as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser wrote.”  The volume was published on Jan. 2, 1646.  It is divided into two parts, with separate title-pages, the first containing the English poems, the second the Latin.  They were probably sold separately.  The frontispiece, engraved by Marshall, is unfortunately a sour and silly countenance, passing as Milton’s, but against which he protests in four lines of Greek appended, which the worthy Marshall seems to have engraved without understanding them.  The British Museum copy in the King’s Library contains an additional MS. poem of considerable merit, in a hand which some have thought like Milton’s, but few now believe it to have been either written or transcribed by him.  It is dated 1647, but for which circumstance one might indulge the fancy that the copy had been a gift from him to some Italian friend, for the binding is Italian, and the book must have seen Italy.

Milton was now to learn what he afterwards taught, that “they also serve who only stand and wait.”  He had challenged obloquy in vindication of what he deemed right:  the cross actually laid upon him was to fill his house with inimical and uncongenial dependants on his bounty and protection.  The overthrow of the Royalist cause was utterly ruinous to the Powells.  All went to wreck on the surrender of Oxford in June, 1646.  The family estate was only saved from sequestration by a friendly neighbour taking possession of it under cover of his rights as creditor; the family mansion was occupied by the Parliamentarians, and the household stuff sold to the harpies that followed in their train; the “malignant’s” timber went to rebuild the good town of Banbury.  It was impossible for the Powells to remain in Oxfordshire, and Milton opened his doors to them as freely as though there had never been any estrangement.  Father, mother, several sons and daughters came to dwell in a house already full of pupils, with what inconvenience from want of room and disquiet from clashing opinions may be conjectured.  “Those whom the mere necessity of neighbourhood, or something else of a useless kind,” he says to Dati, “has closely conjoined with me, whether by accident or the tie of law, they are the persons who sit daily in my company, weary me, nay, by heaven, almost plague me to death whenever they are jointly in the humour for it.”  Milton’s readiness to receive the mother, deemed the chief instigator of her daughter’s “frowardness,” may have been partly due to the situation of the latter, who gave him a daughter on July 29, 1646.  In January, 1647, Mr. Powell died, leaving his affairs in dire confusion.  Two months afterwards Milton’s father followed him at the age of eighty-four, partly cognisant, we will hope, of the gift he had bestowed on his country in his son.  It was probably owing to the consequent improvement in Milton’s circumstances that he about this time gave up his pupils, except his nephews, and removed to a smaller house in High