esprits made verses in her praise. There is a volume of excellent pieces, in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish, printed at Rome under the title of ' Applausi Poetici alle glorie della Signora Leonora Baroni.' Leonora went about usually with her mother, the beautiful Adriana Baroni, and a sister called Katarina. Though Bayle makes the family Mantuan, it was originally Neapolitan, and had migrated from Naples to Mantua. From 1637 onwards, how ever, Rome was the headquarters of the fascinating three.

"APOLOGUS DE RUSTICO ET HERO."-There is nothing to date this Apologue, except that its non-appearance in the edition of 1645 suggests that it was written after that year.

DE MORO. So we may entitle the lampoon on Milton's antagonist Morus, or Alexander More, which appeared in Milton's Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano (1654), and was reproduced in his Pro se Defensio contra Alexandrum Morum (1655). More was a Frenchman, of Scottish parentage, born in 1616, who, after a varied career of celebrity as a Protestant preacher and Professor of Greek and of Theology in various parts of the Continent, at Geneva, in Holland, and again in France, died in Paris in 1670, four years before Milton. His collision with Milton dates from the year 1652, when he caused to be printed, at the Hague, a treatise against the English Commonwealth entitled "Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Cælum adversus Parricidas Anglicanos” ("Cry of the King's Blood to Heaven against the English Parricides"). In this treatise Milton was attacked for his Defences of the Regicide; and, though it was anonymous, and was really not by More, but by Peter du Moulin the younger, Milton made More responsible. In his Defensio Secunda and in his Pro se Defensio he dragged More through a perfect ditch of invective, publishing all sorts of scandals against More's private character, which had come to him from correspondents in Geneva and elsewhere. The distich under notice is one of these unsavoury scandals, embalmed in a Latin pun on More's name. Though twice used by Milton, however, it is all but certainly not his own. It seems to have been concocted originally in Holland by some Dutch wit. At all events, it first appeared in England in the Mercurius Politicus of Sept. 30, 1652, as from a Dutch correspondent, twenty months before the publication of Milton's Defensio Secunda; and Milton, when he quotes it there, speaks of the anonymous author as certainly a clever fellow, whoever he was.

AD CHRISTINAM, SUECORUM REGINAM, NOMINE CROMWELLI. The lines printed with this title in most modern editions of Milton's poems are supposed to have been written for Cromwell in 1654, the first year of his Protectorate, to accompany a portrait of himself which he then sent to the eccentric, and then famous, Christina, Queen of Sweden. Being in elegiac verse, they have their proper place here in the Elegiarum Liber, if they are Milton's. But, almost certainly, they are Andrew Marvell's. They appeared as his, with only slight verbal variations, in his Miscellaneous Poems, published by his widow in 1681, three years after his

death.

SYLVARUM LIBER.

IN OBITUM PROCANCELLARII MEDICI.
Anno ætatis 17.

In both Milton's editions this piece is dated “Anno ætatis 16." This date is a blunder. For, even if we allow Milton his ordinary liberty of dating, according to which the phrase must be translated "at the age of 16 years" and not "in the 16th year of his age" (see Introductions to Elegies Second and Third), the dating will not correspond with the incident of the poem. That incident was the death of John Gostlin, M.D., Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from 1618, and Vice-Chancellor of the University for the second time in the year 1625-6. His Vice-Chancellorship would have expired Nov. 3, 1626; but he died some days before that date, still holding the office: viz. on the 21st of October 1626. The Michaelmas Term of Milton's third academic year had just begun, and Milton was full seventeen years of age, and, in fact, verging on eighteen. The dating “ anno ætatis 16" was, therefore, a slip of memory. The Dr. Gostlin whose death is lamented in the poem, in very pretty mythological language and in good Horatian verse, was a Norwich man by birth, educated at Caius College, admitted M.D. in 1602, and afterwards Regius Professor of Physic in the University. When his turn came round to be Vice-Chancellor, it was something of a rarity in the Uni

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versity to see an M.D., rather than the customary D.D., in that office. "Here comes our medical Vice-Chancellor," one may fancy the Cantabs of 1625-6 saying to each other when they saw Gostlin in the streets. His death, just at the close of his year of office, and when the Colleges had reassembled for a new session, naturally occasioned versifying.

IN QUINTUM Novembris.

Anno ætatis 17.

