The following sections of this BookRags Literature Study Guide is offprint from Gale's For Students Series: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Works: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical Context, Critical Overview, Criticism and Critical Essays, Media Adaptations, Topics for Further Study, Compare & Contrast, What Do I Read Next?, For Further Study, and Sources.
(c)1998-2002; (c)2002 by Gale. Gale is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Gale and Design and Thomson Learning are trademarks used herein under license.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: "Social Concerns", "Thematic Overview", "Techniques", "Literary Precedents", "Key Questions", "Related Titles", "Adaptations", "Related Web Sites". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
All other sections in this Literature Study Guide are owned and copyrighted by BookRags, Inc.
Table of Contents | |
Section | Page |
Start of eBook | 1 |
CHAPTER VI. 128 | 1 |
CHAPTER VII. 152 | 1 |
CHAPTER VIII. 173 | 1 |
INDEX 199 | 1 |
CHAPTER I. | 2 |
CHAPTER II. | 14 |
CHAPTER III. | 25 |
CHAPTER IV. | 40 |
CHAPTER V. | 51 |
CHAPTER VI. | 63 |
CHAPTER VII. | 76 |
CHAPTER VIII. | 87 |
THE END. | 100 |
FOOTNOTES: | 100 |
INDEX. | 101 |
B. | 101 |
C. | 102 |
D. | 102 |
E. | 102 |
F. | 103 |
G. | 103 |
H. | 103 |
I. | 103 |
J. | 103 |
K. | 103 |
L. | 103 |
M. | 103 |
N. | 105 |
O. | 105 |
P. | 105 |
R. | 105 |
S. | 106 |
T. | 106 |
U. | 106 |
V. | 106 |
W. | 106 |
Y. | 106 |
BIBLIOGRAPHY. | 106 |
JOHN P. ANDERSON | 106 |
II. POETICAL WORKS. | 107 |
III. PROSE WORKS. | 113 |
IV. SINGLE WORKS. | 114 |
V. SELECTIONS. | 125 |
VI. APPENDIX. | 126 |
MAGAZINE ARTICLES, ETC. | 138 |
VII. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS. | 142 |
GREAT WRITERS. | 145 |
NEW BOOKLETS. | 151 |
Milton’s poetical projects after his return from Italy; drafts of “Paradise Lost” among them; the poem originally designed as a masque or miracle-play; commenced as an epic in 1658; its composition speedily interrupted by ecclesiastical and political controversies; Milton’s “Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes,” and “Considerations on the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church”; Royalist reaction in the winter of 1659-60; Milton writes his “Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth”; conceals himself in anticipation of the Restoration, May 7, 1660; his writings ordered to be burned by the hangman, June 16; escapes proscription, nevertheless; arrested by the Serjeant-at-Arms, but released by order of the Commons, December 15; removes to Holborn; his pecuniary losses and misfortunes; the undutiful behaviour of his daughters; marries Elizabeth Minshull, February, 1663; lives successively in Jewin Street and in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields; particulars of his private life; “Paradise Lost” completed in or about 1663; agreement for its publication with Samuel Symmons; difficulties with the licenser; poem published in August, 1667.
Place of “Paradise Lost” among the great epics of the world; not rendered obsolete by changes in belief; the inevitable defects of its plan compensated by the poet’s vital relation to the religion of his age; Milton’s conception of the physical universe; his theology; magnificence of his poetry; his similes; his descriptions of Paradise; inevitable falling off of the later books; minor critical objections mostly groundless; his diction; his indebtedness to other poets for thoughts as well as phrases; this is not plagiarism; his versification; his Satan compared with Calderon’s Lucifer; plan of his epic, whether in any way suggested by Andreini, Vondel, or Ochino; his majestic and unique position in English poetry.
Milton’s migration to Chalfont St. Giles to escape the plague in London, July, 1665; subject of “Paradise Regained” suggested to him by the Quaker Ellwood; his losses by the Great Fire, 1666; first edition of “Paradise Lost” entirely sold by April, 1669; “Paradise Regained” and “Samson Agonistes” published, 1671; criticism on these poems; Samson partly a personification of Milton himself, partly of the English people; Milton’s life in Bunhill Fields; his daughters live apart from him; Dryden adapts “Paradise Lost” as an opera; Milton’s “History of Britain,” 1670; second editions of his poems, 1673, and of “Paradise Lost,” 1674; his “Treatise on Christian Doctrine”; fate of the manuscript; Milton’s mature religious opinions; his death and burial, 1674; subsequent history of his widow and descendants; his personal character.
LIFE OF MILTON.
John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, when Shakespeare had lately produced “Antony and Cleopatra,” when Bacon was writing his “Wisdom of the Ancients” and Ralegh his “History of the World,” when the English Bible was hastening into print; when, nevertheless, in the opinion of most foreigners and many natives, England was intellectually unpolished, and her literature almost barbarous.
The preposterousness of this judgment as a whole must not blind us to the fragment of truth which it included. England’s literature was, in many respects, very imperfect and chaotic. Her “singing masons” had already built her “roofs of gold”; Hooker and one or two other great prose-writers stood like towers: but the less exalted portions of the edifice were still half hewn. Some literatures, like the Latin and the French, rise gradually to the crest of their perfection; others, like the Greek and the English, place themselves almost from the first on their loftiest pinnacle, leaving vast gaps to be subsequently filled in. Homer was not less the supreme poet because history was for him literally an old song, because he would have lacked understanding for Plato and relish for Aristophanes. Nor were Shakespeare and the translators of the Bible less at the head of European literature because they must have failed as conspicuously as Homer would have failed in all things save those to which they had a call, which chanced to be the greatest. Literature, however, cannot remain isolated at such altitudes, it must expand or perish. As Homer’s epic passed through Pindar and the lyrical poets into drama history and philosophy, continually fitting itself more and more to become an instrument in the ordinary affairs of life, so it was needful that English lettered discourse should become popular and pliant, a power in the State as well as in the study. The magnitude of the change, from the time when the palm of popularity decorated Sidney’s “Arcadia” to that when it adorned Defoe and Bunyan, would impress us even more powerfully if the interval were not engrossed by a colossal figure, the last of the old school in the erudite magnificence of his style in prose and verse; the first of the new, inasmuch as English poetry, hitherto romantic, became in his hands classical. This “splendid bridge from the old world to the new,” as Gibbon has been called in a different connection, was John Milton: whose character and life-work, carefully analyzed, resolve themselves into pairs of equally vivid contrasts. A stern Puritan, he is none the less a freethinker in the highest and best sense of the term. The recipient of direct poetical inspiration in a measure vouchsafed to few, he notwithstanding studies to make himself a poet; writes little until no other occupation than writing remains to him; and, in general, while exhibiting even more than the usual confidence, shows less than
Milton’s genealogy has taxed the zeal and acumen of many investigators. He himself merely claims a respectable ancestry (ex genere honesto). His nephew Phillips professed to have come upon the root of the family tree at Great Milton, in Oxfordshire, where tombs attested the residence of the clan, and tradition its proscription and impoverishment in the Wars of the Roses. Monuments, station, and confiscation have vanished before the scrutiny of the Rev. Joseph Hunter; it can only be safely concluded that Milton’s ancestors dwelt in or near the village of Holton, by Shotover Forest, in Oxfordshire, and that their rank in life was probably that of yeomen. Notwithstanding Aubrey’s statement that Milton’s grandfather’s name was John, Mr. Hyde Clarke’s researches in the registers of the Scriveners’ Company have proved that Mr. Hunter and Professor Masson were right in identifying him with Richard Milton, of Stanton St. John, near Holton; and Professor Masson has traced the family a generation further back to Henry Milton, whose will, dated November 21, 1558, attests a condition of plain comfort, nearer poverty than riches. Henry Milton’s goods at his death were inventoried at L6 19s.; when his widow’s will is proved, two years afterwards, the estimate is L7 4s. 4d.
Milton’s birth and nurture were thus in the centre of London; but the London of that day had not half the population of the Liverpool of ours. Even now the fragrance of the hay in far-off meadows may be inhaled in Bread Street on a balmy summer’s night; then the meadows were near the doors, and the undefiled sky was reflected by an unpolluted stream. There seems no reason to conclude that Milton, in his early boyhood, enjoyed any further opportunities of resort to rural scenery than the vicinity of London could afford; but if the city is his native element, natural beauty never appeals to him in vain. Yet the influences which moulded his childhood must have been rather moral and intellectual than merely natural:—
“The starlight smile of children,
the sweet looks
Of women, the fair breast
from which I fed,”
played a greater part in the education of this poet than
“The murmur of the unreposing
brooks,
And the green light which,
shifting overhead,
Some tangled bower of vines
around me shed,
The shells on the sea-sand,
and the wild flowers.”
Paramount to all other influences must have been the character of his father, a “mute” but by no means an “inglorious” Milton, the preface and foreshadowing of the son. His great step in life had set the son the example from which the latter never swerved, and from him the younger Milton derived not only the independence of thought which was to lead him into moral and social heresy, and the fidelity to principle which was to make him the Abdiel of the Commonwealth, but no mean share of his poetical faculty also. His mastery of verbal harmony was but a new phase of his father’s mastery of music, which he himself recognizes as the complement of his own poetical gift:—
“Ipse volens Phoebus se dispertire
duobus,
Altera dona mihi, dedit altera
dona parenti.”
As a composer, the circumspect, and, as many no doubt thought prosaic scrivener, took rank among the best of his day. One of his compositions, now lost, was rewarded with a gold medal by a Polish prince (Aubrey says the Landgrave of Hesse), and he appears among the contributors to The Triumphs of Oriana, a set of twenty-five madrigals composed in honour of Queen Elizabeth. “The Teares and Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soule”—dolorous sacred songs, Professor Masson calls them—were, according to their editor, the production of “famous artists,” among whom Byrd, Bull, Dowland, Orlando Gibbons, certainly figure, and three of them were composed by the elder Milton. He also harmonized the Norwich and York psalm tunes, which were adapted to six of the Psalms in Ravenscroft’s Collection. Such performance bespeaks not only musical accomplishment, but a refined nature; and we may well believe that Milton’s love of learning, as well as his love of music, was hereditary in its origin, and fostered by his contact with his father. Aubrey distinctly affirms that Milton’s skill on the organ was directly imparted to him by his father, and there would be nothing surprising if the first rudiments of knowledge were also instilled by him. Poetry he may have taught by precept, but the one extant specimen of his Muse is enough to prove that he could never have taught it by example.
We have therefore to picture Milton growing up in a narrow street amid a strict Puritan household, but not secluded from the influences of nature or uncheered by melodious recreations; and tenderly watched over by exemplary parents—a mother noted, he tells us, for her charities among her neighbours, and a father who had discerned his promise from the very first. Given this perception in the head of a religious household, it almost followed in that age that the future poet should receive the education of a divine. Happily, the sacerdotal caste had ceased to exist, and the education of a clergyman meant not that of a priest, but that of a scholar. Milton was instructed daily, he says, both at grammar schools and under private masters, “as my age would suffer,” he adds, in acknowledgment of his father’s considerateness. Like Disraeli two centuries afterwards (perhaps the single point of resemblance), he went for schooling to a Nonconformist in Essex, “who,” says Aubrey, “cut his hair short.” His own hair? or his pupil’s? queries Biography. We boldly reply, Both. Undoubtedly Milton’s hair is short in the miniature painted of him at the age of ten by, as is believed, Cornelius Jansen. A thoughtful little face, that of a well-nurtured, towardly boy; lacking the poetry and spirituality of the portrait of eleven years later, where the long hair flows down upon the ruff.
After leaving his Essex pedagogue, Milton came under the private tuition of Thomas Young, a Scotchman from St. Andrews, who afterwards rose to be master of Jesus College, Cambridge. It would appear from the elegies subsequently addressed to him by his pupil that he first taught Milton to write Latin verse. This instruction was no doubt intended to be preliminary to the youth’s entrance at St. Paul’s School, where he must have been admitted by 1620 at the latest.
At the time of Milton’s entry, St. Paul’s stood high among the schools of the metropolis, competing with Merchant Taylors’, Westminster, and the now extinct St. Anthony’s. The headmaster, Dr. Gill, was an admirable scholar, though, as Aubrey records, “he had his whipping fits.” His fitful severity was probably more tolerable than the systematic cruelty of his predecessor Mulcaster (Spenser’s schoolmaster when he presided over Merchant Taylors’), of whom Fuller approvingly records: “Atropos might be persuaded to pity as soon as he to pardon where he found just fault. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed with him as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children.” Milton’s father, though by no means “cockering,” would not have tolerated such discipline, and the passionate ardour with which Milton threw himself into the studious life of the school is the best proof that he was exempt from tyranny. “From the twelfth year of my age,” he says, “I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight.” The ordinary school tasks cannot have exacted so much
Among the incidents of Milton’s life at St. Paul’s School should not be forgotten his friendship with Charles Diodati, the son of a Genevese physician settled in England, whose father had been exiled from Italy for his Protestantism. A friendship memorable not only as Milton’s tenderest and his first, but as one which quickened his instinctive love of Italian literature, enhanced the pleasure, if it did not suggest the undertaking, of his Italian pilgrimage, and doubtless helped to inspire the execration which he launched in after years against the slayers of the Vaudois. The Italian language is named by him among three which, about the time of his migration to the University, he had added to the classical and the vernacular, the other two being French and Hebrew. It has been remarked, however, that his use of “Penseroso,” incorrect both in orthography and signification, shows that prior to his visit to Italy he was unacquainted with the niceties of the language. He entered as “a lesser pensioner” at Christ’s College, Cambridge, on February 12, 1625; the greatest poetic name in an University roll already including Spenser, and destined to include Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Tennyson. Why Oxford was not preferred has been much debated. The father may have taken advice from the younger Gill, whose
The external aspect of Milton’s Cambridge is probably not ill represented by Lyne’s coloured map of half a century earlier, now exhibited in the King’s Library at the British Museum. Piles of stately architecture, from King’s College Chapel downward, tower all about, over narrow, tortuous, pebble-paved streets, bordered with diminutive, white-fronted, red-tiled dwellings, mere dolls’ houses in comparison. So modest, however, is the chartographer’s standard, that a flowery Latin inscription assures the men of Cambridge they need but divert Trumpington Brook into Clare Ditch to render their town as elegant as any in the universe. Sheep and swine perambulate the environs, and green spaces are interspersed among the colleges, sparsely set with trees, so pollarded as to justify Milton’s taunt when in an ill-humour with his university:—
“Nuda nec arva placent, umbrasque
negantia molles,
Quam male Phoebicolis convenit
ille locus!”
His own college stands conspicuous at the meeting of three ways, aptly suggestive of Hecate and infernal things. Its spiritual and intellectual physiognomy, and that of the university in general, must be learned from the exhaustive pages of Professor Masson. A book unpublished when he wrote, Ball’s life of Dr. John Preston, Master of Emmanuel, vestige of an entire continent of submerged Puritanism, also contributes much to the appreciation of the place and time. We can here but briefly characterize the University as an institution undergoing modification, rather by the decay of the old than by the intrusion of the new. The revolution by which mathematics became the principal instrument of culture was still to be deferred forty years. Milton, who tells us that he delighted in mathematics, might have been nearly ignorant of that subject if he pleased, and hardly could become proficient in it by the help of his Alma Mater. The scholastic philosophy, however, still reigned. But even here tradition was shaky and undermined; and in matters of discipline the rigid code which nominally governed the University was practically much relaxed. The teaching staff was respectable in character and ability, including many future bishops. But while the academical credentials of the tutors were unimpeachable, perhaps not one among them all could show a commission from the Spirit. No one then at Cambridge seems to have been in the least degree capable of arousing enthusiasm. It might not indeed have been easy for a Newman or a Green to captivate
“Stat quoque juncosas Cami
remeare paludes,
Atque iterum raucae murmur
adire scholae.”
A short rustication would be just the notice the University would be likely to take of the conduct of a pupil who had been engaged in a scuffle with his tutor, in which the fault was not wholly or chiefly his. Formal corporal punishment would have rendered rustication unnecessary. That Milton was not thought wholly in the wrong appears from his not having been mulcted of a term’s residence, his absence notwithstanding, and from the still more significant fact that Chappell lost his pupil. His successor was Nathaniel Tovey, in whom his patroness, the Countess of Bedford, had discerned “excellent talent.” What Milton thought of him there is nothing to show.
This temporary interruption of the smoothness of Milton’s University life occurred, as has been seen, quite early in its course. Had it indeed implied a stigma upon him or the University, the blot would in either case have been effaced by the perfect regularity of his subsequent career. He went steadily through the academic course, which to attain the degree of Master of Arts, then required seven years’ residence. He graduated as Bachelor at the proper time, March, 1629, and proceeded Master in July, 1632. His general relations with the University during the period may be gathered partly from his own account in after years, when perhaps he in some degree “confounded the present feelings with the past,” partly from a remarkable passage in one of his academical exercises, fortunately preserved to us, the importance of which was first discerned by his editor and biographer Mitford. Professor Masson, however, ascertained
“Then also there drew and invited me, in no ordinary degree, to undertake this part your very recently discovered graciousness to me. For when, some few months ago, I was about to perform an oratorical office before you, and was under the impression that any lucubrations whatsoever of mine would be the reverse of agreeable to you, and would have more merciful judges in Aeacus and Minos than almost any of you would prove, truly, beyond my fancy, beyond my hope if I had any, they were, as I heard, nay, as I myself felt, received with the not ordinary applause of all—yea, of those who at other times were, on account of disagreements in our studies, altogether of an angry and unfriendly spirit towards me. A generous mode of exercising rivalry this, and not unworthy of a royal breast, if, when friendship itself is wont often to misconstrue much that is blamelessly done, yet then sharp and hostile enmity did not grudge to interpret much that was perchance erroneous, and not a little, doubtless, that was unskilfully said, more clemently than I merited.”
It is sufficiently manifest from this that after two years’ residence Milton had incurred much anger and unpopularity “on account of disagreements in our studies,” which can scarcely mean anything else than his disapprobation of the University system. Notwithstanding this he had been received on a former occasion with unexpected favour, and on the present is able to say, “I triumph as one placed among the stars that so many men, eminent for erudition, and nearly the whole University have flocked hither.” We have thus a miniature history of Milton’s connection with his Alma Mater. We see him giving offence by the freedom of his strictures on the established practices, and misliking them so much as to write in 1642, “Which [University] as in the time of her better health and mine own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, so now much less.” But, on the other hand, we see his intellectual revolt overlooked on account of his unimpeachable conduct and his brilliant talents, and himself selected to represent his college on an occasion when an able representative was indispensable. Cambridge had all imaginable complacency in the scholar, it was towards the reformer that she assumed, as afterwards towards Wordsworth, the attitude of
“Blind Authority
beating with his staff
The child that would have
led him.”
