John K. Hale
Young Milton’s letters, though seldom considered together, give distinctive opportunities to explore the relations between manuscripts and printed books. First, when they are personal letters, they have their main life as sent, to the friend. Their subsequent printed existence is secondary and optional, and modified by the keeping, gathering, and adjusting for print. Interest sharpens when at the end of his life the old Milton presents the young one. Secondly, a letter may survive in manuscript alone, in manuscript and print, or in print alone. All three outcomes occur with Milton’s letters, asymmetrically. One survives in both manuscript and print, hinting at changes. Most survive solely in the printed gathering of his Latin letters in the year of his death. Yet the most important letter of them all survives in manuscript in two drafts, the only letter surviving in English. It may never have been sent.
The letters comprise Letters I–IX of Epistolarum Familiarium [Liber], 1674. Also to be considered, for reasons discussed in their place, are an equal number of verse letters: two Latin Elegiae, a Latin poem to his father, an Italian sonnet to his friend Diodati; and five Latin poems to friends composed in Italy, 1638–39. The manuscript letter in English is the untitled one in the Trinity Manuscript known as the 'Letter to a Friend'.1
The 'young' Milton is taken for my purposes as 'before 1640', when civil war changed his life. The purposes are: to see how he began; to chart the letters’ multilingual play, as the form and theme of a friendship; and to deepen the sense of his youthful spirit by including the high proportion of letters written in verse. Next, besides explaining the coverage of 'young' and 'letters', something needs to be said about the title’s preposition: how is Milton to be found 'in' a letter? Though letters valuably help the biographer by giving solid knowledge about what he was doing, and when and where,2 that value is mainly instrumental. Nor are the letters mere juvenilia, requiring excuse or dismissal. The present study uses close readings, of his original words in their original tongues, to discover the signs of a youthful personality, and of its development through the friendships. To put it another way, we should ask, where within each letter does he sound most individual, most like himself, that is, a different younger self, or an emergent settled one? Impression – the effect on recipient or reader – and Expression – what the writer discloses about himself or says on his own behalf – will vary their interplay within any letter.3 Indeed, the 1674 selection seems to exploit this, about which more in a moment.
Certain contexts need to be kept in mind. These are: humanist Imitatio, and its influence on the theme of friendship in letters between friends; Renaissance multilingualism; the local relevance of letters in verse; and the problem for the present enquiry of what gets lost in translation.
I keep the Latin term Imitatio with uppercase initial to separate it from its vaguer modern sense, 'imitation, copying', often pejorative. The Imitatio so beloved by humanist teachers and pupils is not mere imitation, but by intention the opposite; not plagiarizing, but outdoing what the exemplary Greeks and Romans had left us – appropriating it to some personal need. Thus Imitatio in Shakespeare (the originality of whose genius cannot be doubted) is his 'wading further' or appropriating of material, be it plots, characters, themes, or words. For example, the old source-play King Leir included a scene where king and daughter kneel, as in Lear IV.vii, to seek forgiveness from each other. The debt is clear enough, but what matters is that while the old play does it feebly, Shakespeare creates order, clarity, and maximum tragic effect. Comparison, source-criticism, reveals this. So enquiry into examples of Imitatio begins from whatever the writer omits, selects, changes, or adds.4 The closer the debt, the more the divergences show the new design. Milton’s first letter typifies this by transforming a humdrum duty-letter.
Where does Milton’s Imitatio go next? The gathered Latin prose letters of 1674 aim to show both variety within the letters, and a self advancing into wider relations of friendship, doing all this basically for purposes of display (otherwise, why publish one’s private letters at all?).5 I argue this by analogy with the poems before 1640, gathered with care by Milton himself for Poems, 1645. There, chronological markers display the young Milton as accomplished beyond his years.6 In the prose letters of 1674 Imitatio is present, but this time showcasing variation and advance.
Humanists were by definition bilingual, if not multilingual. Latin was the language of main exchange. Greek entered into letters, ever since the copious Greek of the genre’s Latin exemplar, Cicero. Greek was expected, and noticed: what might its appearance release which the norm of Latin dignity did not? How far does an appearance raise the register, and mark personal feelings like ardour or hope?
An investigation onward of Milton’s verse letters reveals them doing the same things as his prose letters, but now it is the medium, not the internal register, which has risen higher and disclosed more. Two early friendships are being expressed in verse letters as in prose ones, those to Thomas Young and to Charles Diodati. Milton talks about his other poems in either medium. The high proportion of verse letters in the early correspondence is not paralleled later. And in the sole English letter, which is giving him much trouble to express in prose, he appends an English sonnet to do the job for him. Verse and prose letters interact as vehicles of friendship. So it is with his languages, which for this purpose includes Italian too.
