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Old Calabria by Norman Douglas
page 237 of 451 (52%)
and ostentation. But Salandra and the rest of them were Milton's
contemporaries. It is certainly an astonishing fact that no scholar of
the stamp of Thyer was acquainted with the 'Adamo Caduto'; and it says
much for the isolation of England that, at a period when poems on the
subject of paradise lost were being scattered broadcast in Italy and
elsewhere--when, in short, all Europe was ringing with the doleful
history of Adam and Eve--Milton could have ventured to speak of
his work as 'Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyma'--an amazing
verse which, by the way, is literally transcribed out of Ariosto
('Cosa, non detta in prosa mai, ne in rima'). But even now the
acquaintance of the British public with the productions of continental
writers is superficial and spasmodic, and such was the ignorance of
English scholars of this earlier period, that Birch maintained that
Milton's drafts, to be referred to presently, indicated his intention of
writing an _opera_ (!); while as late as 1776 the poet Mickle,
notwithstanding Voltaire's authority, questioned the very existence of
Andreini, who has written thirty different pieces.

Some idea of the time when Salandra's tragedy reached Milton might be
gained if we knew the date of his manuscript projects for 'Paradise
Lost' and other writings which are preserved at Cambridge. R. Garnett
('Life of Milton,' 1890, p. 129) supposes these drafts to date from
about 1640 to 1642, and I am not sufficiently learned in Miltonian lore
to controvert or corroborate in a general way this assertion. But the
date must presumably be pushed further forward in the case of the
skeletons for 'Paradise Lost,' which are modelled to a great extent upon
Salandra's 'Adamo' of 1647, though other compositions may also have been
present before Milton's mind, such as that mentioned on page 234 of the
second volume of Todd's 'Milton,' from which he seems to have drawn the
hint of a 'prologue spoken by Moses.'
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