A. D. 1655 MILTON'S CHILDHOOD. 67 ham observes, "that it should not have been applied to the use of so beneficial an instrument sooner, which is no where proved, till after these experiments and observations at Oxford." WHILE these men of peace and lovers of science were thus pursuing their beloved avocations in their seclusion at Oxford, the men of more worldly pursuits and warlike habits, did not entirely forget the Muses. Milton was distinguished in early youth, for the purity and elegance of his Latin versification, was an early genius, and a staid and solemn boy, though full of poetic fire. Read his own description of his school life, and wonder not at the mighty soarings of his full-plumed wing. When I was yet a child, no childish play HIS L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, his Comus and his Lycidas, works of highest fame, are early productions. He visited the land of song, tarrying in his progress among congenial souls in Florence, Rome and Naples. He shortened his tour, which he had proposed to have extended to Sicily and Greece, on hearing of the convulsions that disturbed the peace of his native country. "Born to promote all truth, all righteous things," he deemed it" dishonourable," he wrote to a friend in England, "to be lingering abroad for the improvement of his mind, while his fellow-citizens were contending for their liberty at home." In order to be of use to his country, he used his classic pen, as Latin Secretary to the Council, which formed the administrative government of the Lord Protector, and wrote his "Defensio pro Populo Anglicano," planned his immortal Paradise Lost, and left to posterity his profound Latin Treatise, "De Doctrina Christiana," which the liberality of George IV., in whose reign it was discovered in the State Paper Office, gave to the world. NEITHER did the stern Lord Protector despise the softer amenities of the fine arts, sitting to Oliver the miniature-painter, who had recorded the melancholy lineaments of the unfortunate Charles, and desiring the Vandyke of miniature, as he was named, to make a faithful likeness, and copy warts and all and the coins and medals of the Protectorate, designed and sunk by the inimitable Simon, were not only among the finest in Europe, but have rarely been surpassed, even by the eminent artists of our present mint. POETRY, also, sometimes intruded into the puritanical recesses of Cromwell's Whitehall, when perchance the stiffest of his Round-heads, were absent from council. The gallant, gay and amatory Waller, whose always smooth and sonorous, and sometimes lofty and heroic versification, has tended so much to the improvement of English poetry, paid his court to Cromwell; and presented him the noblest tribute of his muse. On the restoration, the pliant bard offered his Parnassian gratulations to Charles II., which were so inferior to the A. D. 1655] A POET-AMBASSADOR. 69 Cromwellian effusion, that "the Merry Monarch" noticed it to the would-be Laureate. "Poets succeed much better in fiction, Sire, than in truth," was the unabashed wit's courtly reply. A DIFFERENT fate befel another poet under similar circumstances of poetic pliability and royal remembrance. Luigi Alamanni, who is as well known for his politics as his poetry, having entered into a conspiracy to overthrow the power of the Medici family in Florence, his native city; on the elevation of Guilio de Medici to the Pontificate, he left Italy and attached himself to the French monarch Francis I. During his residence at the court of that Prince, he wrote a poem called "The Eagle," against the Emperor Charles V. making the imperial Eagle a bird of prey, well carnaged, and at the same time, a sort of monster, with two heads and two beaks, that it might be doubly destructive. L'Aquila grifagna Che per più divorar, duoi rostri porta. On the re-establishment of peace between these Potentates, Signor Alamanni, whose abilities as a statesman, were highly estimated by the French King, was despatched by him as Ambassador to the Emperor. The envoy made a grand oration, attributing to his imperial Majesty, the great and noble qualities of the King of birds. As the diplomatic orator often repeated "l'Aquila," and before he had completed his peroration, the Emperor repeated gravely L'Aquila grifagna Che per più divorar, duoi rostri porta. To which quotation Alamanni, nothing abashed, as 66 gravely replied that when he wrote those verses, he spoke as a poet, but now as an ambassador; that it was allowable for poets to lie, but Ambassadors should always speak the truth. Magnanimo Principe," said the audacious envoy, "allora io raggionava come gli Poeti aquali è lecito di favoleggiare: io raggiono in questo discorso come un Ambasciatore che non devo fingere." ROBERT HERRICK too, sang in this grim and rugged period, but it was in foreign lands, to which he was exiled for loyalty to his King, and fidelity to his church, of which he was an appointed minister. Rather than remain at home with a people whom he loved not, and whose violence he abhorred, he suffered, in common with many other faithful members of the episcopal clergy, deprivation of his benefice, and followed the broken fortunes of his fellow royalists. During this exile he wrote his sorrows and his hopes, his threnodia and his nuga, his Hesperides" a garden of fruits human and divine. This genuine poet deserves a better notoriety than as a writer of the pretty but hacknied ballad of "Cherry ripe," whilst some of the brightest of his golden apples are ungathered, although unguarded by any dragon. Read the following epitaph upon a babe, sweet and gentle as the subject of his verse; 66 HERE she lies, a pretty bud, Lately made of flesh and blood; Give her strewings; but not stir A. D. 1655] ROBERT HERRICK. 71 Or one to a lady who died in child-bed and left a female infant to survive her : As Gilly-flowers do but stay To blow and seed, and so away; So you, sweet Lady, sweet as May, To lend the world your scent and smile. Sweet as yourself and newly blown, Or another who died in maidenhood: HERE she lies, in bed of spice, Fair as Eve in Paradise: For her beauty it was such Virgins, come, and in a ring His epitaph upon a clerical friend, a residentiary, is full of suggestive thoughts upon the remains of him he wept, and of the times in which he departed from the troubled world. TREAD, Sirs, as lightly as you can, And thrice three weeks, he lived here, Yet, READER, let me tell thee this, |