The dialogue between Raphael and Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost VIII is a translation into prelapsarian terms of the postlapsarian dialogue between Augustinus and Franciscus in Petrarch’s Secretum. Milton saw in Petrarch an authorizer, as mediated by the academics he encountered during his Italian sojourn, of a linguistic model, as well as a writer authorized by his evident proto-Protestantism. As is suggested by the conclusion, so much resembling Petrach’s, which Milton’s colloquy draws, that which is principally translated is a sort of indeterminate dialectic, a setting-aside of Augustinus’s cultural verticality in order to favour Franciscus’ humanist horizontality. While the features of the two works correspond in many ways, the most significant form of cultural translation in Milton is the accommodation of the Humanist project of remembering the prelapsarian anticipation, the horizontal Petrarchian process of thought leading, in Paradise Lost as in the Secretum, to the velleity of the conclusion.