One last preliminary is needed since Milton’s original words in the early letters are seldom in English. Translations are included, to give the bare sense. But translations do not convey enough of the local style, or the vital rises in register. It is amazing, too, that translators lump the Greek verse of some insertions into letters with their Latin into undifferentiated prose English. The rises and changes are the places where feeling and personality are most likely to be found. The difficulty of another language must be recognized: it is what makes anglophones think that Shakespeare or Milton undergo reduction or distortion by translation for allophones. The answer is to be patient, to read aloud, to listen, and to savour under guidance; in short, to enlist the help of someone who does read the alien tongue. In my experience, just as with musicians, the performer of a cherished language delights to show off and share the skill.
Letter I exemplifies the recommended school practice of letter writing, by 'imitating onely the forme, but changing the words', as John Brinsley put it.7 By omission or selection, adjustment or addition, Milton makes Cicero’s mild paradox his own.
Cicero:
Quamquam me nomine neglegentiae suspectum tibi esse doleo, tamen non tam mihi molestum fuit, accusari abs te officium meum, quam iucundum requiri; praesertim cum, in quo accusabar, culpa vacarem, in quo autem desiderare te significabas meas litteras, prae te ferres perspectum mihi quidem, sed tamen dulcem et optatum amorem tuum.
('Though I am sorry you should have suspected me on the score of "neglect", still I am more pleased that you missed my attentions than put out that you should accuse me of any remissness, especially since in so far as your charge went, I was in no sense to blame, while in so far as you implied that you longed for a letter from me, you openly avowed an affection for me, which, well as I knew it before, is none the less delightful and desirable'.)
(Cicero, Ep. Fam.; 1943, 2: 1)
Milton (again a single sentence):
Quereris tu vero (quod merito potes) literas meas raras admodum & perbrevis ad te delatas esse; ego vero non tam doleo me adeo jucundo, adeoque expetendo defuisse officio, quam gaudeo & pene exulto eum me in amicitia tua tenere locum, qui possit crebras a me Epistulas efflagitare.
('You complain, indeed, as justly you may, that my letters to you have been as yet few and very short; but I, on the other hand, do not so much grieve that I have been remiss in a duty so pleasant and so enviable as I rejoice, and all but exult, at holding such a place in your friendship that you should care to ask for frequent letters from me'.)
(1931–38, 12: 4–5)8
No matter that the idea hardly deserves such space, nor that its expression is stilted: so it was in Cicero, who is here both generic norm and actual source. Given that Milton borrows from Cicero for Young’s benefit, and is bound by humanist practice to emulate, the question to be asked is: where does he adapt the stilted exemplar? Four things stand out.
First, he changes the syntax, especially word order. A measured subordinate clause (quamquam … tamen) is replaced by a dramatic opening main verb, Quereris tu. Secondly, he is more deferential, as befits the altered relationship between himself and the recipient. Cicero’s phrase about an equal friendship (dulcem et optatum amorem tuum) becomes a deferential one about a duty (adeo jucundo, adeoque expetendo defuisse officio). Thirdly, appropriation is shown in the striving for a stronger adjective, the gerundive expetendo, a duty to be earnestly sought (from an ex-pupil by his preceptor). The striving itself shows, and suits, the case of the young Milton here. Fourthly, the concluding emulation is firm and good. A neat ring-structure, distinct from Cicero’s neglegentiae … amorem, is gained by opposing 'late' (crebras) to 'early' (raras), and by relying for final impact on the strong verb efflagitare. Milton’s artifice is on show because efflagitare is the sort of 'good' or 'strong' verb recommended for those writing Latin proses at school. Although Latin does prefer verbs to abstract nouns, and does for that reason tend to put verbal expressions in emphatic positions, it becomes a knack or trick. Nonetheless, even that suits this letter, from ex-pupil aged sixteen to his Praeceptor optimus. Young, his former teacher, should be gratified at this technical prowess. This is how the game was played. It is all Impression, not Expression. It is also tediously dutiful; but therefore readers of 1674 wait to see what comes next.
