finished. Skinner had transcribed a considerable portion, amounting to 196 pages out of the total of 735 of which the MS. consisted, and had gone through the rest, making corrections and inserting a piece here and there, when Milton died. By Milton's own arrangement, the MS. thus ready for the press, together with a transcript of all Milton's Latin State-Letters written by him for the Council of State, Cromwell, and Richard Cromwell, remained in young Skinner's hands, with a view to their publication. As the Letters of State, from their nature, could not safely then be published in England, Skinner, in 1675, entered into negotiations with Daniel Elzevir, the famous printer of Amsterdam. The MSS., both of the Letters and of the Treatise of Theology, were in Elzevir's hands, when (1676) a surreptitious edition of the former was printed by a London bookseller, into whose hands copies of the Letters had come. Annoyed by this, the English Government made inquiries about the papers that Milton had left; and it was ascertained that Daniel Skinner, B. A. of Trinity College, Cambridge, had some such papers. He was communicated with; had a special interview with Sir Joseph Williamson, Secretary of State; and was told that, if he proceeded farther in the business, he would get himself into trouble, hurt his prospects, etc. Letters on the subject also passed between Elzevir and Sir Joseph Williamson, and Elzevir engaged that he would have nothing more to do with the affair. Skinner went over to Amsterdam himself in 1676 to recover the MSS.; but, though he professed to be glad that they had not been printed, and had even offered to give them up to the English Government, his movements were so uncertain that Government had to give him a hint through the authorities of Trinity College. A Letter is extant from the celebrated Dr. Isaac Barrow, then Master of Trinity, dated Feb. 13, 1676-7, addressed to Skinner, ordering his immediate return to College on pain of expulsion, and warning him against publishing any writing "mischievous to the Church or the State." This seems to have brought him back; for he took his M.A. degree in 1677, and in May 1679 he was promoted to a Senior Fellowship in the College. The price of his promotion, doubtless, was the surrender of the perilous MSS. At all events, they did come into Sir Joseph Williamson's hands, and were stowed away by him, with other lumber, in one of the presses of the State Paper Office, where they lay untouched and unheard of till the year 1823. In that year they were discovered by Mr. Robert

Lemon, Deputy Keeper of the State Papers, wrapped in the original sheet of brown paper, addressed "Mr. Skinner, Merchant," in which they had found their way back from Holland to the premises of young Skinner's father in Mark Lane. The discovery was hailed with interest; and in 1825 the long-lost treatise De Doctrinâ Christiana was given to the world by the Rev. Charles R. Sumner, afterwards Bishop of Winchester. The State Papers, having been already accessible in print since 1676, did not require fresh publication. The original MS. of the Treatise, partly in Daniel Skinner's hand, partly in other hands corrected by his, remains in the State Paper Office.

It is worth mentioning that the leaf of the Cambridge Volume of Milton MSS. which contains ten lines of the present Sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, and the whole of the following, is a leaf of quarto size, presenting every appearance of having been torn out of some other MS. volume, and that the paper is of the same quality and size as that used for a portion of the MS. of the Treatise of Christian Doctrine. That Treatise, it would thus appear, was in progress in the house in Petty France at the time of the composition of the present Sonnet.

SONNET XXII: SECOND SONNET TO CYRIACK SKINNER. (First printed by Phillips, at the end of his Life of Milton, in 1694; but Copy, in the hand of an amanuensis, among the Cambridge MSS.)

This touching Sonnet, the MS. copy of which is on the same leaf as the copy of the last, but in a different hand, must have been written about the same time, or after only a little interval: almost certainly, however, in 1655. For it is another Sonnet on Milton's blindness, and purports to have been written on the third anniversary of the day from which he could date the completeness of that calamity; which day, as we have seen reason for believing (ante, p. 231), was about the middle of 1652. The fact that the Sonnet is addressed to Cyriack Skinner is a proof of the esteem which Milton felt for that friend. The tenor of the closing lines prevented its

publication in 1673.

SONNET XXIII.: To THE MEMORY OF HIS SECOND WIFE.

(Edition of 1673; and Copy, in the hand of an amanuensis, among the Cambridge MSS.)

After some years of widowerhood, Milton, still residing in Petty France, Westminster, had married, Nov. 12, 1656, at St. Mary Aldermanbury, London, his second wife, Catherine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain Woodcock, of Hackney. His wedded life with her, however, was doomed to be brief. She died in childbirth fifteen months after her marriage, and was buried at St. Margaret's, Westminster, Feb. 10, 1657-8. The infant daughter she had borne survived but about a month. Thus, in his fiftieth year, Milton was left in second widowerhood, with his three young daughters by his first wife, the eldest not twelve years of age, partly depending on his charge, and partly expected to take charge of him. There can be no sadder picture than that of the blind, stern man, in 1658, led about in his vacant house, the poor children not understanding him, and half afraid of him.

