Page:Scribner's magazine (IA scribnersmagazin16newy).pdf/354

Keats and others have said by way of criticism, and in the right places their words are jotted on the margins. There is one more literary relic of Milton, an old folio of his prose works, printed in 1697; nothing could be more quaint, more clumsy, more interesting! Whether his speeches and pamphlets were brought together previously, or whether this is a first edition of them collectively, I cannot say. The titles and prefaces and heading are all evidently as Milton intended them to be, and we are invited into his very presence as we turn these old pages. We feel with Wordsworth:

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spoke; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held———

There is however, an older book standing beneath this shelf than any which has ever stood upon it: it is one that fills me with a kind of awe as I look at it, yet which impels me to hold it with affection and to read its pages as I read no other "prophane" volume. This book is a copy of North's "Plutarch," printed in 1603—a book which Shakespeare knew and which he might have held. The strong leather cover has been patched, but perhaps not wholly remade. The bookworms have found their way through it, but the pages remain clear as the day they were printed.

Ludlow Castle, the scene of Milton's "Comus."

The name of a former owner, who lived at Bramfield Hall, Suffolk, is slowly fading off the title-page. but the stately title itself is unchanged, and the name of "James Amiot, Abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the King's privie Councell and great Amner^[1] of France," who translated these lives of the noble Grecians and Romans. out of Greek into French, appears in all its majesty, leading in the name of the great English translator from

1. The Amner (presumably Almoner) was the highest ecclesiastical dignitary of France, to whom was given the superintendence of hospitals.