The next prose letter (IV) to Young is shorter, and less of a dutiful display-piece. It has nothing like the appropriation of Cicero. Its content bulks larger: it is a polite 'See you soon'. Stylish flourishes do occur, being de rigueur, but they are quick ones, like the mild wit of Latinizing the Anglo-Saxon of 'Stow-market' into Stoa Icenorum – the portico or school of the territory of the Iceni, if approached from Cambridge. The whimsical etymology smooths out the jagged, alien look of 'Stowmarket' into a Greco-Latin noun, and the Roman name for the British tribe. The abiding impression is that Milton now (1628) writes a more independent, brisker letter.
This development is enriched once we allow that a verse letter remains a letter. Letter I had confessed that he meant it to be in verse: Epistolium quoddam numeris metricis elucubratum ('a certain small epistle composed in metrical numbers'). Now Letter IV comes to Young after he has fulfilled that promise after all, in spades, in Elegia IV (1627). That verse letter, from Milton now at Cambridge to Young away in Hamburg, has been lost to view as a letter and as part of the exchange with Young because Milton printed it among his Poems, 1645. As will be later shown in the discussion of Milton’s verse letters, the force of this wonderful exile-poem includes autonomy and equality within the exchange for its junior partner. Milton grows up between Letter I and IV.
Similarly, the advance from dutiful amplitude to functional briskness plays off against the other two exchanges from this period before Milton goes to Italy. These are best considered in the terms of multilingual friendship among those who are more of Milton’s own age than that of his Praeceptor optimus Young.
Alexander Gil, junior, was the son of Milton’s headmaster. He was older than Milton; a proficient Latinist, who published a book of Latin verse, with Greek interspersions (Parerga, 1632).9 Letters II, III, and V mark stages in Milton’s growing to equal, then surpass, this accomplished linguist. They exchange verses as well as letters and discuss them. To be more precise, since we read only Milton’s side of the exchange, Milton discusses Gil’s verses (II), but then III and V focus on his own, indeed increasingly so. The emphasis and the increase both convey Milton’s youthful delight in his increasing powers and their efficacy.
Two details of Letter III deserve special note. First, Milton at age twenty is modest but excited that he has been asked for a poem by a fellow of his college. He 'chanced to entrust to my puerility [an arch figure for "my young self"] the composition of the verses' to accompany a university disputation.10 A distinction in itself, even if the fellow was being lazy, it becomes Milton’s first poem to achieve print: he has sent Gil the printed version (Haec quidem Typis donata ad te misi, 'The result, committed to type, I have sent to you').11
Compare and contrast the ebullience of Letter V. Now aged twenty-five, he sends a poem in Greek; not a commissioned item, but voluntary, following some 'sudden impulse before daybreak' (subito nescio quo impetu ante lucis exortum). Modesty remains, but it has become the distinctive modesty of inspiration, for it climbs on the back of the attribution: the poem 'is not exactly mine, but belongs also to the truly divine poet' (non plane meum est, sed & vatis etiam illius vere divini)12 – the Psalmist. He has turned Psalm 114 into Greek, the rousing hexameters of Homer. It is Imitatio again, but translingual now. And it renders verse into verse, but verse with a radically distinct rhythm and music. So the medium of the friendship-exchange is consciously emboldened.
He becomes bolder again in the exchange with the friend of his own age, Diodati.13 Charles Diodati was another school friend, the English son ('Charles', not Carlo) of an Italian Protestant exile. His multilingualism spurred that of Milton, who in their exchange of letters and writing-plans adds Italian to English, Latin, and Greek. The prose letters to Diodati, Letters VI and VII, display self-expression through their Greek.
When Greek enters Milton’s Latin, translators tend to bury it inside uniform English, thereby losing its special effect within the Latin. This is particularly unfortunate while we consider the multilingual play within the friendships of Milton’s letters. The role of the Greek within the letters to Diodati deserves foregrounding.
In general, the Greek takes the form of words, phrases, clauses, or sentences. They may be Milton’s own Greek, or quoted from his reading. That reading was voracious in this decade, since he read much history in Greek and annotated all of Euripides.
The principles of Imitatio and appropriation were at work again. Cicero the exemplar had used Greek freely in his letters, as the display and expression of shared Roman bilingual culture. Milton did the same in regard to his humanist multilingualism. It distinguishes his letters to Diodati. From a solitary nugget of Greek in Letters I to V, the count jumps to six in each letter to Diodati. And they now comprise the range of nuggets, in size, quality, and authorship. This friendship was felt through Greek, since Diodati’s two extant letters to Milton are both in Greek, exuberant Greek at that.14 There may have been more Greek in lost letters. Decisively, the Greek presence intensifies from the one letter to the next.
