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Library. Even had they disappeared, however, we should still have had the Ode to Rous. Milton had kept a copy of it, and had added it to his Latin Poems in the edition of 1673.

The Ode is a curious one, in respect of both its form and its matter. The form, as Milton takes care to explain in a note (appended in his edition, though now more conveniently prefixed), is peculiarly arbitrary. It is a kind of experiment in Latin, after few classical precedents in that language, of the mixed verse, or verse of various metres, common in the Greek choral odes. Even within that range Milton has taken liberties at the bidding of his own ear, paying regard, as he says, rather to facility of reading than to ancient rule. Hence, for example, the Phalacian or Hendecasyllabic lines introduced will be found exceedingly irregular. Altogether, the experiment was rather daring.-The matter of the ode is simple enough. It is not addressed directly to Rous, but to the little volume itself. The double contents of the volume, Latin and English, are spoken of in modest terms; the loss of the first copy, mysteriously abstracted from the bundle of its brothers, when they were on their way from London to Oxford, is playfully mentioned, with wonder what had become of it and into what rough hands it may have fallen; Rous's friendly interest, both in having repeatedly applied at first for the whole set of writings and in having applied again for the missing volume, is acknowledged; and there are the due applauses of Oxford and her great Library. In this last connexion there is an amplification of what had been hinted in the inscription in the volume of the Prose Pamphlets. The time would come, he had there hoped, when even his Prose Pamphlets, now procuring him nothing but ill-will and calumny, might be better appreciated. This hope he now repeats more strongly with reference to his Poems. The following is Cowper's translation of the epode, or closing strain :

"Ye, then, my works, no longer vain

And worthless deemed by me,

Whate'er this sterile genius has produced,

Expect at last, the rage of envy spent,

An unmolested, happy home,

Gift of kind Hermes, and my watchful friend,
Where never flippant tongue profane

Shall entrance find,

And whence the coarse unlettered multitude

Shall babble far remote.

Perhaps some future distant age,

Less tinged with prejudice, and better taught,
Shall furnish minds of power

To judge more equally.
Then, malice silenced in the tomb,
Cooler heads and sounder hearts,

Thanks to Rous, if aught of praise

I merit, shall with candour weigh the claim."

EPIGRAMS ON SALMASIUS.

Salmasius is a great name in the Biography of Milton. The person called by it, according to the custom, then common in the scholarly world of Europe, of Latinising names, was Claude de Saumaise, a Frenchman, born in 1588, and therefore Milton's senior by about twenty years. From his earliest youth he had been a prodigious reader; and by a series of publications, partly in France and partly in Germany, some against the Papal power, but others more purely historical and antiquarian, he had acquired the fame of being perhaps the most learned European scholar of his generation. Princes and States contended for the honour of possessing and pensioning him; but, after various travels, he had taken up his residence chiefly at Leyden, in Holland. Thus brought into contact with Charles II. and the English Royalist exiles after the execution of Charles I., he had been employed or induced, in an evil hour for himself, to write a defence of the late King and attack on the English Commonwealth. It appeared in Holland in 1649, under the title of Defensio Regia pro Carolo I. A book of the kind by a man of his fame was felt in England to be a serious matter; and Milton, then Foreign Secretary to the Council of State, was requested to answer it. He did so in his famous Defensio pro Populo Anglicano contra Claudii Salmasi Defensionem Regiam, published in the end of 1650, or beginning of 1651. Soon all Europe rang from side to side with the rumour of this pamphlet ; and the legend is that Salmasius, who had recently gone to reside at the Court of Sweden on the pressing invitation of the eccentric Queen Christina, was so chagrined at the applause with which the pamphlet was everywhere received, and especially by Christina's consequent coldness to himself, that he soon afterwards died. He

did quit Sweden, and return to Holland, where he died Sept. 3, 1653, leaving an unfinished reply to Milton, and the task of continuing the controversy to other persons. Among these was the Gallo-Scot, Alexander More or Morus, already mentioned in the introduction to the brief epigram De Moro among the Latin Elegies. Milton's Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano, published in 1654, was in reply to a treatise of the same year, which More was supposed to have written, but which he had only seen through the press, entitled Regii Sanguinis Clamor adversus Parricidas Anglicanos. In this "Second Defence," though More was the person directly attacked, Milton went back upon his dead opponent Salmasius. Hence, while the first of the two Epigrams against Salmasius now under notice is from the original pamphlet against the living Salmasius (called now the Defensio Prima), the second is from the Defensio Secunda, in which More receives the direct attack and Salmasius is only recollected for posthumous chastisement.

