Milton arrived in Paris about the end of April or beginning of May.  Of his short stay there it is only known that he was received with distinction by the English Ambassador, Lord Scudamore, and owed to him an introduction to one of the greatest men in Europe, Hugo Grotius, then residing at Paris as envoy from Christina of Sweden.  Travelling by way of Nice, Genoa, Leghorn, and Pisa, he arrived about the beginning of August at Florence; where, probably by the aid of good recommendations, he “immediately contracted the acquaintance of many noble and learned,” and doubtless found, with the author of “John Inglesant,” that “nothing can be more delightful than the first few days of life in Italy in the company of polished and congenial men.”  The Florentine academies, he implies answered one of the purposes of modern clubs, and enabled the traveller to multiply one good introduction into many.  He especially mentions Gaddi, Dati, Frescobaldi, Coltellini, Bonmattei, Chimentelli, and Francini, of all of whom a full account will be found in Masson.  Two of them, Dati and Francini, have linked their names with Milton’s by their encomiums on him inserted in his works.  The key-note of these surprising productions is struck by Francini when he remarks that the heroes of England are accounted in Italy superhuman.  If this is so, Dati may be justified in comparing a young man on his first and last foreign tour to the travelled Ulysses; and Francini in declaring that Thames rivals Helicon in virtue of Milton’s Latin poems, which alone the panegyrist could read.  Truly, as Smollett says, Italian is the language of compliments.  If ludicrous, however, the flattery is not nauseous, for it is not wholly insincere.  Amid all conventional exaggerations there is an under-note of genuine feeling, showing that the writers really had received a deep impression from Milton, deeper than they could well explain or understand.  The bow drawn at a venture did not miss the mark, but it is a curious reflection that those of his performances which would really have justified their utmost enthusiasm were hieroglyphical to them.  Such of his literary exercises as they could understand consisted, he says, of “some trifles which I had in memory composed at under twenty or thereabout; and other things which I had shifted, in scarcity of books and conveniences, to patch up among them.”  The former class of compositions may no doubt be partly identified with his college declamations and Latin verses.  What the “things patched up among them” may have been is unknown.  It is curious enough that his acquaintance with the Italian literati should have been the means of preserving one of their own compositions, the “Tina” of Antonio Malatesti, a series of fifty sonnets on a mistress, sent to him in manuscript by the author, with a dedication to the illustrissimo signore et padrone osservatissimo.  The pieces were not of a kind to be approved by the laureate of chastity, and annoyance at the implied