phrase would certainly include the Italian Sonnets, and might be wholly appropriated to them if the Latin Poems had been previously mentioned, it seems more natural, in the context, to take Daunian as comprehending the Latin Poems with the Italian. The word Daunia applied strictly to a portion of Apulia in South-eastern Italy; and its extension either to ancient Italy generally or to modern Italy seems to be a poetic licence. Possibly, in selecting the term, Milton may have remembered Horace's reference (Od. III. 30) to Daunia as a rather barbaric and sterile part of Italy :

--

"Dicar qua violens obstrepit Aufidus,

Et qua pauper aquæ Daunus agrestium
Regnavit populorum ";

and he may have implied that neither was his Latin offered as the classical Latin of ancient Rome, nor his Italian as the right modern Tuscan. If the Italian Sonnets are specially referred to, then the context would favour the hypothesis that these Sonnets were written in England, and not in Italy (see Introduction to Italian Sonnets, I. pp. 208-210); for it would be too great a strain to translate, with Mr. Keightley, "longinquum" "distant from England,” and “vicinis” "to those who were near him, the Italians."

18. "Thamesis ad incunabula." The true sources of the Thames are not at or near Oxford, but either much farther west, in Gloucestershire (if the Isis is taken as the main head), or considerably to the north-east, in Buckinghamshire (if the Thame is taken as the head); but Milton condescends to the popular fancy that the Thames begins to be the true Thamesis a little below Oxford, where the longer Isis (Celtic ouse or "water"), after being reinforced by the Cherwell precisely at Oxford, receives also the Thame as its tributary, and so starts afresh Londonwards as the Thame-Isis. The poets were fond of this fancy and of its association with Oxford. Thus, Spenser (F. Q. IV. xi. 24—26), in his assembly of all the waters and rivers of the earth to the marriage of the completed Thames with the Medway in the open sea far below London, makes the Thame and Isis come first of all the English rivers, as being the father and mother of the now full-grown bridegroom :—

"But him before there went, as best became,

His auncient parents; namely th' auncient Thame :
But much more aged was his wife than he,

The Ouze, whom men doe Isis rightly name."

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He goes on to tell that the Isis was a weak and crooked creature that could scarce see her way, and required the support of her two attendants the Churne and the Cherwell, but that Thame was stronger, though also old and gray-bearded, and also somewhat' bowed forward in his gait

21.

"by reason of the lode

And auncient heavy burden which he bore
Of that faire City, wherein make abode

So many learned impes, that shoote abrode
And with their braunches spred all Britany."

"Aonidum": of the Muses, called Aonides, from Aonia, the old name of Boeotia.

29. "Tollat nefandos," etc. The Civil War had lasted since 1642; and, as Oxford had been the King's headquarters, the University there had especially suffered. Most of the Colleges had been broken up, or turned into barracks; and all the studious routine of the place had been interrupted. Milton, in Jan. 1646-7, sighs for an end of this state of things in Oxford, and throughout England.

33-36. "Immundasque volucres . . . figat Apollineâ pharetrâ, Phineamque abigat pestem," etc. Milton has in view those who in England, in 1646-7, might be likened to the Harpies, or unclean and infectious birds of Greek mythology, who were sent to punish the Thracian king and soothsayer Phineus, in his blindness, by continually attending him and spoiling and tainting all the food that came to his table. As it was not Apollo that delivered Phineus from the Harpies, the phrase “Apollineâ pharetrâ” is used with reference to the quiver which the deity who will perform the like service for England will bear. It will be the quiver of that monsterkilling god who is also the God of Poetry. So also Thames, the seat of Oxford, is the "amnis Pegaseus," the river of the winged Pegasus, the horse of the Muses, at the stroke of whose hoof sprang up the sacred Hippocrene.-Who, in 1646-7, were the harpies and unclean birds of England, in Milton's estimation, one can easily guess (see Sonnets XI. and XII., and On the New Forcers of Conscience, and Introductions and Notes to those pieces). Some of them had fastened especially on Oxford. But Milton must have had in view also the Royalists and Prelatists.

