die till 1679, or five years after Milton; and in the course of this long life of ninety years, interesting for various private struggles and vicissitudes, including a change of his creed in 1641 from his native Dutch Protestantism back to Roman Catholicism, -he published a long series of works, each of more or less mark and notoriety at the time of its appearance, and collectively of such importance that the Dutch look back on him now as the chief figure in the most flourishing age of their vernacular literature. For evidence of the regard in which he is still held by the Dutch nation, one has only to look at the twelve superb illustrated volumes of "De Werken van Vondel in verband gebracht met zijn Leven" ("The Works of Vondel brought into connexion with his Life"), published at Amsterdam between 1860 and 1870, under the editorship of the late eminent Mr. J. Van Lennep, and with copious annotations and elucidations. Long before that date there had been patriotic mutterings among the Dutch as to Milton's obligations to their Vondel, and especially to Vondel's Lucifer, a tragedy in five Acts, brought out on the Amsterdam stage in 1654, when the author was in the sixty-fifth year of his age. After two representations, the performance was stopped by the authorities, nominally for religious reasons, though really for political reasons also; but the play, having been published simultaneously with its production on the stage, became all the more popular in its printed form. The theory is that Milton must have known and studied this play of Vondel, consisting of over 2000 lines of rhyming Dutch Alexandrines, with interspersed choruses, and used it in his Paradise Lost. Vague rumours of this theory had found their way occasionally into British critical periodicals; but the first distinct view of it in English seems to have been that given by Mr. Edmund W. Gosse in his Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe, published in 1879. In that volume, besides an interesting general account of Vondel's life and writings, there was an express chapter entitled "Vondel and Milton," containing a full abstract of Vondel's Lucifer,-"the most brilliant poetical work in the Dutch language" Mr. Gosse calls it,—with translations of passages from it in the metres of the original, and a brief estimate of the evidence that it must have been used by Milton. On this last point Mr. Gosse expresses himself moderately, concluding that there can be "no doubt whatever" that some passages of Vondel had made a "deep impression on Milton's imagination,"

but dismissing with some contempt the "foolishness" in this case, as in others, of the ordinary outcry of plagiarism. Mr. Gosse's moderation on the subject seems to have given offence to at least one of his readers; for in 1885 there appeared a little volume entitled Milton and Vondel: A Curiosity of Literature, in which the author, Mr. George Edmundson, "Late Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford, Vicar of Northolt, Middlesex," accused Mr. Gosse of having treated the argument in an "incomplete and misleading" manner, and took great pains to supply his deficiencies. Not only from Vondel's Lucifer, published in 1654, did Milton borrow in his great poem, Mr. Edmundson found himself obliged to assert, but also from other works of Vondel: notably his Joannes Boetgezant ("John the Messenger of Repentance"), an epic in rhyming Dutch Alexandrines, "written in 1662"; his Bespiegelingen van God en Godsdienst ("Reflections on God and Religion "), a long didactic poem, in the same kind of verse, published in 1661; and his Adam in Ballingschap ("Adam in Banishment"), a tragedy, also in the same kind of verse, "published early in 1664." In support of this assertion Mr. Edmundson produces 67 passages, longer or shorter, from the four cited books of Vondel (40 from his Lucifer, 13 from his Joannes Boetgezant, 5. from his Bespiegelingen, and 9 from his Adam), translating these passages into English blank verse in the text of his volume, while the original Dutch of them is given in an Appendix, and soliciting attention to parallel passages quoted from Milton. He actually honeycombs Paradise Lost with borrowings from the Dutchman. Accordingly, while it is still to Mr. Gosse's book that English readers must go for the best general account of Vondel, and while the few translated specimens he gives from Vondel's Lucifer in the metres of the original are far more artistically done than the more numerous specimens translated by Mr. Edmundson into blank verse, and so necessarily Miltonised somewhat to begin with, yet it is now to Mr. Edmundson's volume that all readers must go who would see the question of Milton's indebtedness to Vondel argued most minutely and unflinchingly. In the resoluteness of his advocacy of the claims of Vondel he seems hardly to care a rush for the claims of all the competitors previously in the field. While thinking that there were some grains of fact even in Lauder's enumeration of authors used by Milton, he is willing to dismiss all the authors on Lauder's list, or in Todd's later and more extensive

conspectus, as but canaille among Milton's creditors, in comparison with this newly-found creditor in chief. As he makes the present editor remotely responsible in some degree for having brought him to this conclusion, it is but courtesy here to bestow some attention on the result. But, indeed, Mr. Edmundson's little volume deserves attention on its own account. It is a thorough piece of work for its purpose, undertaken and executed with perfect sincerity, and in a scholarly spirit, with nothing of Lauder's rancour against Milton, but, on the contrary, with professions of participation in the common reverence for Milton which one finds it difficult to reconcile with those beliefs respecting Milton's use of Vondel which the book tries to propagate.

