may have been of some reputation in Italy as a living author at the time of Milton's visit. His Adamo, of which special mention is made, was published at Milan in 1613, again at Milan in 1617; and there was a third edition of it at Perugia in 1641. It is a drama in Italian verse, in five Acts, representing the Fall of Man. Among the characters, besides Adam and Eve, are God the Father, the Archangel Michael, Lucifer, Satan, Beelzebub, the Serpent, and various allegoric personages, such as the Seven Mortal Sins, the World, the Flesh, Famine, Despair, Death. There are also choruses of Seraphim, Cherubim, Angels, Phantoms, and Infernal Spirits. From specimens which have been given, it appears that the play, though absurd enough on the whole to justify the way in which Voltaire speaks of it, is not destitute of vivacity and other merits, and that, if Milton did read it, or see it performed, he may have retained a pretty strong recollection of it.

The hint that Milton might have been indebted to Andreini for the first idea of his poem, or for its general scheme, opened up one of those literary questions in which ferrets among old books, and critics of more ingenuity than judgment, delight to lose themselves. The question has been so much written about, and has taken such large dimensions in consequence of successive attempts to raise it in new forms, that some further notice of it will be expected here.

The question of Milton's indebtedness to others for the original idea of his great epic, or for anything of real moment in its scheme and substance, is a very different question, it may be observed in the first place, from that of his indebtedness in the poem to previous writers for casual suggestions or turns of thought and phrase. The hunt for minute parallelisms of thought and expression, in Milton as in any other great author, is a perfectly legitimate form of critical industry for those who take pleasure in it; and Paradise Lost offers itself as the most tempting of possible fields for this kind of exercise. Whatever else it may be, it is, as we have already had occasion to remark with some emphasis in Section II. of this Introduction, undoubtedly one of the most learned poems in the world. It is the work of a man who, before he projected it, had been, avowedly, a diligent student of the whole round of the Greek and Latin classics, of Medieval Latin books of all sorts, of the Hebrew Bible and commentaries upon it, and of all that was best in the modern literatures of France and Italy, in addition to all that was good, bad, or

indifferent in the accumulated literature of his own English speech. Moreover, at the very time when he first meditated Paradise Lost, and announced to the public his design of some such great English poem, had he not intimated that he did not consider his acquisitions of the requisite learning even then completed, and that he purposed, among his preparations for his task, some further amount of "industrious and select reading"? That was in 1641, when he had still eleven years left of the use of his eyesight. Through those eleven years, as we know, there was much additional reading of kinds that, whether undertaken in the direct interest of Paradise Lost or not, must ultimately have been useful in the poem. Nor, as we know, was this all. After complete blindness had fallen upon Milton in 1652, and through those seven years of his continued absolute blindness, from 1658 to 1665, when he was engaged on his poem steadily or intermittently, he still maintained, as we have seen, by an extraordinary ingenuity in the use of the eyes and voices of others, his commerce with books. We actually find him, when he could himself deal with books by touch only, ordering from France certain volumes of the Collective Parisian Edition of the Byzantine Historians to complete the set of those Greek folios already in his library, and also negotiating for the purchase for him, in Amsterdam, of a costly new Atlas or collection of maps. Recollecting all this, one can have no fault to find, I repeat, with that species of Miltonic criticism which would inquire into the use made by Milton in his Paradise Lost of materials derived from his multifarious readings, and would trace parallelisms of thought and expression in the poem with the thoughts and expressions of previous poems, ancient or modern. Though the industry has certainly been overdone, in its main directions, by past labours in it, and though it is, on the whole, an enfeebling one for the minds of those whom it engrosses, there is no reason why it should even yet be altogether stopped.

The question which Voltaire raised so innocently by his casual remark or guess about Andreini is, however, much more extensive, and affects Milton's originality in a much more vital manner, than that just described. In its extreme form, it goes beyond anything that Voltaire intended by his innocent guess, and asserts Milton's indebtedness not merely to some one particular modern book for the first idea of his Paradise Lost, but to a whole shelf of particular modern books for the plan of the poem, or portions of that plan, and for

The person

many of its finest and most striking individual passages. who made himself most notorious for the advocacy of this extreme form of the speculation respecting Milton's indebtedness to previous or contemporary modern authors was another of those scholarly Scots who are so numerous in the earlier stages of the Milton tradition. He was a Scot of a different type, however, from either the worthy Patrick Hume, or the worthy Gulielmus Hogæus, already mentioned.

