derived from a Scriptural drama, entitled Adamo, by an Italian, Giovanni Battista Andreini; and in 1730 a Scotchman, William Lauder, published a volume to prove that Milton had ransacked modern and medieval literature for ideas and language. Lauder's charges were quickly exposed, and afterwards confessed to be for the most part forgeries. But the indebtedness of Milton continued to be a subject of discussion; the Paraphrase of Genesis by the Anglo-Saxon poet Cædmon being among the sources from which he was supposed to have drawn, while Todd, in his edition of the Poetical Works, gave a long list of Italian writers to whom by one person or another it was supposed that the poet had gone for his inspiration. Of late all these borrowings, the proofs of which are no proofs, have given place to the more definite and circumstantial charges of plagiarism from Vondel's Lucifer, which, first broached in England in Gosse's Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe, 1875, were in 1885 elaborated in a volume, entitled Milton and Vondel, by a clergyman of the name of Edmundson. According to this work, the design, language, ideas, imagery, and character of Paradise Lost owe large debts not only to Vondel's Lucifer, but to an epic, written in 1662, to a long didactic poem, published in 1661, and to a tragedy in 1664, all by the same author. A patient and searching examination of the charges as thus arrayed will be found in Masson's Introduction to Paradise Lost, ii. pp. 145-64. This examination is of course too long to be followed throughout. But the gist of the conclusions, which seem to me unanswerable, may be given in two short extracts. "Most of the parallelisms," he says, p. 151, "more than nineteen-twentieths of them, I

may say at once, are disposed of at first sight by the simple consideration, already insisted on, of the hereditary character of the themes of the two poets, and the established tradition in the mind of Christendom of certain personages, incidents, and situations, as belonging to these themes by Biblical and prescriptive right. Lucifer, Beelzebub, Belial, Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael were common property; and if a poet introduced Lucifer or Beelzebub, Gabriel or Michael, into a poem, what could he do but make them look and speak, to the best of his ability, in conformity with general expectation? The Angelic Wars in Heaven, the rout of the Rebel Angels, their expulsion into Hell, their wingings thence upwards again through the spaces of the new starry Cosmos, the Ptolemaic constitution of this Cosmos, the infant Earth in the midst of it, and Adam and Eve on this earth in their Paradise of foliage and beauty these also were common property; and, if any poet ventured on these subjects, he had similarly to conform to tradition and expectation in essentials, whatever variation of picturing or of wording his genius might enable him to effect in particulars." "Having given," he adds, pp. 163, 4, "some specimens of Mr. Edmundson's collection of parallelisms, I may add that I have not met in all the rest of the collection a single parallelism that could convince me of a direct use by Milton in his Paradise Lost of any passage in Vondel. My opinion, indeed, after considering all the parallelisms produced by Mr. Edmundson, is that it would be quite possible to maintain the extreme position that Paradise Lost would have been exactly the same as it is if Vondel's poems had never been written, or if Vondel himself had never

:

existed. That position, however, might be too extreme. Mr. Gosse thinks that Vondel's Lucifer was known to Milton; and Mr. Gosse's opinion on such a subject, taken along with the already explained historical probabilities of the case, ought to count for something. Let the vote, then, be that Milton did somehow contrive, amid the difficulties of his blindness, to superimpose upon all the mass of his previous readings from his youth onwards some new readings in the Lucifer, and in other poems, of his celebrated Dutch contemporary. That is all that is needed; and it is a very different speculation from Mr. Edmundson's. The matter of a man's reading, in any day or week of his life, does not remain distinct from his mind as already constituted, or only as something additional that his mind can thence forth work upon; it is necessarily, like all his other new experiences, transmuted, there and then, into the very substance of his mind, modifying the very structure of his thinking faculty for all its future operations of reasoning, imagining, or whatever else. In this sense only,-that, when any mind is stirred, all its contents are stirred,—is there any worth whatever, I believe, in any theory of Milton's indebtedness to any particular author; and all speculations as to Milton's indebtedness to particular authors in any other and less honourable sense have in them, I believe, whether they know it or not, the transmitted taint of the wretched Lauder's, and are doomed inevitably to the fate that attended their prototype."

In the Notes, as well as in this Introduction, will be found abundant evidence of my obligations to Professor Masson's edition of Milton's Poems and to his Life of Milton.

To the latter work especially I owe a great deal more than can be shown by quotations; and I feel it to be something like an impertinence to express my admiration for the learning, research, accuracy, and completeness which mark its every page.

To my friend Mr. Maurice Macmillan I also owe my best thanks for the care with which, as in the case of my school editions of plays of Shakespeare, he has read the proof sheets, and for the many valuable suggestions he has been kind enough to make.

MILTON.

THE Life of Milton has been already written in so many forms, and with such minute inquiry, that I might perhaps more properly have contented myself with the addition of a few notes to Mr. Fenton's elegant Abridgement, but that a new narrative was thought necessary to the uniformity of this edition.

John Milton was by birth a gentleman, descended from the proprietors of Milton near Thame in Oxfordshire, one of whom forfeited his estate in the times of York and Lancaster. Which side he took I know not; his descendant inherited no 10 veneration for the White Rose.

His grandfather John was keeper of the forest of Shotover, a zealous papist, who disinherited his son because he had forsaken the religion of his ancestors.

His father, John, who was the son disinherited, had recourse for his support to the profession of a scrivener. He was a man eminent for his skill in music, many of his compositions being still to be found; and his reputation in his profession was such, that he grew rich, and retired to an estate. He had probably more than common literature, as his son addresses 20 him in one of his most elaborate Latin poems. He married a gentlewoman of the name of Caston, a Welsh family, by whom he had two sons, John the poet, and Christopher who studied the law, and adhered, as the law taught him, to the King's party, for which he was a while persecuted; but having, by his brother's interest, obtained permission to live in quiet,