But  it  is  more  likely  that  no  such  poetical  memoranda
were  ever  made,  and  that  Milton  trusted  entirely  to
memory  for  the  wealth  of  classical  allusion  with  which
his  verse  is  surcharged.  He  did  not  extract  from  the
poets  and  the  great  writers  whom  he  was  daily  turning
over,  but  only  from  the  inferior  authors  and  secondary
historians,  which  he  read  only  once.  Most  of  the  material
collected  in  the  commonplace  book  is  used  in  his  prose
pamphlets.  But  the  facts  are  worked  into  the  texture  of
his  argument,  rather  than  cited  as  extraneous  witnesses.
In  reading  history  it  was  his  aim  to  get  at  a  conspectus  of
the  general  current  of  affairs  rather  than  to  study  minutely
o  3


20  FIRST  PERIOD.    1608—1639.  [CHAP.
a  special  period.  He  tells  Diodati  in  September,  1637,
that  he  has  studied  Greek  history  continuously  from  the
beginning  to  the  fall  of  Constantinople.  When  he  tells
the  same  friend  that  he  has  been  long  involved  in  the
obscurity  of  the  early  middle  ages  of  Italian  history  down
to  the  time  of  the  Emperor  Rudolf,  we  learn  from  the
commonplace  book  that  he  had  only  been  reading  the  one
volume  of  Sigonius's  Historia  Regni  ItaUci.  From  the
thirteenth  century  downwards  he  proposes  to  himself  to
study  each  Italian  state  in  some  separate  history.  Even
before  his  journey  to  Italy  he  read  Italian  with  as  much
ease  as  French.  He  tells  us  that  it  was  by  his  father's
advice  that  he  had  acquired  these  modern  languages.
But  we  can  see  that  they  were  essential  parts  of  his  own
scheme  of  self-education,  which  included,  in  another
direction,  Hebrew,  both  Biblical  and  Eabbinical,  and  even
Syriac.