The University and Milton made a practical covenant like Frederick the Great and his subjects: she did what she pleased, and he thought what he pleased. In sharp contrast with his failure to influence her educational methods is “that more than ordinary respect which I found above any of my equals at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the Fellows of that College wherein I spent seven years; who, at my parting, after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways how much better it would content them that I would stay; as by many letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, I was assured of their singular good affection toward me.” It may be added here that his comeliness and his chastity gained him the appellation of “Lady” from his fellow collegians: and the rooms at Christ’s alleged to have been his are still pointed out as deserving the veneration of poets in any event; for whether Milton sacrificed to Apollo in them or not, it is certain that in them Wordsworth sacrificed to Bacchus.
For Milton’s own sake and ours his departure from the University was the best thing that could have happened to him. It saved him from wasting his time in instructing others when he ought to be instructing himself. From the point of view of advantage to the University, it is perhaps the most signal instance of the mischief of strictly clerical fellowships, now happily things of the past. Only one fellowship at Christ’s was tenable by a layman: to continue in academical society, therefore, he must have taken orders. Such had been his intention when he first repaired to Cambridge, but the young man of twenty-three saw many things differently from the boy of sixteen. The service of God was still as much as ever the aim of his existence, but he now thought that not all service was church service. How far he had become consciously alienated from the Church’s creed it is difficult to say. He was able, at all events, to subscribe the Articles on taking his degree, and no trace of Arianism appears in his writings for many years. As late as 1641 he speaks of “the tri-personal Deity.” Curiously enough, indeed, the ecclesiastical freethought of the day was then almost entirely confined to moderate Royalists, Hales, Chillingworth, Falkland. But he must have disapproved of the Church’s discipline, for he disapproved of all discipline. He would not put himself in the position of those Irish clergymen whom Strafford frightened out of their conscientious convictions by reminding them of their canonical obedience. This was undoubtedly what he meant when he afterwards wrote: “Perceiving that he who would take orders must subscribe slave.” Speaking of himself a little further on as “Church-outed by the prelates,” he implies that he would not have refused orders if he could have had them on his own terms. As regarded Milton personally this attitude was reasonable, he had a right to feel himself
Even so resolute a spirit as Milton’s could hardly contemplate the relinquishment of every definite calling in life without misgiving, and his friends could hardly let it pass without remonstrance. There exists in his hand the draft of a letter of reply to the verbal admonition of some well-wisher, to whom he evidently feels that he owes deference. His friend seems to have thought that he was yielding to the allurements of aimless study, neglecting to return as service what he had absorbed as knowledge. Milton pleads that his motive must be higher than the love of lettered ease, for that alone could never overcome the incentives that urge him to action. “Why should not all the hopes that forward youth and vanity are afledge with, together with gain, pride, and ambition, call me forward more powerfully than a poor, regardless, and unprofitable sin of curiosity should be able to withhold?” And what of the “desire of honour and repute and immortal fame seated in the breast of every true scholar?” That his correspondent may the better understand him, he encloses a “Petrarchean sonnet,” recently composed, on his twenty-third birthday, not one of his best, but precious as the first of his frequent reckonings with himself:—
“How soon hath Time, the subtle
thief of youth,
Stolen on his
wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days
fly on with full career;
But my late spring
no bud or blossom shew’th.
Perhaps my semblance might
deceive the truth,
That I to manhood
am arrived so near;
And inward ripeness
doth much less appear,
Than some more
timely-happy spirits indu’th.
Yet be it less or more, or
soon or slow,
It shall be still
in strictest measure even
To that same lot,
however mean or high,
Towards which Time leads me,
and the Will of Heaven.
All is, if I have
grace to use it so,
As ever in my
great Taskmaster’s eye.”
The poetical temperament is especially liable to misgiving and despondency, and from this Milton evidently was not exempt. Yet he is the same Milton who proclaimed a quarter of a century afterwards—
“I
argue not
Against Heaven’s hand
or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still
bear up and steer
Right onward.”
There is something very fine in the steady resolution with which, after so fully admitting to himself that his promise is yet unfulfilled, and that appearances are against him, he recurs to his purpose, frankly owning the while that the gift he craves is Heaven’s, and his only the application. He had received a lesson against over-confidence in the failure of his solitary effort up to this time to achieve a work on a large scale. To the eighth and last stanza of his poem, “The Passion of Christ,” is appended the note: “This subject the author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished.” It nevertheless begins nobly, but soon deviates into conceits, bespeaking a fatigued imagination. The “Hymn on the Nativity,” on the other hand, begins with two stanzas of far-fetched prettiness, and goes on ringing and thundering through strophes of ever-increasing grandeur, until the sweetness of Virgin and Child seem in danger of being swallowed up in the glory of Christianity; when suddenly, by an exquisite turn, the poet sinks back into his original key, and finally harmonizes his strain by the divine repose of concluding picture worthy of Correggio:—
“But see, the Virgin
blest
Hath laid the Babe to rest;
Time is our tedious song should here have ending;
Heaven’s youngest-teemed star
Hath fixed her polished car,
Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending;
And all about the courtly stable
Bright harnessed Angels sit in order serviceable.”
In some degree this magnificent composition loses force in our day from its discordance with modern sentiment. We look upon religions as members of the same family, and are more interested in their resemblances than their antagonisms. Moloch and Dagon themselves appear no longer as incarnate fiends, but as the spiritual counterparts of antediluvian monsters; and Milton’s treatment of the Olympian deities jars upon us who remember his obligations to them. If the most Hebrew of modern poets, he still owed more to Greece than to Palestine. How living a thing Greek mythology was to him from his earliest years appears from his college vacation exercise of 1628, where there are lines which, if one did not know to be Milton’s, one would declare to be Keats’s. Among his other compositions by the time of his quitting Cambridge are to be named the superb verses, “At a Solemn Music,” perhaps the most perfect expression of his ideal of song; the pretty but over fanciful lines, “On a fair Infant dying of a cough;” and the famous panegyric of Shakespeare, a fancy made impressive by dignity and sonority of utterance.
With such earnest of a true vocation, Milton betook himself to retirement at Horton, a village between Colnbrook and Datchet, in the south-eastern corner of Buckinghamshire, county of nightingales, where his father had settled himself on his retirement from business. This retreat of the elder Milton may be supposed to have taken place in 1632, for in that year he took his clerk into partnership, probably devolving the larger part of the business upon him. But it may have been earlier, for in 1626 Milton tells Diodati—
“Nos quoque lucus habet vicina
consitus ulmo,
Atque suburbani nobilis umbra
loci.”
And in a college declamation, which cannot have been later than 1632, he “calls to witness the groves and rivers, and the beloved village elms, under which in the last past summer I remember having had supreme delight with the Muses, when I too, among rural scenes and remote forests, seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated through a hidden eternity.”
Doctor Johnson deemed “the knowledge of nature half the task of a poet,” but not until he had written all his poetry did he repair to the Highlands. Milton allows natural science and the observation of the picturesque no place among the elements of a poetical self-education, and his practice differs entirely from that which would in our day be adopted by an aspirant happy in equal leisure. Such an one would probably have seen no inconsiderable portion of the globe ere he could resolve to bury himself in a tiny hamlet for five years. The poems which Milton composed at Horton owe so much of their beauty to his country residence as to convict him of error in attaching no more importance to the influences of scenery. But this very excellence suggests that the spell of scenery need not be exactly proportioned to its grandeur.
The beauties of Horton are characterized by Professor Masson as those of “rich, teeming, verdurous flat, charming by its appearance of plenty, and by the goodly show of wood along the fields and pastures, in the nooks where the houses nestle, and everywhere in all directions to the sky-bound verge of the landscape.” He also notices “the canal-like abundance and distribution of water. There are rivulets brimming through the meadows among rushes and water-plants; and by the very sides of the ways, in lieu of ditches, there are slow runnels, in which one can see the minnows swimming.” The distant keep of Windsor, “bosomed high in tufted trees,” is the only visible object that appeals to the imagination, or speaks of anything outside of rural peace and contentment. Milton’s house, as Todd was informed by the vicar of the parish, stood till about 1798. If so, however, it is very remarkable that the writer of an account of Horton in the Gentleman’s Magazine for August, 1791, who speaks of Milton with veneration, and transcribes his mother’s epitaph, does not
Milton’s five years at Horton were nevertheless the happiest of his life. It must have been an unspeakable relief to him to be at length emancipated from compulsory exercises, and to build up his mind without nod or beck from any quarter. For these blessings he was chiefly indebted to his father, whose industry and prudence had procured his independence and his rural retirement, and whose tender indulgence and noble confidence dispensed him from what most would have deemed the reasonable condition that he should at least earn his own living. “I will not,” he exclaims to his father, “praise thee for thy fulfilment of the ordinary duties of a parent, my debt is heavier (me poscunt majora). Thou hast neither made me a merchant nor a barrister":—
“Neque
enim, pater, ire jubebas
Qua via lata patet, qua pronior
area lucri,
Certaque condendi fulget spes
aurea nummi:
Nec rapis ad leges, male custoditaque
gentis
Jura, nec insulsis damnas
clamoribus aures.”
The stroke at the subserviency of the lawyers to the Crown (male custodita jura gentis) would be appreciated by the elder Milton, nor can we doubt that the old Puritan fully approved his son’s resilience from a church denied by Arminianism and prelacy. He would not so easily understand the dedication of a life to poetry, and the poem from which the above citation is taken seems to have been partly composed to smooth his repugnance away. He was soon to have stronger proofs that his son had not mistaken his vocation: it would be pleasant to be assured that the old man was capable of valuing “Comus” and “Lycidas” at their worth. The circumstances under which “Comus” was produced, and its subsequent publication with the extorted consent of the author, show that Milton did not wholly want encouragement and sympathy. The insertion of his lines on Shakespeare in the Second Folio (1632) also denotes some reputation as a wit. In the main, however, remote from urban circles and literary cliques, with few correspondents and no second self in sweetheart or friend, he must have led a solitary intellectual life, alone with his great ambition, and probably pitied by his acquaintance. “The world,” says Emerson to the Poet, “is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower.” The special nature of Milton’s studies cannot now be exactly ascertained. Of his manner of studying he informs Diodati, “No delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period of my studies.” Of his object he says: “God has instilled into me, at all events, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labour is Ceres said to have sought Proserpine as I am wont day and night to seek for the idea of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things, and to follow it leading me on as with certain assured traces.” We may be sure that he read the classics of all the languages which he understood. His copies of Euripides, Pindar, Aratus, and Lycophron, are, or have been recently, extant, with marginal notes, proving that he weighed what he read. A commonplace book contains copious extracts from historians, and he tells Diodati that he has read Greek history to the fall of Constantinople. He speaks of having occasionally repaired to London for instruction in mathematics and music. His own programme, promulgated eight years later, but without doubt perfectly appropriate to his Horton period, names before all else—“Devout prayer to the Holy Spirit, that can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and send out His Seraphim with the hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases. To this must be added select reading, steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs, till which in
Milton’s poetical development is, in many respects, exceptional. Most poets would no doubt, in theory, agree with Landor, “febriculis non indicari vires, impatientiam ab ignorantia non differre,” but their faith will not be proved by lack of works, as Landor’s precept and example require. He, who like Milton lisps in numbers usually sings freely in adolescence; he who is really visited by a true inspiration generally depends on mood rather than on circumstance. Milton, on the other hand, until fairly embarked on his great epic, was comparatively an unproductive, and literally an occasional poet. Most of his pieces, whether English or Latin, owe their existence to some impulse from without: “Comus” to the solicitation of a patron, “Lycidas” to the death of a friend. The “Allegro” and the “Penseroso” seem almost the only two written at the urgency of an internal impulse; and perhaps, if we knew their history, we should discover that they too were prompted by extraneous suggestion or provoked into being by accident. Such is the way with Court poets like Dryden and Claudian; it is unlike the usual procedure of Milton’s spiritual kindred. Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, write incessantly; whatever care they may bestow upon composition, the impulse to produce is never absent. With Milton it is commonly dormant or ineffectual; he is always studying, but the fertility of his mind bears no apparent proportion to the pains devoted to its cultivation. He is not, like Wordsworth, labouring at a great work whose secret progress fills him with a majestic confidence; or, like Coleridge, dreaming of works which he lacks the energy to undertake; or, save once, does he seem to have felt with Keats:—
“Fears that I may cease to
be
Before my pen
has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before that books, in high
piled charactery,
Hold in rich garners
the full ripened grain.”
He neither writes nor wishes to write; he simply studies, piling up the wood on the altar, and conscious of the power to call down fire from Heaven when he will. There is something sublime in this assured confidence; yet its wisdom is less evident than its grandeur. “No man,” says Shelley, “can say, ‘I will compose poetry.’” If he cannot say this of himself to-day, still less can he say it of himself to-morrow. He cannot tell whether the illusions of youth will forsake him wholly; whether the joy of creation will cease to thrill; what unpropitious blight he may encounter in an enemy or a creditor,
It is in keeping with the infrequency of Milton’s moods of overmastering inspiration, and the strength of will which enabled him to write steadily or abstain from writing at all, that his early compositions should be, in general, so much more correct than those of other English poets of the first rank. The childish bombast of “Titus Andronicus,” the commonplace of Wordsworth, the frequent inanity of the youthful Coleridge and the youthful Byron, Shelley’s extravagance, Keats’s cockneyism, Tennyson’s mawkishness, find no counterpart in Milton’s early compositions. All these great writers, though the span of some of them was but short, lived long enough to blush for much of what they had in the days of their ignorance taken for poetry. The mature Milton had no cause to be ashamed of anything written by the immature Milton, reasonable allowance being made for the inevitable infection of contemporary false taste. As a general rule, the youthful exuberance of a Shakespeare would be a better sign; faults, no less than beauties, often indicate the richness of the soil. But Milton was born to confute established opinions. Among other divergencies from usage, he was at this time a rare example of an English poet whose faculty was, in large measure, to be estimated by his essays in Latin verse. England had up to this time produced no distinguished Latin poet, though Scotland had: and had Milton’s Latin poems been accessible, they would certainly have occupied a larger place in the estimation of his contemporaries than his English compositions. Even now they contribute no trifling addition to his fame, though they cannot, even as exercises, be placed in the highest rank. There are two roads to excellence in Latin verse—to write it as a scholar, or to write it as a Roman. England has once, and only once, produced a poet so entirely imbued with the Roman spirit that Latin seemed to come to him like the language of some prior state of existence, rather remembered than learned. Landor’s Latin verse is hence greatly superior to Milton’s, not, perhaps, in scholarly elegance, but in absolute vitality. It would be poor praise to commend it for fidelity to the antique, for it is the antique. Milton stands at the head of the numerous class who, not being actually born Romans, have all but made themselves so. “With a great sum obtained I this freedom.” His
Except for his formal incorporation with the University of Oxford, by proceeding M.A. there in 1635, and the death of his mother on April 3, 1637, Milton’s life during his residence at Horton, as known to us, is entirely in his writings. These comprise the “Sonnet to the Nightingale,” “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” all probably written in 1633; “Arcades,” probably, and “Comus” certainly written in 1634; “Lycidas” in 1637. The first three only are, or seem to be, spontaneous overflowings of the poetic mind: the others are composed in response to external invitations, and in two instances it is these which stand highest in poetic desert. Before entering on any criticism, it will be convenient to state the originating circumstances of each piece.
“Arcades” and “Comus” both owe their existence to the musician Henry Lawes, unless the elder Milton’s tenancy of his house from the Earl of Bridgewater can be accepted as a fact. Both were written for the Bridgewater family, and if Milton felt no special devotion to this house, his only motive could have been to aid the musical performance of his friend Henry Lawes, whose music is discommended by Burney, but who, Milton declares:
“First taught our English
music how to span
Words with just note and accent.”
Masques were then the order of the day, especially after the splendid exhibition of the Inns of Court in honour of the King and Queen, February, 1634. Lawes, as a Court musician, took a leading part in this representation, and became in request on similar occasions. The person intended to be honoured by the “Arcades” was the dowager Countess of Derby, mother-in-law of the Earl of Bridgewater, whose father, Lord Keeper Egerton, she had married in 1600. The aged lady, to whom more than forty years before Spenser had dedicated his “Teares of the Muses,” and who had ever since been an object of poetic flattery and homage, lived at Harefield, about four miles from Uxbridge; and there the “Arcades” were exhibited, probably in 1634. Milton’s melodious verses were only one feature in a more ample entertainment. That they pleased we may be sure, for we find him shortly afterwards engaged on a similar undertaking of much greater importance, commissioned by the Bridgewater family. In those days Milton had no more of the Puritanic aversion to the theatre—
“Then to the well-trod stage
anon,
If Jonson’s learned
sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s
child,
Warble his native wood-notes
wild,”
than to the pomps and solemnities of cathedral ritual:—
“But let my due feet never
fail
To walk the studious cloisters
pale,
And love the high-embowed
roof,
With antique pillars massy
proof,
And storied windows richly
dight,
Casting a dim religious light:
There let the pealing organ
blow,
To the full-voic’d quire
below,
In service high and anthems
clear,
As may with sweetness through
mine ear
Dissolve me into ecstacies,
And bring all heaven before
mine eyes.”
He therefore readily fell in with Lawes’s proposal to write a masque to celebrate Lord Bridgewater’s assumption of the Lord Presidency of the Welsh Marches. The Earl had entered upon the office in October, 1633, and “Comus” was written some time between this and the following September. Singular coincidences frequently linked Milton’s fate with the north-west Midlands, from which his grandmother’s family and his brother-in-law and his third wife sprung, whither the latter retired, where his friend Diodati lived, and his friend King died, and where now the greatest of his early works was to be represented in the time-hallowed precincts of Ludlow Castle, where it was performed on Michaelmas night, in 1634. If, as we should like to think, he was himself present, the scene must have enriched his memory and his mind. The castle—in which Prince Arthur had spent with his Spanish bride the six months of life which alone remained to him, in which eighteen years before the performance Charles the First had been installed Prince of Wales with extraordinary magnificence, and which, curiously enough, was to be the residence of the Cavalier poet, Butler—would be a place of resort for English tourists, if it adorned any country but their own. The dismantled keep is still an imposing object, lowering from a steep hill around whose base the curving Teme alternately boils and gushes with tumultuous speed. The scene within must have realized the lines in the “Allegro “:
“Pomp, and feast, and revelry,
Mask and antique pageantry,
Where throngs of knights and
barons bold,
In weeds of peace high triumphs
hold,
With store of ladies, whose
bright eyes
Rain influence.”
