“To the very accomplished youth, PETER HEIMBACH.

“Most amply, my Heimbach, have you fulfilled your promises and all the other expectations one would have of your goodness, with the exception, that I have still to long for your return.  You promised that it would be within two months at farthest; and now, unless my desire to have you back makes me misreckon the time, you have been absent nearly three.  In the matter of the Atlas you have abundantly performed all I requested of you; which was not that you should procure me one, but only that you would find out the lowest price of the book.  You write that they ask 130 florins; it must be the Mauritanian mountain Atlas, I think, and not a book, that you tell me is to be bought at so huge a price.  Such is now the luxury of Typographers in printing books that the furnishing of a library seems to have become as costly as the furnishing of a villa.  Since to me at least, on account of my blindness, painted maps can hardly be of use, vainly surveying as I do with blind eyes the actual globe of the earth, I am afraid that the bigger the price at which I should buy that book the greater would seem to be my grief over my deprivation.  Be good enough, pray, to take so much farther trouble for me as to be able to inform me, when you return, how many volumes there are in the complete work, and which of the two issues, that of Blaeu or that of Jansen, is the larger and more correct.  This I hope to hear from yourself personally, on your speedy return, rather than by another letter.  Meanwhile farewell, and come back to us as soon as you can.

  “Westminster:  Nov. 8, 1656.”

One guesses from this letter that Heimbach was then in Amsterdam.  It was there, at all events, that the two Atlases about which Milton enquired had been published or were in course of publication.  That of John Jansen, called Novus Atlas, when completed in 1658, consisted of six folio volumes; the yet more magnificent Geographia Blaeviana, or Atlas of the geographer and printer John Blaeu, was not perfect till 1662, and then consisted of eleven volumes of very large folio.  But various Atlases, or collections of maps in anticipation of the complete Atlas, had been on sale by Blaeu for ten or twelve years previously:  e.g., from his own trade-catalogue in 1650, “Atlas, four volumes illuminated, bound after the best fashion, will cost 150 guldens,” and “Belgia Foederata and Belgia Regia, two vols., white [uncoloured], 70 guldens, or illuminated 140 guldens.”  The gulden or Dutch florin was equal to 1_s._ 8_d._ English, so that the price of Blaeu’s four volume Atlas of 1650 was L12 10_s._ To Milton in 1656 the price of the same, or of whatever other Atlas he had in view, was to be twenty florins less, i.e. about L11.  It was much as if one were asked to give L38 for a book now; and no wonder that Milton hesitated.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The information about the prices of Blaeu’s general Atlas in 1650 and his special Atlas of the two Belgiums in the same year is from a curious letter in the Correspondence of the Earls of Ancram and Lothian, edited for the Marquis of Lothian, in 1875, by Mr. David Laing (II. 256).]