May I find such a friend ... when, if ever, I shall revive in song our native princes, and among them Arthur moving to the fray even in the nether world, and when I shall, if only inspiration be mine, break the Saxon bands before our Britons' prowess. The same announcement is reproduced in the _Epitaphium Damonis_, 1639, and, in Pamphlet No. 4, in the often-quoted words:-- Perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at under twenty, or thereabout, met with acceptance.... I began to assent to them (the Italians) and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting which now grows dally upon me, that by labour and intent study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die. Between the publication of the collected _Poems_ in 1645, and the appearance of _Paradise Lost_ in 1687, a period of twenty-two years, Milton gave no public sign of redeeming this pledge. He seemed to his cotemporaries to have renounced the follies of his youth, the gewgaws of verse; and to have sobered down into the useful citizen, "Le bon poëte," thought Malherbe, "n'est pas plus utile à l'état qu'un bon joueur de quilles." Milton had postponed his poem, in 1641, till "the land had once enfranchished herself from this impertinent yoke of prelatry, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish." Prelatry was swept away, and he asked for further remand on account of the war. Peace was concluded, the country was settled under the strong government of a Protector, and Milton's great work did not appear. It was not even preparing. He was writing not poetry but prose, and that most ephemeral and valueless kind of prose, pamphlets, extempore articles on the topics of the day. He poured out reams of them, in simple unconsciousness that they had no influence whatever on the current of events.