Lawes himself acted the attendant Spirit, the Lady and the Brothers were performed by Lord Bridgewater’s youthful children, whose own nocturnal bewilderment in Haywood Forest, could we trust a tradition, doubted by the critics, but supported by the choice of the neighbourhood of Severn as the scene of the drama, had suggested his theme to Milton. He is evidently indebted for many incidents and ideas to Peele’s “Old Wives’ Tale,” and the “Comus” of Erycius Puteanus; but there is little morality in the former production and little fancy in the latter. The peculiar blending of the highest morality with the noblest imagination is as much Milton’s own as the incomparable diction. “I,”
It has been remarked that one of the most characteristic traits of Milton’s genius, until he laid hand to “Paradise Lost,” is the dependence of his activity upon promptings from without. “Comus” once off his mind, he gives no sign of poetical life for three years, nor would have given any then but for the inaccurate chart or unskilful seamanship which proved fatal to his friend Edward King, August 10, 1637. King, a Fellow of Milton’s college, had left Chester, on a voyage to Ireland, in the stillest summer weather:—
“The air was calm, and on
the level brine
Sleek Panope and all her sisters
played.”
Suddenly the vessel struck on a rock, foundered, and all on board perished except some few who escaped in a boat. Of King it was reported that he refused to save himself, and sank to the abyss with hands folded in prayer. Great sympathy was excited among his friends at Cambridge, enough at least to evoke a volume of thirty-six elegies in various languages, but not enough to inspire any of the contributors, except Milton, with a poetical thought, while many are so ridiculous that quotation would be an affront to King’s memory. But the thirty-sixth is “Lycidas.” The original manuscript remains, and is dated in November. Of the elegy’s relation to Milton’s biography it may be said that it sums up the two influences which had been chiefly moulding his mind of late years, the natural influences of which he had been the passive recipient during his residence at Horton, and the political and theological passion with which he was becoming more and more inspired by the circumstances of the time. By 1637 the country had been eight years without a parliament, and the persecution of Puritans had attained its acme. In that year Laud’s new Episcopalian service book was forced, or rather was attempted to be forced, upon Scotland; Prynne lost his ears; and Bishop Williams was fined eighteen thousand pounds and ordered to be imprisoned during the King’s pleasure. Hence the striking,
The “Penseroso” and the “Allegro,” notwithstanding that each piece is the antithesis of the other, are complementary rather than contrary, and may be, in a sense, regarded as one poem, whose theme is the praise of the reasonable life. It resembles one of those pictures in which the effect is gained by contrasted masses of light and shade, but each is more nicely mellowed and interfused with the qualities of the other than it lies within the resources of pictorial skill to effect. Mirth has an undertone of gravity, and melancholy of cheerfulness. There is no antagonism between the states of mind depicted; and no rational lover, whether of contemplation or of recreation, would find any difficulty in combining the two. The limpidity of the diction is even more striking than its beauty. Never were ideas of such dignity embodied in verse so easy and familiar, and with such apparent absence of effort. The landscape-painting is that of the seventeenth century, absolutely true in broad effects, sometimes ill-defined and even inaccurate in minute details. Some of these blemishes are terrible in nineteenth-century eyes, accustomed to the photography of our Brownings and Patmores. Milton would probably have made light of them, and perhaps we owe him some thanks for thus practically refuting the heresy that inspiration implies infallibility. Yet the poetry of his blindness abounds with proof that he had made excellent use of his eyes while he had them, and no part of his poetry wants instances of subtle and delicate observation worthy of the most scrutinizing modern:—
“Thee, chantress, oft the
woods among,
I woo, to hear thy evensong;
And, missing thee, I walk
unseen
On the dry, smooth-shaven
green.”
“The song of the nightingale,” remarks Peacock, “ceases about the time the grass is mown.” The charm, however, is less in such detached beauties, however exquisite, than in the condensed opulence—“every epithet a text for a canto,” says Macaulay—and in the general impression of “plain living and high thinking,” pursued in the midst of every charm of nature and every refinement of culture, combining the ideal of Horton with the ideal of Cambridge.
“Lycidas” is far more boldly conventional, not merely in the treatment of landscape, but in the general conception and machinery. An initial effort of the imagination is required to feel with the poet; it is not wonderful that no such wing bore up the solid Johnson. Talk of Milton and his fellow-collegian as shepherds! “We know that they never drove afield, and that they had no flocks to batten.” There is, in fact, according to Johnson, neither nature nor truth nor art nor pathos in the poem, for all these things are inconsistent with the introduction of a shepherd of souls in the character of a shepherd of sheep. A nineteenth-century reader, it may be hoped, finds no more difficulty in idealizing Edward King as a shepherd than in personifying the ocean calm as “sleek Panope and all her sisters,” which, to be sure, may have been a trouble to Johnson. If, however, Johnson is deplorably prosaic, neither can we agree with Pattison that “in ‘Lycidas’ we have reached the high-water mark of English Poesy and of Milton’s own production.” Its innumerable beauties are rather exquisite than magnificent. It is an elegy, and cannot, therefore, rank as high as an equally consummate example of epic, lyric, or dramatic art. Even as elegy it is surpassed by the other great English masterpiece, “Adonais,” in fire and grandeur. There is no incongruity in “Adonais” like the introduction of “the pilot of the Galilean lake”; its invective and indignation pour naturally out of the subject; their expression is not, as in “Lycidas,” a splendid excrescence. There is no such example of sustained eloquence in “Lycidas” as the seven concluding stanzas of “Adonais” beginning, “Go thou to Rome.” But the balance is redressed by the fact that the beauties of “Adonais” are the inimitable. Shelley’s eloquence is even too splendid for elegy. It wants the dainty thrills and tremors of subtle versification, and the witcheries of verbal magic in which “Lycidas” is so rich—“the opening eyelids of the morn;” “smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds;” Camus’s garment, “inwrought with figures dim;” “the great vision of the guarded mount;” “the tender stops of various quills;” “with eager thought warbling his Doric lay.” It will be noticed that these exquisite phrases have little to do with Lycidas himself, and it is a fact not to be ignored, that though Milton and Shelley doubtless felt more deeply than Dryden when he composed his scarcely inferior threnody on Anne Killegrew, whom he had never seen, both might have found subjects of grief that touched them more nearly. Shelley tells us frankly that “in another’s woe he wept his own.” We cannot doubt of whom Milton was thinking when he wrote:
“Fame is the spur that the
clear spirit doth raise,
(That last infirmity of noble
mind)
To scorn delights, and live
laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when
we hope to find,
And think to burst out into
sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with
“Comus,” the richest fruit of Milton’s early genius, is the epitome of the man at the age at which he wrote it. It bespeaks the scholar and idealist, whose sacred enthusiasm is in some danger of contracting a taint of pedantry for want of acquaintance with men and affairs. The Elder Brother is a prig, and his dialogues with his junior reveal the same solemn insensibility to the humorous which characterizes the kindred genius of Wordsworth, and would have provoked the kindly smile of Shakespeare. It is singular to find the inevitable flaw of “Paradise Lost” prefigured here, and the wicked enchanter made the real hero of the piece. These defects are interesting, because they represent the nature of Milton as it was then, noble and disinterested to the height of imagination, but self-assertive, unmellowed, angular. They disappear entirely when he expatiates in the regions of exalted fancy, as in the introductory discourse of the Spirit, and the invocation to Sabrina. They recur when he moralizes; and his morality is too interwoven with the texture of his piece to be other than obtrusive. He fatigues with virtue, as Lucan fatigues with liberty; in both instances the scarcely avoidable error of a young preacher. What glorious morality it is no one need be told; nor is there any poem in the language where beauties of thought, diction, and description spring up more thickly than in “Comus.” No drama out of Shakespeare has furnished such a number of the noblest familiar quotations. It is, indeed, true that many of these jewels are fetched from the mines of other poets: great as Milton’s obligations, to Nature were, his obligations to books were greater. But he has made all his own by the alchemy of his genius, and borrows little but to improve. The most remarkable coincidence is with a piece certainly unknown to him—Calderon’s “Magico Prodigioso,” which was first acted in 1637, the year of the publication of “Comus,” a great year in the history of the drama, for the “Cid” appeared in it also. The similarity of the situations of Justina tempted by the Demon, and the Lady in the power of Comus, has naturally begotten a like train of thought in both poets.
“Comus.
Nay, Lady, sit; if I but wave this wand,
Your nerves are all chained
up in alabaster,
And you a statue, or, as Daphne
was,
Root-bound, that fled Apollo.
Lady.
Fool, do not boast
Thou can’st not touch
the freedom of my mind
With all thy charms, although
this corporal rind
Thou hast immanacled, while
Heaven sees good.”
“Justina.
Thought is not in my power, but action is.
I will not move my foot to
follow thee.
Demon.
But a far mightier wisdom than thine own
Exerts itself within thee,
with such power
Compelling thee to that which
it inclines
That it shall force thy step;
how wilt thou then
Resist, Justina?
Justina. By my free will.
Demon.
I
Must force thy will.
Justina.
It is invincible.
It were not free if thou had’st
power upon it.”
It must be admitted that where the Spaniard and the Englishman come directly into competition the former excels. The dispute between the Lady and Comus may be, as Johnson says it is, “the most animating and affecting scene in the drama;” but, tried by the dramatic test which Calderon bears so well, it is below the exigencies and the possibilities of the subject. Nor does the poetry here, quite so abundantly as in the other scenes in this unrivalled “suite of speeches,” atone for the deficiencies of the play.
It is a just remark of Pattison’s that “in a mind of the consistent texture of Milton’s, motives are secretly influential before they emerge in consciousness.” In September, 1637, Milton had complained to Diodati of his cramped situation in the country, and talked of taking chambers in London. Within a few months we find this vague project matured into a settled scheme of foreign travel. One tie to home had been severed by the death of his mother in the preceding April; and his father was to find another prop of his old age in his second son, Christopher, about to marry and reside with him. “Lycidas” had appeared meanwhile, or was to appear, and its bold denunciation of the Romanizing clergy might well offend the ruling powers. The atmosphere at home was, at all events, difficult breathing for an impotent patriot; and Milton may have come to see what we so clearly see in “Comus,” that his asperities and limitations needed contact with the world. Why speak of the charms of Italy, in themselves sufficient allurement to a poet and scholar? His father, trustful and unselfish as of old, found the considerable sum requisite for a prolonged foreign tour; and in April, 1638, Milton, provided with excellent introductions from Sir Henry Wootton and others, seeks the enrichment and renovation of his genius in Italy:—
“And tricks his beams, and
with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of
the morning sky.”
Four times has a great English poet taken up his abode in “the paradise of exiles,” and remained there until deeply imbued with the spirit of the land. The Italian residence of Byron and Shelley, of Landor and Browning, has infused into English literature a new element which has mingled with its inmost essence. Milton’s brief visit could not be of equal moment. Italian letters had already done their utmost for him; and he did not stay long enough to master the secret of Italian life. A real enthusiasm for Italy’s classical associations is indicated by his original purpose of extending his travels to Greece, an enterprise at that period requiring no little disdain of hardship and peril. But it would have been an anachronism if he could have contemplated the comprehensive and scientific scheme of self-culture by Italian influences of every kind which, a hundred and fifty years later, was conceived and executed by Goethe. At the time of Milton’s visit Italian letters and arts sloped midway in their descent from the Renaissance to the hideous but humorous rococo so graphically described by Vernon Lee. Free thought had perished along with free institutions in the preceding century, and as a consequence, though the physical sciences still numbered successful cultivators, originality of mind was all but extinct. Things, nevertheless, wore a gayer aspect than of late. The very completeness of the triumph of secular and spiritual despotism had made them less suspicious, surly, and austere. Spanish power was visibly decaying. The long line of zelanti Popes had come to an end; and it was thought that if the bosom of the actual incumbent could be scrutinized, no little complacency in Swedish victories over the Faith’s defenders would be found. An atmosphere of toleration was diffusing itself, bigotry was imperceptibly getting old-fashioned, the most illustrious victim of the Inquisition was to be well-nigh the last. If the noble and the serious could not be permitted, there was no ban upon the amiable and the frivolous: never had the land been so full of petty rhymesters, antiquarian triflers, and gregarious literati, banded to play at authorship in academies, like the seven Swabians leagued to kill the hare. For the rest, the Italy of Milton’s day, its superstition and its scepticism, and the sophistry that strove to make the two as one; its monks and its bravoes; its processions and its pantomimes; its cult of the Passion and its cult of Paganism; the opulence of its past and the impotence of its present; will be found depicted by sympathetic genius in the second volume of “John Inglesant.”
Milton arrived in Paris about the end of April or beginning of May. Of his short stay there it is only known that he was received with distinction by the English Ambassador, Lord Scudamore, and owed to him an introduction to one of the greatest men in Europe, Hugo Grotius, then residing at Paris as envoy from Christina of Sweden. Travelling by way of Nice, Genoa, Leghorn, and Pisa, he arrived about the beginning of August at Florence; where, probably by the aid of good recommendations, he “immediately contracted the acquaintance of many noble and learned,” and doubtless found, with the author of “John Inglesant,” that “nothing can be more delightful than the first few days of life in Italy in the company of polished and congenial men.” The Florentine academies, he implies answered one of the purposes of modern clubs, and enabled the traveller to multiply one good introduction into many. He especially mentions Gaddi, Dati, Frescobaldi, Coltellini, Bonmattei, Chimentelli, and Francini, of all of whom a full account will be found in Masson. Two of them, Dati and Francini, have linked their names with Milton’s by their encomiums on him inserted in his works. The key-note of these surprising productions is struck by Francini when he remarks that the heroes of England are accounted in Italy superhuman. If this is so, Dati may be justified in comparing a young man on his first and last foreign tour to the travelled Ulysses; and Francini in declaring that Thames rivals Helicon in virtue of Milton’s Latin poems, which alone the panegyrist could read. Truly, as Smollett says, Italian is the language of compliments. If ludicrous, however, the flattery is not nauseous, for it is not wholly insincere. Amid all conventional exaggerations there is an under-note of genuine feeling, showing that the writers really had received a deep impression from Milton, deeper than they could well explain or understand. The bow drawn at a venture did not miss the mark, but it is a curious reflection that those of his performances which would really have justified their utmost enthusiasm were hieroglyphical to them. Such of his literary exercises as they could understand consisted, he says, of “some trifles which I had in memory composed at under twenty or thereabout; and other things which I had shifted, in scarcity of books and conveniences, to patch up among them.” The former class of compositions may no doubt be partly identified with his college declamations and Latin verses. What the “things patched up among them” may have been is unknown. It is curious enough that his acquaintance with the Italian literati should have been the means of preserving one of their own compositions, the “Tina” of Antonio Malatesti, a series of fifty sonnets on a mistress, sent to him in manuscript by the author, with a dedication to the illustrissimo signore et padrone osservatissimo. The pieces were not of a kind to be approved by the laureate of chastity, and annoyance at the implied
The very type and emblem of the free spirit of Italy, crushed but not conquered, then inhabited Florence in the person of “the starry Galileo,” lately released from confinement at Arcetri, and allowed to dwell in the city under such severe restraint of the Inquisition that no Protestant should have been able to gain access to him. It may not have been until Milton’s second visit in March, 1639, when Galileo had returned to his villa, that the English stranger stood unseen before him. The meeting between the two great blind men of their century is one of the most picturesque in history; it would have been more pathetic still if Galileo could have known that his name would be written in “Paradise Lost,” or Milton could have foreseen that within thirteen years he too would see only with the inner eye, but that the calamity which disabled the astronomer would restore inspiration to the poet. How deeply he was impressed appears, not merely from the famous comparison of Satan’s shield to the moon enlarged in “the Tuscan artist’s optic glass,” but by the ventilation in the fourth and eighth books of “Paradise Lost,” of the points at issue between Ptolemy and Copernicus:—
“Whether the sun predominant
in heaven
Rise on the earth, or earth
rise on the sun,
He from the east his flaming
road begin,
Or she from west her silent
course advance
With inoffensive pace, that
spinning sleeps
On her soft axle, while she
paces even,
And bears thee soft with the
smooth air along.”
It would be interesting to know if Milton’s Florentine acquaintance included that romantic adventurer, Robert Dudley, strange prototype of Shelley in face and fortune, whom Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Dean Bargrave encountered at Florence, but whom Milton does not mention. The next stage in his pilgrimage was the Eternal City, by this time resigned to live upon its past. The revenues of which Protestant revolt had deprived it were compensated by the voluntary
After two months’ stay in Rome, Milton proceeded to Naples, whence, after two months’ residence, he was recalled by tidings of the impending troubles at home, just as he was about to extend his travels to Sicily and Greece. The only name associated with his at Naples is that of the Marquis Manso, then passing his seventy-ninth year with the halo of reverence due to a veteran who fifty years ago had soothed and shielded Tasso, and since had protected Marini. He now entertained Milton with equal kindness, little dreaming that in return for hospitality he was receiving immortality. Milton celebrated his desert as the friend of poets, in a Latin poem of singular elegance, praying for a like guardian of his own fame, in lines which should never be absent from the memory of his biographers. He also unfolded the project which he then cherished of an epic on King Arthur, and assured Manso that Britain was not wholly barbarous, for the Druids were really very considerable poets. He is silent on Chaucer and Shakespeare. Manso requited
Milton’s conduct on his return justifies Wordsworth’s commendation:—
“Thy
heart
The lowliest duties on herself
did lay.”
Full, as his notebooks of the period attest, of magnificent aspiration for “flights above the Aonian mount,” he yet quietly sat down to educate his nephews, and lament his friend. His brother-in-law Phillips had been dead eight years, leaving two boys, Edward and John, now about nine and eight respectively. Mrs. Phillips’s second marriage had added two daughters to the family, and from whatever cause, it was thought best that the education of the sons should be conducted by their uncle. So it came to pass that “he took him a lodging in St. Bride’s Churchyard, at the house of one Russel, a tailor;” Christopher Milton continuing to live with his father.
We may well believe that when the first cares of resettlement were over, Milton found no more urgent duty than the bestowal of a funeral tribute upon his friend Diodati. The “Epitaphium Damonis” is the finest of his Latin poems, marvellously picturesque in expression, and inspired by true manly grief. In Diodati he had lost perhaps the only friend whom, in the most sacred sense of the term, he had ever possessed; lost him when far away and unsuspicious of the already accomplished stroke; lost him when returning to his side with aspirations to be imparted, and intellectual treasures to be shared. Bis ille miser qui serus amavit. All this is expressed with earnest emotion in truth and tenderness, surpassing “Lycidas,” though void of the varied music and exquisite felicities which could not well be present in the conventionalized idiom of a modern Latin poet. The most pathetic passage is that in which he contrasts the general complacency of animals in their kind with man’s dependence for sympathy on a single breast; the most biographically interesting where he speaks of his plans for an epic on the story of Arthur, which he seems about to undertake in earnest. But the impulses from without which generally directed the course of this seemingly autocratic, but really susceptible, nature, urged him in quite a different direction: for some time yet he was to live, not make a poem.
