and artificial in every point than that of the corresponding English poem, Milton will be found, undeniably, and with an earnestness which breaks through the assumed guise and thrills the nerves of the reader, speaking his own heart. For my part,

I risk the assertion and will leave the verification to the reader. To the reader also I will leave the pleasure of finding out what is interesting otherwise in the poem. Only let him rest a little, for special reasons, over the memorable VOL. I.

I