GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE MINOR POEMS WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE EDITIONS OF 1645 AND 1673 AND OF THE MILTON MSS. AT CAMBRIDGE ON referring to the lists given in the preceding Memoir, it will be seen that thirteen of those English pieces and seventeen of those Latin pieces which are now included in the collection of Milton's Minor Poems were written by him during the eight years of his boyhood and youth which elapsed between 1624, his last year at St. Paul's School, London, and 1632, when he left the University of Cambridge, after his seven years of study there, with the full degree of Master of Arts. If, at this last date, when he was in his twentyfourth year, he had chosen to publish those thirty pieces, English and Latin together, they would have made a volume of very tiny appearance, but sufficient to announce to the discerning that here was a new and most genuine poet. Among those capable of appreciating the Latin pieces the powerful In Quintum Novembris would, by itself, have sufficed for that effect, while the Ode on the Nativity, among the English pieces, would have been similarly impressive, by itself, for a wider circle of readers. But, although there can be no doubt that all or most of both sets of pieces, some of them relating to academic events or even produced on formal academic occasions, had been in private circulation in manuscript among Milton's fellowcollegians at Cambridge and his other friends, and although it is certain that they had obtained for him the reputation, from his undergraduate days onwards, of being specially "the poet of Christ's College" as well as one of the foremost men of the University generally, only one of them, so far as we now know, was allowed by himself to go forth in public print while his connexion with Cambridge lasted. This was his enthusiastic juvenile tribute to the memory of Shakespeare, beginning "What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones The labour of an age in pilèd stones, Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid Written in 1630, fourteen years after Shakespeare's death, and when Milton was in his twenty-second year, these lines found their way somehow, though without the author's name attached, into no less distinguished a place than the Second Folio Edition of Shakespeare's Plays, published in London in 1632. They appeared there under the title "An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatick Poet W. Shakespeare," in conjunction with a reproduction of Ben Jonson's two famous encomiums on Shakespeare, and of the other commendatory verses and editorial matter that had been prefixed to the First Folio of 1623; and, with two other short pieces, they formed the sole addition made in the Second Folio to the preliminary or editorial matter so reproduced from the First Folio. Whether Milton had offered the lines to the editors of the Second Folio, or had given them on request, their admission into such distinguished company was an honour; and, if Ben Jonson took some charge of the editing of the Second Folio, as he certainly had done of the editing of the First, one might even construe this honour done to the young Cambridge scholar into a special recognition of him, personally or from hearsay, by the veteran Laureate, and a certificate by that authority that he promised well. It is interesting now, at all events, that Milton's first effective appearance in public print should have been in such a Shakespearian connexion, and that we should have to remember Ben Jonson's signed verses in the Folio of 1623, reproduced in that of 1632, and young Milton's anonymous lines in the latter, as constituting together the first adequate expression of the world's imperishable Shakespeare-worship. Nor will an acute reader miss the more subtle significance of that passage in Milton's lines which implies some self-comparison by the young Cambridge poet of his own efforts in verse with the remains of the prodigious man who had died so recently, and now lay buried in the Church of Stratford-on-Avon : "For, whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art, Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart Hath from the lines of thy unvalued book : Those Delphic lines with deep impression took, Dost make us marble with too much conceiving." The five years and nine months of "absolute leisure" which Milton spent at his father's country residence at Horton in Buckinghamshire after leaving the University, and which brought him from his twenty-fourth year to his thirtieth, were devoted, as he tells us, mainly to continued reading and study. Only now and then during this period did he employ himself in new poetic production. The total result, however, was not unimportant, comprising as it did the addition of his beautiful poem Ad Patrem to his previous stock of Latin pieces, and the addition of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Arcades, Comus, and Lycidas, to his smaller previous stock in English. Had Milton, in 1638, the last year of his residence at Horton, ventured on that collective publication of his juvenile poems which he had so long delayed, the volume containing them would, by this increase, have been considerably larger than the volume that might have borne his name six years before, and would have been all the more certain, so far as the English portion of its