Theologiae Elencticae ranking to this day among Calvinistic Theologians as a master-work of its kind.  Well, this Francis Turretin, rising into fame at Geneva, just as Ezekiel Spanheim was, and seeing Spanheim daily, had, it seems from Milton’s letter, a brother in London, on intimate terms with Milton; and Milton’s proposition to young Spanheim was that they should correspond in future through the two Turretins.  Who would have thought to find the future author of the Institutio Theologiae Elencticae used by Milton for postal purposes?  Is it not clear too that the London Turretin must have been one of Milton’s informants about Morus’s reasons for leaving Geneva?  Respectability everywhere, at our present date at least, seems adverse to Morus.[2]

[Footnote 1:  For mention of Jean Louis Calandrin, the Genevese merchant, see Letters between Pell and Thurloe in Vaughan’s Protectorate (I. 302, 308, 354).  He died at Geneva, in Feb. 1655-6, about a year after this mention of him by Milton.  It is possible he may have been a relative of a “Caesar Calandrinus” mentioned by Wood as one of the many foreigners who had studied at Exeter College, Oxford, during the Rectorship of Dr. Prideaux (1612-1641), and who was afterwards “a Puritanical Theologist,” intimate with Usher, a Rector in Essex, and finally minister of the parish of Peter le Poor in London, where he died in 1665, leaving a son named John.  Wood speaks of him as a German (Wood, Ath.  III. 269, and Fasti, I. 393-4); but the name is evidently Italian.  Indeed I find that there had been an intermarriage in Italy between the Diodati family and a family of Calandrinis, bringing some of the Calandrinis also to Geneva about the year 1575. (Reprint, for private circulation, of a Paper on the Italian ancestry of Mr. William Diodate of New Haven, U.S., read before the New Haven Colony Historical Society, June 28, 1875, by Edward E. Salisbury, p. 13).  By the kindness of Colonel Chester, whose genealogical researches are all-inclusive, I have a copy of the will of the above-named Caesar Calandrini of St. Peter le Poor, London.  It is dated Aug. 4, 1665, when he was “three score and ten,” and mentions two sons, Lewis and John, two daughters living, one of them married to a Giles Archer, and grandchildren by these children, besides nephews and nieces of the names of Papillon and Burlamachi.  The son “John” in this will proved it in October 1665, and cannot have been the Calandrini of Milton’s letter; but that Calandrini may have been of the same connexion.]

[Footnote 2:  Bayle, Art. Francois Turretin.]

Busy over his reply to the Fides Publica, Milton had stretched his dispensation from routine duty in his Secretaryship not only through November and December 1654 and January 1654-5, as was noted in last section, but as far as to April 1655 in the present section.  Through these five months there is, so far as the records show, a total blank, at all events, in his official letter-writing.  In April 1655, however, as if his reply to the Fides Publica were then off his mind, and lying in the house in Petty France complete or nearly complete in manuscript, we do come upon two more of his Latin State-letters, as follows:—­