This is a Gunpowder Plot poem, written by Milton for Guy Fawkes's Day, or the Fifth of November, 1626. There are four Latin trifles on the same subject among the Elegies, but the present piece, in sustained Hexameters, is a much more elaborate performance. It is, indeed, one of the very best of Milton's things in Latin. The spirit, it is true, is that of the common popular Protestantism of England in Milton's time, which firmly believed in all the traditional details of the Plot of 1605, and regarded it as a wide-spread conspiracy of the Roman Catholics, characteristic of their principles, and prompted by the Papacy itself. Naturally, such a poem (and there are minuter ferocities against the Papacy in the fillingup) will be read in different humours by different persons. But the execution of the poem, the power of imagination and of language shown in it, cannot fail to strike even the reader who is least sympathetic with the spirit. I would instance particularly the description of Satan flying through the air and beholding Britain (lines 7-47), that of the den of Murder and Treason (lines 139-156), and that of the Temple of Fame (lines 170-193). The ending of the poem is rather abrupt.

IN OBITUM PRÆSULIS ELIENSIS.

Anno ætatis 17.

On the 5th of October 1626, or only a fortnight after the death of Dr. Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, there died another prelate, Dr. Nicholas Felton, Bishop of Ely. Like Andrewes, he was a Cambridge man, of Pembroke Hall, and he had, like Andrewes, been for some time master of that Hall before he was made a Bishop. Milton, who had just written his Elegy on Andrewes's death (Elegia Tertia), paid a similar honour to his brother-bishop, but employed Iambic verse of alternate Trimeters and Dimeters instead of Elegiacs. Hence this piece on Felton comes among the Sylva.

NATURAM NON PATI SENIUM.

From one of Milton's Epistolæ Familiares, dated "Cambridge, July 2, 1628," and addressed to his former master at St. Paul's School, Alexander Gill the younger, it appears that these Latin Hexameters were one of the pieces of verse printed copies of which were distributed, according to custom, by the University Bedels at the Cambridge Commencement ceremonial, or annual meeting for the conferring of degrees, held in St. Mary's Church on Tuesday the Ist of July 1628.

The ceremonial, though held at the end of the academic year, was called the "Commencement," because those who graduated in Divinity, Arts, Law, Physic, and Music, were then said to "commence" in their respective faculties, and were designated Inceptores. Part of the business in the graduation in each faculty consisted of what was called an Act or Disputation in that faculty, carried on in Latin between one appointed debater-in-chief, called the Respondent (in the Divinity Act there were generally two Respondents), and other debaters who attacked him successively and were called Opponents. First, early in the morning, as soon as all had assembled in St. Mary's Church, the Vice-Chancellor presiding, there began the Divinity Act, or Debate, accompanied by a distribution of copies of verses, and ending in the ceremonious conferring of the degree of D.D. on all the candidates of the year for that degree. Next, and usually about mid-day, came on the Philosophical Act and Graduation in Arts. This was a richer and more diversified affair than the Divinity Graduation which had preceded it, not only because the candidates for the M.A. degree each year were a very numerous body, consisting of young men from all the Colleges, but also because custom tolerated a great deal of liberty and even of fun in the philosophical discussion. Here also, however, the backbone of the business was the Latin logomachy between the appointed representative of the Arts faculty, called the Respondent, and the Opponents who successively attacked him; and here also the logomachy began with the reading of the Respondent's thesis, and the distribution of his verses, while he was reading it, by the University Bedels. After the Act was over, there was only a specimen of the actual graduation in Arts within the church, in the persons of the ten or twelve Commencers from King's College; and the rest were marched off to receive their M.A. degree in the Public School. For by this time it was growing late, and the Law Act, the Physic Act, and the Music Act, with their accompanying graduations, had still

to come.

Milton may have been present already at three Commencements; but that of 1628 had a peculiar interest for him. Bainbrigge, Master of his own College of Christ's, was ViceChancellor of the University for the year 1627-8, and there was a relish for the undergraduates of Christ's in this fact, and in the prospect of his presidency in the Comitia of July 1628. Nor was that all. One of the Senior Fellows of Christ's, it appears, had been selected for the important post of Respondent in the Philosophical Act for that year; and he had found the bit of verse expected from him quite out of his habits, or had broken down over it at the last moment, and had asked Milton to help him out. With some pains, from the shortness of the time, Milton had furbished up what he thought would pass; and so the Christ's College people might congratulate themselves triply on the representation of their College at the Commencement of 1628. Not only would their master preside as Vice-Chancellor, and not only would a Fellow of their College be Respondent in the Philosophical Act, but the Latin verses which the University Bedels would distribute in connection with that Act would be (but perhaps it was a secret) by an undergraduate of Christ's. Actually the verses were put into print and distributed by the Bedels; and on the 2d of July, or the day after the Commencement, Milton was able to send a copy, or some copies, of them to Gill in London.

One would like now to know which of the thirteen Fellows of Christ's it was that begged Milton's poetical help, and what was the subject of the thesis which the verses were to illustrate. We have light only on the last point from Milton's