The tidings which, arriving at Naples about Christmas, 1638, prevailed upon Milton to abandon his projected visit to Sicily and Greece, were no doubt those of the revolt of Scotland, and Charles’s resolution to quell it by force of arms. Ere he had yet quitted Italy, the King’s impotence had been sufficiently demonstrated, and about a month ere he stood on English soil the royal army had “disbanded like the break-up of a school.” Milton may possibly have regretted his hasty return, but before many months had passed it was plain that the revolution was only beginning. Charles’s ineffable infatuation brought on a second Scottish war, ten times more ridiculously disastrous than the first, and its result left him no alternative but the convocation (November, 1640) of the Long Parliament, which sent Laud to the Tower and Strafford to the block, cleared away servile judges and corrupt ministers, and made the persecuted Puritans persecutors in their turn. Not a member of this grave assemblage, perhaps, but would have laughed if told that not its least memorable feat was to have prevented a young schoolmaster from writing an epic.
Milton had by this time found the lodgings in St. Bride’s Churchyard insufficient for him, and had taken a house in Aldersgate Street, beyond the City wall, and suburban enough to allow him a garden. “This street,” writes Howell, in 1657, “resembleth an Italian street more than any other in London, by reason of the spaciousness and uniformity of the buildings and straightness thereof, with the convenient distance of the houses.” He did not at this time contemplate mixing actively in political or religious controversy.
“I looked about to see if I could get any place that would hold myself and my books, and so I took a house of sufficient size in the city; and there with no small delight I resumed my intermitted studies; cheerfully leaving the event of public affairs, first to God, and then to those to whom the people had committed that task.”
But this was before the convocation of the Long Parliament. When it had met,
“Perceiving that the true way to liberty followed on from these beginnings, inasmuch also as I had so prepared myself from my youth that, above all things, I could not be ignorant what is of Divine and what of human right, I resolved, though I was then meditating certain other matters, to transfer into this struggle all my genius and all the strength of my industry.”
Milton’s note-books, to be referred to in another place, prove that he did not even then cease to meditate themes for poetry, but practically he for eighteen years ceased to be a poet.
There is no doubt something grating and unwelcome in the descent of the scholar from regions of serene culture to fierce political and religious broils. But to regret with Pattison that Milton should, at this crisis of the State, have turned aside from poetry to controversy is to regret that “Paradise Lost” should exist. Such a work could not have proceeded from one indifferent to the public weal, and if Milton had been capable of forgetting the citizen in the man of letters we may be sure that “a little grain of conscience” would ere long have “made him sour.” It is sheer literary fanaticism to speak with Pattison of “the prostitution of genius to political party.” Milton is as much the idealist in his prose as in his verse; and although in his pamphlets he sides entirely with one of the two great parties in the State, it is not as its instrument, but as its prophet and monitor. He himself tells us that controversy is highly repugnant to him.
“I trust to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, put from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies, to come in to the dim reflection of hollow antiquities sold by the seeming bulk.”
But he felt that if he allowed such motives to prevail with him, it would be said to him:
“Timorous and ungrateful, the Church of God is now again at the foot of her insulting enemies, and thou bewailest, What matters it for thee or thy bewailing? When time was, thou would’st not find a syllable of all that thou hast read or studied to utter on her behalf. Yet ease and leisure was given thee for thy retired thoughts, but of the sweat of other men. Thou hast the diligence, the parts, the language of a man, if a vain subject werePage 33
to be adorned or beautified; but when the cause of God and His Church was to be pleaded, for which purpose that tongue was given thee which thou hast, God listened if He could hear thy voice among His zealous servants, but thou wert dumb as a beast; from henceforward be that which thine own brutish silence hath made thee.”
A man with “Paradise Lost” in him must needs so think and act, and, much as it would have been to have had another “Comus” or “Lycidas,” were not even such well exchanged for a hymn like this, the high-water mark of English impassioned prose ere Milton’s mantle fell upon Ruskin?
“Thou, therefore, that sittest in light and glory unapproachable. Parent of angels and men! next, Thee I implore, Omnipotent King, Redeemer of that lost remnant whose nature Thou didst assume, ineffable and everlasting Love! And Thou, the third subsistence of Divine Infinitude, illuminating Spirit, the joy and solace of created things! one Tri-personal godhead! look upon this Thy poor and almost spent and expiring Church, leave her not thus a prey to these importunate wolves, that wait and think long till they devour Thy tender flock; these wild boars that have broke into Thy vineyard, and left the print of their polluting hoofs on the souls of Thy servants. O let them not bring about their damned designs that stand now at the entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watchword to open and let out those dreadful locusts and scorpions to reinvolve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, where we shall never more see the sun of Thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful dawn, never more hear the bird of morning sing. Be moved with pity at the afflicted state of this our shaken monarchy, that now lies labouring under her throes, and struggling against the grudges of more dreaded calamities.
“O Thou, that, after the impetuous rage of five bloody inundations, and the succeeding sword of intestine war, soaking the land in her own gore, didst pity the sad and ceaseless revolution of our swift and thick-coming sorrows; when we were quite breathless of Thy free grace didst motion peace and terms of covenant with us; and, having first well-nigh freed us from anti-Christian thraldom, didst build up this Britannic Empire to a glorious and enviable height, with all her daughter-islands about her; stay us in this felicity, let not the obstinacy of our half-obedience and will-worship bring forth that viper of sedition, that for these fourscore years hath been breeding to eat through the entrails of our peace; but let her cast her abortive spawn without the danger of this travailing and throbbing kingdom: that we may still remember in our solemn thanksgivings, how, for us, the northern ocean, even to the frozen Thule, was scattered with the proud shipwrecks of the Spanish Armada, and the very maw of Hell ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that horrible and damned blast.
“O how much more glorious will those former deliverances appear, when we shall know them not only to have saved us from greatest miseries past, but to have reserved us for greatest happiness to come? Hitherto Thou hast but freed us, and that not fully, from the unjust and tyrannous claim of Thy foes, now unite us entirely and appropriate us to Thyself, tie us everlastingly in willing homage to the prerogative of Thy eternal throne.
“And now we know, O Thou, our most certain hope and defence, that Thine enemies have been consulting all the sorceries of the great whore, and have joined their plots with that sad, intelligencing tyrant that mischiefs the world with his mines of Ophir, and lies thirsting to revenge his naval ruins that have larded our seas: but let them all take counsel together, and let it come to nought; let them decree, and do Thou cancel it; let them gather themselves, and be scattered; let them embattle themselves, and be broken; let them embattle, and be broken, for Thou art with us.
“Then amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, some one may perhaps be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty measures, to sing and celebrate Thy Divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages; whereby this great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the fervent and continual practice of truth and righteousness, and casting far from her the rags of her old vices, may press on hard to that high and happy emulation to be found the soberest, wisest, and most Christian people at that day, when Thou, the Eternal and shortly-expected King, shalt open the clouds to judge the several kingdoms of the world, and distributing national honours and rewards to religious and just commonwealths, shall put an end to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming Thy universal and mild monarchy through heaven and earth; where they undoubtedly, that by their labours, counsels, and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of religion, and their country, shall receive above the inferior orders of the blessed, the regal addition of principalities, legions, and thrones into their glorious titles, and in supereminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, shall clasp inseparable hands with joy and bliss, in over-measure for ever.
“But they contrary, that by the impairing and diminution of the true faith, the distresses and servitude of their country, aspire to high dignity, rule and promotion here, after a shameful end in this life (which God grant them), shall be thrown down eternally into the darkest and deepest gulf of Hell, where, under the despiteful control, the trample and spurn of all the other damned, that in the anguish of their torture, shall have no other ease than to exercise a raving and bestial tyranny over them as their slaves and negroes, they shall remain in that plight for ever, the basest, the lowermost,Page 35
the most dejected, most underfoot, and down-trodden vassals of perdition.”
The five pamphlets in which Milton enunciated his views on Church Government fall into two well-marked chronological divisions. Three—“Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England,” “Of Prelatical Episcopacy,” “Animadversions upon the Remonstrant’s Defence against Smectymnuus”—which appeared almost simultaneously, belong to the middle of 1641, when the question of episcopacy was fiercely agitated. Two—“The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy,” and “The Apology for Smectymnuus,"[1] belong to the early part of 1642, when the bishops had just been excluded from the House of Lords. To be just to Milton we must put ourselves in his position. At the present day forms of church government are usually debated on the ground of expediency, and even those to whom they seem important cannot regard them as they were regarded by Milton’s contemporaries. Many may protest against Episcopacy receiving especial recognition from the State, but no one dreams of abolishing it, or of endowing another form of ecclesiastical administration in its room. It is no longer contended that the national religion should be changed, the contention is that no religion should be national, but that all should be placed on an impartial footing. But Milton at this time desired a theocracy, and nothing doubted that he could produce a pattern agreeable in every respect to the Divine will if only Prelacy could be hurled after Popery. The controversy, therefore, assumed far grander proportions than would be possible in our day, when it is three-fourths a protest against the airs of superiority which the alleged successors of the Apostles think it becoming to assume towards teachers whose education and circumstances approach more closely than their own to the Apostolic model. What would seem exaggerated now was then perfectly in place. Milton, in his own estimation, had a theme for which the cloven tongues of Pentecost were none too fiery, or the tongues of angels too melodious. As bursts of impassioned prose-poetry the finest passages in these writings have never been surpassed, nor ever will be equalled so long as short sentences prevail, and the interminable period must not unfold itself in heights and hollows like the incoming tide of ocean, nor peal forth melodious thunder like a mighty organ. But, considered as argumentative compositions, they are exceedingly weak. No masculine head could be affected by them; but a manly heart may easily imbibe the generous contagion of their noble enthusiastic idealism. No man with a single fibre of ideality or enthusiasm can help confessing that Milton has risen to a transcendent height, and he may imagine that it has been attained by the ladder of reason rather than the pinion of poetry. Such an one may easily find reasons for agreeing with Milton in many inspired outbursts of eloquence simulating the logic that is in fact lacking to them. The following splendid passage, for instance, and there are very many like it, merely proves that a seat in the House of Lords is not essential to the episcopal office, which no one ever denied. It would have considerable force if the question involved the nineteenth century one of the Pope’s temporal sovereignty:—
“Certainly there is no employment more honourable, more worthy to take up a great spirit, more requiring a generous and free nurture, than to be the messenger and herald of heavenly truth from God to man, and by the faithful work of holy doctrine to procreate a number of faithful men, making a kind of creation like to God’s by infusing his spirit and likeness into them, to their salvation, as God did into him; arising to what climate soever he turn him, like that Sun of Righteousness that sent him, with healing in his wings, and new light to break in upon the chill and gloomy hearts of his hearers, raising out of darksome barrenness a delicious and fragrant spring of saving knowledge and good works. Can a man thus employed find himself discontented or dishonoured for want of admittance to have a pragmatical voice at sessions and jail deliveries? or because he may not as a judge sit out the wrangling noise of litigious courts to shrive the purses of unconfessing and unmortified sinners, and not their souls, or be discouraged though men call him not lord, whereas the due performance of his office would gain him, even from lords and princes, the voluntary title of father?”
When it was said of Robespierre, cet homme ira bien loin, car il croit tout ce qu’il dit, it was probably meant that he would attain the chief place in the State. It might have been said of Milton in the literal sense. The idealist was about to apply his principles of church polity to family life, to the horror of many nominal allies. His treatise on Divorce was the next of his publications in chronological order, but is so entwined with his domestic life that it will be best to postpone it until we again take up the thread of his personal history, and to pass on for the present to his next considerable writings, his tracts on education and on the freedom of the press.
Milton’s tract on Education, like so many of his performances, was the fruit of an impulse from without. “Though it be one of the greatest and noblest designs that can be thought on, and for want of which this nation perishes, I had not at this time been induced but by your earnest entreaties and serious conjurements.” The efficient cause thus referred to existed in the person of Samuel Hartlib, philanthropist and polypragmatist, precursor of the Franklins and Rumfords of the succeeding century. The son of a Polish exile of German extraction, Hartlib had settled in England about 1627. He found the country behindhand both economically and socially, and with benign fervour applied himself to its regeneration. Agriculture was his principal hobby, and he effected much towards its improvement in England, rather however by editing the unpublished treatises of Weston and Child than by any direct contributions of his own. Next among the undertakings to which he devoted himself were two of no less moment than the union of British and foreign Protestants, and the reform of English
The next publication of Milton’s is another instance of the dependence of his intellectual workings upon the course of events outside him. We owe the “Areopagitica,” not to the lonely overflowings of his soul, or even to the disinterested observation of public affairs, but to the real jeopardy he had incurred by his neglect to get his books licensed. The Long Parliament had found itself, in 1643, with respect to the Press, very much in the position of Lord Canning’s government in India at the time of the Mutiny. It marks the progress of public opinion that, whereas the Indian Government only ventured to take power to prevent inopportune publication with many apologies, and as a temporary measure, the Parliament assumed it as self-evident that “forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed papers, pamphlets, and books” had no right to exist, and should be nipped in the bud by the appointment of licensers. Twelve London ministers, therefore, were nominated to license books in divinity, which was equivalent to enacting that nothing contrary to Presbyterian orthodoxy should be published in England.[2] Other departments, not forgetting poetry and fiction, were similarly provided for. The ordinance is dated June 14, 1643. Milton had always contemned the licensing regulations previously existing, and within a month his brain was busy with speculations which no reverend licenser could have been expected to confirm with an imprimatur. About August 1st the “Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce” appeared, with no recognition of or from a licenser; and the second edition, published in the following February, equally infringed the Parliamentary ordinance. No notice appears to have been taken until the election of a new Master of the Stationers’ Company, about the middle of 1644. The Company had an interest in the enforcement of the ordinance, which was aimed at piracy as well as sedition and heresy; and whether for this reason, or at the instigation of Milton’s adversaries, they (August 24th) petitioned Parliament to call him to account. The matter was referred to a committee, but more urgent business thrust it out of sight. Milton, nevertheless, had received his marching orders, and on November 24, 1644, appeared “Areopagitica; a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing”: itself unlicensed.
The “Areopagitica” is by far the best known of Milton’s prose writings, being the only one whose topic is not obsolete. It is also composed with more care and art than the others. Elsewhere he seeks to overwhelm, but here to persuade. He could without insincerity profess veneration for the Lords and Commons to whom his discourse is addressed, and he spares no pains to give them a favourable opinion both of his dutifulness and his reasonableness. More than anywhere else he affects the character of a practical man, pressing home arguments addressed to the understanding rather than to the pure reason. He points out sensibly, and for him calmly, that the censorship is a Papal invention, contrary to the precedents of antiquity; that while it cannot prevent the circulation of bad books, it is a grievous hindrance to good ones; that it destroys the sense of independence and responsibility essential to a manly and fruitful literature. We hear less than might have been expected about first principles, of the sacredness of conscience, of the obligation on every man to manifest the truth as it is within him. He does not dispute that the magistrate may suppress opinions esteemed dangerous to society after they have been published; what he maintains is that publication must not be prevented by a board of licensers. He strikes at the censor, not at the Attorney-General. This judicious caution cramped Milton’s eloquence; for while the “Areopagitica” is the best example he has given us of his ability as an advocate, the diction is less magnificent than usual. Yet nothing penned by him in prose is better known than the passage beginning, “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation;” and none of his writings contain so many seminal sentences, pithy embodiments of vital truths. “Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth.” “A dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil doing. For God more esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person than the restraint of ten vicious.” “Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” “A man maybe a heretic in the truth.” Towards the end the argument takes a wider sweep, and Milton, again the poet and the seer, hails with exultation the approach of the time he thinks he discerns when all the Lord’s people shall be prophets. “Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with His protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers working to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching reformation.” He clearly indicates that he regards the licensing ordinance as not really the offspring of an honest though mistaken concern for
Ranging with Milton’s spirit over the “fresh woods and pastures new,” foreshadowed in the closing verse of “Lycidas,” we have left his mortal part in its suburban dwelling in Aldersgate Street, which he seems to have first inhabited shortly before the convocation of the Long Parliament in November, 1640. His visible occupations are study and the instruction of his nephews; by and by he becomes involved in the revolutionary tempest that rages around; and, while living like a pedagogue, is writing like a prophet. He is none the less cherishing lofty projects for epic and drama; and we also learn from Phillips that his society included “some young sparks,” and may assume that he then, as afterwards—
“Disapproved that care, though
wise in show,
That with superfluous burden
loads the day,
And, when God sends a cheerful
hour, refrains.”
There is eloquent testimony of his interest in public affairs in his subscription of four pounds, a large sum in those days, for the relief of the homeless Protestants of Ulster. The progress of events must have filled him with exultation, and when at length civil war broke out in September, 1642, Parliament had no more zealous champion. His zeal, however, did not carry him into the ranks, for which some biographers blame him. But if he thought that he could serve his cause better with a pamphlet than with a musket, surely he had good reason for what he thought. It should seem, moreover, that if Milton detested the enemy’s principles, he respected his pikes and guns:—
WHEN THE ASSAULT WAS INTENDED TO THE CITY [NOVEMBER, 1642.]
Captain, or Colonel, or Knight
in arms,
Whose
chance on these defenceless doors may seize,
If
deed of honour did thee ever please,
Guard
them, and him within protect from harms.
He can requite thee, for he
knows the charms
That
call fame on such gentle acts as these,
And
he can spread thy name o’er lands and seas,
Whatever
clime the sun’s bright circle warms.
Lift not thy spear against
the Muse’s bower:
The
great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The
house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground; and the
repeated air
Of
sad Electra’s poet had the power
To
save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.
If this strain seems deficient in the fierceness befitting a besieged patriot, let it be remembered that Milton’s doors were literally defenceless, being outside the rampart of the City.
We now approach the most curious episode of Milton’s life, and the most irreconcilable with the conventional opinion of him. Up to this time this heroic existence must have seemed dull to many, for it has been a life without love. He has indeed, in his beautiful Sonnet to the Nightingale (about 1632), professed himself a follower of Love: but if so, he has hitherto followed at a most respectful distance. Yet he had not erred, when in the Italian sonnet, so finely rendered in Professor Masson’s biography, he declared the heart his vulnerable point:—
“Young, gentle-natured, and
a simple wooer,
Since
from myself I stand in doubt to fly,
Lady,
to thee my heart’s poor gift would I
Offer
devoutly; and by tokens sure
I know it faithful, fearless,
constant, pure,
In
its conceptions graceful, good, and high.
When
the world roars, and flames the startled sky;
In
its own adamant it rests secure;
As free from chance and malice
ever found,
And
fears and hopes that vulgar minds confuse,
As
it is loyal to each manly thing
And to the sounding lyre and
to the Muse.
Only
in that part is it not so sound
Where
Love hath set in it his cureless sting.”
It is highly probable that the very reaction from party strife turned the young man’s fancies to thoughts of love in the spring of 1643. Escorted, we must fear, by a chorus of mocking cuckoos, Milton, about May 21st, rode into the country on a mysterious errand. It is a ghoulish and ogreish idea, but it really seems as if the elder Milton quartered his progeny upon his debtors, as the ichneumon fly quarters hers upon caterpillars. Milton had, at all events for the last sixteen years, been regularly drawing interest from an Oxfordshire squire, Richard Powell of Forest Hill, who owed him L500, which must have been originally advanced by the elder Milton.