In both letters Milton cites historians and poets, as we might expect from knowing the bent of his studies in the 1630s: he cites Thucydides with Pindar in VI, and with Euripides in VII. They are cited in passing, to enliven a point or let off steam, but not to make any independent point. But Letter VII differs drastically, by iterated Platonizing talk, capped by a revelation about himself which takes its being from Plato. He moves mid-letter from averring his devout 'love of tò kalon [το καλον] … in all its forms', to declare that 'I am growing wings', pterophuô [πτεροϕυω]. Pterophuô is a coinage, or rather an image, of Plato’s in the rapt context of the Phaedrus (251c, 255d). What wings, and what incipient flight, is he reporting to Diodati?
In the Phaedrus, two loves are being contrasted: earthly, homoerotic desire, and the love of philosophy. To detect the former is to import too much of Plato. And philosophy is also broader than the locus of these letters. The immediate context is the love of the beautiful in all its forms. Poetic composition is the likeliest one, being a continuing theme of these letters. Milton need not be taking much more than the startling, climactic image from Plato.
There are good reasons which, taken together, point to the wing-extending composition as Lycidas. (1) He confides in Diodati elsewhere about poetry and trusts his judgment. (2) Lycidas is dated November 1637 in the Trinity Manuscript, and so are Letters VI and VII by modern scholarship.15 They are dated to the same month, the 2nd and the 23rd. The 'wings' have grown in the time between them. (3) Exchange of poems is as regular a part of these letters as exchange of friendship. To this most trusted friend he confides his new degree of self-belief. (4) Poetry is a main subject of the exchanges, and the most likely arena of growth, wings, and flying. (5) Contrast the diffidence and sense of unripeness in Sonnet 7 and the English letter in the Trinity Manuscript. (6) In other ways, too, despite the risk of circularity and hindsight, poetic hopes fit the rapturous diction and the higher register that Greek within Latin is. And (7) on anyone’s reckoning Lycidas fully justifies the exhilaration.
Greek thus has a special place within Milton’s multilingualism. Even so, Greek and Latin are not his only languages in which he takes pleasure. The pleasure is made explicit in the poem to his father, Ad Patrem. It acknowledges his debt for five languages, not two: Latin, Greek, then French and Italian, then Hebrew. Though undatable, the poem sums up a general connection to our theme of enablement and self-expansion through languages. Languages and letters together gave the young Milton his medium of friendship and a source of inspiration, for Ad Patrem is a letter in verse. What remains unexplained is how verse letters enlarge the sense of young Milton in his letters.
Reasons for examining the young Milton’s prose and verse letters together include: first, the fact that Milton writes to friends in each medium equally in this period, but not later; secondly, that some of his friendships are conducted by both means; thirdly, that for one letter (Letter I, at the outset of the prose letters) he considered whether to write it in verse or prose; fourthly, that he calls some verse letters epistulae; fifthly, that when he collects and prints them, all receive similar arranging and editing; and sixthly, above all, that they have the same essential function, of address to a friend, addressed as tu, updating each about how life – especially writing – is going and nurturing the friendship.16 One further reason is decisive for me, that (as we shall see in a moment) his letter in the Trinity Manuscript claims to be the same account of his life at a crisis by a prose letter and by a sonnet.
Letters in the two mediums differ in less essential respects. They differ in exemplars – not Cicero now (whose verses were sometimes lamentable), but Ovid for elegy, Catullus for a special effect, and so on. The verse letters give Milton greater scope and freedom, through choice of verse-genre and its exemplars. He is freed, too, from the formulaic details of time and place as they pertain to the first writing of a prose letter. It may irk scholars that the verse letters become harder to date, but the writer himself was released into writing more timelessly, and with a more diverse wit.
One striking variation which verse allows is the angle of address, or narrative point of view. Every prose letter must come from an 'I' to a 'you'. A verse letter need not do this, but instead by a hallowed fiction can address the letter itself, personified: Elegia Quarta.17 It is a kind of fiction, which paradoxically allows a greater sincerity, to speak praise or feelings to them but as if about them – as one might influence a friend by saying what a 'good friend' would do, or a colleague by mentioning 'good practice' or 'professionalism'.
