tomed pallor and distressed look in the other's countenance, and his first question was: "Are not you well?"

"No," replied he, "indeed I am not, though I feel shame in admitting your just surmise. I shall certainly soon be brought to the last extremity, unless you will prescribe for me and undertake the cure of a wounded mind.”

At these words Politian, without waiting to hear what more he might wish to say, and eyeing him most austerely, said: "Is it thus you pervert and pollute the sanctity of home and the laws of hospitality? Has not this exemplary family of itself, beside the good advice of your many teachers and friends (though you may despise mine), been enough to restrain you from so base a deed? Well, if you are so weak, let us return home at once, and so avert the committal of a most unworthy act."

He said all this so forcibly and impressively that Eugenius was by mere shame driven to a kind of sorrowful admission; but later on, when thinking it quietly over by himself, it struck him that Politian had neither been so friendly or yet so considerate in this affair as he usually was, and he began to suspect that he was in love with the lady too, and, calling to mind again what had occurred, he determined to keep a stricter watch in future.

Politian, although he had clearly perceived for some time the ill-concealed love of Eugenius, was much annoyed to hear such an open avowal of it, and now began to regard him with disfavour, as likely to be a serious and difficult obstacle to his own happiness. So terrible is the power of love, and so insatiable its rage, that not only does it master all our other feelings, but it can separate the firmest friends if it should come between them.

EXCURSUS A

THE PROBABLE "BEGETTER" OF NOVA SOLYMA

WE have to show how Hartlib could be in any sense the begetter of Nova Solyma. It would be somehow thus. It is well known that Milton was closely connected about this time with a small clique of most active reformers-not exactly the kind of men we understand now by political reformers, but men wishing heartily to improve their country generally, and to get rid of prominent abuses of all kinds. The leading and most active members of this band were Samuel Hartlib, John Durie, Theodore Haak, and William Petty, then a rising young man, afterwards to become much better known. But Hartlib, "philanthropist and polypragmatist," as Dr. Garnett felicitously styles him, was the mainspring of the whole work. In 1642 he had written Macaria's Happy Kingdom, his conception of a happy ideal State, and from that time onwards the idea of Reform possessed him. Pamphlet after pamphlet came from his active brain: The Reformed Husbandman, The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees, and others with similar titles and object. He was ever ready to write a preface and see through the press any books tending to reformation as he understood it. He urged his friends to produce them and send them to him to publish; and when John Durie, Milton's great friend, wrote The Reformed School and The Reformed Librarie Keeper, Hartlib, who calls himself the publisher, addresses the reader thus: "Learned Reader! these Tracts are the fruits of some of my solicitations and negotiations for the Advancement of Learning"; and again: "In mine own part, I shall confesse freely that amongst all

the Objects whereunto I have dedicated my thoughts and pains there is not any one which doth lie nearer my heart than this of the Education of Children in the way of Christianity." This was only about a year after he had, according to my contention, procured his friend Milton's permission to let the world see his complete views on education, even if under the strictest mask of secrecy.

Hartlib had obtained from Milton by "earnest entreaties and serious conjurements" a divided and transposed account of his former thoughts on the subject. This we learn from Milton's own words at the beginning of his Tractate of 1644; but later on, about the year 1647, Hartlib became taken up with Reformation work more than ever, and it was now that he presented to the High Court of Parliament "certain considerations" on reformed education and the redressing of "Publike Evils" for the advancement of God's "Universale Kingdom" and the general communion of His saints, this last being a phrase that occurs more than once in Nova Solyma where we should otherwise hardly expect it. He asked for the establishment of an "Office of Communication and Publike addresse for the Glory of God and the Happinesse of the nation," which he would undertake to manage, and make "his Addresse towards all that are of eminent parts, or of any singular abilities and straines; whether in Publike Places or not, to give them some objects to work upon, and exercise their faculties in, to the end that all knowledge may abound in Love, and the Discovery of one Truth may beget another."

He contemplated especially being a book producer (p. 50), for he recommends an annual special committee to take into consideration what books shall deserve to be published in print for the public benefit and the advancement of Divine and human learning.

What book could be more to his purpose than Nova Solyma, if he could obtain it? and this was in 1647, and Milton was his firm friend, one of the inner circle of the small reforming party.

Exc. A]

LITERARY PROJECTS

313

In 1648, the very year our anonymous Romance appeared, Hartlib is again pressing his suit with "A further Discoverie of the Office of Publike Addresse," etc., asking sans phrase to be appointed "Generall Superintendent" with an allowance of £200 a year, and a convenient great house. He adds that some effect has been already produced and more would have followed "if the danger of this last Commotion had not employed all the strength and attention of the Parliament to save from sudden shipwrack."

In November, 1649, when Nova Solyma was already published, Hartlib issued and edited a work by Durie about this "Agency for the Advancement of Universall Learning," as the title seemed then to be. Mr. Durie, a great friend of John Milton, but whether in the secret of Nova Solyma or no we cannot tell, begins by saying:

"We [ie. the Hartlib-Durie-Milton-Haak-Petty combination] are upon the design of a Publike Reformation; herein everybody is one way or other, if not engaged yet concerned, some more, some lesse, some in a Private, some in a Publicke way. This work hath been long in hand, many stones have been moved about it, much dust is raised in it, and to the outward appearance we are further from our purpose than at the beginning.'

At the end of this discourse Durie adds that "they should have a peculiar presse for printing. Many excellent feats of learning in men, and in manuscripts, be dead and buried in oblivion, and cannot be brought to any perfection for want of some patronage." Could he be thinking of poor Nova Solyma, that "excellent feat of learning," with its meagre title-page, its lack of all prefatory remarks or laudatory verses, and the total absence of either publisher or patronage? We are not likely ever to know; but I hope this long but necessary account of Hartlib and his darling project has led my readers to infer what I have been aiming at-viz. the probability that our present book of 1648 was drawn from Milton by Hartlib or some other partisan of the reforming school, and printed as best they could, and distributed

to a few friends of the cause at home and abroad, but never in those troubled times even looked at, much less purchased, by the reading public.

Moreover, at no time of his life was Milton more likely to be tempted to put forth such a tentative work as Nova Solyma than about this same year 1648. As we know, he began teaching in 1639, just after his return from Italy, beginning with his two nephews, then about nine and ten years old respectively, first for a very brief period in lodgings near St. Bride's Churchyard, then for five years in Aldersgate Street (1640-45), with such other few pupils as could be accommodated, and then (1645-47) in his new and more commodious house in Barbican, which had been expressly taken to provide room for additional scholars. In the spring of 1647 Milton's father died, and old Mr. Powell, his wife's father, having predeceased him by a month or two, the Powell kindred took their departure, and there was a great clearance in Milton's household. In consequence, pupilising rose now to its highest point in Milton's career. "The house looked again like the house of the Muses only," says Edward Phillips, the elder nephew, who was there as an eye-witness, and he ventures to conjecture that his uncle had now some idea of putting in practice his peculiar system of education on a larger scale, and becoming the head of some such public academy as had been described in the notable letter on Education to Hartlib a few years before. If Milton's early MS. musings, his history of a liberal education sketched off in the heat of youth with those new and bold touches (novo atque audaci commento) peculiar to that aspiring period of life-if these were to influence the thinking public both in England and abroad, now was the time to try.

A reform in national education had for some time been in the minds of all who were enemies of Privilege and Prelacy, and they were many in those seething days. So near our date as May, 1647, there was an Ordinance of Parliament for the Visitation and Purgation of the University of Oxford, and that brought the burning question