IN SALMASII HUNDREDAM.—This Epigram occurs in the 8th chapter of the Defensio Prima, and is a rough jest against Salmasius for his parade of his knowledge of a few English law-terms, or terms of public custom, such as "County Court," and "Hundred" or "Hundreda," in the sense of a division of a shire or an aggregation of parishes. "Where did Salmasius, that magpie, get his scraps of bad English, and especially his Hundreda?" asks the Epigram. Why, he got a hundred Jacobuses, the last in the pouch of the "poor exiled King, for writing his pamphlet! The prospect of more cash would make him write up the very Pope, and sing the "Song of the Cardinals, though he once demonstrated the Papacy "to be Antichrist." Or, to keep the thing more exactly in its metrical form :—

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"Who told Salmasius what is meant by Hundred,

And taught his magpie-mouth to try our phrases ?
Schoolmaster Stomach, and the hundred Jameses
Squeezed from the poor pouch of the exiled King!
Set but before him money's deceitful glitter;
And he who proved the Pope was Antichrist,

And vowed to blast the Papacy to atoms,
Will sit amidst the Cardinals a-singing."

Such is the Epigram: a poor thing after all, and a mere momentary parody of the last seven lines of the Prologue to the Satires of Persius. These may be given here for the sake of comparison:

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IN SALMASIUM.-This is from the Defensio Secunda, where it is introduced in a passage in reply to an immense eulogy on Salmasius occurring in the Sanguinis Clamor. The writer of that book, assumed by Milton to be Alexander More, had prophesied a tremendous castigation to Milton in the forthcoming "impression " of an answer to the Defensio Prima that had been written by the divine Salmasius himself, that prodigy of erudition and of genius, and was ready in manuscript. Milton professes to be very easy in the expectation of this posthumous reply, which he had reason otherwise to know that Salmasius had been busy with at the time of his death. People know already, he hints, that he has his own opinion respecting the genius and erudition of the famous deceased. "You, therefore, it seems," he says, addressing More, "are like the "little client-fish in advance of Whale Salmasius, who is threatening

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impressions' on these shores: we are sharpening our irons so as "to be ready to squeeze out whatever may be in the 'impressions' "and 'castigations,' whether of oil or pickle. Meanwhile we shall "admire the more than Pythagorean goodness of the great man, "who, in his pity for the animals, and especially for the fishes, "which are not spared even in Lent, poor things, has provided so "many volumes for decently wrapping them up in,—has bequeathed

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by will, I may say, to so many thousands of poor sprats and "herrings paper coats individually." After this ponderous piece of prose-fun in the Latin comes the present Epigram. It simply prolongs the joke, in verse which is a cross between Catullus and Martial, by calling on all herrings, pilchards, and other fishes to rejoice in their prospect of abundant paper wrappages from the books of Salmasius :

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"Herrings, rejoice, and all ye scaly millions

That live in brine and shiver through the winter!
The Knight Salmasius, pitying your case,

Kindly intends you all a suit of clothes.

Whole reams before him, he is getting ready

Fine paper-jackets for you, each one blazoned
With his own coat of arms and decorations,
That you may figure, when you come to market,
In full knight's livery, packed in jars and barrels,
A pleasant sight to the fish-handling folk,

The folk that wipe their noses with their elbows."

The Posthumous Reply of Salmasius to Milton, the publication of which is here anticipated with so much contempt, was not published till late in 1660, when it appeared in London with the title Claudii Salmasii ad Johannem Miltonum Responsio, Opus Posthumum, and with a dedication to Charles II. in the name of Claudius Salmasius, as son and representative of the deceased author. It was, though long enough, only a fragment of the work. as Salmasius had schemed it,—his death, or perhaps his mortal dread of further encounter with such an antagonist as he had found in "the English mastiff," having cut the performance short. The publication of the fragment which he had actually written was safe enough in 1660. Charles II. was on the throne of England, and Milton's mouth was stopped in the Salmasian, or in any other, controversy.

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