How many weeks? The story seemed a straightforward one until Professor Masson remarked what had before escaped attention. According to Phillips, an inmate of the house at the period—“By that time she had for a month, or thereabouts, led a philosophical life (after having been used to a great house, and much company and joviality), her friends, possibly incited by her own desire, made earnest suit by letter to have her company the remaining part of the summer, which was granted, on condition of her return at the time appointed, Michaelmas or thereabout. Michaelmas being come, and no news of his wife’s return, he sent for her by letter, and receiving no answer sent several other letters, which were also unanswered, so that at last he dispatched down a foot-messenger; but the messenger came back without an answer. He thought it would be dishonourable ever to receive her again after such a repulse, and accordingly wrote two treatises,” &c. Here we are distinctly assured that Mary Milton’s desertion of her husband, about Michaelmas, was the occasion of his treatise on divorce. It follows that Milton’s tract must have been written after Michaelmas. But the copy in the British Museum belonged to the bookseller Thomason, who always inscribed the date of publication on every tract in his collection, when it was known
The grandeur of Milton’s poetry, and the dignity and austerity of his private life, naturally incline us to regard him as a man of iron will, living by rule and reason, and exempt from the sway of passionate impulse. The incident of his marriage, and not this incident alone, refutes this conception of his character; his nature was as lyrical and mobile as a poet’s should be. We have seen “Comus” and “Lycidas” arise at another’s bidding, we shall see a casual remark beget “Paradise Regained.” He never attempts to utter his deepest religious convictions until caught by the contagious enthusiasm of a revolution. If any incident in his life could ever have compelled him to speak or die it must have been the humiliating issue of his matrimonial adventure. To be cast off after a month’s trial like an unsatisfactory servant, to forfeit the hope of sympathy and companionship which had allured him into the married state, to forfeit it, unless the law could be altered, for ever! The feelings of any sensitive man must find some sort of expression in such an emergency. At another period what Milton learned in suffering would no doubt have been taught in song. But pamphlets were then the order of the day, and Milton’s “Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” in its first edition, is as much the outpouring of an overburdened heart as any poem could have been. It bears every mark of a hasty composition, such as may well have been written and printed within the last days of July, following Mary Milton’s departure. It is short. It deals with the most obvious aspects of the question. It is meagre in references and citations; two authors only are somewhat vaguely alleged, Grotius and Beza. It does not contain the least allusion to his domestic circumstances, nor anything unless the thesis itself, that could hinder his wife’s return. Everything betokens that it was composed in the bitterness of wounded feeling upon the incompatibility becoming manifest; but that he had not yet arrived at the point of demanding the application of his general principle to his own special case. That point would be reached when Mary Milton deliberately refused to return, and the chronology of the greatly enlarged second edition, published in the following February, entirely confirms Phillips’s account. In one point only he must be wrong. Mary Milton’s return to her father’s house cannot have been a voluntary concession on Milton’s part, but must have been wrung from him after bitter contentions.
If Milton’s first tract on divorce had not been a mere impromptu, extorted by the misery of finding “an image of earth and phlegm” in her “with whom he looked to be the co-partner of a sweet and gladsome society,” he would certainly have rendered his argument more cogent and elaborate. The tract, in its inspired portions, is a fine impassioned poem, fitter for the Parliament of Love than the Parliament at Westminster. The second edition is far more satisfactory as regards that class of arguments which alone were likely to impress the men of his generation, those derived from the authority of the Scriptures and of divines. In one of his principal points all Protestants and philosophers will confess him to be right, his reference of the matter to Scripture and reason, and repudiation of the mediaeval canon law. It is not here, nevertheless, that Milton is most at home. The strength of his position is his lofty idealism, his magnificent conception of the institution he discusses, and his disdain for whatever degrades it to conventionality or mere expediency. “His ideal of true and perfect marriage,” says Mr. Ernest Myers, “appeared to him so sacred that he could not admit that considerations of expediency might justify the law in maintaining sacred any meaner kind, or at least any kind in which the vital element of spiritual harmony was not.” Here he is impregnable and above criticism, but his handling of the more sublunary departments of the subject must be unsatisfactory to legislators, who have usually deemed his sublime idealism fitter for the societies of the blest than for the imperfect communities of mankind. When his “doctrine and discipline” shall have been sanctioned by lawgivers, we may be sure that the world is already much better, or much worse.
As the girl-wife vanishes from Milton’s household her place is taken by the venerable figure of his father. The aged man had removed with his son Christopher to Reading, probably before August, 1641, when the birth of a child of his name—Christopher’s offspring as it should seem—appears in the Reading register. Christopher was to exemplify the law of reversion to a primitive type. Though not yet a Roman Catholic like his grandfather, he had retrograded into Royalism, without becoming on that account estranged from his elder brother. The surrender of Reading to the Parliamentary forces in April, 1643, involved his “dissettlement,” and the migration of his father to the house of John, with whom he was moreover better in accord in religion and politics. Little external change resulted, “the old gentleman,” says Phillips, “being wholly retired to his rest and devotion, with the least trouble imaginable.” About the same time the household received other additions in the shape of pupils, admitted, Phillips is careful to assure us, by way of favour, as M. Jourdain selected stuffs for his friends. Milton’s pamphlet was perhaps not yet published, or not generally known to be his, or his friends were indifferent to public sentiment. Opinion was unquestionably against Milton, nor can he have profited much by the support, however practical, of a certain Mrs. Attaway, who thought that “she, for her part, would look more into it, for she had an unsanctified husband, that did not walk in the way of Sion, nor speak the language of Canaan,” and by and by actually did what Milton only talked of doing. We have already seen that he had incurred danger of prosecution from the Stationers’ Company, and in July, 1644, he was denounced by name from the pulpit by a divine of much note, Herbert Palmer, author of a book long attributed to Bacon. But, if criticised, he was read. By 1645 his Divorce tract was in the third edition, and he had added three more pamphlets—one to prove that the revered Martin Bucer had agreed with him; two, the “Tetrachordon” and “Colasterion,” directed against his principal opponents, Palmer, Featley, Caryl, Prynne, and an anonymous pamphleteer, who seems to have been a somewhat contemptible person, a serving-man turned attorney, but whose production contains some not unwelcome hints on the personal aspects of Milton’s controversy. “We believe you count no woman to due conversation accessible, as to you, except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, and dispute against the canon law as well as you.” Milton’s later tracts are not specially interesting, except for the reiteration of his fine and bold idealism on the institution of marriage, qualified only by his no less strenuous insistance on the subjection of woman. He allows, however, that “it is no small glory to man that a creature so like him should be made subject to him,” and that “particular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yield; for then a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female.”
Milton’s seminary, meanwhile, was prospering to such a degree as to compel him to take a more commodious house. Was it necessity or enthusiasm that kept him to a task so little compatible with the repose he must have needed even for such intellectual exercise as the “Areopagitica,” much more for the high designs he had not ceased to meditate in verse? Enthusiasm, one would certainly say, only that it is impossible to tell to what extent his father’s income, chiefly derived from money out at interest, may have been impaired by the confusion of the times. Whether he had done rightly or wrongly in taking the duties of a preceptor upon himself, his nephew’s account attests the self-sacrificing zeal with which he discharged them: we groan as we read of hours which should have been devoted to lonely musing or noble composition passed in “increasing as it were by proxy” his knowledge of “Frontinus his Stratagems, with the two egregious poets Lucretius and Manilius.” He might also have been better employed than in dictating “A tractate he thought fit to collect from the ablest of divines who have written on that subject of atheism, Amesius, Wollebius,” &c. Here should be comfort for those who fear with Pattison that Milton’s addiction to politics deprived us of unnumbered “Comuses.” The excerpter of Amesius and Wollebius, as we have so often insisted, needed great stimulus for great achievements. Such stimulus would probably have come superabundantly if he could at this time have had his way, for the most moral of men was bent on assuming a direct antagonism to conventional morality. He had maintained that marriage ought to be dissolved for mere incompatibility; his case must have seemed much stronger now that incompatibility had produced desertion. He was not the man to shrink from acting on his opinion when the fit season seemed to him to have arrived; and in the summer of 1645 he was openly paying his addresses to “a very handsome and witty gentlewoman, one of Dr. Davis’s daughters.” Considering the consequences to the female partner to the contract, it is clear that Miss Davis could not be expected to entertain Milton’s proposals unless her affection for him was very strong indeed. It is equally clear that he cannot be acquitted of selfishness in urging his suit unless he was quite sure of this, and his own heart also was deeply interested. An event was about to occur which seems to prove that these conditions were wanting.
Nearly two years have passed since we have heard of Mary Milton, who has been living with her parents in Oxfordshire. Her position as a nominal wife must have been most uncomfortable, but there is no indication of any effort on her part to alter it, until the Civil War was virtually terminated by the Battle of Naseby, June, 1645. Obstinate malignants had then nothing to expect but fine and forfeiture, and their son-in-law’s Puritanism may have presented itself to the Powells in the light of a merciful dispensation.
“in
Adam wrought
Commiseration;...
As one disarmed, his anger
all he lost,
And thus with peaceful words
upraised her soon.”
Phillips appears to intimate that the penitent’s reception began like Dalila’s and ended like Eve’s. “He might probably at first make some show of aversion and rejection; but partly his own generous nature, more inclinable to reconciliation than to perseverance in anger and revenge, and partly the strong intercession of friends on both sides, soon brought him to an act of oblivion, and a firm league of peace for the future.” With a man of his magnanimous temper, conscious no doubt that he had himself been far from blameless, such a result was to be expected. But it was certainly well that he had made no deeper impression than he seems to have done upon “the handsome and witty gentlewoman.” One would like to know whether she and Mistress Milton ever met, and what they said to and thought of each other. For the present, Mary Milton dwelt with Christopher’s mother-in-law, and about September joined her husband in the more commodious house in the Barbican whither he was migrating at the time of the reconciliation. It stood till 1864, when it was destroyed by a railway company.
Soon after removing to the Barbican, Milton set his Muse’s house in order, by publishing such poems, English and Latin, as he deemed worthy of presentation. It is a remarkable proof both of his habitual cunctativeness and his dependence on the suggestions of others, that he should so long have allowed such pieces to remain uncollected, and should only have collected them at all at the solicitation of the publisher, Humphrey Moseley. The transaction is most honourable to the latter. “It is not any private respect of gain,” he affirms; “for the slightest pamphlet is nowadays more vendible than the works of learnedest men, but it is the love I bear to our own language.... I know not thy palate, how it relishes such dainties, nor how harmonious thy soul is: perhaps more trivial airs may please better.... Let the event guide itself which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing forth into the light
Milton was now to learn what he afterwards taught, that “they also serve who only stand and wait.” He had challenged obloquy in vindication of what he deemed right: the cross actually laid upon him was to fill his house with inimical and uncongenial dependants on his bounty and protection. The overthrow of the Royalist cause was utterly ruinous to the Powells. All went to wreck on the surrender of Oxford in June, 1646. The family estate was only saved from sequestration by a friendly neighbour taking possession of it under cover of his rights as creditor; the family mansion was occupied by the Parliamentarians, and the household stuff sold to the harpies that followed in their train; the “malignant’s” timber went to rebuild the good town of Banbury. It was impossible for the Powells to remain in Oxfordshire, and Milton opened his doors to them as freely as though there had never been any estrangement. Father, mother, several sons and daughters came to dwell in a house already full of pupils, with what inconvenience from want of room and disquiet from clashing opinions may be conjectured. “Those whom the mere necessity of neighbourhood, or something else of a useless kind,” he says to Dati, “has closely conjoined with me, whether by accident or the tie of law, they are the persons who sit daily in my company, weary me, nay, by heaven, almost plague me to death whenever they are jointly in the humour for it.” Milton’s readiness to receive the mother, deemed the chief instigator of her daughter’s “frowardness,” may have been partly due to the situation of the latter, who gave him a daughter on July 29, 1646. In January, 1647, Mr. Powell died, leaving his affairs in dire confusion. Two months afterwards Milton’s father followed him at the age of eighty-four, partly cognisant, we will hope, of the gift he had bestowed on his country in his son. It was probably owing to the consequent improvement in Milton’s circumstances that he about this time gave up his pupils, except his nephews, and removed to a smaller house in High
Impulse to work of another sort was at hand. On January 30, 1649, Charles the First’s head rolled on the scaffold. On February 13th was published a pamphlet from Milton’s hand, which cannot have been begun before the King’s trial, another proof of his feverish impetuosity when possessed by an overmastering idea. The title propounds two theses with very different titles to acceptance. “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates proving that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any who have the power to call to account a tyrant or wicked king, and after due conviction to depose and put him to death: if the ordinary magistrate have neglected or denied to do it.”
He had flung himself into a perilous breach. “Eikon Basilike”—most timely of manifestoes—had been published only four days before the appearance of “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.” Between its literary seduction and the horror generally excited by the King’s execution, the tide of public opinion was turning fast. Milton no doubt felt that no claim upon him could be equal to that which the State had a right to prefer. He accepted the office of “Secretary for Foreign Tongues” to the Committee of Foreign Affairs, a delegation from the Council of State of forty-one members, by which the country was at that time governed. Vane, Whitelocke, and Marten were among the members of the committee. The specified duties of the post were the preparation and translation of despatches from and to foreign governments. These were always in Latin,—the Council, says that sturdy Briton, Edward Phillips, “scorning to carry on their affairs in the wheedling, lisping jargon of the cringing French.” But it must have been understood that Milton’s pen would also be at the service of the Government outside the narrow range of official correspondence. The salary was handsome for the time—L288, equivalent to about L900 of our money. It was an honourable post, on the manner of whose discharge the credit of England
Milton was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues on March 15, 1649. He removed from High Holborn to Spring Gardens to be near the scene of his labours, and was soon afterwards provided with an official residence in Whitehall Palace, a huge intricacy of passages and chambers, of which but a fragment now remains. His first performance was in some measure a false start; for the epistle offering amity to the Senate of Hamburg, clothed in his best Latin, was so unamiably regarded by that body that the English envoy never formally delivered it. An epistle to the Dutch on the murder of the Commonwealth’s ambassador, Dorislaus, by refugee Cavaliers, had a better reception; and Milton was soon engaged in drafting, not merely translating, a State paper designed for the press—observations on the peace concluded by Ormond, the Royalist commander in Ireland, with the confederated Catholics in that country, and on the protest against the execution of Charles I. volunteered by the Presbytery of Belfast. The commentary was published in May, along with the documents. It is a spirited manifesto, cogent in enforcing the necessity of the campaign about to be undertaken by Cromwell. Ireland had at the moment exactly as many factions as provinces; and never, perhaps, since the days of Strongbow had been in a state of such utter confusion. Employed in work like this, Milton did not cease to be “an eagle towering in his pride of place,” but he may seem to have degenerated into the “mousing owl”
The controversy respecting the authorship of the “Eikon Basilike” is a remarkable instance of the degree in which literary judgment may be biassed by political prepossession. In the absence of other testimony one might almost stamp a writer as Royalist or Parliamentarian according as his verdict inclined to Charles I. or Bishop Gauden. In fact, it is no easy matter to balance the respective claims of two entirely different kinds of testimony. The external evidence of Charles’s authorship is worth nothing. It is almost confined to the assertions, forty years after the publication, of a few aged Cavaliers, who were all morally certain that Charles wrote the book, and to whom a fiction supplying the accidental lack of external testimony would have seemed laudable and pious. The only wonder is that such legends are not far more numerous. On the other hand, the internal evidence seems at first sight to make for the king. The style is not dissimilar to that of the reputed royal author; the sentiments are such as would have well become him; the assumed character is supported throughout with consistency; and there are none of the slips which a fabricator might have been thought hardly able to avoid. The supposed personator of the King was unquestionably an unprincipled time-server. Is it not an axiom that a worthy book can only proceed from a worthy mind?
“If
this fail,
The pillared firmament is
rottenness,
And earth’s base built
on stubble!”
Against such considerations we have to set the stubborn facts that Bishop Gauden did actually claim the authorship that he preferred his claim to the very persons who had the strongest interest in exploding it; that he invoked the testimony of those who must have known the truth, and could most easily have crushed the lie; that he convinced not only Clarendon, but Charles’s own children, and received a substantial reward. In the face of these undeniable facts, the numerous circumstances used with skill and ingenuity by Dr. Wordsworth to invalidate his claim, are of little weight. The stronger the apparent objections, the more certain that the proofs in Gauden’s hands must have been overwhelming, and the greater the presumption that he was merely urging what had
According to Selden’s biographer, Cromwell was at first anxious that the “Eikon” should be answered by that consummate jurist, and it was only on his declining the task that it came into Milton’s hands. That he also would have declined it but for his official position may be inferred from his own words: “I take it on me as a work assigned, rather than by me chosen or affected.” His distaste may further be gauged by his tardiness; while “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” had been written in little more than a week, his “Eikonoklastes,” a reply to a book published in February, did not appear until October 6th. His reluctance may be partly explained by his feeling that “to descant on the misfortunes of a person fallen from so high a dignity, who hath also paid his final debt both to nature and his faults, is neither of itself a thing
Milton’s reputation as a political controversialist, however, was not to rest upon “Eikonoklastes,” or to be determined by a merely English public. The Royalists had felt the necessity of appealing to the general verdict of Europe, and had entrusted their cause to the most eminent classical scholar of the age. To us the idea of commissioning a political manifesto from a philologist seems eccentric; but erudition and the erudite were never so highly prized as in the seventeenth century. Men’s minds were still enchained by authority, and the precedents of Agis, or Brutus, or Nehemiah, weighed like dicta of Solomon or Justinian. The man of Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew learning was, therefore, a person of much greater consequence than he is now, and so much the more if he enjoyed a high reputation and wrote good Latin. All these qualifications were combined in Claudius Salmasius, a Frenchman, who had laid scholars under an eternal obligation by his discovery of the Palatine MS. of the Anthology at Heidelberg, and who, having embraced Protestantism from conviction, lived in splendid style at Leyden, where the mere light of his countenance—for he did not teach—was valued by the University at three thousand livres a year. It seems marvellous that a man should become dictator of the republic of letters by editing “Solinus” and “The Augustan History,” however ably; but an achievement like this, not a “Paradise Lost” or a “Werther” was the sic itur ad astra of the time. On the strength of such Salmasius had pronounced ex cathedra on a multiplicity of topics, from episcopacy to hair-powder, and there was no bishop and no perfumer between the Black Sea and the Irish who would not rather have the scholar for him than against him. A man, too, to be named with respect; no mere annotator, but a most sagacious critic; peevish, it might be, but had he not seven grievous disorders at once? One who had shown such independence and integrity in various transactions of his life, that we may be very sure that Charles II.’s hundred Jacobuses, if ever given or even promised, were the very least of the inducements that called him into the field against the executioners of Charles I.