Briefly to illustrate how Milton takes these opportunities: to Thomas Young, 'his preceptor', he personifies the letter, amusingly blaming the letter for being tardy (line 3). Then he can express his affection for Young more fulsomely than by direct tu: 'that man is more to me than one half of my soul' (line 19). And when the letter has reached distant Hamburg, it will make an inset, commissioned speech to Young in the second person after all: lines 51 to the end of the poem express commiseration at exile and encouragement in danger. The register changes at 51, from playful wit to a high-style poem of exile, overgoing Ovid.18
The multilingual side of his self-expression in verse letters is positively flaunted in the Italian sonnets. These are addressed to the lady herself, or to the poem, but Sonnet IV is addressed, yet again, to Diodati. Diodati, e te ’l dirò con maraviglia … ('Diodati, I’ll tell you something which amazes me …'). A sonnet is not a letter, or not when it comes amidst a little sequence, but the direct addressing and the fiction of apostrophe to this friend, require notice in the context of this friendship exchange, which is the apex of Milton’s multilingual letter writing.
In the poem to his sick friend Salzilli in Rome, he chooses the unusual medium of scazontes. Here the wit preponderates to the end: the 'limping' verses suit the 'sick' Salzilli (Scazontes … aegrotantem). 'O Muse, by choice you drag the foot, lamely'. The friendly wishes for recovery are conveyed as between poets, whom poetry has brought together from distant places. Touchingly, Milton closes the poem with his friend’s river, the Tiber, running out to sea; adusque curvi salsa regna Portumni ('To salt Portumnus’ curving sea-limits').19
Verse in a letter enables Milton to tell more of a story. There is both a fluidity and a heightening about verse which he relishes. Here is a final example from the verses he wrote in Italy. Writing not one but three laudatory elegiacs to the singer Leonora, he turns twice from third-person generality to direct tu. His third, however, turns from one tu to another, from Naples, to Leonora. It is a fertile and multilingual playing, but more than that, a story-telling or fictionalizing of letters of friendship.
It looks as if the journey to Italy re-awoke or redirected Milton's letter writing, from prose towards verse. Before Italy, seven prose letters remain, three verse letters. From Italy 1638–39, only two prose letters, five verse ones (and now no recipients of both sorts of letter). Can we account for this?
First, there is a break in the relation to recipients. None, now, are family or school friends. Milton wrote in verse to fellow poets and to Leonora, but in prose to Buonmattei on a public topic, and also to Holstenius, for whom he was conducting some business. Secondly, he makes a careful choice among verse-forms for each recipient: elegiac couplets for the praise-poems to Leonora, grave iambics for the elder statesman of poetry, Manso, witty scazontes for the young invalid Salzilli. The choices themselves are witty and apt. Thirdly, his letters of 1638–39 show maturity and assurance. He is spreading some wings further, by embarking on wider topics with a wider acquaintance. They are less playful, let alone exuberant: Impression is on his mind. Fourthly, he is on his mettle, eager to ensure his poems are 'received with written encomiums', seeing that 'the Italian is not forward to bestow [them] on men this side of the Alps' (Milton 1953–82, 1: 810).20 It is true that he cannot use English to write to these Italians, and true too that using Latin was pleasure as much as necessity. All in all, however, these letters in either medium are less familiar, less personal. Milton is not so young by now, aged about thirty.
A different factor is the editing of his poems in 1645 and the letters in 1674. Selection and ordering both subserve Impression. But the Expression is not stifled, nor even the youthful exuberance; witness the sustaining of the conceit through forty-one lines of a demanding rare metre for Salzilli's get-well poem. If only we could interpret aright the differences between the letter as sent to Holstenius and the text printed in 1674. In 1674 its superscription is in the third person and describes the addressee – which a reader needs to know, though the addressee did not. Beyond that, however, was the printer’s copy a first draft or a fair copy or a late revision, or some combination of these?
The scholar who unearthed the manuscript of the letter sent to Holstenius in the Vatican Library, J. McG. Bottkol, remarked on small divergences from it in the 1674 printing (1953, 617–27). Leo Miller eliminated many of them (1991, 573–87). One that remains bears on our topic, the young Milton. Where 1674 speaks of readers of Holstenius’s editions 'receiving' his published works, the letter sent says they 'snatched them up'. The difference is between the 'cc' of accipiuntur and the 'rr' of arripiuntur (see Milton 1998, 112 [text] and 23–24 [discussion]). Though other explanations are possible, and mine risks circularity, I incline to agree with Bottkol in this instance, that the enthusiasm of the younger Milton leads him into the hyperbole, of readers 'snatching at' the works, like proverbial hot cakes. For ancients like Aristotle and Quintilian held that hyperbole is typical of young men: Milton is hyperbolical in other Italian letters, for example those to Leonora (see Longinus 1964, 170). It is also typical of young men to be smitten by the love of music as sung by the female voice. It humanizes Milton, that he wrote fan letters in verse, three in a row.
