reverence due to a veteran who fifty years ago had soothed and shielded
Tasso, and since had protected Marini. He now entertained Milton with
equal kindness, little dreaming that in return for hospitality he was
receiving immortality. Milton celebrated his desert as the friend of
poets, in a Latin poem of singular elegance, praying for a like guardian
of his own fame, in lines which should never be absent from the memory
of his biographers. He also unfolded the project which he then cherished
of an epic on King Arthur, and assured Manso that Britain was not wholly
barbarous, for the Druids were really very considerable poets. He is
silent on Chaucer and Shakespeare. Manso requited 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