Whether, however, the hundred Jacobuses were forthcoming or not, Salmasius’s undertaking was none the less a commission from Charles II., and the circumstance put him into a false position, and increased the difficulty of his task. Human feeling is not easily reconciled to the execution of a bad magistrate, unless he has also been a bad man. Charles I. was by no means a bad man, only a mistaken one. He had been guilty of many usurpations and much perfidy: but he had honestly believed his usurpations within the limits of his prerogative; and his breaches of faith were committed against insurgents whom he regarded as seamen look upon pirates, or shepherds upon wolves. Salmasius, however, pleading by commission from Charles’s son, can urge no such mitigating plea. He is compelled to maintain the inviolability even of wicked sovereigns, and spends two-thirds of his treatise in supporting a proposition to state which is to refute it in the nineteenth century. In the latter part he is on stronger ground. Charles had unquestionably been tried and condemned by a tribunal destitute of legal authority, and executed contrary to the wish and will of the great majority of his subjects. But this was a theme for an Englishman to handle. Salmasius cannot think himself into it, nor had he sufficient imagination to be inspired by Charles as Burke (who, nevertheless, has borrowed from him) was to be inspired by Marie Antoinette.
His book—entitled “Defensio Regia pro Carolo I.”—appeared in October or November, 1649. On January 8, 1650, it was ordered by the Council of State “that Mr. Milton do prepare something in answer to the Book of Salmasius, and when he hath done it bring it to the Council.” There were many reasons why he should be entrusted with this commission, and only one why he should not; but one which would have seemed conclusive to most men. His sight had long been failing. He had already lost the use of one eye, and was warned that if he imposed this additional strain upon his sight, that of the other would follow. He had seen the greatest astronomer of the age condemned to inactivity and helplessness, and could measure his own by the misery of Galileo. He calmly accepted his duty along with its penalty, without complaint or reluctance. If he could have performed his task in the spirit with which he undertook it, he would have produced a work more sublime than “Paradise Lost.”
This, of course, was not possible. The efficiency of a controversialist in the seventeenth century was almost estimated in the ratio of his scurrility, especially when he wrote Latin. From this point of view Milton had got his opponent at a tremendous disadvantage. With the best will in the world, Salmasius had come short in personal abuse, for, as the initiator of the dispute, he had no personal antagonist. In denouncing the general herd of regicides and parricides he had hurt nobody in particular, while concentrating all Milton’s lightnings on his own unlucky head.
Milton could hear the plaudits, he could not see the wreaths. The total loss of his sight may be dated from March, 1652, a year after the publication of his reply. It was then necessary to provide him with an assistant—that no change should have been made in his position or salary shows either the value attached to his services or the feeling that special consideration was due to one who had voluntarily given his eyes for his country. “The choice lay before me,” he writes, “between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight; in such a case I could not listen to the physician, not if AEsculapius himself had spoken from his sanctuary; I could not but obey that inward monitor, I know not what, that spoke to me from heaven.” In September, 1654, he described the symptoms of his infirmity to his friend, the Greek Philaras, who had flattered him with hopes of cure from the dexterity of the French oculist Thevenot. He tells him how his sight began to fail about ten years before; how in the morning he felt his eyes shrinking from the effort to read anything; how the light of a candle appeared like a spectrum of various colours; how, little by little, darkness crept over the left eye; and objects beheld by the right seemed to waver to and fro; how this was accompanied by a kind of dizziness and heaviness which weighed upon him throughout the afternoon. “Yet the darkness which is perpetually before me seems always nearer to a whitish than to a blackish, and such that, when the eye rolls itself, there is admitted, as through a small chink, a certain little trifle of light.” Elsewhere he says that his eyes are not disfigured:
“Clear
To outward view of blemish
or of spot.”
These symptoms have been pronounced to resemble those of glaucoma. Milton himself, in “Paradise Lost,” hesitates between amaurosis ("drop serene”) and cataract ("suffusion"). Nothing is said of his having been recommended to use glasses or other precautionary contrivances. Cheselden was not yet, and the oculist’s art was probably not well understood. The sufferer himself, while not repining or despairing of medical assistance, evidently has little hope from it. “Whatever ray of hope may be for me from your famous physician, all the same, as in a case quite incurable, I prepare and compose myself accordingly. My darkness hitherto, by the singular kindness of God, amid rest and studies, and the voices and greetings of friends, has been much easier to bear than that deathly one. But if, as is written, ’Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,’ what should prevent me from resting in the belief that eyesight lies not in eyes alone, but enough for all purposes in God’s leading and providence? Verily, while only He looks out for me, and provides for me, as He doth; teaching me and leading me forth with His hand through my whole life, I shall willingly, since it hath seemed good to Him, have given my eyes their long holiday. And to you I now bid farewell, with a mind not less brave and steadfast than if I were Lynceus himself for keenness of sight.” Religion and philosophy, of which no brighter example was ever given, did not, in this sore trial, disdain the support of a manly pride:—
“What
supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to
have lost them overplied
In liberty’s defence,
my noble task,
O! which all Europe rings
from side to side;
This thought might lead me
through the world’s vain mask,
Content though blind, had
I no better guide.”
Noble words, and Milton might well triumph in his victory in the field of intellectual combat. But if his pamphlet could have put Charles the First’s head on again, then, and then only, could it have been of real political service to his party.
Milton’s loss of sight was accompanied by domestic sorrow, though perhaps not felt with special acuteness. Since the birth of his eldest daughter in 1646, his wife had given him three more children—a daughter, born in October, 1648; a son, born in March, 1650, who died shortly afterwards; and another daughter, born in May, 1652. The birth of this child may have been connected with the death of the mother in the same or the following month. The household had apparently been peaceful, but it is unlikely that Mary Milton can have been a companion to her husband, or sympathized with such fraction of his mind as it was given her to understand. She must have become considerably emancipated from the creeds of her girlhood if his later writings could have been anything but detestable to her; and, on the whole, much as one pities her probably wasted life, her disappearance from the scene, if tragic in her ignorance to the last of the destiny that might have been hers, is not unaccompanied with a sense of relief. Great, nevertheless, must have been the blind poet’s embarrassment as the father of three little daughters. Much evil, it is to be feared, had already been sown; and his temperament, his affliction, and his circumstances alike nurtured the evil yet to come. He was then living in Petty France, Westminster, having been obliged, either by the necessities of his health or of the public service, to give up his apartments in Whitehall. The house stood till 1877, a forlorn tenement in these latter years; far different, probably, when the neighbourhood was fashionable and the back windows looked on St. James’s Park. It is associated with other celebrated names, having been owned by Bentham and occupied by Hazlitt.
The controversy with Salmasius had an epilogue, chiefly memorable in so far as it occasioned Milton to indulge in autobiography, and to record his estimate of some of the heroes of the Commonwealth. Among various replies to his “Defensio,” not deserving of notice here, appeared one of especial acrimony, “Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum,” published about August, 1652. It was a prodigy of scurrilous invective, bettering the bad example which Milton had set (but which hundreds in that age had set him) of ridiculing Salmasius’s foibles when he should have been answering his arguments. Having been in Italy, he was taxed with Italian vices: he
Milton’s tract is also interesting for its pen-portraits of some of the worthies of the Commonwealth, and its indications of his own views on the politics of his troubled times. Bradshaw is eulogized with great elegance and equal truth for his manly courage and strict consistency. “Always equal to himself, and like a consul re-elected for another year, so that you would say he not only judged the King from his tribunal, but is judging him all his life.” This was matter of notoriety: one may hope that Milton had equal reason for his praise of Bradshaw’s affability, munificence, and placability. The comparison of Fairfax to the elder Scipio Africanus is more accurate than is always or often the case with historical parallels, and by a dexterous turn, surprising if we have forgotten the scholar in the controversialist, Fairfax’s failure in statesmanship, as Milton deemed it, is not only extenuated, but is made to usher in the more commanding personality of Cromwell. Caesar, says Johnson, had not more elegant flattery than Cromwell received from Milton: nor Augustus, he might have added, encomiums more heartfelt and sincere. Milton was one of the innumerable proofs that a man may be very much of a Republican without being anything of a Liberal. He was as firm a believer in right divine as any Cavalier, save that in his view such right was vested in the worthiest; that is, practically, the strongest. An admirable doctrine for 1653,—how unfit for 1660 remained to be discovered by him. Under its influence he had successively swallowed Pride’s Purge, the execution of Charles I. by a self-constituted tribunal, and Cromwell’s expulsion of the scanty remnant of what had once seemed the more than Roman senate of 1641. There is great reason to believe with Professor Masson that a tract vindicating this violence was actually taken down from his lips. It is impossible to say that he was wrong. Cromwell really was standing between England and anarchy. But Milton might have been expected to manifest some compunction at the disappointment of his own brilliant hopes, and some alarm at the condition of the vessel of the State reduced to her last plank. Authority actually had come into the hands of the kingliest man in England, valiant and prudent, magnanimous and merciful. But Cromwell’s life was precarious, and what after Cromwell? Was the ancient constitution, with its halo of antiquity, its settled methods, and its substantial safeguards, wisely exchanged for one life, already the mark for a thousand bullets? Milton did not reflect, or he kept his reflections to himself. The one point on which he does seem nervous is lest his hero should call himself what he is. The name of Protector even is a stumbling-block, though one can get over it. “You have, by assuming a title likest that of Father of your Country, allowed yourself to be, one cannot say elevated, but rather brought down so many stages from your real sublimity, and as it were forced into rank for the public convenience.” But there must be no question of a higher title:—
“You have, in your far higher majesty, scorned the title of King. And surely with justice: for if in your present greatness you were to be taken with that name which you were able when a private man to reduce and bring to nothing, it would be almost as if, when by the help of the true God you had subdued some idolatrous nation, you were to worship the gods you had yourself overcome.”
This warning, occurring in the midst of a magnificent panegyric, sufficiently vindicates Milton against the charge of servile flattery. The frank advice which he gives Cromwell on questions of policy is less conclusive evidence: for, except on the point of disestablishment, it was such as Cromwell had already given himself. Professor Masson’s excellent summary of it may be further condensed thus—1. Reliance on a council of well-selected associates. 2. Absolute voluntaryism in religion. 3. Legislation not to be meddlesome or over-puritanical. 4. University and scholastic endowments to be made the rewards of approved merit. 5. Entire liberty of publication at the risk of the publisher. 6. Constant inclination towards the generous view of things. The advice of an enthusiastic idealist, Puritan by the accident of his times, but whose true affinities were with Mill and Shelley and Rousseau.
An interesting question arises in connection with Milton’s official duties: had he any real influence on the counsels of Government? or was he a mere secretary? It would be pleasing to conceive of him as Vizier to the only Englishman of the day whose greatness can be compared with his; to imagine him playing Aristotle to Cromwell’s Alexander. We have seen him freely tendering Cromwell what might have been unpalatable advice, and learn from Du Moulin’s lampoon that he was accused of having behaved to the Protector with something of dictatorial rudeness. But it seems impossible to point to any direct influence of his mind in the administration; and his own department of Foreign Affairs was neither one which he was peculiarly qualified to direct, nor one in which he was likely to differ from the ruling powers. “A spirited foreign policy” was then the motto of all the leading men of England. Before Milton’s loss of sight his duties included attendance upon foreign envoys on State occasions, of which he must afterwards have been to a considerable extent relieved. The collection of his official correspondence published in 1676 is less remarkable for the quantity of work than the quality. The letters are not very numerous, but are mostly written on occasions requiring a choice dignity of expression. “The uniformly Miltonic style of the greater letters,” says Professor Masson, “utterly precludes the idea that Milton was only the translator of drafts furnished him.” We seem to see him sitting down to dictate, weighing out the fine gold of his Latin sentences to the stately accompaniment, it may be, of his chamber-organ. War is declared against the Dutch; the Spanish ambassador
“Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered
saints, whose bones
Lie scattered
on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who
kept Thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers
worshipped stocks and stones.
Forget not: in Thy book
record their groans
Who were Thy sheep,
and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody
Piemontese that rolled
Mother with infant
down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the
hills, and they
To Heaven.
Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O’er all
the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from
these may grow
A hundredfold,
who, having learned Thy way,
Early may fly
the Babylonian woe.”
This is what Johnson calls “carving heads upon cherry-stones!”
Milton’s calamity had, of course, required special assistance. He had first had Weckherlin as coadjutor, then Philip Meadows, finally Andrew Marvell. His emoluments had been reduced, in April, 1655, from L288 to L150 a year, but the diminished allowance was made perpetual instead of annual, and seems to have been intended as a retiring pension. He nevertheless continued to work, drawing salary at the rate of L200 a year, and his pen was never more active than during the last months of Oliver’s Protectorate. He continued to serve under Richard, writing eleven letters between September, 1658, and February, 1659. With two letters for the restored Parliament after Richard’s abdication, written in May, 1659, Milton, though his formal supersession was yet to come, virtually bade adieu to the Civil Service:—
“God
doth not need
Either man’s
work, or his own gifts; who best
Bear His mild
yoke, they serve Him best: His state
Is kingly; thousands at His
bidding speed,
And post o’er
land and ocean without rest;
They also serve
who only stand and wait.”
The principal domestic events in Milton’s life, meanwhile, had been his marriage with Katherine, daughter of an unidentified Captain Woodcock, in November, 1656; and the successive loss of her and an infant daughter in February and March, 1658. It is probable that Milton literally never saw his wife, whose worth and the consequent happiness of the fifteen months of their too brief union, are sufficiently attested by his sonnet on the dream in which he fancied her restored to him, with the striking conclusion, “Day brought back my night.” Of his daughters at the time, much may be conjectured, but nothing is known; his nephews, whose education had cost him such anxious care, though not undutiful in their personal relations with him, were sources of uneasiness from their own misadventures, and might have been even more so as sinister omens of the ways in which the rising generation was to walk. The fruits of their bringing up upon the egregious Lucretius and Manilius were apparently “Satyr against Hypocrites,” i.e., Puritans; “Mysteries of Love and Eloquence;” “Sportive Wit or Muses’ Merriment,” which last brought the Council down upon John Phillips as a propagator of immorality. In his nephews Milton might have seen, though we may be sure he did not see, how fatally the austerity of the Commonwealth had alienated those who would soon determine whether the Commonwealth should exist. Unconscious of the “engine at the door,” he could spend happy social hours with attached friends—Andrew Marvell, his assistant in the secretaryship and poetical satellite; his old pupil Cyriack Skinner; Lady Ranelagh; Oldenburg, the Bremen envoy, destined to fame as Secretary of the Royal Society and the correspondent of Spinoza; and a choice band of “enthusiastic young men who accounted it a privilege to read to him, or act as his amanuenses, or hear him talk.” A sonnet inscribed to one of these, Henry Lawrence, gives a pleasing picture of the British Homer in his Horatian hour:—
“Lawrence, of virtuous father
virtuous son,
Now that the fields
are dank, and ways are mire,
Where shall we
sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen
day, what may be won
From the hard season gaining?
Time will run
On smoother, till
Favonius re-inspire
The frozen earth,
and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose,
that neither sowed nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast
us, light and choice,
Of Attic taste,
with wine, whence we may rise
To hear the lute
well touched, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and
Tuscan air?
He who of those
delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them
oft, is not unwise.”
“Thought by thought in heaven-defying
minds
As flake by flake is piled,
till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations
echo round.”
These lines, slightly altered from Shelley, are more applicable to the slow growth and sudden apparition of “Paradise Lost” than to most of those births of genius whose maturity has required a long gestation. In most such instances the work, however obstructed, has not seemed asleep. In Milton’s case the germ slumbered in the soil seventeen or eighteen years before the appearance of a blade, save one of the minutest. After two or three years he ceased, so far as external indications evince, to consciously occupy himself with the idea of “Paradise Lost.” His country might well claim the best part of his energies, but even the intervals of literary leisure were given to Amesius and Wollebius rather than Thamyris and Maeonides. Yet the material of his immortal poem must have gone on accumulating, or inspiration, when it came at last, could not so soon have been transmuted into song. It can hardly be doubted that his cruel affliction was, in truth, the crowning blessing of his life. Remanded thus to solemn meditation, he would gradually rise to the height of his great argument; he would reflect with alarm how little, in comparison with his powers, he had yet done to “sustain the expectation he had not refused:” and he would come little by little to the point when he could unfold his wings upon his own impulse, instead of needing, as always hitherto, the impulse of others. We cannot tell what influence finally launched this high-piled avalanche of thrice-sifted snow. The time is better ascertained. Aubrey refers it to 1658, the last year of Oliver’s Protectorate. As Cromwell’s death virtually closed Milton’s official labours, a Genie, overshadowing land and sea, arose from the shattered vase of the Latin Secretaryship.
Nothing is more interesting than to observe the first gropings of genius in pursuit of its aim. Ample insight, as regards Milton, is afforded by the precious manuscripts given to Trinity College, Cambridge, by Sir Henry Newton Puckering (we know not how he got them), and preserved by the pious care of Charles Mason and Sir Thomas Clarke. By the portion of the MSS. relating to Milton’s drafts of projected poems, which date about 1640-1642, we see that the form of his work was to have been dramatic, and that, in respect of subject, the swift mind was divided between Scripture and British History. No fewer than ninety-nine possible themes—sixty-one Scriptural, and thirty-eight historical or legendary—are jotted down by him. Four of these relate to “Paradise Lost.” Among the most remarkable of the other subjects are “Sodom” (the plan is detailed at considerable length, and, though evidently impracticable, is interesting as a counterpart of “Comus"), “Samson Marrying,” “Ahab,” “John the Baptist,” “Christus Patiens,” “Vortigern,” “Alfred the Great,” “Harold,” “Athirco” (a very striking subject from a Scotch legend), and “Macbeth,” where Duncan’s ghost was to have appeared instead of Banquo’s, and seemingly taken a share in the
If it is true—and the fact seems well attested—that Milton’s poetical vein flowed only from the autumnal equinox to the vernal[5], he cannot well have commenced “Paradise Lost” before the death of Cromwell, or have made very great progress with it ere his conception of his duty called him away to questions of ecclesiastical policy. The one point on which he had irreconcilably differed from Cromwell was that of a State Church; Cromwell, the practical man, perceiving its necessity, and Milton, the idealist, seeing only its want of logic. Unfortunately, this inconsequence existed only for the few thinkers who could in that age rise to the acceptance of Milton’s premises. In his “Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes,” published in February, 1659, he emphatically insists that the civil magistrate has neither the right nor the power to interfere in matters of religion, and concludes: “The defence only of the Church belongs to the magistrate. Had he once learnt not further to concern himself with Church affairs, half his labour might be spared and the commonwealth better tended.” It is to be regretted that he had not entered upon this great subject at an earlier period. The little tract, addressed to the Republican members of Parliament, is designedly homely in style, and the magnificence of Milton’s diction is still further tamed down by the necessity of resorting to dictation. It is nevertheless a powerful piece of argument, in its own sphere of abstract reason unanswerable, and only questionable in that lower sphere of expediency which Milton disdained. In the following August appeared a sequel with the sarcastic title, “Considerations on the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church.” The recipe is simple and efficacious—cease to hire them, and they will cease to be hirelings. Suppress all ecclesiastical endowments, and let the clergyman be supported by free-will offerings. The fact that this would have consigned about half the established clergy to beggary does not trouble him; nor were they likely to be greatly troubled by a proposal so sublimely impracticable. Vested interests can only be over-ridden in times of revolution, and 1659, in outward appearance a year of anarchy, was in truth a year of reaction. For the rest, it is to be remarked that Milton scarcely allowed the ministry to be followed as a profession, and that his views on ecclesiastical organization had come to coincide very nearly with those now held by the Plymouth Brethren.
