MILTON. THE personal beauty of MILTON has given occasion to a little romantic story, which is pleasing to the imagination. As the youthful bard was asleep under a tree, an Italian lady, accidentally passing near the place, was struck with his charms, and alighted from her carriage to contemplate them. After gratifying her curiosity, and feeding her love with the spectacle, she dropped a paper, intimating the occurrence and professing her passion; and then, withdrawing without awaking him, she proceeded on her journey. This event, as the story further relates, determined him to cross the Alps, for the purpose of discovering the fugitive fair one among the beauties of Italy. It is unnecessary to say that his search was unsuccessful but in the voice and the charms of Leonora Baroni he found an ample compensation for the loss of his imaginary mistress. Symmons's Life of Milton. B DRAWN BY RICHARD WESTALL R..A. ENGRAVED BY JOHN ROMNEY: PUBLISHED BY JOHN SHARPE, LONDON. JULY 11827 BOOK I. The Subject proposed. Invocation of the Holy Spirit.-The Poem opens with John baptizing at the river Jordan. Jesus coming there is.baptized; and is attested by the descent of the Holy Ghost, and by a voice from Heaven, to be the Son of God. Satan, who is present, upon this immediately flies up into the regions of the air: where, summoning his Infernal Council, he acquaints them with his apprehensions that Jesus is that seed of the Woman, destined to destroy all their power; and points out to them the immediate necessity of bringing the matter to proof, and of attempting, by snares and fraud, to counteract and defeat the person, from whom they had so much to dread. This office he offers himself to undertake; and, his offer being accepted, sets out on his enterprise.-In the mean time God, in the assembly of holy Angels, declares that be has given up bis Son to be tempted by Satan; but foretells that the tempter shall be completely defeated by him :-upon which the Angels sing a hymn of triumph. Jesus is led up by the Spirit into the wilderness, while he is meditating on the commencement of his great office of Saviour of Mankind. Pursuing his meditations he narrates, in a soliloquy, what divine and philanthropic impulses he had felt from his early youth, and how his mother Mary, on perceiving these dispositions in him, had acquainted him with the circumstances of his birth, and informed him that he was no less a person than the Son of God; to which he adds what his own inquiries and reflections had supplied in confirmation of this great truth, and particularly dwells on the recent attestation of it at the river Jordan. Our Lord passes forty days, fasting, in the wilderness; where the wild beasts become mild and harmless in his presence. Satan now appears under the form of an old peasant; and enters into discourse with our Lord, wondering what could have brought him alone into so dangerous a place, and at the same time professing to recognise him for the person lately acknowledged by John, at the river Jordan, to be the Son of God. Jesus briefly replies. Satan rejoins with a description of the difficulty of supporting life in the wilderness; and entreats Jesus, if he be really the Son of God, to manifest his divine power, by changing some of the stones into bread. Jesus reproves him, and at the same time tells him that he knows who |