MILTON'S Tercentenary has had fit honours paid by the British Academy in fine performances of Comus and Samson Agonistes, as well as Milton's in special orations and critical studies. Two of the essays Tercentenary. have been published for the Academy by the Oxford University Press, and others will no doubt follow. Milton as an Historian, by Prof. Firth (pp. 31, Is. net), examines the historical methods and standpoints of the author of the History of Britain with results which throw light on the question whether the poetic and the critical temperament can co-exist in one man. Milton disbelieved Arthur and most of the other creations of Geoffrey of Monmouth. He discredited all legends of saints, yet accepted (as Beda did) King Lucius, and he declined. to recognise Constantine the Great's mother, Helena, as a British princess, although he hesitated and temporised about the Brutus dynasty. He poked mild fun at Buchanan's readiness to adopt myth when it redounded to the glory of the Scots, but he did not forestall futurity by any scepticism concerning Ingulf's Chronicle of Croyland. His historical model was Sallust; his pet antagonisms were popery and woman; and his historic passion a tendency towards academic equations of liberty and virtue and moralisations therefrom. He scoffed, alas! at Dodsworth and Dugdale, and though distinguishing sometimes between antiquaries and 'antiquitarians could sneer at Camden as a lover of old coins and monasteries for antiquity's sake, and disdain to 'wrinkle the smoothness of history' with rugged names better harped at in Camden and other chronographers.' His history seldom loses an occasion to point the moral of virtue and liberty and apply it to his own time, and as Prof. Firth says, 'to warn the England of Charles II.' One quotation called for a note of commentary we miss. The well-known reference to 'the wars of kites, or crows flocking and fighting in the air' is perhaps less a jibe at early British tumults than at the portent-loving chroniclers who told such tales as that of the foedum certamen inter corvos milvosque' (quoted e.g. from Pontanus sub anno 1462 by Wolfius in his Lectionum Memorabilium, i, 907), which had survived the Renaissance and remained a prognostic

with the uncritical.

Professor Courthope's paper, A Consideration of Macaulay's Comparison of Dante and Milton (pp. 16, Is. net), occupies more Macaulay's incidental contrast itself in a rather thin attack on the undoubtedly vulnerable antitheses of the great, if rhetorical, essayist. One wonders whether at a tercentenary time more generous measure might not have been allotted to the glowing tribute which the young Macaulay paid to Milton in 1825, and whether the carping British Academician of to-day is so much nearer the mark than the critic of eighty years ago, whose rhetoric he finds so old-fashioned, and whose Whiggism he disapproves as heartily as he does the commonwealth politics of Milton himself. There are extravagances in extravagances in Macaulay's contrast, yet his insistence on the crude, concrete, medieval concepts of Dante as against the vast impressionist abstractions-corporate of Milton remains as true as the fact which Professor Courthope by implication denies, that a war of faction in Florence was a puny affair for civilisation compared with

Now in the Alnwick Castle Museum, similar to fragmentary slab discovered at CORSTOPITUM.

the facts in England which made Milton secretary to a republic. As a substantive exposition, how little is gained by a generalisation that the Divine Comedy is an exact and faithful mirror of European thought in the Middle Ages.' This is just as true as, and no truer than, the same proposition would be about Paradise Lost for the seventeenth century. Surely Macaulay had ample warrant for recognising party as a mighty element in the making of both: in both the mirror was distorted— in Dante much more obviously distorted by politics than in Milton. The world credits what is done': the rebellious mood was a necessary incentive to both, and gives a piquancy that both need: and there are still some of us who like our poet entire, and our Cromwell with his

warts.

Mr.J.T.T.

