Our stedfast bard, to his own genius true,
  Still bad his muse fit audience find, tho’ few;
  Scorning the judgment of a trifling age,
  To choicer spirits he bequeath’d his page. 
  He too was scorned, and to Britannia’s shame,
  She scarce for half an age knew Milton’s name;
  But now his fame by every trumpet blown,
  We on his deathless trophies raise our own. 
  Nor art, nor nature, could his genius bound: 
  Heaven, hell, earth, chaos, he survey’d around. 
  All things his eye, thro’ wit’s bright empire thrown,
  Beheld, and made what it beheld his own.

In 1637 Our author published his Lycidas; in this poem he laments the death of his friend Mr. Edward King, who was drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish seas in 1637; it was printed the year following at Cambridge in 4to. in a collection of Latin and English poems upon Mr. King’s death, with whom he had contracted the strongest friendship.  The Latin epitaph informs us, that Mr. King was son of Sir John King, secretary for Ireland to Queen Elizabeth, James I. and Charles I. and that he was fellow in Christ’s-College Cambridge, and was drowned in the twenty-fifth year of his age.  But this poem of Lycidas does not altogether consist in elegiac strains of tenderness; there is in it a mixture of satire and severe indignation; for in part of it he takes occasion to rally the corruptions of the established clergy, of whom he was no favourer; and first discovers his acrimony against archbishop Laud; he threatens him with the loss of his head, a fate which he afterwards met, thro’ the fury of his enemies; at least, says Dr. Newton, I can think of no sense so proper to be given to the following verses in Lycidas;

  Besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw,
  Daily devours apace, and nothing said;
  But that two-handed engine at the door,
  Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

Upon the death of his mother, Milton obtained leave of his father to travel, and having waited upon Sir Henry Wotton, formerly ambassador at Venice, and then provost of Eaton College, to whom he communicated his design, that gentleman wrote a letter to him, dated from the College, April 18, 1638, and printed among the Reliquiae Wottonianae, and in Dr. Newton’s life of Milton.  Immediately after the receipt of this letter our author set out for France, accompanied only with one man, who attended him thro’ all his travels.  At Paris Milton was introduced to the famous Hugo Grotius, and thence went to Florence, Siena, Rome, and Naples, in all which places he was entertained with the utmost civility by persons of the first distinction.