“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639cultural experiences; an austere or defensive mien would not elicit such comment.
Dati offered his “tribute of admiration, reverence and love” in Latin prose:
To John Milton of London
A young man distinguished by the land of his birth and by his personal merits.
To a man who, through his journeys to foreign lands, has viewed with care many
places, by his studies has viewed every place the wild world over, to the end that, like
a modern Ulysses, he might learn all things from every people everywhere.
To a polyglot, on whose lips languages already wholly dead live again with such
vigor and might that all idioms, when employed to praise him, lose power of utter-
ance. Yet so justly does he know them all, that he understands the expressions of
admiration and applause called forth from the people by his own wisdom.
To a man whose gifts of mind and body move the senses to admiration, and yet
through that very admiration rob them of their own motion, whose works exhort
applause, yet by their beauty stifle the voice of the praisers.
To one in whose memory the whole world is lodged, in whose intellect is wisdom,
in whose will is a passion for glory, in whose mouth is eloquence; who, with as-
tronomy as his guide, hears the harmonious strains of the heavenly spheres; who, with
philosophy as his teacher, reads and interprets those marks of nature’s marvels by
which the greatness of God is portrayed; who, with assiduous reading of these authors
as his companion, probes the secrets of antiquity, the ruins of ages, the labyrinths of
learning...^74Dati signed himself a lover of Milton’s great virtues.
Francini’s tribute is a long, hyperbolic Italian ode which begins by praising Eng-
land as a refuge of virtue, and then extols Milton as scholar, poet, and linguist. This
poem asserts (for the first time) that Milton knew Spanish:
So, enamoured of beautiful fame,
Milton, quitting your native skies as a pilgrim
You passed through various places
Seeking after Sciences and Arts;
You beheld the realms ruled by France
And now the most worthy heroes of Italy.
...
All those born in Florence
Or who have learned there the art of speaking Tuscan,
Whose eternal deeds
The world honors the memory in learned pages,
You have desired to seek after as your treasure,
And have conversed with them in their works.In vain for you in proud Babel
Did Jove confuse the tongues
When through different languages