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Hallam's remark (Hist. of Eng. Lit. vol. iii. p. 46), that it has been said fairly that Lycidas is a good test of real feeling in poetry.' But no better or more comprehensive answer could be given than the following, which we take the liberty of quoting from Masson's Life of Milton, vol. ii. p. 84: It is 'a finer monument to the memory of King-to let the fact of his death originate a whole mood of the poet's mind-than if he had merely registered the fact in a lyric of direct regret. So poets honour the dead: they let his image intertwine itself with all else that arises in their minds; and out of the best choosing still the best, they lay that on the tomb, saying, "This belongs to you." Yet Dr. Johnson, notwithstanding his prejudice, forgot certain facts which he might with a little ingenuity have pressed into his service. First, we know nothing whatever of Milton's relations with Edward King, except what we gather from this poem. There is no mention of any kind of association between them during their college career. Secondly, we do know that King gained the fellowship over Milton's head; and thirdly, Milton does not notice King's death to Diodati, though writing only a month afterwards. As to the disappointment about the fellowship, we have no right to suppose that it led to any coldness between the two friends, and it would not have been like Milton to allow this. The first and third points are purely negative, so that after all we must look to the Lycidas to speak for itself. The mere form of the poem can prove nothing against the genuineness of Milton's regret, for grief, like all deep feeling, will reflect the tendency or mental habit of the patient. Thus Cicero philosophised grief when his daughter died; and Marmontel, the dramatist, wrote the play of Penelope on the death of his child; to which we may add the example of our own poet laureate in his exquisite In

Of the Lycidas it may be truly said (to use the language of one of our public journals), that it is not to be classed among the coldly-correct Jeremiads, in which at the grave of academical renown rhetorical tears

are shed with artistic precision and griefs meted out in strict accordance with the canons of the schools.'Daily Telegraph, on death of Charles Dickens, June 20, 1870.

Memoriam. It was, therefore, only natural that Milton should give vent to his grief in verse, and in that kind of verse which was then most usual on such occasions. But we must be careful lest the pathos and intrinsic beauty of much of the poem should lead us into an exaggerated idea of the extent of his sorrow. We may safely conclude with Professor Masson that King was really a friend, but not the friend of his youth. For both the evidence of Milton's correspondence with Diodati, and the intense and passionate grief of some portions of the Epitaphium Damonis, prove that he and not King was deepest in his affections. Yet the elegy in which he laments the loss of Diodati is a pastoral, cast in a form more artificial than even the Lycidas, and written not in English but in Latin. We will now proceed to give some account of this other poem.

The subject of it, Charles Diodati (see the Argument), was born in 1608, and was therefore about the same age as Milton. His father, Theodore Diodati, was an Italian by descent, but married an English lady of good fortune, and was appointed physician to Prince Henry and the Princess Elizabeth, afterwards Queen of Bohemia : his uncle, Giovanni Diodati, was the author of the Italian translation of the Bible, known by his name. He formed a close intimacy with Milton at St. Paul's School, which he left in 1621 for Trinity College, Oxford, where Alexander Gill, son of the head-master of St. Paul's, had also been educated. The friendship between the two young men continued throughout their university career, though they could only meet in London during the vacations, and correspond by letters at other times. Two of Diodati's epistles are extant, written in Greek, probably in 1625 and 1626, and bearing the headings Θεόσδοτος Μίλτωνι εὐφραίνεσθαι and χαίρειν respectively. The first name is, of course, a literal rendering of the Italian Dio-dăti, 'God-given' (see note on Epit. Dam. 210). To this letter Milton appears to have replied in the elegiac poem which stands first in the collection entitled Elegiarum Liber, the third line of which shows that his friend was then residing in Cheshire, somewhere on the banks of the Dee. From the heading prefixed to the 6th elegy of the same series we learn that Diodati had on Dec. 15, 1629, sent Milton a copy of verses, describing the Christmas festivities he was then enjoying, and pleading these by way of excuse if his poetry were found to be 'less good than usual' ('sua carmina excusari postulasset, si solito minus essent bona'). Milton's answer is that conviviality and poetry, 'Bacchus and the Muse,' are not hostile to one another, but go well in company; only that he who would sing of high and holy themes, ' of heaven and pious heroes and leaders half divine' he must live soberly and severely, with chaste morals and stainless hands. The elegy concludes with a mention of the Hymn on Christ's Nativity, upon which the poet was at that time engaged, and which he promises to submit to his friend for criticism (see on Epit. Dam. 180).

