the eulogium with an epigram and two richly-wrought cups, and told Milton that he would have shown him more observance still if he could have abstained from religious controversy.  Milton had not acted on Sir Henry Wootton’s advice to him, il volto sciolto, i pensieri stretti.  “I had made this resolution with myself,” he says, “not of my own accord to introduce conversation about religion; but, if interrogated respecting the faith, whatsoever I should suffer, to dissemble nothing.”  To this resolution he adhered, he says, during his second two months’ visit to Rome, notwithstanding threats of Jesuit molestation, which probably were not serious.  At Florence his friends received him with no less warmth than if they had been his countrymen, and with them he spent another two months.  His way to Venice lay through Bologna and Ferrara, and if his sonnets in the Italian language were written in Italy, and all addressed to the same person, it was probably at Bologna, since the lady is spoken of as an inhabitant of “Reno’s grassy vale,” and the Reno is a river between Bologna and Ferrara.  But there are many difficulties in the way of this theory, and, on the whole, it seems most reasonable to conclude that the sonnets were composed in England, and that their autobiographical character is at least doubtful.  That nominally inscribed to Diodati, however, would well suit Leonora Baroni.  Diodati had been buried in Blackfriars on August 27, 1638, but Milton certainly did not learn the fact until after his visit to Naples, and possibly not until he came to pass some time at Geneva with Diodati’s uncle.  He had come to Geneva from Venice, where he had made some stay, shipping off to England a cargo of books collected in Italy, among which were many of “immortal notes and Tuscan air.”  These, we may assume, he found awaiting him when he again set foot on his native soil, about the end of July, 1639.

Milton’s conduct on his return justifies Wordsworth’s commendation:—­

                              “Thy heart
    The lowliest duties on herself did lay.”

Full, as his notebooks of the period attest, of magnificent aspiration for “flights above the Aonian mount,” he yet quietly sat down to educate his nephews, and lament his friend.  His brother-in-law Phillips had been dead eight years, leaving two boys, Edward and John, now about nine and eight respectively.  Mrs. Phillips’s second marriage had added two daughters to the family, and from whatever cause, it was thought best that the education of the sons should be conducted by their uncle.  So it came to pass that “he took him a lodging in St. Bride’s Churchyard, at the house of one Russel, a tailor;” Christopher Milton continuing to live with his father.