42.

"institoris insulsi.” Mr. Keightley translates "the ignorant keeper of a bookstall"; but it may be any "tasteless huckster " that could make use of the paper of the book.

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46. "remige pennâ." Mr. Keightley quotes Virgil, Æn. I. 301, Remigio alarum"; and Warton compares Par. Lost, II. 927, “sailbroad vans."

56-60. "Quam cui præfuit Ion . . . Actæâ genitus Creusâ." Ion, the mythical ancestor of the whole Ionian race, was the son of Apollo by Creusa, the daughter of Erechtheus, king of Athens. He was therefore Erechtheides, or grandson of Erechtheus, just as his mother Creusa was Actæa, i.e. Attic or Athenian (from Acte,

"promontory," an old name for Attica). The story about Ion was that his mother, ashamed of his birth, exposed him in a cave, but that Apollo caused Hermes to carry him to Delphi, where he was brought up, as a child of unknown parentage, in Apollo's own temple. "He, therefore, a youth, would wander in play about the altars which fed him; but, when he grew to manhood, the Delphians made him guardian of the treasures of the God, and trustworthy keeper of all." So says Euripides in the beginning of his Ion, and the rest of that play continues the story. It is to Ion, when he was keeper of the rich temple of Delphi, with its furniture of golden tripods and other gifts, that Milton compares Rous of the Bodleian. 65. "Delo posthabitâ": adapted from Virgil's words about Juno (Æn. I. 16), “posthabitâ

Samo."

73-87. "Vos tandem . . . Roüsio favente." Warton and Mr. Keightley think that this Epode has in view chiefly the future fate of those of Milton's prose-writings that had been sent to Rous (see list of them, Introd. I. pp. 330, 331); but, though these are included, I do not see that he distinguishes between them and the poems he was now replacing in their companionship. In 1646-7, when this Ode was written, Milton, whether as poet or as prose-writer, was under that cloud of abuse, and in some quarters even infamy, which his Anti-Episcopal pamphlets and Divorce pamphlets, but especially the latter, had occasioned. There probably was some discrimination already among his contemporaries between the merits of his poetry and the demerits or disputed merits of his prose-pamphlets; for the public beginnings of his poetical reputation might date from as far back as 1634, when his Comus was acted and heard of, whereas his controversial prose-pamphlets and the conflict of judgments about them dated only from 1641. But in the conflict of judgments about his prose-pamphlets any poetical reputation he had previously acquired had been swallowed up. Even the collected volume of his poems which he had let Moseley publish for him in 1645, partly with a view to compel people to remember that he was not a prosepamphleteer only, had failed of that effect; and some fourteen months afterwards, when the present Ode was written, Milton might well look forward to a very dubious verdict from his countrymen on the worth of all he had done. Still he had faith in at least the rectitude of what he had done, whether as poet or as prose-writer; and hence he could say, half sadly, "Si quid meremur sana posteritas sciet," and could expect those “ultimi nepotes," that "cordatior ætas," that should understand him thoroughly and do him justice. The "cordatior atas" was long in coming! Milton himself hardly lived to see it. New fame, but also new infamy, in England and through Europe, grew round him for thirteen years more, in consequence

