again. His return journey, however, probably because he learnt that the news he had first received was exaggerated or premature, was broken into stages. He spent a second January and February (1638–1639) in Rome, in some danger, he says, from the papal police, because the English Jesuits in Rome had taken offence at his habit of free speech, wherever he went, on the subject of religion. From Rome he went to Florence, his second visit to the city, including an excursion to Lucca, extending over two months; and not till April 1639 did he take his leave, and proceed, by Bologna and Ferrara, to Venice. About a month was given to Venice; and thence, having shipped for England the books he had collected in Italy, he went on, by Verona and Milan, over the Alps, to Geneva. In this Protestant city he spent a week or two in June, forming interesting acquaintanceships there too, and having daily conversations with the great Protestant theologian Dr Jean Diodati, the uncle of his friend Charles Diodati. From Geneva he returned to Paris, and so to England. He was home again in August 1639, having been absent in all fifteen or sixteen months.
Milton’s Continental tour, and especially the Italian portion of it, which he describes at some length in his Defensio secunda, remained one of the chief pleasures of his memory through all his subsequent life. Nor was it without fruits of a literary kind. Besides two of his Latin Epistolae familiares, one to the Florentine grammarian Buommattei, and the other to Lucas Holstenius, there have to be assigned to Milton’s sixteen months on the Continent his three Latin epigrams Ad Leonoram Romae canentem, his Latin scazons Ad Salsillum poetam romanum aegrotantem, his fine Latin hexameters entitled Mansus, addressed to Giovanni Battista Manso, and his five Italian sonnets, with a canzone, in praise of a Bolognese lady.
His bosom friend and companion from boyhood, Charles Diodati, died in Blackfriars, London, in August 1638, not four months after Milton had gone away on his tour. The intelligence did not reach Milton till some months afterwards, probably not till his second stay in Florence; and, though he must have learnt some of the particulars from his friend’s uncle in Geneva, he did not know them fully till his return to England. How profoundly they affected him appears from his Epitaphium Damonis, then written in memory of his dead friend. The importance of this poem in Milton’s biography cannot be overrated. It is perhaps the noblest of all his Latin poems; and, though written in the artificial manner of a pastoral, it is unmistakably an outburst of the most passionate personal grief. In this respect Lycidas, artistically perfect though that poem is, cannot be compared with it; and it is only the fact that Lycidas is in English, while the Epitaphium Damonis is in Latin, that has led to the notion that Edward King of Christ’s College was peculiarly and pre-eminently the friend of Milton in his youth and early manhood.
We should not have known, but for an incidental passage in the Epitaphium Damonis, that, at the time of his return from Italy, he had chosen a subject for a great poem from the Arthurian legend. The passage (lines 160–178) is one in which, after referring to the hopes of Diodati’s medical career so suddenly cut short by his death, Milton speaks of himself and of his own projects in his profession of literature. Milton wrote that he was meditating an epic of which King Arthur was to be the central figure, but which should include somehow the whole cycle of British and Arthurian legend. This epic was to be in English, and he had resolved that all his poetry for the future should be in the same tongue.
Not long after Milton’s return the house at Horton ceased to be the family home. Christopher Milton and his wife went to reside at Reading, taking the old gentleman with them, while Milton himself preferred London. He had first taken lodgings in St Bride’s Churchyard, at the foot of Fleet Street; but, after a while, probably early in 1640, he removed to a “pretty garden house” of his own, at the end of an entry, in the part of Aldersgate Street which lies immediately on the city side of what is now Maidenhead Court. His sister, whose first husband had died in 1631, had married a Mr Thomas Agar, his successor in the Crown Office; and it was arranged that her two sons by her first husband should be educated by their uncle. John Phillips, the younger of them, only nine years old, had boarded with him in the St Bride’s Churchyard lodgings; and, after the removal to Aldersgate Street, the other brother, Edward Phillips, only a year older, became his boarder also. Gradually a few other boys, the sons of well-to-do personal friends, joined the two Phillipses, whether as boarders or for daily lessons, so that the house in Aldersgate Street became a small private school.
The Arthurian epic had been given up, and his mind was roving among many other subjects, and balancing their capabilities. How he wavered between Biblical subjects and heroic subjects from British history, and how many of each kind suggested themselves to him, one learns from a list in his own handwriting among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge. It contains jottings of no fewer than fifty-three subjects from the Old Testament, eight from the Gospels, thirty-three from British and English history before the Conquest, and five from Scottish history. It is curious that all or most of them are headed or described as subjects for “tragedies,” as if the epic form had now been abandoned for the dramatic. There are four separate drafts of a possible tragedy on the Greek model under the title of Paradise Lost, two of them merely enumerating the dramatis personae, but the last two indicating the plot and the division into acts. In 1641 he wrote in the Reason of Church Government that he was meditating a poem on high moral or religious subjects. But the fulfilment of these plans was indefinitely postponed. Milton became absorbed in the ecclesiastical controversies following on the king’s attempt to force the episcopal system on the Scots.
Of the first proceedings of the Long Parliament, including the trial and execution of Strafford, the impeachment and imprisonment of Laud and others, and the breakdown of the system of Thorough by miscellaneous reforms and by guarantees for parliamentary liberty, Milton was only a spectator. It was when the church question emerged distinctly as the question paramount, and there had arisen divisions on that question among those who had been practically unanimous in matters of civil reform, that he plunged in as an active adviser. There were three parties on the church question. There was a high-church party, contending for episcopacy by divine right, and for the maintenance of English episcopacy very much as it was; there was a middle party, defending episcopacy on grounds of usage and expediency, but desiring to see the powers of bishops greatly curtailed, and a limited episcopacy, with councils of presbyters round each bishop, substituted for the existing high episcopacy; and there was the root-and-branch party, as it called itself, desiring the entire abolition of episcopacy and the reconstruction of the English Church on something like the Scottish Presbyterian model. Since the opening of the parliament there had been a storm of pamphlets from these three parties. The manifesto of the high-church party was a pamphlet by Joseph Hall, bishop of Exeter, entitled “Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament.” In answer to Hall, and in representation of the views of the root-and-branch party, there had stepped forth, in March 1640–1641, five leading Puritan parish ministers, the initials of whose names, clubbed together on the title-page of their joint production, made the uncouth word “Smectymnuus.” These were Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen and William Spurstow. Thomas Young was the Scottish divine who had been Milton’s tutor in Bread Street; he had returned from Hamburg in 1628, and had been appointed to the vicarage of Stowmarket in Suffolk. The famous Smectymnuan pamphlet in reply to Hall was mainly Young’s. What is more interesting is that his old pupil Milton was secretly in partnership with him and his brother-Smectymnuans. Milton’s hand is discernible in a portion of the original Smectymnuan pamphlet; and he continued to aid the Smectymnuans in their subsequent rejoinders to Hall’s defences
