than rich, had acquiesced in his not so far earning one penny for himself, and was now prepared to provide him with about a thousand pounds of our present money to enable him to go abroad for a year or two in comfortable style and with the attendance of a servant. Leaving England in the spring of 1638, he spent a few days in Paris, where he was civilly entertained by the famous Grotius, then Swedish Ambassador there, as well as by the English Ambassador, Lord Scudamore, but soon moved south, entering Italy by Nice and Genoa and arriving at Florence in August or September. There he spent two months, and was enthusiastically received by the various academies or clubs of men of letters which then flourished in Florence, one of whose still existing minute {44} books records that at its meeting on September the 16th a certain John Milton, an Englishman, read to the members a Latin hexameter poem showing great learning. There also he paid his famous visit to Galileo, now old and blind, and still a sort of nominal prisoner of the Inquisition, for the sin, as Milton says in the Areopagitica, of "thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." One may be sure that it was not merely the interest of the new theory about the motion of the earth which drew him back so often to that question in Paradise Lost. The blind astronomer, whose scientific heresies had placed him in some danger of the thumbscrew, must have been a very near and moving memory to the blind poet whose political and ecclesiastical heresies had so nearly brought him to the gallows.

From Florence Milton went on to Rome, where his scholarly tastes gratified themselves for two months in the study of what remained of the ancient city. The famous picture of Rome in Paradise Regained may owe something to these weeks. There, too, he was well received by several of Rome's most distinguished scholars who paid him compliments of Italian extravagance. There, too, he heard the famous Leonora Baroni {45} sing, and was so moved as to write three Latin epigrams in her praise. But it was at Naples, whither he passed on before winter, that he made the acquaintance which, except that of Galileo, is the most interesting his Italian tour brought him. It was that of the Neopolitan patrician, Giovanni Manso, who had been intimate with Tasso and Marini and had been celebrated by Tasso in the Gerusalemme Conquistata. His courtesy to a foreigner was soon to procure him a still greater honour; for before leaving Naples Milton addressed to him a Latin poem thanking him for his kindness, speaking openly of his own poetic ambitions and praying that, if he lives to write the great Arthurian Epic which he was then planning, he may find such a friend as Tasso found to welcome his poem, comfort his old age and cherish his fame. The only difficulty which separated Manso and Milton was that of religion, where Milton's unguarded frankness embarrassed his host. So, when he abandoned his intended tour in Greece because he thought it "base" to be "travelling abroad at case for intellectual culture while his fellow-countrymen were fighting at home for liberty," he was warned that the Jesuits at Rome had their eyes on him. But he stayed there two {46} months nevertheless, fearlessly keeping his resolution, not indeed to introduce or invite religious controversy but, if questioned, then, as he says, "whatsoever I should suffer to dissemble nothing." By February he was again in Florence; and after visits to Bologna, Ferrara and Venice, whence he characteristically shipped "a chest or two of choice music books" for England, he crossed the Alps, spent a week or two at Geneva and in France, and was at home by August 1639.

The elaborate education was now formally complete; and what ordinary men call practical life was at last to begin for Milton. Now for the first time he had an abode of his own, a lodging in St. Bride's, Fleet Street, and soon afterwards a house in Aldersgate Street where he settled with a young nephew whom he undertook to educate. But the real work which he had in view was that of a poet, not of a schoolmaster. The high expectations which he knew he had excited among Italian men of letters had reinforced those of his English friends; and he was now more than ever inclined to follow that "inward prompting which now grew daily upon me that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might {47} perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die." So, as his extant notes show, he was weighing a large number of subjects for the great poem, slowly settling on a Biblical one, and indeed on that of the Fall of Man, and perhaps writing some earliest lines of what we now know as Paradise Lost.

But in November 1640 occurred an event which governed Milton's life for the next twenty years. The Long Parliament met, and, from that time forward till its final meeting in 1660 to dissolve itself and prepare the way for Charles II, politics were the dominant interest of Milton's mind. It is his age of prose; during it he wrote very little verse of any kind, and none of importance except the finer of his eighteen Sonnets which nearly all belong to these years. On the other hand, most of his prose works were written between 1640 and 1660. Of these it is enough to say that they are perhaps the most curious of all illustrations of the great things which a poet alone can bring to prose and of the dangers which he runs in bringing them. A poet of the stature of Milton is ready at all times to catch all kinds of fire, not only the fires of faith and zeal and enthusiasm, but also, as a rule, those of a scorn {48} that knows no limit and a hatred that knows no mercy. Such a man needs a strongly made vessel to control his boiling ardours. Prose is not such a vessel: and they too often overflow from it in extravagance and violence. Poetry in all its severer forms places a restraint upon the poet from which as the mood of art gains upon him he has no desire to escape. Law and limitation, willing obedience to the prescribed conditions, are of the very essence of art. And this is as true of the greatest of the arts as of any other. It is not merely that the poet accepts the bondage of rhymes, or stanzas, or numbered syllables, as the painter accepts those of a flat canvas and the sculptor those of bronze or marble; it is that they all alike submit to the mood of art which is always universal and eternal as well as individual and temporal and therefore disdains such crudities of personal violence as are to be found everywhere in Milton's prose and nowhere in his poetry.

But if a poet's prose has its inevitable disadvantages it has also some great qualities which only a poet can supply. In 1640 Milton plunged into a great struggle in which his attitude throughout was that of an angry and contemptuous partisan. And his pamphlets exhibit all the distortion of facts, {49} injustice to opponents, and narrowness of view which are the inevitable if often unconscious vices of the man who writes in the interest of a party. But they also contain flights of noble eloquence, in which, as in the passage about the City of London in the Areopagitica, the soul of partisanship has undergone a fiery purification and emerges free of all its grosser elements, a pure essence of zeal and faith and spiritual vision.

The first stage of the struggle was largely ecclesiastical, and Milton plunged into it with five pamphlets in 1641 and 1642, fiercely demanding the abolition of Episcopacy and the establishment of a Presbyterian system in England. Fortunately for himself, as he was soon to see, the views he advocated did not in the end prevail. For the next step he took in the way of pamphlet writing would assuredly have got him into difficulties with any possible kind of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, whether after the model of Laud or of Calvin.