of his Regicide pamphlets and his connexion with the Commonwealth and Cromwell; at the Restoration he was "blind Milton," one of the "damnable Cromwellian crew," whom even respectable people wanted to see hanged, or consented to see live on unhanged only because God had already put the mark of his own vengeance upon him, and punished him with blindness; and, though Paradise Lost in 1667, and Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in 1671, recalled attention to the blind heretic, and revived the distinction that might be made between his poetical genius and his political and prose enormities, only a brave Dryden among the greater critics, with here and there a following among the lesser, neglected this distinction in their general estimate, and saluted the yet living Milton with adequate reverence. Thirteen years after Milton's death (1687) a scribbler called Winstanley dismissed him thus in a book called Lives of the most famous English Poets: "He is one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place among the principal of our English poets; but his fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff, and his memory will always stink." Through the subsequent century, as we know, this conclusion was resented and reversed, and the poet Milton became for England all that he has since been. But still there was the inevitable distinction. The Poet Milton was one being, high in heaven; Milton the Prose-writer was quite another being, down irrecoverably in Tartarus. Hear, for example, how the able and scholarly Warton, who was the first to do editorial justice to Milton's Minor Poems, could speak of Milton's Prosewritings as late as 1791, in a note to this very passage in the Ode to Rous. "Upon the whole," wrote Warton, "and with regard to "his political writings at large, even after the prejudices of party "have subsided, Milton, I believe, has found no great share of "favour, of applause, or even of candour, from distant generations. "His Si quid meremur, in the sense here belonging to the words, "has been too fully ascertained by the mature determination of "time. Toland, about thirty years after the Restoration, thought "Milton's prose-works of sufficient excellence and importance to be "collected and printed in one body. But they were neglected and 66 soon forgotten. Of late years, some attempts have been made to "revive them, with as little success. At present they are almost "unknown. If they are ever inspected, it is perhaps occasionally "by a commentator on Milton's verse, as affording materials for "comparative criticism, or from motives of curiosity only, as the

productions of the writer of Comus and Paradise Lost, and not so "much for any independent value of their own. In point of doctrine, "they are calculated to annihilate the very foundations of our civil " and religious establishment, as it now subsists: they are subversive "of our legislature, and our species of government. In condemning

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tyranny, he strikes at the bare existence of Kings; in combating "superstition, he decries all public Religion. These discourses "hold forth a system of government at present as unconstitutional, "and almost as obsolete, as the nonsense of passive obedience; "and, in this view, we might just as well think of republishing the pernicious theories of the Kingly bigot James as of the Republican usurper Oliver Cromwell. Their style is perplexed, pedantic, "poetical, and unnatural, abounding in enthusiastic effusions which "have been mistaken for eloquence and imagination. In the midst "of the most solemn rhapsodies, which would have shone in a Fast "Sermon before Cromwell, he sometimes indulges a vein of jocularity; "but his witticisms are as awkward as they are unsuitable, and "Milton never more misunderstands the nature and bias of his genius than when he affects to be arch either in prose or verse. "His want of deference to superiors teaches him to write without good manners; and, when we consider his familiar acquaintance "with the elegancies of antiquity, with the orators and historians of "Greece and Rome, few writers will be found to have made so "slender a sacrifice to the Graces." Clearly, when this was written by one of the truest admirers of Milton's Poetry, the cordiator ætas which Milton had anticipated for his writings in general had not come. Has it come even yet? Less decisively than 'before, but decisively enough, there is still kept up the Wartonian kind of distinction between Milton's poetry and Milton's prose. About Milton's Poems people know what it is right to say; but Oh! his opinions, Oh! his pamphlets! To be sure, there is his Areopagitica; they will make that an exception, they will call that noble, for its doctrine is now axiomatic; but Oh! for the rest! Well, it cannot be denied that there is something valid in the distinction theoretically, and that practically we do find it necessary to make such distinctions in our literary criticisms. We like one production of a writer, and we do not like, or we do not equally like, another production of the same writer. Besides, poems are poems, and opinions are opinions. We desire only to be stirred and roused and charmed and elevated by a poem; but, if an opinion concerns any matter of morals or politics still in discussion, how can we avoid hating it, and even any presentation of it, if we do not agree with it? With all this, however, the distinction, as it has been applied to Milton, may be challenged at its roots, and will more and more be challenged. It is the author of Paradise Lost that is the author of those Prose Pamphlets; and it is the author of the Prose Pamphlets that is the author of Paradise Lost. They sprang from one life; they are but diverse manifestations of one and the same soul; they are organically related; neither could have come into the world from any other mind than precisely that which exulted in the other; there is an