In me triste nihil fœdissima turba potestis, Hence wakeful Cares and pining Sorrows fly! No harm can touch me from your hateful band: But he could only calculate the contingencies, not fasten his sight, (if the expression may be allowed to me,) on the realities of futurity. If some minister of the divine wrath, commissioned to disclose the vision of our poet's advancing life, had at this instant exhibited to him the Milton of later days, sacrificing his prime of manhood to the sullen and fiery demon of religious and civil discord; exposed to rancorous and savage calumny; making a cheerful surrender of his sight to the cause, as he deemed it, of his country and his species, yet afterwards abandoned and persecuted; with his public objects lost, his private fortune ruined, his society avoided, his name pronounced with execration, his life itself saved only by a kind of miracle from an ignominious and a torturing execution, and his old age, more deeply clouded also by the unkindness of children, finally closing amid dangers and and of whom, on her sudden disappearance among the crowd, he could never obtain any further intelligence. A critical eye may sometimes detect in these compositions an expression which an Augustan writer would not perhaps acknowledge as authentic; and a reader of taste may sometimes wish for more compression in the style, and may be sorry that the youthful poet did not occasionally follow some model of more nerve than the diffuse and languid Ovid. On the whole however these productions must be regarded as possessing rare and pre-eminent merit. To England indeed they are peculiarly interesting, as they were the first pieces which extended her fame for Latin poetry to the continent; and as they evince the various power of her illustrious bard by showing that he, who subsequently approved himself to be her Æschylus and her Homer, could once flow in the soft numbers and breathe the tender sentiments of Ovid and Tibullus. The only prose compositions of this date, which we possess of our author's, are some of his college and University exercises, under the title of "Prolusiones oratoriæ," and five of his familiar letters; four of them in Latin to his old preceptors, Young and Gill, and one in English, forming his answer to a friend who had censured him for wasting his life in literary pursuits, and had urged him to forsake his study for some of the active occupations of the world. This letter, of which Dr. Birch has published the rough and the corrected draught from the author's MSS. in the library of Trinity college, Cambridge, concludes with a very impressive sonnet; and is particularly interesting for the view which it gives to us of the writer's delicacy of principle and of the high motives which actuated his bosom. The reader, as I persuade myself, will thank me for communicating it. " SIR, "Besides that in sundry other respects I must acknowledge me to profit by you whenever we meet, you are often to me, and were yesterday especially, as a good watchman to admonish that the hours of the night pass on, (for so I call my life as yet obscure and unserviceable to mankind,) and that the day with me is at hand, wherein Christ commands all to labour while there is light. Which because I am persuaded you do to no other purpose than out of a true desire that God should be honoured in alarms, in solitude and darkness-if this scene, I say, in its full deformity had been exposed to our poet's eye in his happy retreat at Horton, the cup of joy would have fallen from his hand; his fortitude, strong as we know it to have been, would probably have yielded to the shock; and, prostrate before the Father of mercies, he would have poured his soul in solicitous supplication for the refuge of an early grave. But of the world of destiny, as it was passing, one spot alone was discovered to him; and all that was unknown was peopled by hope with her own gay and beautiful progeny. While he passed his hours in converse with the mighty dead, or with the wise and virtuous living; while, unmolested by any agitating or painful passions, he penetrated science with his intellect or traversed fairy regions with his fancy, he enjoyed an interval of happiness on which, amid the asperities of his later years, he must frequently have looked back with emotions nearly similar to those of the traveller, who, wandering over the moors of Lapland and beaten by an arctic storm, reflects on the blue skies, the purple clusters and the fragrant orange groves of Italy. To this favoured period of our author's life are we indebted for some of the most exquisite productions of his genius. The Comus, in 1634, and the Lycidas, in 1637, were unquestionably written at Horton; and there is the strongest internal evidence to prove that the Arcades, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso were also composed in this rural scene and this season of delightful leisure. It is probable, indeed, that the composition. of the "Arcades" preceded that of the “Comus,” as the countess dowager of Derby,' for whom it was written, seems, from her residence at Harefield in the vicinity of Horton and from her double alliance with the family of Egerton, to have been the connecting link between the author and the earl of Bridgewater, the immediate patron of Comus. These pieces have been so frequently made the subjects of critical remark, that a long suspension of our narrative would not Alice, countess dowager of Derby, was the sixth daughter. of sir John Spencer of Althorpe in Northamptonshire, and married lord Strange, who by the death of his father in 1594 became earl of Derby, and died in the following year. She afterwards married the lord chancellor Egerton, who died in 1617: her daughter; Frances, married the chancellor's son, John earl of Bridgewater lord president of Wales. She was of the same family with Spenser the poet; and had been his patroness and his theme of praise before she was celebrated by the Muse of Milton. 'The earl of Bridgewater was the proprietor also of Horton: H |