Jonson with

Among the intimations which the tercentenary has evoked is an announcement of unusual, and doubly Scottish, interest in a paragraph of the Glasgow Herald (19 Dec.) regarding a probable Milton Brown's relic in the possession of Mr. J. T. T. Brown. This is a copy of the folio volume of 1616, in which Ben Jonson col- (Milton's) lected his Works. The nine plays have each a title page. annotations. Cynthia's Revels and The Poetaster have title pages with elaborate borders. In Mr. Brown's copy, on the title page of Cynthia's Revels, in the space between the title and subtitle is the signature John Milton,' and underneath, in another space, the date 1634.' The signature is in the bold Italian script generally used by the poet when he subscribed his name. In the eighteenth century the volume belonged to the historian and philosopher, David Hume, whose book-plate is on the inside of the front cover. There are no other evidences of early ownership. That the seventeenth-century owner read it with care is evident from the marginalia on nearly every page. The notes are mostly in the older court hand of the seventeenth century, which Milton not infrequently used, as many manuscripts of his testify. Some, however, are in the Italian hand. There is no doubt that all are written by the same person, although at different times, and with change of quill. The ink is of differing degrees of blackness, and the caligraphy changes both in size of character and in clearness. The marginalia are for the greater part in English; a number are in Latin. A perusal of them gives the impression that Jonson had been studied not merely as a dramatist, but for his diction. Characteristic phrases and words are nearly all noted and repeated in the margin, e.g. 'itching leprosie of wit,' 'suburbe humour,' and hundreds other such.

An adequate idea of their import would need much space, but one or two characteristic notes may be given. In the epilogue to The Poetaster, added to the play in 1616, where Jonson speaks of his spending

half my nights and all my days

Here in a cell, to get a dark, pale face

To come forth worth the ivy or the bays.

The annotator's note is 'painful student.' In Every Man out of his Humour (Act III., Sc. 4), in the long passage where Carlo Buffone

counsels Mucilente how he ought to carry himself as a gentleman'Love no man. Trust no man. Speak ill of no man to his face, nor well of any man behind his back,' etc., the decisive and curt comment is damnable dissimulation." Another note on a passage in Cynthia's Revels is also worthy of mention. Jonson uses the word 'preposterous in a bad sense, as Shakespeare does in Sonnet cix.; in Troilus and Cressida (Act v., sc. 1); and again in Othello (Act I., sc. 3). In the Jonson play the word occurs in Act I., sc. 3. The annotator's note is 'preposterous rude nymph,' and he double-underlines the adverb. Wherever Jonson praises 'poesy' or 'the poet' there the adjacent margin is filled. Opposite the long list of Greek and Latin poets named in The Poetaster there is the note the famous poets named and highlie praised.' In other places, too, we find on the margin 'honour of poetrie,' 'poetrie bewitcheth,'praise of poetrie'; and the disquisitions on comedy and tragedy which Jonson so frequently gives in his plays are all carefully marked with catch-words as if for easy reference at some future time. Jonson's remark on the faulty metric of some of his contemporaries, who eked out their lines by 'helpe of some few foot and halfe-foote words,' has the note opposite, 'sesquipedalia verba': 'poets wanting judgment.'

Specimens might be indefinitely multiplied-praise of a scholar'; 'barking dogs'; 'beauties of theft'; 'concords' and 'dissonances'; "good and bad princes'; 'mischiefes feed like beasts, when they are fat they bleed'; 'Puritans threatened'; 'comparisons odious,' and such like. Of more interest is it to note the method followed by Jonson's early annotator. The first thing that strikes one is, that while the lyrics in the plays are underlined, there are no words of comment on the margin either of praise or dispraise. The same is true as regards Jonson's filchings from classical authors': the long passage from Book IV. of the Aeneid, incorporated in The Poetaster, Act v., sc. 2, is here and there underlined, but the margin is white. To Milton, Ben's translations no doubt would appear harsh and crude, his Virgilian attempts specially so. The Epigrams also exhibit a clean margin, but underlinings of the text show that they have been read, and the same is true of the Forest. There are only a few marginalia in the case of the Entertainments and Panegyrics, but Jonson's learned notes and glosses, especially those in Latin, have evidently been closely studied. The Latin verses and notes are nearly always underlined.

The volume has, unfortunately, suffered from the guillotine of a ruthless bookbinder, in consequence of which, final letters of words on the outside margin have, in most cases, been pared away. But for that manifest defect, the present binding might easily have passed for the original. Most likely, however, the book was rebound before it passed into the possession of David Hume.