Milton's renewed involvement in political discourse a decade after the Restoration was based on a judgment that it had again become possible to gain a hearing for his most cherished convictions. In this respect his final prose works anticipate a central feature of the posthumous publication history of all his prose: there has been an interest in the prose for its own sake mostly when the political situation has made it seem relevant again. This pattern has prevailed from the first publication of the Character of the Long Parliament in 1681, through the publication or translation of many of his pamphlets during the American and French revolutions, all the way to the twentieth century, in which, in the aftermath of the 1960s, there has been a marked increase in the number of academic books and articles about Milton's prose. It should come as no surprise that the author of Paradise Lost (1667) should have poured forth sufficient vitality of thought and expression from his "left hand" alone to command attention at most of the moments of high political passion and resolve in modern Anglo-American and Western history.
Milton was born in London on 9 December 1608, the second of the three children of John and Sara Jeffrey Milton who would survive into adulthood.
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