We have every reason to believe that Milton did not read Saxon. At that day who did? There were not "ten men to save the city." In Milton's "History of England," a loose and solitary reference to the Saxon Chronicle, then untranslated, was probably found ready at hand; for all his Saxon annals are drawn from the Latin monkish authorities: and in that wonderful list of one hundred dramatic subjects which the poet had set down for the future themes of his muse, there are many on Saxon stories; but all the references are to Speed and Hollinshed. The nephew of the poet has enumerated all the languages in which Milton was conversant--"the Hebrew, (and I think the Syriac,) the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, the Spanish, and French." We find no allusion to any of the northern tongues, which that votary of classical antiquity and of Ausonian melody and fancy would deem--can we doubt it?--dissonant and barbarous. The Northern Scalds were yet as little known as our own Saxons. A recent discovery that Milton once was desirous of reading Dutch may possibly be alleged by the Saxonists as an approach to the study of the Saxon; but at that time Milton was in office as "the Secretary for Foreign Tongues," and in a busy intercourse with the Hollanders.[13] "Secretary Milton" at that moment was probably anxious to con the phrases of a Dutch state-paper, to scrutinise into the temper of their style. Had Milton ever acquired the Dutch idiom for literary purposes, to study Vondel, the Batavian Shakspeare,[14] from whom some foreigners imagine our poet might have drawn his "Lucifer," it could not have escaped the nephew in the enumeration of his uncle's philological acquirements. But even to read Dutch was not to read a Saxon manuscript, whose strange characters, uncouth abbreviations, and difficult constructions, are only mastered by long practice. To have known anything about the solitary Cædmon, the poet must have been wholly indebted to the friendly offices of its guardian; a personal intimacy which does not appear. The improbability that this scholar translated the manuscript phrase by phrase is nearly as great as the supposition that the poet could have retained ideas and expressions to be reproduced in that epic poem, which was not commenced till several years after.