irresistibly, and a careful perusal of the two poems will add to the impression. Whoever will read the Latin Epitaphium Damonis will perceive in it a passionateness of personal grief, an evidence of bursts of tears and sobbings interrupting the act of writing, to which there is nothing equivalent in the English Lycidas, affectionate and exquisitely beautiful as that poem is. Yet the two poems are, in a sense, companions, and ought to be recollected in connexion. Both are pastorals; in both the form is that of a surviving shepherd bewailing the death of a dear fellow-shepherd. In the one case the dead shepherd is named Lycidas, while the surviving shepherd who mourns him is left unnamed, and only seen at the end as the "uncouth swain" who has been singing; in the other the dead shepherd is named Damon, and Milton, under the name of Thyrsis, is avowedly the shepherd who laments him. The Epitaphium Damonis indeed is a pastoral of the most artificial variety. It is in Latin ; and this, in itself, removes it into the realm of the artificial. But, in the Latin, the precedents of the Greek pastoralists, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, as well as of the Latin Virgil, have been studied, and every device of classic pastoralism has been imitated. There are the sheep, the kids, the reeden flutes, the pastures, the shepherds and shepherdesses wondering at the mourner and coming round him to comfort him. The measure used is the Virgilian Hexameter, and the poem is broken into musical parts or bursts by a recurring phrase, as in some of the Greek Idylls; the names used for the shepherds and shepherdesses are from the Greek Idyllists or from Virgil; the very title of the poem is an echo of that of the third Idyll of Moschus, Epitaphium Bionis. All the more strange, to those whose notion of the Pastoral has not gone beyond Dr. Johnson's in his criticism of Lycidas, may seem the assertion that in this Latin pastoral, the Epitaphium Damonis, the pastoralism of which is more subtle and artificial in every point than that of the corresponding English poem, Milton will be found, undeniably, and with an earnestness which breaks through the assumed guise and thrills the nerves of the reader, speaking his own heart. For my part,

I risk the assertion and will leave the verification to the reader. To the reader also I will leave the pleasure of finding out what is interesting otherwise in the poem. Only let him rest a little, for special reasons, over the memorable

passage beginning "Ipse etiam" (line 155) and extending to "Orcades 'undis" (line 178). That passage is an important shred of Milton's autobiography. It tells, more minutely, and in a more emphatic manner, what he had already hinted in his Latin poem to Manso: viz. that at this period of his life his thoughts were full of the project of an Epic founded on British legendary History, and especially on the subject of King Arthur. Combined with this glimpse of what was shaping itself in Milton's mind at that time (1639-40) is the farther information that he had then also resolved to give up Latin for the purposes of Poetry, and to confine himself to English.

The Italian physician, Dr. Theodore Diodati, lived till Feb. 1650-1. By his will, Colonel Chester informed me, he left his property chiefly to his second wife, Abigail, and a nephew, Theodore Diodati, a son of the Genevese divine, who had settled in London in medical practice. This second Theodore Diodati is found alive in London, as "Doctor of Medicine and Merchant," to as late as 1680. It would thus seem that John Diodati, the son of the first Dr. Theodore, and the surviving brother of Milton's friend Charles, had remained in that state of estrangement from his father which had been occasioned as far back as 1637 by the old gentleman's second marriage. This John Diodati, however, left a widower in 1638 by the death of his wife Isabell (Underwood, it seems, was her maiden surname), contracted a second marriage himself, and had a second son by that marriage, named John, born in 1660. That John too married twice, and had children by both marriages. One of his children by his second marriage, William Diodati, or Diodate, emigrated to New England before 1717, and was a person of some note in the colony of New Haven till his death in 1751. His American descendants to the present day are traced, and there is an elaborate exploration of the whole prior pedigree of the Diodati family back to their Italian original in Lucca in the fourteenth century, in a monograph, entitled Mr. William Diodate and his Italian Ancestry, by Professor Edward E. Salisbury, printed for private circulation, from the Archives of the New Haven Historical Society, in 1876.

AD JOANNEM ROUSIUM,

OXONIENSIS ACADEMIE BIBLIOTHECARIUM.

JANUARY 23, 1646-7.