Beyond the needs of Impression, it is clear that Italy released a joy in newly confident Expression. This makes our final letter stand out all the more, for its insecurity about vocation. The first aim of life was apparently not writing poems and letters.
The theme of this letter to an older, probably clerical friend is explicitly vocation. Much else is different. Milton, aged twenty-four, writes in English. He writes in prose, then (to the same sense) in verse. He writes with difficulty, even puzzlement. He writes two full drafts, both heavily worked over, which survive; yet the finished version is lost, or was not sent. These differences from all other letters before 1640 require explanation.
On the one hand, his puzzlement could be overstated. In both prose drafts the head-scratching is resolved by the concluding sonnet in which initial puzzlement ends in clear conviction; well, clear enough. 'How soon hath time the subtle thief of youth', Milton reflects on his own youth. Nonetheless, he affirms, 'time also leads me, and the will of heaven'.21 He is not going to budge. On the other hand, he is never so visibly unsure of his expression in other extant drafts from before 1640. It may simply be that he is young and feels unripe. At all events, we should exploit the rare opportunity to watch Milton labouring over what to say. The best way forward should be by close reading and comparison of the two drafts, not forgetting the false starts within each.
Yet the drafting is unwieldy too. The sentences are enormous and – both on the page, and by their nature – shapeless. How many of these, with their phrasal and syntactical tinkering, can be set out in one essay? How best to represent their fits and starts? The aim in what follows is to slow down the reading, and so call attention to the awkward and distinctive. It is done with the conviction that, alongside brisker explanations, a patient close reading may open up a unique state of Milton’s mind. As was the case with his poem 'The Passion', something is 'above his years', as Milton said in 1645 of that failed ode. The dithering makes him human and shows him young.
In the first version (Milton 1970, 6), the opening sentence is 138 words long, while the next is 33 before the third swells to a Brobdignagian 511. The total word count goes up slightly more when Milton’s changes to his original wording are factored in. The verbosity raises the possibility that a sonnet of one or two sentences in a little over a hundred words would have proved a more effective medium here.
For the second version, however (Milton 1970, 7), comparable figures are: 146 (inclusive), 195, 119, and 79 (all told, and barely 50 when shorn of changes); 89, 56, 51, and 209. This draft shortens sentences but increases their number. Yet that purpose is defeated as the draft goes on, becoming swollen once more by the last sentence, of 209 words. Thus the total of 736 words becomes almost 1,000. The sonnet is not written out again, and the draft ends with three additional sentences, switching to a closing wit and courtesy: 36, 37, and 52 words. These confirm the intention to write shorter sentences, to make a better impression on the recipient. Thereby they emphasize how the sentence preceding the sonnet had nonetheless swollen up in the throes of composition.
For present purposes, we need to see a whole sentence, and see it warts and all. The best choice might be of the longest, most conflicted sentence; that of 511 words becoming 'only' 209. Instead of this unwieldy choice, I will simply examine the opening sentence in each draft.
It is laid out here as follows. The transcription shows the length and make-up of each original line by starting from the left-hand margin and running any overspill to its own next line in single spacing. A new line, by contrast, is begun after a complete blank (1.5 point) line. The manuscript lines are identified by page- and line-number as 'One-1' and so on, where 'One' = first draft (Trinity Manuscript, p. 6) and 'Two-1' = second draft (Trinity Manuscript, p. 7). The line-numbers follow the hyphen. (The absence of line-numbers in Milton 1970 is a drawback.) Each line of the manuscript is transcribed in turn, and followed by comments. The lines are differentiated from the comments by alternation of fonts. Deleted words are given strikethrough. Inserts are described in the comments.
One-1i Sr, (besides that in sundry respects I must acknowledge me to proffit by you as oft/ as oft when/ as wee/ as wee22
Milton hesitates over wording. After four attempts he settles for the simple, rhythmic 'when ever we meet', by adding 'when ever' in the left-hand margin of line 2.
