Prince of Wales a fugitive back to Holland with his useless fleet (Aug. 28); the little English Army of Independents and Sectaries once more everywhere the victor, and the Parliament and the Presbytery-besotted Londoners ruefully accepting the victory when they would have been nearly as glad of a defeat! No fear now of any very violent execution of the Ordinance against Heresies and Blasphemies, or of a Presbyterian discipline of absolutely intolerable stringency! The Army and the Independents were once more supreme. The sole piece of Milton's verse that has come down to us from the time of the Second Civil War is an expression of his joy at its happy conclusion. It is in the form of a Sonnet to Fairfax. The Sonnet is generally printed with the mere heading "To the Lord General Fairfax;" but in the original in Milton's own hand among the Cambridge MSS. one reads this heading through a line of erasure: "On ye Lord Gen. Fairfax at ye seige of Colchester." This assigns the Sonnet to the end of August, or to September, 1648. "Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings, Victory home, though new rebellions raise For what can War but endless war still breed, Through the later months of 1648 Milton's heart must have been wholly with Fairfax and the other Army-chiefs, as he 1 For obvious reasons Milton could not print this Sonnet in the Second or 1673 Edition of his Minor Poems. It was first printed by Phillips at the end of his Memoir of Milton prefixed to the saw them driving things, cautiously at first, but more and more boldly by degrees, into the exact course marked out by this Sonnet. Their very professions were that, having finished the war and crushed the Hydra-heads of the new rebellions, they must and would proceed to the yet nobler task of preventing future wars, by freeing Truth and Right once for all from Violence, and clearing the public Faith of England from the brand of public Fraud. Hence, from September to December, the adoption by the Army of that peculiarly intrepid policy which has been described in our last chapter. Though the Parliament began their new Treaty with the King in the Isle of Wight, there were significant signs from the first that the Army regarded the Treaty with utter disdain; as the Treaty proceeded, regiment after regiment spoke out, each with its manifesto calling for justice on the King, and otherwise more or less democratic; and so till the Army rose at last collectively, issued its great Remonstrance and programme of a Democratic Constitution (Nov. 16), dragged the King from his unfinished Treaty at Newport to safer keeping in Hurst Castle (Dec. 1), and itself marched into London to superintend the sequel (Dec. 2). Nominally in the centre of all this was the Lord General Fairfax, with Ireton as his chief adviser. Cromwell had not yet returned from his work in the north. BIRTH OF MILTON'S SECOND CHILD: ANOTHER LETTER FROM CARLO DATI. In the very midst of these thrilling public events there inserts itself a little domestic incident of Milton's life in Holborn. Oct. 25, 1648, his second child was born, two years and three months after the first. This also was a daughter, and they called her Mary after her mother. From that date on to our limit of time in the present volume we have no distinct incident of the Holborn household to record, unless it be the receipt of another letter from Carlo Dati. Although VOL. III. Y Y the amiable young Italian had received no answer to his last, of Nov. 1647, there had meantime reached him, by some slow conveyance, those copies of the Latin portion of Milton's published volume of Poems which had been promised him as long ago as April of the same year. This occasioned the following letter: Illmo. Sig. e Pron Osso [literally, "Most Illustrious Sir and Most As far back as the end of last year I replied to your very courteous and elegant letter, thanking you affectionately for the kind remembrance you are pleased to entertain of me. I wrote, as I do now, in Italian, knowing my language to be so dear and familiar to you that in your mouth it scarcely appears like a foreign tongue. Since then I have received two copies of your most erudite Poems, and there could not have reached me a more welcome gift; for, though small, it is of infinite value, as being a gem from the treasure of Signor John Milton. And, in the words of Theocritus: : ἦ μεγάλα χάρις Τώρῳ ξὺν ὀλίγῳ, πάντα δὲ τιμᾶντα τὰ παρ' φίλων. "Great