contents was concerned, of immediate and admiring welcome. That he was still in no hurry to publish is not a little remarkable. It certainly was not because, amid his multifarious scholarly occupations at Horton, including not only his systematic readings in the whole round of the Greek and Latin Classics, but also advanced studies in Mathematics and Music, he had ceased to regard Poetry as pre-eminently and specially his vocation. His verses Ad Patrem, which were written in his first year at Horton, and are an answer, affectionately playful in form, but very serious in substance, to some gentle remonstrances of his father on his devotion of himself to Poetry and Literature rather than to the customary career in one of the professions, leave no doubt on this subject. They are a glowing defence of the "God-given art of the Poet," a vindication of the supreme power and majesty of this Art in the world and even beyond the world; and they proclaim, for the writer himself, that it was for this Art that he knew he was born, and that for this Art only he meant to live. The closing lines even intimate that he was not indifferent to the chances that the verses he was then writing, and the other verses he had in his possession, would suffice of themselves to prove his title to be ranked among Poets. In translation, they run thus: "Ye too, my youthful verses, my pastime and play for the present, It is certainly surprising that, having felt thus in 1632 or 1633, and having so considerably increased the stock of his "youthful verses before 1638, Milton should have still refrained from the publication of them, and should have suffered his claims to the poetic character to depend still, as they had depended in his Cambridge days, on mere rumour among those who had seen some of his manuscripts or heard him read from them. What he had not done himself, however, had been done for him, to some extent, by others. It was in 1637 that his friend Henry Lawes, the musical composer, at whose solicitation he had written his Comus, and who had set the songs of that masque to music, and had superintended the performance of it by the young people of the Bridgewater family at Ludlow Castle, Shropshire, on Michaelmas night 1634, published the masque separately in a small volume, with a dedication to young Viscount Brackley, who had acted one of the parts in it. Lawes had done this, he tells us, to save himself the continued trouble of copying out the masque over and over again to meet the demands of those who, having seen it performed at Ludlow, or having otherwise heard of it, were anxious to have transcripts of it, or at least of the songs. Although the name of the author was still withheld, Milton must have consented to the publication of the little volume and have sent about some presentation copies. At the time when he was sending about these copies he was engaged on the last of his poems of the Horton period; which was of a nature hardly admitting of concealment of the author's name. This was his Lycidas, a pastoral in memory of his Cambridge fellow-collegian Edward King, whose death by shipwreck off the Welsh coast on the 10th of August 1637, on his passage to Dublin for a vacation-holiday, had caused no ordinary sensation among his many academic friends. They had resolved to mark their sense of so great a loss to Cambridge and to the Church of England by the publication of a collection of obituary verses, in Greek, Latin, and English, by different hands, in King's honour; and, Milton having undertaken to send one of the English contributions, the result was Lycidas. Though ready in November 1637, it did not appear till the beginning of 1638, when it was printed, with his initials "J. M." annexed, as the last of thirteen pieces of verse which formed together the Second or English part of the quarto volume of obsequies to the memory of King then issued from the Cambridge University Press. Who "J. M." was must have been perfectly well known to most of those into whose hands the volume came. In the beginning of 1638, therefore, when Milton was preparing for his Italian Journey, there were printed copies of his anonymous Comus and of his initialled Lycidas in the University and College libraries and in some English households. With what trepidation he had ventured even on such a small amount of publicity appears rather curiously from hints in the two publications themselves. Not only, in consenting to the publication of Comus by Lawes, had he kept his name out of the title-page, but he had caused Lawes to insert in the title-page this motto from the Second Eclogue of Virgil: "Eheu! quid volui misero mihi? floribus Austrum There the quotation stops, the classical reader left to complete it for himself, and to know the full meaning; which may be roughly versioned : "Ah! wretched and undone ! myself to have brought The wind among my flowers!" The same feeling of risk from premature publication is expressed in the fine metaphor with which Lycidas opens: "Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more, Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Compels me to disturb your season due ; Before Milton had left England for his continental tour, he had received at least one emphatic assurance that his hesitations in the matter of publishing were quite unnecessary. Having made the acquaintance of his eminent neighbour the aged Sir Henry Wotton, VOL. I G |