One-2 when ever we meet), you are often to me and were yesterday especially as a good watch man to admonish that the howres of
'And … especially' is inserted above the line. Milton caps his general 'when ever' with yesterday’s instance, making a logically superfluous doublet. The following image of the 'watch man' is making him hyperconscious of his time-expressions, as indeed he is in the whole letter, which is about his own 'tardinesse'. The 'watchman' image is biblical: see Psalm 127.1; Isaiah 21.6, 11; and other prophets, such as Ezekiel 3.17, 'son of man, I have made thee a watchman'. Not far away stands Matthew 24.42 and its Synoptic cognates, 'watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come'.
One-3 the night passe on (for so I call my life as yet obscure & unserviceable to mankind)
It is only in his third line, and then in a parenthesis, that he names the topic. Does the young man feel so vulnerable to criticism that he only coyly names it? Or should we note that the line is the first which has no alterations, as though regardless of throat-clearing he must account for his life being 'as yet obscure & unserviceable'? The 'as yet' forestalls the depreciative adjectives, since it connotes a 'but wait and see'. He agrees in so 'calling' it, without absolutely agreeing to its truth.
One-4 & that the twelve day is at hand wherin Christ commands all to worke labour while there
John 11.9–10 has 'Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any Man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world. But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him'. Does Milton write 'twelve', then remember that the number 12 concerns hours, not days, or that he is thinking of the 'eleventh' hour of another parable, the harvesters of Matthew 20? And why alter 'work' to 'labour'?
One-5 is light which because I am persuaded you doe to no other purpose then out of a true desire
More scriptural cento, from John 9.4 and 12.35–36. Milton is combining 'I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day' with 'Walk while ye have the light'.
One-6 that god should be honour’d in all men every one, I am ever readie, you know, still as as when occasion is,
Milton makes two verbal changes; the first indifferent, but the second yet another time-expression, and needing two attempts.
One-7 offer’d to give you account, as I ought though unaskt, of my tardie moving according to the praecept
The syntax of 'offer’d' is not clear: we expect 'readie … to offer'. Next, with 'account', parables of stewardship and service come into view. Milton seems to delay to a much later sentence his naming of the obvious parable, of the 'terrible seasure of him that hid his talent'. With 'though unaskt' inserted above the line with caret, Milton inserts the affirmation of volition, in answer to duty (conscience). Volition becomes the focus of puzzlement and explanation when, after 138 words of his first sentence, Milton comes to the point with 'tardie'; his slowness or lateness in 'moving'. The word 'moving' covers several meanings: he is slow to decide; his motivation is sluggish; there is a slow moving within him of 'the praecept … god'. The antecedent is not clear – what is tardy in moving? – nor how and why he is slow in obeying ('according to') the 'praecept'.
One-8 of my conscience, wch I firmely trust is not wthout god.
He counters the concessive tardie with an affirmation, not without god. Syntactically, the antecedent may in syntax be moving, praecept, or conscience. The heavier punctuation of the second complete version will eliminate the first possibility. Praecept is less tautological than conscience. The litotes remains a characteristic figure of intended emphasis with Milton, lifelong. So far is he from uppercasing his nouns in this draft that he begins every sentence with lower case, and writes god for God (both times in this sentence). Nonetheless his sentence closes here on the pious litotes 'not without god'.
It is an astonishing opening, not merely from its length, but because of its unprofitable density, barely altered in the rewriting, while still being shorter and simpler than some sentences which follow, in both versions. Small wonder that in the end Milton hands the task over to his sonnet. Its brevity stands in striking contrast, while its compressed syntax (though taxing readers’ ingenuity) feels like the density of compression, not hesitancy. Milton must have thought so too: 'I am the bolder to send you a piece of some of my nightward thoughts …', worded the same in both drafts. The 'boldness' of sending a poem is made bold because it helps him admit to 'a certain belatedness in me'– an awkward, nervous apology.
In view of these hesitancies, we next examine how Milton tidies up the sentence when he writes its intended – yet still abortive – fair copy.
Two-1 Sr, besides that in sundry other respects I must acknowledge me to proffit by you when ever
Milton now removes the brackets which had surrounded '(besides … mankind)'. He inserts 'other' above with caret; a slight clarification or smoothing, but possibly otiose in view of 'besides'.
Two-2 wee meet, you are often to me, and were yesterday especially, as a good watch man to admonish
This is unchanged from the eventual state of the first draft.
Two-3 that the howres of the night passe on (for so I call my life as yet obscure, & unserviceable to
So far the rewriting is more liberal with commas, consistently placed to articulate the small pauses of the thought to a reader, as befits a fair copy of what was previously left balder in the throes of composition.
