many foreigners resident in the eternal city. But though he received
much civility, we do not find that he met with the peculiar sympathy
which endeared to him his Tuscan friends. His chief ally was the
German, Lucas Holstenius, a native of Hamburg, who had abjured
Protestantism to become librarian of the Vatican. Holstenius had
resided three years in Oxford, and considered himself bound to repay
to the English scholar some of the attentions he had received himself.
Through Holstenius Milton was presented to the nephew, Francesco
Barberini, who was just then everything in Rome. It was at a concert
at the Barberini palace that Milton heard Leonora Baroni sing. His
three Latin epigrams addressed to this lady, the first singer of
Italy, or of the world at that time, testify to the enthusiasm she
excited in the musical soul of Milton.

Nor are these three epigrams the only homage which Milton paid to
Italian beauty. The susceptible poet, who in the sunless north would
fain have "sported with the tangles of Neaera's hair," could not
behold Neaera herself and the flashing splendour of her eye, unmoved.
Milton proclaims (_Defensio Secunda_) that in all his foreign tour he
had lived clear from all that is disgraceful. But the pudicity of his
behaviour and language covers a soul tremulous with emotion, whose
passion was intensified by the discipline of a chaste intention. Five
Italian pieces among his poems are to the address of another lady,
whose "majestic movements and love-darting dark brow" had subdued him.
The charm lay in the novelty of this style of beauty to one who came
from the land of the "vermeil-tinctur'd cheek" (_Comus_) and the
"golden nets of hair" (_El._ i. 60). No clue has been discovered to
the name of this divinity, or to the occasion on which, Milton saw
her.