There is much plausibility in Pattison’s comparison of the men of the Commonwealth disputing about matters of this sort on the eve of the Restoration, to the Greeks of Constantinople contending about the Azymite controversy while the Turks were breaching their walls. In fact, however, this blindness was not confined to one party. Anthony Wood, a Royalist, writing thirty years afterwards, speaks of the Restoration as an event which no man expected in September, 1659.
“Mammon, the least erected
spirit that fell
From heaven, for even in heaven
his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent,
admiring more
The riches of heaven’s
pavement, trodden gold.”
In the field, or on the quarter-deck, George Monk was the stout soldier, acquitting himself of his military duty most punctually. In his political conduct he laid himself out for titles and money, as little of the ambitious usurper as of the self-denying patriot. Such are they for whom more generous spirits, imprudently forward in revolutions, usually find that they have laboured. “Great things,” said Edward Gibbon Wakefield, “are begun by men with great souls and little breeches-pockets, and ended by men with great breeches-pockets and little souls.”
Milton would not have been Milton if he could have acquiesced in an ever so needful Henry Cromwell or Charles Stuart. Never quick to detect the course of public opinion, he was now still further disabled by his blindness. There is great pathos in the thought of the sightless patriot hungering for tidings, “as the Red Sea for ghosts,” and swayed hither and thither by the narratives and comments of passionate or interested reporters. At last something occurred which none could misunderstand or misrepresent. On February 11th, about ten at night, Mr. Samuel Pepys, being in Cheapside, heard “all
One quality of Milton’s pamphlet claims the highest admiration, its audacious courage. On the very eve of the Restoration, and with full though tardy recognition of its probable imminence, he protests as loudly as ever the righteousness of Charles’s execution, and of the perpetual exclusion of his family from the throne. When all was lost, it was no disgrace to quit the field. His pamphlet appeared on March 3, 1660; a second edition, with considerable alterations, was for the time suppressed. On March 28th the publisher was imprisoned for vending treasonable books, among which the pamphlet was no doubt included. Every ensuing day added something to the discomfiture of the Republicans, until on May 1st, “the happiest May-day,” says that ardent Royalist du lendemain, Pepys, “that hath been many a year to England,” Charles II.’s letter was read to a Parliament that none could deny to have been freely chosen, and acclaimed, “without so much as one No.” On May 7th, as is conjectured by the date of an assignment made to Cyriack Skinner as security for a loan, Milton quitted his house, and concealed himself in Bartholomew Close, Smithfield. Charles re-entered his kingdom on May 29th, and the hue and cry after regicides and their abettors began. The King had wisely left the business to Parliament, and, when the circumstances of the times, and the sincere horror in which good men held what they called regicide and sacrilege are duly considered, it must be owned that Parliament acted with humanity and moderation. Still, in the nature of things, proscription on a small scale was inevitable. Besides the regicides proper, twenty persons were to be named for imprisonment and permanent incapacitation for office then, and liable to prosecution and possibly capital punishment hereafter. It seemed almost inevitable that Milton should be included. On June 16th his writings against Charles I. were ordered to be burned by the hangman, which
His condition, in sooth, was one of well-nigh unmitigated misfortune, and his bearing up against it is not more of a proof of stoic fortitude than of innate cheerfulness. His cause lost, his ideals in the dust, his enemies triumphant, his friends dead on the scaffold, or exiled, or imprisoned, his name infamous, his principles execrated, his property seriously impaired by the vicissitudes of the times. He had been deprived of his appointment and salary as Latin Secretary, even before the Restoration: and he was now fleeced of two thousand pounds, invested in some kind of Government security, which was repudiated in spite of powerful intercession. Another “great sum” is said by Phillips to have been lost “by mismanagement and want of good advice,” whether at this precise time is uncertain. The Dean and Chapter of Westminster reclaimed a considerable property which had passed out of their hands in the Civil War. The Serjeant-at-Arms had no doubt made all out of his captive that the Commons would let him. On the whole, Milton appears to have saved about L1500 from the wreck of his fortunes, and to have possessed about L200 income from the interest of this fund and other sources, destined to be yet further reduced within
“I
dark in light exposed
To daily fraud, contempt,
abuse, and wrong,
Within doors, or without,
still as a fool
In power of others, never
in my own.”
He probably never understood how greatly he was himself to blame. He had, in the first place, neglected to give his daughters the education which might have qualified them in some measure to appreciate him. The eldest, Anne, could not even write her name; and it is but a poor excuse to say that, though good-looking, she was deformed, and afflicted with an impediment in her speech. The second, Mary, who resembled her mother, and the third, Deborah, the most like her father, were better taught; but still not to the degree that could make them intelligent doers of the work they had to perform for him. They were so drilled in foreign languages, including Greek and Latin (Hebrew and Syriac are also mentioned, but this is difficult of belief), that they could read aloud to him without any comprehension of the meaning of the text. Sixty years afterwards, passages of Homer and Ovid were found lingering as melodious sounds in the memory of the youngest. Such a task, inexpressibly delightful to affection, must have been intolerably repulsive to dislike or indifference: we can scarcely wonder that two of these children (of the youngest we have a better report), abhorred the father who exacted so much and imparted so little. Yet, before visiting any of the parties with inexorable condemnation, we should consider the strong probability that much of the misery grew out of an antecedent state of things, for which none of them were responsible. The infant minds of two of the daughters, and the two chiefly named as undutiful, had been formed by their mother. Mistress Milton cannot have greatly
It is something in favour of the Milton girls that they were at least not calculating in their undutifulness. Had they reflected, they must have seen that their behaviour was little to their interest. If they brought a stepmother upon themselves, the blame was theirs. Something must certainly be done to keep Milton’s library from the rag-women; and in February, 1663, by the advice of his excellent physician Dr. Paget, he married Elizabeth Minshull, daughter of a yeoman of Wistaston in Cheshire, a distant relation of Dr. Paget’s own, and exactly thirty years younger than Milton. “A genteel person, a peaceful and agreeable woman,” says Aubrey, who knew her, and refutes by anticipation Richardson’s anonymous informant, perhaps Deborah Clarke, who libelled her as “a termagant.” She was pretty, and had golden hair, which one connects pleasantly with the late sunshine she brought into Milton’s life. She sang to his accompaniment on the organ and bass-viol, but is not recorded to have read or written for him; the only direct testimony we have of her care of him is his verbal acknowledgment of her attention to his creature comforts. Yet Aubrey’s memoranda show that she could talk with her husband about Hobbes, and she treasured the letters he had received from distinguished foreigners. At the time of their marriage Milton was living in Jewin Street, Aldersgate, from which he soon afterwards removed to Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, his last residence. He lodged in the interim with Millington, the book auctioneer, a man of superior ability, whom an informant of Richardson’s had often met in the streets leading his inmate by the hand.
It is at this era of Milton’s history that we obtain the fullest details of his daily life, as being nearer to the recollection of those from whom information was sought after his death. His household was larger than might have been expected in his reduced circumstances; he had a man-servant, Greene, and a maid, named Fisher. That true hero-worshipper, Aubrey, tells us that he generally rose at four, and
“The kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation.” We know but little of the history of the greatest works of genius. That something more than usual should be known of “Paradise Lost” must be ascribed to the author’s blindness, and consequent dependence upon amanuenses. When inspiration came upon him any one at hand would be called upon to preserve the precious verses, hence the progress of the poem was known to many, and Phillips can speak of “parcels of ten, twenty, or thirty verses at a time.” We have already heard from him that Milton’s season of inspiration lasted from the autumnal equinox to the vernal: the remainder of the year doubtless contributed much to the matter of his poem, if nothing to the form. His habits of composition appear to be shadowed forth by himself in the induction to the Third Book:—
“Thee, Sion, and the flowery
brooks beneath
That wash thy hallowed feet,
and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit—”
“Then feed on thoughts that
voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the
wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest
covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note.”
This is something more precise than a mere poetical allusion to his blindness, and the inference is strengthened by the anecdote that when “his celestial patroness” “Deigned nightly visitation unimplored,” his daughters were frequently called at night to take down the verses, not one of which the whole world could have replaced. This was as it should be. Grand indeed is the thought of the unequalled strain poured forth when every other voice was hushed in the mighty city, to no meaner accompaniment than the music of the spheres. Respecting the date of composition, we may trust Aubrey’s statement that the poem was commenced in 1658, and when the rapidity of Milton’s composition is considered ("Easy my unpremeditated verse”) it may, notwithstanding the terrible hindrances of the years 1659 and 1660, have been, as Aubrey thinks, completed by 1663. It would still require mature revision, which we know from Ellwood that it had received by the summer of 1665. Internal evidence of the chronology of the poem is very scanty. Professor Masson thinks that the first two books were probably written before the Restoration. In support of this view it may be urged that lines 500-505 of Book i. wear the appearance of an insertion after the Restoration, and that in the invocation to the Third Book Milton may be thought to allude to the dangers his life and liberty had afterwards encountered, figured by the regions of nether darkness which he had traversed as a poet.
“Hail holy Light!...
Thee I revisit now with bolder
wing,
Escaped the Stygian pool,
though long detained
In that obscure sojourn, while
in my flight
Through utter and through
middle darkness borne.”
The only other passage important in this respect is the famous one from the invocation to the Seventh Book, manifestly describing the poet’s condition under the Restoration:—
“Standing on earth, not rapt
above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal
voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though
fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen
and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers
compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone,
while thou
Visitest my slumbers nightly,
or when morn
Purples the east. Still
govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find,
though few.
But drive far off the barbarous
dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers,
the race
Of that wild rout that tore
the Thracian bard.”
This allusion to the licentiousness of the Restoration literature could hardly have been made until its tendencies had been plainly developed. At this time “Paradise Lost” was half finished. ("Half yet remains unsung.”) The remark permits us to conclude that Milton conceived and executed his poem as a whole, going steadily through it, and not leaving gaps to be supplied at higher or lower levels of inspiration. There is no evidence of any resort to older material, except in the case of Satan’s address to the Sun.
The publication of “Paradise Lost” was impeded like the birth of Hercules. In 1665 London was a city of the dying and the dead; in 1666 the better part of it was laid in ashes. One remarkable incident of the calamity was the destruction of the stocks of the booksellers, which had been brought into the vaults of St. Paul’s for safety, and perished with the cathedral. “Paradise Lost” might have easily, like its hero—
“In
the singing smoke
Uplifted spurned the ground.”
but the negotiations for its publication were not complete until April 27, 1667, on which day John Milton, “in consideration of five pounds to him now paid by Samuel Symmons, and other the considerations herein mentioned,” assigned to the said Symmons, “all that book, copy, or manuscript of a poem intituled ‘Paradise Lost,’ or by whatsoever ether title or name the same is or shall be called or distinguished, now lately licensed to be printed.” The other considerations were the payment of the like sum of five pounds upon the entire sale of each of the first three impressions, each impression to consist of thirteen hundred copies. “According to the present value of money,” says Professor Masson, “it was as if Milton had received L17 10s. down, and was to expect L70 in all. That was on the supposition of a sale of 3,900 copies.” He lived to receive ten pounds altogether; and his widow in 1680 parted with all her interest in the copyright for eight pounds, Symmons shortly afterwards reselling it for twenty-five. He is not, therefore, to be enumerated among those publishers who have fattened upon their authors, and when the size of the book and the unfashionableness of the writer are considered, his enterprise may perhaps appear the most remarkable feature of the transaction. As for Milton, we may almost rejoice that he should have reaped no meaner reward than immortality.
It will have been observed that in the contract with Symmons “Paradise Lost” is said to have been “lately licensed to be printed.” The censorship named in “Areopagitica” still prevailed, with the difference that prelates now sat in judgment upon Puritans. The Archbishop gave or refused license through his chaplains, and could not be ignored as Milton had ignored the little Presbyterian Popes; Geneva in his person must repair to Lambeth. Chaplain Tomkyns, who took cognisance of “Paradise Lost,” was fortunately a broad-minded man, disposed to live and let live, though scrupling somewhat when he found “perplexity” and “fear of change” imputed to “monarchs.” His objections were overcome, and on August 20, 1667—three weeks after the death of Cowley, and eight days after Pepys had heard the deceased extolled as the greatest of English poets—John Milton came forth clad as with adamantine mail in the approbation of Thomas Tomkyns. The moment beseemed the event, it was a crisis in English history, when heaven’s “golden scales” for weighing evil against good were hung—
“Betwixt Astrea and the Scorpion sign,”
one weighted with a consuming fleet, the other with a falling minister. The Dutch had just burned the English navy at Chatham; on the other hand, the reign of respectable bigotry was about to pass away with Clarendon. Far less reputable men were to succeed, but men whose laxity of principle at least excluded intolerance. The people were on the move, if not, as Milton would have wished, “a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep,” at least a faint and weary nation creeping slowly—Tomkyns and all—towards an era of liberty and reason when Tomkyns’s imprimatur would be accounted Tomkyns’s impertinence.
The world’s great epics group themselves in two divisions, which may be roughly defined as the natural and the artificial. The spontaneous or self-created epic is a confluence of traditions, reduced to symmetry by the hand of a master. Such are the Iliad, the Odyssey, the great Indian and Persian epics, the Nibelungen Lied. In such instances it may be fairly said that the theme has chosen the poet, rather than the poet the theme. When the epic is a work of reflection, the poet has deliberately selected his subject, and has not, in general, relied so much upon the wealth of pre-existing materials as upon the capabilities of a single circumstance. Such are the epics of Virgil, Camoens, Tasso, Milton; Dante, perhaps, standing alone as the one epic poet (for we cannot rank Ariosto and Spenser in this class) who owes everything but his creed to his own invention. The traditional epic, created by the people and only moulded by the minstrel, is so infinitely the more important for the history of culture, that, since this new field of investigation has become one of paramount interest, the literary epic has been in danger
It is easy to represent “Paradise Lost” as obsolete by pointing out that its demonology and angelology have for us become mere mythology. This criticism is more formidable in appearance than in reality. The vital question for the poet is his own belief, not the belief of his readers. If the Iliad has survived not merely the decay of faith in the Olympian divinities, but the criticism which has pulverized Achilles as a historical personage, “Paradise Lost” need not be much affected by general disbelief in the personality of Satan, and universal disbelief in that of Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. A far more vulnerable point is the failure of the purpose so ostentatiously proclaimed, “To justify the ways of God to men.” This problem was absolutely insoluble on Milton’s data, except by denying the divine foreknowledge, a course not open to him. The conduct of the Deity who allows his adversary to ruin his innocent creature from the purely malignant motive
“That with reiterated crimes
he might
Heap on himself damnation,”
without further interposition than a warning which he foresees will be fruitless, implies a grievous deficiency either in wisdom or in goodness, or at best falsifies the declaration:
“Necessity
and chance
Approach me not, and what
I will is fate.”
The like flaw runs through the entire poem, where Satan alone is resolute and rational. Nothing can exceed the imbecility of the angelic guard to which Man’s defence is entrusted. Uriel, after threatening to drag Satan in chains back to Tartarus, and learning by a celestial portent that he actually has the power to fulfil his threat, considerately draws the fiend’s attention to the circumstance, and advises him to take himself off, which Satan judiciously does, with the intention of returning as soon as convenient. The angels take all possible pains to prevent his gaining an entrance into Paradise, but omit to keep Adam and Eve themselves in sight, notwithstanding the strong hint they have received by finding the intruder
“Squat like a toad, close
at the ear of Eve,
Assaying by his devilish art
to reach
The organs of her fancy, and
with them forge
Illusions as he list, phantasms
and dreams.”
If anything more infatuated can be imagined, it is the simplicity of the All-Wise Himself in entrusting the wardership of the gate of Hell, and consequently the charge of keeping Satan in, to the beings in the universe most interested in letting him out. The sole but sufficient excuse is that these faults are inherent in the subject. If Milton had not thought that he could justify the ways of Jehovah to man he would not have written at all; common sense on the part of the angels would have paralysed the action of the poem; we should, if conscious of our loss, have lamented the irrefragable criticism that should have stifled the magnificent allegory of Sin and Death. Another critical thrust is equally impossible to parry. It is true that the Evil One is the hero of the epic. Attempts have been made to invest Adam with this character. He is, indeed, a great figure to contemplate, and such as might represent the ideal of humanity till summoned to act and suffer. When, indeed, he partakes of the forbidden fruit in disobedience to his Maker, but in compassion to his mate, he does seem for a moment to fulfil the canon which decrees that the hero shall not always be faultless, but always shall be noble. The moment, however, that he begins to wrangle with Eve about their respective shares of blame, he forfeits his estate of heroism more irretrievably than his estate of holiness—a fact of which Milton cannot have been unaware, but he had no liberty to forsake the Scripture narrative. Satan remains, therefore, the only possible hero, and it is one of the inevitable blemishes of the poem that he should disappear almost entirely from the latter books.
These defects, and many more which might be adduced, are abundantly compensated by the poet’s vital relation to the religion of his age. No poet whose fame is co-extensive with the civilised world, except Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever been greatly in advance of his times. Had Milton been so, he might have avoided many faults, but he would not have been a representative poet; nor could Shelley have classed him with Homer and Dante, and above Virgil, as “the third epic poet; that is, the third poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their development.” Hence it is that in the “Adonais,” Shelley calls Milton “the third among the sons of light.”
