Notes to Chapter 113 In Choice Psalmes put into Musick, for Three Voices, which contained settings by Henry
and his brother William who had recently died fighting for the king, Milton’s
sonnet bore the title, “To My Friend Mr. Henry Lawes.” The sonnet was not re-
printed in the Lawes volumes of 1653 or 1655, suggesting that the political divide was
then too great: the lyrics and commendatory poems in those volumes are mostly by
royalists.
14 Cf. Waller’s commendation of Lawes in Ayres and Dialogues (London, 1653):
So others with Division hide
The Light of Sense, the Poets Pride,
But you alone may truly boast
That not a syllable is lost;
The Writer’s and the Setter’s skill
At once the ravish’t Eare do fill. (sig. b v)In his Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues (London, 1655) Lawes defines himself as a
self-conscious reformer of English song: “Yet the way of composition I chiefly profess
(which is to shape Notes to the Words and Sense) is not hit by too many: and I have
been often sad to observe some (otherwise able) Musitians guilty of such lapses and
mistakes in this way” (sig. a 2v).
15 Other song writers who allowed the melodic line to follow the pace of the verse were
William Lawes, John Wilson, Simon Ives, Charles Coleman, John Gamble, and ear-
lier, Thomas Campion. In this they followed a style of monody begun in Italy about
twenty-five years earlier: see Willa M. Evans, Henry Lawes (New York, 1941). For an
argument questioning the influence of the new Italian secunda practica on Lawes’s music
and Milton’s musical aesthetic, see John Harper, “ ‘One equal music:’ The Music of
Milton’s Youth,” MQ 31 (1997), 1–10. See chapter 1, p. 3 and note 11; also chapter 4,
pp. 101–2, 106.
16 Casella sang the first canzone from Dante’s Convivio, “Amor che ne la mente ni ragiona”
(Love that discourses in my mind). See Charles S. Singleton, trans., The Divine Comedy:
Purgatorio, I, 20 and II, 35 (Princeton, NJ, 1973).
17 Many Presbyterians in the Westminster Assembly, prompted by the Scots Commis-
sioners (Samuel Rutherford, Alexander Henderson, Robert Baillie, and George Gillespie),
pressed for independent ecclesiastical commissions to try the orthodoxy and probity of
ministers and elders, as well as admission to the sacrament and excommunication. The
Erastians in parliament, led by the formidable scholar John Selden, held out for parlia-
ment’s oversight and final jurisdiction over such commissions.
18 Letter to William Lenthall, Speaker of the House of Commons, June 14, 1645, in W.
C. Abbott, ed., Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1937), I,
360.
19 See Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Non-comformity in
Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 104–23.
20 For example, William Prynne, Foure Serious Questions of Grand Importance (London,
1645, c. August 25); and Samuel Rutherford, The Divine Right of Church-Government and
Excommunication (London, 1646, c. March 3).
21 A Letter of the Ministers of the City of London... Against Toleration, 6; Certain Additionall
Notes to Chapter 7