Led about in that house, or seated by himself in one of its rooms, Milton thinks much of his dead wife, far more really a partner of his heart than the first wife had been, but remembers also that first wife, the mother of his children, and wonders what may become of these children, left now with neither mother nor substitute. From his despondency, as we know, he roused himself to resume that poem of Paradise Lost which he had schemed eighteen years before. But the sense of his loss recurs, and intrudes itself into his dreams. One night his dream is strangely happy. He sees his lately dead wife, not dead, but alive, and returned to him clad all in white like one of the saints, her face veiled, and stooping to embrace him. He wakes from his dream to find it but a dream, and his night brought back; but he commemorates the dream in a Sonnet. The reader ought to notice the full significance of the words of the Sonnet. They imply that Milton had never actually beheld his second wife with his bodily eyes, having married her after he was blind, and with no acquaintance with her dating from before his blindness. Hence, though in his dream he sees her, it is as a radiant figure with a veiled face. He had not carried into sleep the recollection out of which the face could be

formed, and could only know that love, sweetness, and goodness must have dwelt in one who had that saint-like figure.

The handwriting of the copy of this, the last of Milton's Sonnets, in the Cambridge MSS., is a peculiar one, and has been identified. It is distinctly the handwriting of the amanuensis who wrote the greater part of that original MS. of the Treatise on Christian Doctrine which Daniel Skinner was afterwards employed partly to transcribe and partly to revise and correct, and which now lies in the State Paper Office. This amanuensis must have been much employed by Milton from 1658 onwards. Milton's signature to the deed of May 1660, already mentioned (p. 236), conveying an Excise Bond for £400 to Cyriack Skinner, is not an autograph signature, though in such a document, if in any, an autograph was to be expected. It is a vicarious signature, and is in the hand of this same amanuensis.

TRANSLATIONS.

"THE FIFTH ODE OF HORACE, Lib. I., ENGLISHED."

(Edition of 1673.)

Such is the title in the Table of Contents prefixed to the volume of 1673; but the heading of the piece itself in the body of the volume is more elaborate, as follows: "The Fifth Ode of Horace, "Lib. I., Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa, rendered almost word "for word, without rhyme, according to the Latin measure, as near "as the language will permit." Still farther to call attention to the exactness of the translation, there is printed, parallel with it, on the opposite page, the original Latin of Horace, with this heading: "AD PYRRHAM. Ode V. Horatius ex Pyrrhæ illecebris tanquam e naufragio enataverat, cujus amore irretitos affirmat esse miseros." ("To PYRRHA. Ode V. Horace had escaped from the allurements of Pyrrha, as by swimming from shipwreck, and he pronounces miserable those who are ensnared by love of her.") The particular Ode on the translation of which Milton bestowed so much pains is one on which many translators have since tried their hands; but it may be doubted whether any one of them has beaten Milton. His transla

tion, if not quite word for word, is nearly so; and the rhythm he has adopted, though not answering in the least to the proper scansion of the metre of the Ode, is meant to do duty to the English ear for the metre as ordinarily read by accent only, and does so all the better because of a certain strangeness, arising from the absence of rhyme and the retention of the Latin syntax. On the whole, however, the thing is a trifle. It must have been written after 1645, as it does not appear in the edition of that year.

"NINE OF THe Psalms donE INTO METRE, WHEREIN ALL BUT WHAT IS IN A DIFFERENT CHARACTER ARE THE VERY WORDS OF THE TEXT, TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL."

(Edition of 1673.)

The Psalms grouped together under this heading are Psalms LXXX.-LXXXVIII.; and the group is ushered in with the dating April 1648: J. M.,” showing at what time they were translated.

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There can be no doubt, I think, that Milton was moved to his experiment by the interest which was then felt, both in England and Scotland, and had been felt for some years, in the project of a complete new Version of the Psalms, which should supersede, for public worship, the old English Version of Sternhold and Hopkins and others, first published complete in 1562, and the Version, partly the same, that had been in use in Scotland since 1565, and was known as Lekprevik's, from the name of the printer who had published it that year in Edinburgh. In spite of competing Versions of the Psalms, or of some of them, these had remained substantially the authorised Psalters in the two countries till the meeting of the Long Parliament. But, after the meeting of that body, and especially after the Westminster Assembly had been convoked to aid it in religious matters (July 1643), and the English and Scots had come to a kind of understanding that there should be a conformity between the two countries on the basis of a common Confession of Faith, common forms of worship, and common Church-government, a revision or renovation of the Psalter had been much discussed. It was one of those matters on which the Westminster Assembly were especially required to deliberate and report to the Parliament. Hence

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