That Milton had heard a good deal about his Dutch contemporary may be taken for granted. The connexion between the Dutch Provinces and the British Islands was never more intimate than in the time of the English Commonwealth and the Oliverian Protectorate. There had even been negotiations for such a union of the two Republics as should make them substantially one European power; and, though these negotiations broke down and a brief time of war followed, the coming and going between the two countries was incessant. Thus, among the distinguished foreign visitors to London with whom Milton was brought into contact by the duties of his Foreign Secretaryship, not a few were Dutchmen. Eminent Dutchmen were among his correspondents; and there are proofs that gossip about literary matters reached him from Leyden, Amsterdam, and other Dutch towns. He cannot have remained ignorant, therefore, of the existence of such a Dutch drama as Vondel's Lucifer, or of the stir it caused in Holland on its first production and publication in 1654. Whether he knew more of it than its existence, its name, and something of its general character by report, is not so certain. It was in Dutch, and did Milton understand Dutch? It would have been a fair conjecture that, having so much to do with Dutchmen and Dutch documents in the course of his official duties, he did not remain quite ignorant of a language then of greater European interest even on literary grounds than it has ever been since; but we are not left to mere conjecture on the subject. In a letter of Milton's friend, the celebrated New-Englander and Arch-Tolerationist Roger Williams, containing reminiscences of his visit to London in 1651-4 (see ante, vol. i. pp. 227-9), these words occur: "It pleased the Lord to call

me, for some time and with some persons, to practise the Hebrew, the Greek, Latin, French, and Dutch. The Secretary of the Council, Mr. Milton, for my Dutch I read him, read me many more languages." This exchange of Williams's Dutch readings to Milton for Milton's readings in other tongues to Williams must have been late in 1651, or early in 1652; after the middle of which last year Milton was blind, and could not read to anybody. It is credible, of course, that Williams's Dutch readings to Milton were not merely vivâ voce translations from Dutch into English for Milton's benefit, but included actual lessons in Dutch, and so that Milton before he became blind may have understood spoken Dutch and been able to read a bit of Dutch for himself. When Mr. Gosse ventured on the fancy, however, that "immediately on the publication of Vondel's Lucifer a copy found its way to Milton," and that "it may have been one of the last books he read with his own faded eyes," there was a neglect of dates. Vondel's Lucifer did not appear till 1654, when Milton had been already for two years totally blind. Any acquaintance he made with Vondel's drama, whether on its first appearance or afterwards, must therefore have been by the assistance of others. We may imagine, if we choose, that Williams's readings to Milton were continued to as late as March 1654, when Williams left England on his return to America, and so that the very last of them was Vondel's Lucifer, if a copy of the book was then procurable in London. Or, if acquaintance with the book was postponed till 1658, when the composition of Paradise Lost was fairly begun, there can have been no lack in London then, or at any time between that year and 1665, when Paradise Lost was finished, of persons who could read Dutch to Milton on pressing occasion. Dutch, indeed, is not specially mentioned as one of the languages which his daughters had been drilled to read to him from print; but, if they failed in this particular, there could be other help. It is therefore quite possible that, before Milton was engaged on Paradise Lost, or while he was engaged on it, he may have formed a sufficient acquaintance with Vondel's Lucifer, whether by merely having the Dutch read out to him and translating it mentally for himself, or by having it translated to him by the reader so far as that was necessary. He may thus have come to know that the personages of Vondel's drama, in addition to Lucifer himself, designated "Stedehouder" or "Stadtholder," were Beelzebub, Belial, Apollion, and other "Luciferists," on the one

hand, and Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and other faithful Angels, on the other; and he may have carried away a complete enough notion of the story and action of the drama, and have been impressed, more or less favourably, by individual passages in the dialogue. But this is not by any means all that Mr. Edmundson requires us to believe. He requires us to believe that Milton kept that Dutch book beside him day after day, and year after year, making his daughters, or whoever else were his assistants, read from it to him again and again and again, often directing them to passages he remembered but wanted to hear repeated exactly, and all the while conveying the ideas, images, and expressions he liked best into the secrecies of his own blind musings, to be reproduced, as much "bettered in the borrowing" as he found possible, in his next day's, or some future day's, dictation. Nay more, he requires us to believe that Milton found Vondel's book so useful, such a mine of suggestions, that he was on the watch for any other books from the same quarter. He requires us to believe that in 1661 and 1662, when a large part of Paradise Lost had been done, Milton procured Vondel's Bespiegelingen van God en Godsdienst and his Joannes Boetgezant, and that similarly in 1664, when Paradise Lost was approaching completeness, he procured Vondel's Adam in Ballingschap, and that he used these books too, in the manner described, for what remained of his epic, even going back to retouch prior portions of his epic by hints and insertions derived from them, and moreover reserving what he could not work into Paradise Lost from them for more leisurely use in his Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. For Samson Agonistes, indeed, Mr. Edmundson provides a special and more express Vondelian original in a drama of Vondel's on the same Biblical hero published in 1660.

Mr. Edmundson, all this notwithstanding, may contrive to admire and revere Milton as much as he says he does; but not even the wretched Lauder, whom he so properly scorns, dared a speculation of such intrinsic damage as Mr. Edmundson's to the name and fame of Milton. For to what does it amount? To nothing less than an instruction to us to conceive that the blind poet, all the while that he was publicly invoking for his aid God's Holy Spirit, all the while that he was professing dependence only on the Heavenly Muse that had been heard of old on Oreb and Sinai and by Sion hill and the brook of Siloa, all the while that he could describe this Muse as visiting him unimplored in the night-watches, dictating to him almost