The long line of _zelanti_ Popes had come to an end; and it was thought that if the bosom of the actual incumbent could be scrutinized, no little complacency in Swedish victories over the Faith's defenders would be found.

An atmosphere of toleration was diffusing itself, bigotry was imperceptibly getting old-fashioned, the most illustrious victim of the Inquisition was to be well-nigh the last.

If the noble and the serious could not be permitted, there was no ban upon the amiable and the frivolous: never had the land been so full of petty rhymesters, antiquarian triflers, and gregarious literati, banded to play at authorship in academies, like the seven Swabians leagued to kill the hare.

For the rest, the Italy of Milton's day, its superstition and its scepticism, and the sophistry that strove to make the two as one; its monks and its bravoes; its processions and its pantomimes; its cult of the Passion and its cult of Paganism; the opulence of its past and the impotence of its present; will be found depicted by sympathetic genius in the second volume of "John Inglesant." Milton arrived in Paris about the end of April or beginning of May.

Of his short stay there it is only known that he was received with distinction by the English Ambassador, Lord Scudamore, and owed to him an introduction to one of the greatest men in Europe, Hugo Grotius, then residing at Paris as envoy from Christina of Sweden.