Two-4 mankind) & that the day wth me is at hand wherin Christ commands all to labour while there is light
This is unchanged from the eventual state of the first draft.
Two-5 wch because I am persuaded you doe to no other purpose then out of a true desire that god should
'Wch' was written in full, as 'which', in the first draft: now Milton moves more quickly. 'Then' = than, as elsewhere. Still no uppercasing for initial 'G', and no uppercasing whatever except for 'I' and 'Christ'. The Scolar Press edition (Milton 1970) incorrectly transcribes both instances of 'god' as 'God'.
Two-6 be honour’d in every one; I therefore thinke my selfe bound though unask’t, as oft as occasion
The semi-colon after 'every one' is a strong pause in this rewriting, introducing a more resolute wording of his position. He postpones the deleted judicious or explanatory phrase, though it is not needed for the main sense.
Two-7 is, to give you account, as oft as occasion is, of this my tardie moving; according to the prae-
He has moved 'as oft as occasion … is' to a more suitable position than after 'unask’t', where it was ambiguous and infelicitous.
Two-8 cept of my conscience, wch I firmely trust is not wthout god.
Now that the sentence has come to its final point, the wording is virtually unchanged from the emergent first version. The number of words is only slightly less, the number of lines unchanged. Yet the page as a whole becomes even fuller than the first. The Trinity Manuscript page 7 so expands and adds, with plenteous deletions, that it has left no room on the new page for the sonnet. After the tortuous explaining and excusing, he still needs the sonnet 'the better' to show he is aware of 'a certaine belatednesse in me'.
Though a single sentence does not permit secure conclusions, it does suggest lines of enquiry, points of departure, for the remainder of the letter. We do see how Milton began one awkward letter about himself. And from our own perspective, of that self experimenting with choices among languages and mediums, something useful emerges. First, he is less accomplished with English prose in this period than in other tongues or in verse. Secondly, this deficit can be detected in one notable lack. For his English prose, by contrast with the Latin, he lacks agreed exemplars. The reliance on shapeless appositions betrays this: main points are syntactically tucked away and consequently suggest insecurity or defensiveness. His verbs are inferior to those of Latin, the latter being forceful in their muscularity and enhanced by Latin habits of placement, whether regular or hyperbatic. Rhythm and weight, when found, come instead from the gospel wording.
To put this another way: his control in English verse outweighs that of his prose. Mother tongue notwithstanding, the Trinity letter is devoid of the power by which (for instance) he moves in the Vacation Exercise from Latin prose to English verse: 'Hail, native language …' (Milton 1997, 79). The same power is marked here by change of medium, not tongue. His 'nightward thoughts', contained in a sonnet, 'come in fitly' because the sonnet form gives shape and backbone. The young, undecided Milton is ready to use more than one form or medium in order to share himself with a friend.
At the same time, the fiddling with words, even on slight incidentals, can indicate fluency rather than the opposite. The impression is not exactly confusion of mind, nor is it writer’s block. It is the struggle of a talented self to explain its current unproductivity to itself by way of a letter to some friend– to explain youthfulness to itself.
Another conclusion is simpler. Milton’s life never again forced him to defend his inaction to a person he respected. He did defend his actions, but it was to people he could disrespect (and so he could defend himself by attacking or dismissing them). He did respect other people, like Selden or Hobbes, but he did not defend himself to them. The 'Letter to a Friend' gives a unique chance to see the young Milton on the defensive, writing an apologia pro vita sua.
Milton’s diverse letters from before 1640 suggest two sides of the young author. From the published letters comes a sense of steadily expanding friendship and sociability. This is both an Impression sought and self-delighting Expression, playful and untroubled. From the 'Letter to a Friend', unpublished and perhaps not sent either, comes a striking perplexity about the use of time. It is reflected, unwittingly, by troubled Expression, where 'expression' now means both the search for words and the search to explain himself, which on this occasion means both to the recipient and to himself. The perplexity propels a shadow even into Paradise Lost, where he speaks of 'long choosing [its subject] and beginning late' (9.26). Is the age of thirty-one (when he settled to the subject of Adam Unparadiz’d; Milton 1970, 38) so very 'late', or does the epic contain a shadow of a 'certaine belatednesse in me'? The many confident externals in young Milton’s letters go with some inward sense of being slow to accomplish what he has in him to accomplish. The two things are found separately in the letters before 1640. Neither ceases entirely with age: instead, they are recognized and voiced together.