grace may be In a slight gift: all from a friend is precious." I return you therefore my very best thanks, and pray Heaven to put it in my power to show my devoted appreciation of your merit. There are some pieces of news which I will not keep from you, because I am sure, from your kindness, they will be agreeable to you. The most Serene Grand Duke my master has been pleased to appoint me to the Chair and Lectureship of Humanity in the Florentine Academy, vacant by the death of the very learned Signor Giovanni Doni of Florence. This is a most honourable office, and has always been held by gentlemen and scholars of this country, as by Poliziano, the two Vettori, and the two Adriani, luminaries in the world of letters. Last week, on the death of the Most Serene Prince Lorenzo of Tuscany, uncle of the reigning Grand Duke, I made the funeral oration; when it is published, it shall be my care to send you a copy. I have on hand several works, such as, please God, may lead to a better opinion of me among my learned and kind friends. Signor Valerio Chimentelli has been appointed by his Highness to be Professor of Greek Literature in Pisa, and there are great expectations from him. Signors Frescobaldi, Coltellini, Francini, Galilei, and many others unite in sending you affectionate 1 salutations; and I, as under more obligation to you than any of the others, remain ever yours to command. [No signature, but addressed on the outside, Florence, Dec. 4, 1648. Il Signor Giovanni Miltoni, Londra.]1 While this letter was on its way to Milton, and possibly before it could have reached him, there had enacted itself, close within his view in High Holborn, that final catastrophe of a great political drama the boom of which was not to stop within the British Islands, but was to be heard in Italy itself and all the foreign world. 1 The Italian of this letter is printed in the Appendix to Mr. Mitford's Life of Milton prefixed to Pickering's edition of Milton's Works, and was communicated, I believe, by the late Mr. Watts of the British Museum from the original in that collection. It is doubtless the copy which Milton received.-Of the Doni mentioned in the letter, as Dati's predecessor in the chair of Belles Lettres at Florence, we had a glimpse Vol. I. p. 746. He died, Mr. Watts says, in Dec. 1647, and left to Dati the charge of publishing his works. Fres cobaldi, Coltellini, and Francini are already known (Vol. I. 725-9); the Galilei mentioned is not the great Galileo, who had died in 1642, but his natural son Vincenzo Galilei, also a man of talent.---As we take leave of Dati at this point, for some time at least, I may quote an interesting sentence, respecting one of his intentions in later life, from the notices of him in Salvini's Fasti Consolari dell'Accademia Fiorentina (1717): "He had particu"larly in view the publication of the "letters which he had received from "various literary men, such as John "Milton, Isaac Vossius, Paganino Gau"denzio, Giovanni Rodio, Valerio "Chimentelli, and Nicolas Heinsius: "from the last he had a very large "number." When he died, Jan. 11, 1675, a few months after Milton, he had not fulfilled this intention; but it is likely, as we have seen (ante, p. 655), that there has survived from among his papers only the one letter of Milton to him which Milton himself published. CHAPTER III. ORDINANCE THE TWO HOUSES IN THE GRASP OF THE ARMY: FINAL EFFORTS IN taking the King out of the Isle of Wight, and lodging him for a time in the solitary keep of Hurst Castle on the Hampshire coast, the Army had proclaimed their intention of bringing him to public justice, and it was that they might compel this result that they had marched into London with Fairfax at their head. As they desired that the proceedings should be regular, they had resolved that the two Houses of Parliament, or at least one of them, should conduct the business. THE TWO HOUSES IN THE GRASP OF THE ARMY: THEIR FINAL EFFORTS FOR THE KING: PRIDE'S PURGE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. Here was their difficulty. On Dec. 2, 1648, when the Army took possession of London, there were nineteen Peers present in their places in the House of Lords: viz. the Earl of Manchester, as Speaker; the Earls of Pembroke, Rutland, Salisbury, Suffolk, Lincoln, Mulgrave, Middlesex, Stamford, Northumberland, and Nottingham; Viscount Saye and Sele; and Lords Howard, Maynard, Dacres, Montague, North, |