John Rous, M. A., and Fellow of Oriel College, was elected Chief Librarian of the Bodleian, May 9, 1620, and he remained in that post till his death in April 1652. Milton may have become acquainted with him in some visit to Oxford during the Cambridge period of his life; or, at all events, in 1635, when, as a Cambridge M. A. of three years' standing, he was incorporated, in the same degree, at Oxford. It is almost certain that "our common friend Mr. R." mentioned by Sir Henry Wotton in his letter to Milton of April 13, 1638, as having sent to Wotton a copy of Lawes's anonymous edition of Comus of the previous year, bound up with a volume of inferior poetry printed at Oxford, was this John Rous, the Oxford Librarian. In any case, Milton had come to know Rous. Who in those days could avoid doing so that had dealings with books, and was drawn to the sight of such a collection of books as that in the great Bodleian? It may have been a recommendation of Rous in Milton's eyes that, Oxonian though he was, his sympathies were decidedly Parliamentarian. Possibly he was a relative of Francis Rous, the Puritan member of the Long Parliament for Truro.

Milton, at Rous's request, had sent him, for the Bodleian, in 1646, a set of his published writings complete to that date: to wit, his eleven Prose-pamphlets of 1641-5 (the five on the Episcopacy question, the four on Divorce, the Areopagitica, and the Tract on Education), and, separately bound, the edition of his Poems in English and Latin published by Moseley in the end of 1645. Of these, however, only the Prose-pamphlets had reached their destination; the Poems had been lost or stolen on their way to Oxford, or had otherwise gone astray. Rous, accordingly, both in his own behalf and in the interest of the Library, begs for another copy, to make the set of Milton's writings complete, as had been intended. Milton complies with the request, and sends a second copy of the Poems. But, amused by the incident of the loss of the first, he composes a Latin Ode on the subject; and a transcript of this Ode, carefully written out on a sheet

of paper by himself, or by some one else, in an Italian hand, he causes to be inserted in the second copy, between the English and the Latin contents of the volume. Accordingly, there are now in the Bodleian two volumes of Milton's writings, his own gift to the Library. One is the volume of the eleven collected Prose-pamphlets, with an inscription in Milton's undoubted autograph; the other is the supplementary volume of his Poems, sent to Rous, "ut cum aliis nostris reponeret" ("that he might replace it beside our other things”), and containing the Ode to Rous on an inserted sheet of MS., generally supposed to be also Milton's autograph, in an unusual form of laboured elegance, but probably, I think, a transcript by some caligraphist whom he employed.

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 a 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. Altogether, the experiment was very daring.—The matter of the ode is simple enough. It is addressed not 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 connection there is an amplification of what had been hinted in the inscription in the volume of the Prosepamphlets. 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 :

AD JOANNEM ROUSIUM,

OXONIENSIS ACADEMIE BIBLIOTHECARIUM.

JANUARY 23, 1646-7.

John Rous, M. A., and Fellow of Oriel College, was elected Chief Librarian of the Bodleian, May 9, 1620, and he remained in that post till his death in April 1652. Milton may have become acquainted with him in some visit to Oxford during the Cambridge period of his life; or, at all events, in 1635, when, as a Cambridge M.A. of three years' standing, he was incorporated, in the same degree, at Oxford. It is almost certain that "our common friend Mr. R." mentioned by Sir Henry Wotton in his letter to Milton of April 13, 1638, as having sent to Wotton a copy of Lawes's anonymous edition of Comus of the previous year, bound up with a volume of inferior poetry printed at Oxford, was this John Rous, the Oxford Librarian. In any case, Milton had come to know Rous. Who in those days could avoid doing so that had dealings with books, and was drawn to the sight of such a collection of books as that in the great Bodleian? It may have been a recommendation of Rous in Milton's eyes that, Oxonian though he was, his sympathies were decidedly Parliamentarian. Possibly he was a relative of Francis Rous, the Puritan member of the Long Parliament for Truro.

Milton, at Rous's request, had sent him, for the Bodleian, in 1646, a set of his published writings complete to that date: to wit, his eleven Prose-pamphlets of 1641-5 (the five on the Episcopacy question, the four on Divorce, the Areopagitica, and the Tract on Education), and, separately bound, the edition of his Poems in English and Latin published by Moseley in the end of 1645. Of these, however, only the Prose-pamphlets had reached their destination; the Poems had been lost or stolen on their way to Oxford, or had otherwise gone astray. Rous, accordingly, both in his own behalf and in the interest of the Library, begs for another copy, to make the set of Milton's writings complete, as had been intended. Milton complies with the request, and sends a second copy of the Poems. But, amused by the incident of the loss of the first, he composes a Latin Ode on the subject; and a transcript of this Ode, carefully written out on a sheet