s of the world. But in
the result he actually wrote less poetry in the next twenty years than
he had written in the previous five: less in quantity and far less in
quality and importance. The first interruption was the completion of
his elaborate education by a grand tour. His generous father, who was
well-to-do rather than rich, had acquiesced in his not so far earning
one penny for himself, and was now prepared to provide him with about a
thousand pounds of our present money to enable him to go abroad for a
year or two in comfortable style and with the attendance of a servant.
Leaving England in the spring of 1638, he spent a few days in Paris,
where he was civilly entertained by the famous Grotius, then Swedish
Ambassador there, as well as by the English Ambassador, Lord Scudamore,
but soon moved south, entering Italy by Nice and Genoa and arriving at
Florence in August or September. There he spent two months, and was
enthusiastically received by the various academies or clubs of men of
letters which then flourished in Florence, one of whose still existing
minute {44} books records that at its meeting on September the 16th a
certain John Milton, an Englishman, read to the members a Latin
hexameter poem showing great learning. There also he paid his famous
visit to Galileo, now old and blind, and still a sort of nominal
prisoner of the Inquisition, for the sin, as Milton says in the
_Areopagitica_, of "thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan
and Dominican licensers thought." One may be sure that it was not
merely the interest of the new theory about the motion of the earth
which drew him back so often to that question in _Paradise Lost_. The
blind astronomer, whose scientific heresies had placed him in some
danger of the thumbscrew, must have been a very near and moving memory
to the blind poet whose political and ecclesiastical heresies had so
nearly brought him to the gallows.

From Florence Milton went on to Rome, where his scholarly tastes
gratified themselves for two months in the study of what remained of
the ancient city. The famous picture of Rome in _Paradise Regained_
may owe something to these weeks. There, too, he was well received by
several of Rome's most distinguished scholars who paid him compliments
of Italian extravagance. There, too, he heard the famous Leonora
Baroni {45} sing, and was so moved as to write three Latin epigrams in
her praise. But it was at Naples, whither he p