lic affairs, we are apt to exaggerate
the importance in their daily lives of these visible official
activities. The world thinks it knows men who fight battles, or make
speeches, or write books; but it knows nothing of their private
thoughts or studies and still less of their private loves and joys and
sorrows which to themselves {69} and in truth are much the most real
part of their lives. So with Milton during these years; his wife and
little children may have been, his second wife and such friends as
Cyriack Skinner and Henry Lawrence and Lady Ranelagh and the poet
Marvell certainly were, much greater realities to him in his daily
thoughts than either the hated Salmasius and Morus of the pamphlets or
the admired Cromwell of the sonnet. The "weekly table" he is said to
have kept, at the expense of the State, for foreign ministers, must
have provided interesting talk; but the true Milton cannot have lived
in these gatherings so fully at the time or remembered them afterwards
so affectionately as those other more intimate parties of which he
gives us a picture in the two sonnets to Lawrence and Skinner which,
for lovers of poetry, look so pleasantly back to Horace and so
pleasantly forward to Cowper and Tennyson.

"Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
{70}
On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise."

This is his own graver and older parallel to what his nephew tells us
of his schoolmastering days when he would turn from "hard study and
spare diet" to "drop once a month or so into the society of some young
sparks of his acquaintance," and with them "would so far make bold with
his body as now and then to keep a gawdy day." The sonnet shows that
the poet is still the poet of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, no narrow
fanatic, but a lover of company and the arts, and of the richness and
fulness of life. Such occasions as that it describes must have bee