After this we have no more direct information about Diodati until Sept. 2, 1637, when Milton addressed to him a Latin epistle, complaining of his long silence, and expressing a hope that they might shortly meet in London. From this and the following letter (dated Sept. 23 of the same year) we gather that Diodati was now in full medical practice, probably in Cheshire,' among the Hyperboreans,' as Milton jocosely terms the natives of those parts, that he made occasional journeys for visiting and recreation, and that he had a regular lodging in town, where Milton once expected to find him, but was disappointed. Part of the second letter will presently be quoted (in translation) in the note on 1. 150 of the Epitaphium; and towards the end of it Milton intimates his intention of taking chambers in one of the Inns of Court for the purpose of study; but this plan appears to have been abandoned in favour of the continental tour which took place early in the following year (Masson, vol. i. p. 601). It was during this journey (in the summer or autumn of 1638) that Diodati died suddenly. The place and circumstances of his death are alike uncertain ; but we know that the sad news did not reach Milton till some time afterwards, as the third Italian sonnet (beginning Diodati,

e te'l dirò con maraviglia) must have been addressed to his friend from Italy about, or more probably after, the actual time of his decease (ib. p. 775). Prof. Masson argues very plausibly that Milton heard the tidings first from John Diodati, Theological Professor at Geneva, with whom he was staying in June 1639, on his way back to England. But however this may have been, we are sure that grief for the loss of so dear a friend possessed the poet's mind to the temporary exclusion even of those political anxieties which had been the cause of his sudden return. Of this we have evidence not only in the Epitaphium Damonis itself, which, notwithstanding its artificial form and its pastoral conceits, is as true an outburst of the bitterest sorrow as anything of the kind we know, but also in Milton's own words forming part of a letter in 1647 to Carlo Dati, one of his former friends at Florence (Epit. Dam. 137). After recalling the recollection of their former intimacy, and assuring Dati of his continued affection, he suddenly refers to the memory of the deceased Diodati, and to the grief he had felt at his death, which only the thought of the unmixed joy he had tasted in the society of his Florentine companions could in any way alleviate. We give the extract : ' Testor illum mihi semper sacrum et solenne futurum Damonis tumulum, in cujus funere ornando cum luctu et merore oppressus, ad ea quæ potui solatia confugere cupiebam, non aliud mihi quicquam jucundius occurrit quam vestrum omnium gratissimam mihi memoriam revocasse. Id quod ipse jamdiu legisse debes, siquidem ad vos illud carmen pervenit, quod ex te nunc primum audio.' The 'carmen' referred to is in fact the Epitaphium Damonis, a copy of which Milton had sent to Dati as a token of his regard, on account of his name being mentioned therein (137 1. c.).

Of the poem itself we have already spoken incidentally in our observations on the Lycidas, and much of what has been said of the one applies with equal force to the other. It is, however, more of a direct and avowed pastoral, and was evidently suggested by the ̓Επιτάφιος Βίωνος of Moschus, whence its

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title is taken. We have had occasion to mention and partly to examine that poem as a specimen of Greek pastoral (see p. 5), and we then noticed how the real circumstances of the life and death of Bion appear from time to time through the veil of allegory under which the poet has chosen to disguise his personality. The same fact is observable in several passages of Milton's Epitaphium, in which the poet's actual self is blended with the character of the ideal Thyrsis, and the person of the real Diodati with that of the shepherd Damon. Nor is this surprising; the image of his lost friend was too vividly impressed upon Milton's soul, and his grief (like that of Moschus for Bion) too sincere to allow him to sustain with absolute continuity his assumed disguise, which, be it remembered, he had adopted merely in deference to the then prevailing fashion, and would not, even on purely critical grounds, have felt himself bound to keep with undeviating precision. Yet he never allows this liberty to degenerate into a license: the strain of the poem is pastoral throughout far more so than in the case of the Lycidas, whose variations and digressions have already been discussed in detail. It is this very freedom of treatment which gives the Epitaphium Damonis its real value and interest, claiming for it recognition as a record of one period in the life of a great and distinguished man, about which we should otherwise have had but scanty information. The following remarks by Warton, in answer to some rather disparaging criticism of Dr. Johnson on this poem, are very much to the point: 'The pastoral form is a fault of the poet's times.' The poem 'contains some passages which wander far beyond the bounds of bucolick song, and are in his own original style of the more sublime poetry. Milton cannot be a shepherd long. His native powers often break forth, and cannot bear the assumed disguise.' We subjoin a list of those passages, in which the pastoral allegory is for the moment abandoned.

In 1. 13, Thyrsis is described as sojourning Tusca in urbe, i.e. at Florence, where Milton was actually staying at the time for literary purposes-'animi causa' as the Argument expresses