“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632urges Milton to follow through with a projected outing, which is to be filled with
the delights of nature – “the air and the sun and the river, and trees and little birds
and earth and men will laugh and dance with us” – and especially with the joys of
“philosophical and learned conversation” (CPW I, 336). The other, written from
some place in the country, reports Diodati’s pleasure in nature and in holiday fes-
tivities, but also his regrettable lack of “some noble soul skilled in conversation...
a good companion, learned and initiate” – by implication, Milton. He ends with
jesting advice to Milton to relax his unremitting studies:
But you, extraordinary man, why do you despise the gifts of nature? Why such inex-
cusable perseverance, bending over books and studies day and night? Live, laugh,
enjoy your youth and the hours, and stop reading the serious, the light, and the
indolent works of ancient wise men, wearing yourself out the while. I, who in all
other things am your inferior, in this one thing, in knowing the proper limit of labor,
both seem to myself, and am, your better. Farewell, and be merry, but not in the
manner of Sardanapalus in Soli. (CPW I, 337)The alllusion pointedly separates the merry pleasures he urges from the debauchery
and sodomy associated with the Assyrian king. Here, typically, these friends make
their differences in temperament and lifestyle a matter of good-natured jest. Each
regards himself and his friend as poet and scholar, but Diodati is cast by both as a
merry, carefree, pleasure-loving extrovert (like l’Allegro), and Milton as a sober,
bookish recluse (like il Penseroso). Their exchanges are filled with warm affection,
intimacy of spirit, and eager anticipations of reunions, with some overtones of
homoeroticism – most likely unacknowledged as such by either one.^66 We have no
letters in prose from Milton to Diodati, but Milton’s verse letters to him contrast
their lifestyles and their poetry in similar terms; these friends no doubt exchanged
several such letters, now lost, and met as occasion offered.
Milton may have been at Cambridge the following September for the visit of the
new chancellor, Henry Rich, Earl of Holland (elected after Buckingham’s assassi-
nation), at which time an honorary Master of Arts was awarded to Peter Paul Rubens
and several Latin comedies were performed, among them Philip Stubbes’s Fraus
Honesta (The Honest Fraud). In December, 1629 Milton was in London, where he
purchased a copy of Giovanni della Casa’s sonnets.^67 He also received a letter and
poems (now lost) from Diodati, who was evidently celebrating Christmas in Cheshire.
The heading of Milton’s verse letter, Elegy VI, sent as a response, explains these
circumstances:
To Charles Diodati, staying in the country. Who, when he wrote on the thirteenth of
December, begging that his verses might be excused if they were not so good as usual,
pled that in the midst of the festivities with which he had been received by his friends,
he was not able to cultivate the Muses very prosperously. He had this answer.^68