From about the year 1730 there had been living in Edinburgh, as a teacher of Latin, a certain sallow-faced, loud-voiced, violenttempered man, named William Lauder, who had been permanently lamed by an accident. He was employed for some time in teaching the Latin classes in the University as a substitute for the Latin Professor; and, in 1734, when that Professor died, he became a candidate for the post. Though recommended as a fit person to teach Humanity in any school or college whatever," he failed in his application; and this, followed by a similar disappointment in his application for the University Librarianship, seems to have soured him. He lived on in Edinburgh, however, still as a private teacher of the classics, and in considerable repute as one of a knot of scholars, with Ruddiman in their centre, then known in the Scottish capital. With some assistance from Ruddiman and others, he brought out, in 1739, from Ruddiman's press, a handsome book in two octavo volumes, entitled Poetarum Scotorum Musæ Sacra. It consisted of a new edition of the Latin Translation of the Psalms and the Song of Solomon by Arthur Johnston, the most celebrated of the Scottish Latinists after Buchanan, together with other reproduced specimens of approved Scottish Latinity, older or later, including the Poems of Archbishop Adamson, and those Paraphrases of Job and Ecclesiastes which had been published in London in 1682 by the unfortunate William Hog. Among the editorial additions were Latin lives of Johnston and Adamson, with a note expressing regret that nothing more had been ascertained about Hog than that he had lived long in London, and, besides translating Job and Ecclesiastes, had published Latin Paraphrases of the Paradise Lost, the Paradise Regained, and the Samson Agonistes, of John Milton, the celebrated English poet ("Joannis Miltoni Angli, poeta celeberrimi"). Lauder had high expectations of profit from his book, founded on a petition he had sent in to the General Assembly of the Scottish Church, request

ing that body to recommend or authorise the use of Johnston's Latin Psalms, and another portion of the contents of the book, in all the schools of Scotland. But, though the Commission of the General Assembly did, on the 13th of November 1740, grant the prayer of the petition, nothing came of it; and, having been disappointed in a subsequent application, in 1742, for the Mastership of the Grammar School of Dundee, Lauder resolved to transfer himself to London. He seems, by this time, to have earned the reputation of being, though a good scholar, an ill-conditioned and unsafe kind of person.

Lauder had been in London for some time when the issue of Newton's proposals for a new and annotated edition of Paradise Lost excited him greatly. In interviews with Newton he denounced Milton as a plagiarist, offering to prove it; and, this not sufficing, he began in January 1747 a series of articles in the Gentleman's Magazine, propounding his discovery, and supporting his charge against Milton by quotations of parallel passages from out-of-the-way Latin books. The papers caused an unusual stir among the London critics some of them very sceptical, and even retorting on Lauder in the Magazine or elsewhere as a mere carping Zoilus, but others inclining to the belief that he had made out a fair case. Among these latter was Dr. Johnson, then only Mr. Samuel Johnson, but already in full literary celebrity, and engaged on his great Dictionary. So sympathetic was Johnson in the main with Lauder's views that, when Lauder brought them out in a more complete state, in a volume published in 1750, with a dedication to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and with the title An Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in his Paradise Lost, Johnson had a hand in the book. He contributed the Preface; the opening words of which are so characteristic that they may be here quoted. "It is now more than half a century," Lauder is made to say, but it is Johnson that speaks, "since the Paradise Lost, having broke through "the cloud with which the unpopularity of the author for a time "obscured it, has attracted the general admiration of mankind, who "have attempted to compensate the error of their first neglect by lavish praises and boundless veneration. There seems to have " arisen a contest among men of genius and literature who should "most advance its honour or best distinguish its beauties. Some "have revised editions, others have published commentaries; and "all have endeavoured to make their particular studies in some

"degree subservient to this general emulation. Among the inquiries "to which this ardour of criticism has naturally given occasion, none " is more obscure in itself, or more worthy of rational curiosity, than a retrospection of the progress of this mighty genius in the con"struction of his work: a view of the fabric gradually rising, perhaps "from small beginnings, till its foundation rests in the centre and "its turrets sparkle in the skies; to trace back the structure, through "all its varieties, to the simplicity of its first plan; to find what was "first projected, whence the scheme was taken, how it was improved, "by what assistance it was executed, and from what stores the "materials were collected, whether its founder dug them from the quarries of nature, or demolished other buildings to embellish his "own." Besides the Preface, Johnson contributed a special Postscript to the volume, full of the same Johnsonian generosity. Newton's great new edition of the Paradise Lost had just been published; and Johnson had noted in Newton's Life of Milton, prefixed to that edition, the fact that Milton's granddaughter, Elizabeth Foster, was then still alive, in very poor circumstances, she and her husband keeping a small chandler's shop in Cock Lane, near Shoreditch Church. "That this relation is true," said the Postscript to Lauder's volume, "cannot be questioned; but surely the honour of "letters, the dignity of sacred poetry, the spirit of the English nation, require that it should be true no longer. In an age in which statues are erected to the honour of this great writer, in which his effigy "has been diffused on medals, and his work propagated by transla"tions and illustrated by commentaries; in an age which, amidst all "its vices and all its follies, has not become infamous for want of "charity it may be, surely, hoped that the living remains of Milton "will be no longer suffered to languish in distress. It is yet in the power of a great people to reward the poet whose name they boast, "and from their alliance to whose genius they claim some kind of "superiority to every other nation of the earth,-that poet whose "works may possibly be read when every other monument of British "greatness shall be obliterated: to reward him, not with pictures or "with medals,—which, if he sees, he sees with contempt,--but with "tokens of gratitude which he, perhaps, may even now consider as "not unworthy the regard of an immortal spirit. And, surely, to "those who refuse their names to no other scheme of expense, it "will not be unwelcome that a subscription is proposed for relieving,