We may well believe that when the first cares of resettlement were over, Milton found no more urgent duty than the bestowal of a funeral tribute upon his friend Diodati.  The “Epitaphium Damonis” is the finest of his Latin poems, marvellously picturesque in expression, and inspired by true manly grief.  In Diodati he had lost perhaps the only friend whom, in the most sacred sense of the term, he had ever possessed; lost him when far away and unsuspicious of the already accomplished stroke; lost him when returning to his side with aspirations to be imparted, and intellectual treasures to be shared. Bis ille miser qui serus amavit. All this is expressed with earnest emotion in truth and tenderness, surpassing “Lycidas,” though void of the varied music and exquisite felicities which could not well be present in the conventionalized idiom of a modern Latin poet.  The most pathetic passage is that in which he contrasts the general complacency of animals in their kind with man’s dependence for sympathy on a single breast; the most biographically interesting where he speaks of his plans for an epic on the story of Arthur, which he seems about to undertake in earnest.  But the impulses from without which generally directed the course of this seemingly autocratic, but really susceptible, nature, urged him in quite a different direction:  for some time yet he was to live, not make a poem.

The tidings which, arriving at Naples about Christmas, 1638, prevailed upon Milton to abandon his projected visit to Sicily and Greece, were no doubt those of the revolt of Scotland, and Charles’s resolution to quell it by force of arms.  Ere he had yet quitted Italy, the King’s impotence had been sufficiently demonstrated, and about a month ere he stood on English soil the royal army had “disbanded like the break-up of a school.”  Milton may possibly have regretted his hasty return, but before many months had passed it was plain that the revolution was only beginning.  Charles’s ineffable infatuation brought on a second Scottish war, ten times more ridiculously disastrous than the first, and its result left him no alternative but the convocation (November, 1640) of the Long Parliament, which sent Laud to the Tower and Strafford to the block, cleared away servile judges and corrupt ministers, and made the persecuted Puritans persecutors in their turn.  Not a member of this grave assemblage, perhaps, but would have laughed if told that not its least memorable feat was to have prevented a young schoolmaster from writing an epic.

Milton had by this time found the lodgings in St. Bride’s Churchyard insufficient for him, and had taken a house in Aldersgate Street, beyond the City wall, and suburban enough to allow him a garden.  “This street,” writes Howell, in 1657, “resembleth an Italian street more than any other in London, by reason of the spaciousness and uniformity of the buildings and straightness thereof, with the convenient distance of the houses.”  He did not at this time contemplate mixing actively in political or religious controversy.