st the Dutch; the Spanish ambassador
is reproved for his protraction of business; the Grand Duke of Tuscany
is warmly thanked for protecting English ships in the harbour of
Leghorn; the French king is admonished to indemnify English merchants
for wrongful seizure; the Protestant Swiss cantons are encouraged to
fight for their religion; the King of Sweden is felicitated on the birth
of a son and heir, and on the Treaty of Roeskilde; the King of Portugal
is pressed to use more diligence in investigating the attempted
assassination of the English minister; an ambassador is accredited to
Russia; Mazarin is congratulated on the capture of Dunkirk. Of all his
letters, none can have stirred Milton's personal feelings so deeply as
the epistle of remonstrance to the Duke of Savoy on the atrocious
massacre of the Vaudois Protestants (1655); but the document is
dignified and measured in tone. His emotion found relief in his greatest
sonnet; blending, as Wordsworth implies, trumpet notes with his habitual
organ-music; the most memorable example in our language of the fire and
passion which may inspire a poetical form which some have deemed only
fit to celebrate a "mistress's eyebrow"[4]:--

"Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
Forget not: in Thy book record their groans
Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learned Thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."

This is what Johnson calls "carving heads upon cherry-stones!"

Milton's calamity had, of course, required special assistance. He had
first had Weckherlin as coadjutor, then Philip Meadows, finally Andrew
Marvell. His emoluments had been reduced, in April, 1655, from L288 to
L150 a year, but the diminished allowance was made perpetual instead of
annual, and seems to have been intended as a retiring pension. He
nevertheless continued to work, drawing salary at the rate of L200 a
year, and his pen was never more active than during the last mont