A clear conception of the universe as Milton’s inner eye beheld it, and of his religious and philosophical opinions in so far as they appear in the poem, is indispensable for a correct understanding of “Paradise Lost.” The best service to be rendered to the reader within such limits as ours is to direct him to Professor Masson’s discussion of Milton’s cosmology in his “Life of Milton,” and also in his edition of the Poetical Works. Generally speaking, it may be said that Milton’s conception of the universe is Ptolemaic, that for him sun and moon and planets revolve around the central earth, rapt by the revolution of the crystal spheres in which, sphere enveloping sphere, they are successively located. But the light which had broken in upon him from the discoveries of Galileo has led him to introduce features not irreconcilable with the solar centre and ethereal infinity of Copernicus; so that “the poet would expect the effective permanence of his work in the imagination of the world, whether Ptolemy or Copernicus should prevail.” So Professor Masson, who finely and justly adds that Milton’s blindness helped him “by having already converted all external space in his own sensations into an infinite of circumambient blackness through which he could flash brilliance at his pleasure.” His inclination as a thinker is evidently towards the Copernican theory, but he saw that the Ptolemaic, however inferior in sublimity, was better adapted to the purpose of a poem requiring a definite theatre of action. For rapturous contemplation of the glory of God in nature, the Copernican system is immeasurably the more stimulating to the spirit, but when made the theatre of an action the universe fatigues with its infinitude—
“Millions have meaning; after
this
Cyphers forget
the integer.”
An infinite sidereal universe would have stultified the noble description how Satan—
“In
the emptier waste, resembling air,
Weighs his spread wings, at
leisure to behold
Far off the empyreal heaven,
extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square
or round,
With opal towers and battlements
adorned
Of living sapphire, once his
native seat;
And fast by, hanging in a
golden chain,
This pendant world, in bigness
as a star
Of smallest magnitude close
by the moon.”
This pendant world, observe, is not the earth, as Addison understood it, but the entire sidereal universe, depicted not as the infinity we now know it to be, but as a definite object, so insulated in the vastness of space as to be perceptible to the distant Fiend as a minute star, and no larger in comparison with the courts of Heaven—themselves not wholly seen—than such a twinkler matched with the full-orbed moon. Such a representation, if it diminishes the grandeur of the universe accessible to sense, exalts that of the supersensual and extramundane regions where the action takes its birth, and where Milton’s gigantic imagination is most perfectly at home.
There is no such compromise between religious creeds in Milton’s mind as he saw good to make between Ptolemy and Copernicus. The matter was, in his estimation, far too serious. Never was there a more unaccountable misstatement than Ruskin’s, that “Paradise Lost” is a poem in which every artifice of invention is consciously employed—not a single fact being conceived as tenable by any living faith. Milton undoubtedly believed most fully in the actual existence of all his chief personages, natural and supernatural, and was sure that, however he might have indulged his imagination in the invention of incidents, he had represented character with the fidelity of a conscientious historian. His religious views, moreover, are such as he could never have thought it right to publish if he had not been intimately convinced of their truth. He has strayed far from the creed of Puritanism. He is an Arian; his Son of God, though an unspeakably exalted being, is dependent, inferior, not self-existent, and could be merged in the Father’s person or obliterated entirely without the least diminution of Almighty perfection. He is, moreover, no longer a Calvinist: Satan and Adam both possess free will, and neither need have fallen. The reader must accept these views, as well as Milton’s conception of the materiality of the spiritual world, if he is to read to good purpose. “If his imagination,” says Pattison, pithily, “is not active enough to assist the poet, he must at least not resist him.”
This is excellent advice as respects the general plan of “Paradise Lost,” the materiality of its spiritual personages, and its system of philosophy and theology. Its poetical beauties can only be resisted where they are not perceived. They have repeated the miracles of Orpheus and Amphion, metamorphosing one most bitterly obnoxious, of whom so late as 1687 a royalist wrote that “his fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff, and his memory will always stink,” into an object of universal veneration. From the first instant of perusal the imagination is led in captivity, and for the first four books at least stroke upon stroke of sublimity follows with such continuous and undeviating regularity that sublimity seems this Creation’s first law, and we feel like pigmies transported to a world of giants. There is nothing forced or affected in this grandeur, no visible effort, no barbaric profusion, everything proceeds with a severe and majestic order, controlled by the strength that called it into being. The similes and other poetical ornaments, though inexpressibly magnificent, seem no more so than the greatness of the general conception demands. Grant that Satan in his fall is not “less than archangel ruined,” and it is no exaggeration but the simplest truth to depict his mien—
“As
when the sun, new risen,
Looks through the horizontal
misty air,
Shorn of his beams; or from
behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous
twilight sheds
On half the nations.”
When such a being voyages through space it is no hyperbole to compare him to a whole fleet, judiciously shown at such distance as to suppress every minute detail that could diminish the grandeur of the image—
“As when far off at sea a
fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial
winds
Close sailing from Bengala,
or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence
merchants bring
Their spicy drugs: they
on the trading flood,
Through the wide Ethiopian
to the Cape,
Ply stemming nightly towards
the pole: so seemed
Far off the flying Fiend.”
These similes, and an infinity of others, are grander than anything in Homer, who would, however, have equalled them with an equal subject. Dante’s treatment is altogether different; the microscopic intensity of perception in which he so far surpasses Homer and Milton affords, in our opinion, no adequate compensation for his inferiority in magnificence. That the theme of “Paradise Lost” should have evoked such grandeur is a sufficient compensation for its incurable flaws and the utter breakdown of its ostensible moral purpose. There is yet another department of the poem where Milton writes as he could have written on nothing else. The elements of his under-world are comparatively simple, fire and darkness, fallen angels now huddled thick as leaves in Vallombrosa; anon,
“A forest huge of spears and thronging helms,”
charming their painful steps over the burning marl by
“The
Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft recorders;”
the dazzling magnificence of Pandemonium; the ineffable welter of Chaos; proudly eminent over all like a tower, the colossal personality of Satan. The description of Paradise and the story of Creation, if making less demand on the poet’s creative power, required greater resources of knowledge, and more consummate skill in combination. Nature must yield up her treasures, whatever of fair and stately the animal and vegetable kingdoms can afford must be brought together, blended in gorgeous masses or marshalled in infinite procession. Here Milton is as profuse as he has hitherto been severe, and with good cause; it is possible to make Hell too repulsive for art, it is not possible to make Eden too enchanting. In his descriptions of the former the effect is produced by a perpetual succession of isolated images of awful majesty; in his Paradise and Creation the universal landscape is bathed in a general atmosphere of lustrous splendour. This portion of his work is accordingly less great in detached passages, but is little inferior in general greatness. No less an authority than Tennyson, indeed, expresses a preference for the “bowery loneliness” of Eden over the “Titan angels” of the “deep-domed Empyrean.” If this only means that Milton’s Eden is finer than his war in heaven, we must concur; but if a wider application be intended, it does seem to us that his Pandemonium exalts him to a greater height above every other poet than his Paradise exalts him above his predecessor, and in some measure, his exemplar, Spenser.
To remain at such an elevation was impossible. Milton compares unfavourably with Homer in this; his epic begins at its zenith, and after a while visibly and continually declines. His genius is unimpaired, but his skill transcends his stuff. The fall of man and its consequences could not by any device be made as interesting as the fall of Satan, of which it is itself but a consequence. It was, moreover, absolutely inevitable that Adam’s fall, the proper catastrophe of the poem, should occur some time before the conclusion, otherwise there would have been no space for the unfolding of the scheme of Redemption, equally essential from the point of view of orthodoxy and of art. The effect is the same as in the case of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” which, having proceeded with matchless vigour up to the flight of the conspirators after Antony’s speech, becomes comparatively tame and languid, and cannot be revived even by such a masterpiece as the contention between Brutus and Cassius. It is to be regretted that Milton’s extreme devotion to the letter of Scripture has not permitted him to enrich his latter books with any corresponding episode. It is not until the very end that he is again truly himself—
“They, looking back, all the
eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their
happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming
brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged
and fiery arms.
Some natural tears they dropped,
but wiped them soon.
The world was all before them,
where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence
their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering
steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary
way.”
Some minor objections may be briefly noticed. The materiality of Milton’s celestial warfare has been censured by every one from the days of Sir Samuel Morland,[6] a splenetic critic, who had incurred Milton’s contempt by his treachery to Cromwell and Thurloe. Warfare, however, there must be: war cannot be made without weapons; and Milton’s only fault is that he has rather exaggerated than minimized the difficulties of his subject. A sense of humour would have spiked his celestial artillery, but a lively perception of the ridiculous is scarcely to be demanded from a Milton. After all, he was borrowing from good poets,[7] whose thought in itself is correct, and even profound; it is only when artillery antedates humanity that the ascription of its invention to the Tempter seems out of place. The metamorphosis of the demons into serpents has been censured as grotesque; but it was imperatively necessary to manifest by some unmistakable outward sign that victory did not after all remain with Satan, and the critics may be challenged to find one more appropriate. The bridge built by Sin and Death is equally essential. Satan’s progeny must not be dismissed without some exploit worthy of their parentage. The one passage where Milton’s taste seems to us entirely at fault is the description of the Paradise of Fools (iii., 481-497), where his scorn of—
“Reliques,
beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons,
bulls,”
has tempted him to chequer the sublime with the ludicrous.
No subject but a Biblical one would have insured Milton universal popularity among his countrymen, for his style is that of an ancient classic transplanted, like Aladdin’s palace set down with all its magnificence in the heart of Africa; and his diction, the delight of the educated, is the despair of the ignorant man. Not that this diction is in any respect affected or pedantic. Milton was the darling poet of our greatest modern master of unadorned Saxon speech, John Bright. But it is freighted with classic allusion—not alone from the ancient classics—and comes to us rich with gathered sweets, like a wind laden with the scent of many flowers. “It is,” says Pattison, “the elaborated outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry—the language of one who lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of past time.” “Words,” the same writer reminds us, “over and above their dictionary signification, connote all the feeling which has gathered round them by reason of their employment through a hundred generations of song.” So it is, every word seems instinct with its own peculiar beauty, and fraught with its own peculiar association, and yet each detail is strictly subordinate to the general effect. No poet of Milton’s rank, probably, has been equally indebted to his predecessors, not only for his vocabulary, but for his thoughts. Reminiscences throng upon him, and he takes all that comes, knowing that he can make it lawfully his own. The comparison of Satan’s shield to the moon, for instance, is borrowed from the similar comparison of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, but what goes in Homer comes out Milton. Homer merely says that the huge and massy shield emitted a lustre like that of the moon in heaven. Milton heightens the resemblance by giving the shield shape, calls in the telescope to endow it with what would seem preternatural dimensions to the naked eye, and enlarges even these by the suggestion of more than the telescope can disclose—
“His
ponderous shield,
Ethereal temper, massy, large,
and round
Behind him cast; the broad
circumference
Hung on his shoulders like
the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan
artist views
At evening, from the top of
Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry
new lands,
Rivers or mountains in her
spotty globe.”
Thus does Milton appropriate the wealth of past literature, secure of being able to recoin it with his own image and superscription. The accumulated learning which might have choked the native fire of a feebler spirit was but nourishment to his. The polished stones and shining jewels of his superb mosaic are often borrowed, but its plan and pattern are his own.
One of the greatest charms of “Paradise Lost” is the incomparable metre, which, after Coleridge and Tennyson have done their utmost, remains without equal in our language for the combination of majesty and music. It is true that this majesty is to a certain extent inherent in the subject, and that the poet who could rival it would scarcely be well advised to exert his power to the full unless his theme also rivalled the magnificence of Milton’s. Milton, on his part, would have been quite content to have written such blank verse as Wordsworth’s “Yew Trees,” or as the exordium of “Alastor,” or as most of Coleridge’s idylls, had his subject been less than epical. The organ-like solemnity of his verbal music is obtained partly by extreme attention to variety of pause, but chiefly, as Wordsworth told Klopstock, and as Mr. Addington Symonds points out more at length, by the period, not the individual line, being made the metrical unit, “so that each line in a period shall carry its proper burden of sound, but the burden shall be differently distributed in the successive verses.” Hence lines which taken singly seem almost unmetrical, in combination with their associates appear indispensable parts of the general harmony. Mr. Symonds gives some striking instances. Milton’s versification is that of a learned poet, profound in thought and burdened with the further care of ordering his thoughts: it is therefore only suited to sublimity of a solemn or meditative cast, and most unsuitable to render the unstudied sublimity of Homer. Perhaps no passage is better adapted to display its dignity, complicated artifice, perpetual retarding movement, concerted harmony, and grave but ravishing sweetness than the description of the coming on of Night in the Fourth Book:—
“Now came still evening on,
and twilight grey
Had in her sober livery all
things clad;
Silence accompanied; for beast
and bird,
They to their grassy couch,
these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful
nightingale;
She all night long her amorous
descant sung;
Silence was pleased:
now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus
that led
The stary host rose brightest,
till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty,
at length
Apparent queen unveiled her
peerless light,
And o’er the dark her
silver mantle threw.”
How exquisite the indication of the pauseless continuity of the nightingale’s song by the transition from short sentences, cut up by commas and semicolons, to the “linked sweetness long drawn out” of “She all night long her amorous descant sung”! The poem is full of similar felicities, none perhaps more noteworthy than the sequence of monosyllables that paints the enormous bulk of the prostrate Satan:—
“So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay.”
It is a most interesting subject for inquiry from what sources, other than the Scriptures, Milton drew aid in the composition of “Paradise Lost.” The most striking counterpart is Calderon, to whom he owed as little as Calderon can have owed to him. “El Magico Prodigioso,” already cited as affording a remarkable parallel to “Comus,” though performed in 1637, was not printed until 1663, when “Paradise Lost” was already completed.[8] The two great religious poets have naturally conceived the Evil One much in the same manner, and Calderon’s Lucifer,
“Like the red outline of beginning Adam,”
might well have passed as the original draft of Milton’s Satan:—
“In
myself I am
A world of happiness and misery;
This I have lost, and that
I must lament
For ever. In my attributes
I stood
So high and so heroically
great,
In lineage so supreme, and
with a genius
Which penetrated with a glance
the world
Beneath my feet, that, won
by my high merit,
A King—whom I may
call the King of Kings,
Because all others tremble
in their pride
Before the terrors of his
countenance—
In his high palace, roofed
with brightest gems
Of living light—call
them the stars of heaven—
Named me his counsellor.
But the high praise
Stung me with pride and envy,
and I rose
In mighty competition, to
ascend
His seat, and place my foot
triumphantly
Upon his subject thrones.
Chastised, I know
The depth to which ambition
falls. For mad
Was the attempt; and yet more
mad were now
Repentance of the irrevocable
deed.
Therefore I chose this ruin
with the glory
Of not to be subdued, before
the shame
Of reconciling me with him
who reigns
By coward cession. Nor
was I alone,
Nor am I now, nor shall I
be, alone.
And there was hope, and there
may still be hope;
For many suffrages among his
vassals
Hailed me their lord and king,
and many still
Are mine, and many more perchance
shall be.”
A striking proof that resemblance does not necessarily imply plagiarism. Milton’s affinity to Calderon has been overlooked by his commentators; but four luminaries have been named from which he is alleged to have drawn, however sparingly, in his golden urn—Caedmon, the Adamus Exul of Grotius, the Adamo of the Italian dramatist Andreini, and the Lucifer of the Dutch poet Vondel. Caedmon, first printed in 1655, it is but barely possible that he should have known, and ere he could have known him the conception of “Paradise Lost” was firmly implanted in his mind. External evidence proves his acquaintance with Grotius, internal evidence his knowledge of Andreini: and small as are his direct obligations to the Italian drama, we can easily believe with Hayley that “his fancy caught fire from that spirited, though irregular and fantastic
“And rather the first prince
at an inferior court
Than in the blessed light
the second or still less.”
Mr. Gosse followed up the inquiry, which eventually became the subject of a monograph by Mr. George Edmundson ("Milton and Vondel,” 1885). That Milton should have had, as he must have had, Vondel’s works translated aloud to him, is a most interesting proof, alike of his ardour in the enrichment of his own mind, and of his esteem for the Dutch poet. Although, however, his obligations to predecessors are not to be overlooked, they are in general only for the most obvious ideas and expressions, lying right in the path of any poet treating the subject. Je l’aurais bien pris sans toi. When, as in the instance above quoted, he borrows anything more recondite, he so exalts and transforms it that it passes from the original author to him like an angel the former has entertained unawares. This may not entirely apply to the Italian reformer, Bernardino Ochino, to whom, rather than to Tasso, Milton seems indebted for the conception of his diabolical council. Ochino, in many respects a kindred spirit to Milton, must have been well known to him as the first who had dared to ventilate the perilous question of the lawfulness of polygamy. In Ochino’s “Divine Tragedy,” which he may have read either in the Latin original or in the nervous translation of Bishop Poynet, Milton would find a hint for his infernal senate. “The introduction to the first dialogue,” says Ochino’s biographer Benrath, “is highly dramatic, and reminds us of Job and Faust.” Ochino’s arch-fiend, like Milton’s, announces a masterstroke of genius. “God sent His Son into the world, and I will send my son.” Antichrist accordingly comes to light in the shape of the Pope, and works infinite havoc until Henry VIII. is divinely commissioned for his discomfiture. It is a token, not only of Milton’s, but of Vondel’s, indebtedness, that, with Ochino as with them, Beelzebub holds the second place in the council, and even admonishes his leader. “I fear me,” he remarks, “lest when Antichrist shall die, and come down hither to hell, that as he passeth us in wickedness, so he will be above us in dignity.” Prescience worthy of him who
“In
his rising seemed
A pillar of state; deep on
his front engraven
Deliberation sat, and public
care;
And princely counsel in his
face yet shone.”
Milton’s borrowings, nevertheless, nowise impair his greatness. The obligation is rather theirs, of whose stores he has condescended to avail himself. He may be compared to his native country, which, fertile originally in little but enterprise, has made the riches of the earth her own. He has given her a national epic, inferior to no other, and unlike most others, founded on no merely local circumstance, but such as must find access to every nation acquainted with the most widely-circulated Book in the world. He has further enriched his native literature with an imperishable monument of majestic diction, an example potent to counteract that wasting agency of familiar usage by which language is reduced to vulgarity, as sea-water wears cliffs to shingle. He has reconciled, as no other poet has ever done, the Hellenic spirit with the Hebraic, the Bible with the Renaissance. And, finally, as we began by saying, his poem is the mighty bridge—
“Bound with Gorgonian rigour not to move,”
across which the spirit of ancient poetry has travelled to modern times, and by which the continuity of great English literature has remained unbroken.
In recording the publication of “Paradise Lost” in 1667, we have passed over the interval of Milton’s life immediately subsequent to the completion of the poem in 1663. The first incident of any importance is his migration to Chalfont St. Giles, near Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, about July, 1665, to escape the plague then devastating London. Ell wood, whose family lived in the neighbourhood of Chalfont, had at his request taken for him “a pretty box” in that village; and we are, says Professor Masson, “to imagine Milton’s house in Artillery Walk shuttered up, and a coach and a large waggon brought to the door, and the blind man helped in, and the wife and the three daughters following, with a servant to look after the books and other things they have taken with them, and the whole party driven away towards Giles-Chalfont.” According to the same authority, Chalfont well deserves the name of Sleepy Hollow, lying at the bottom of a leafy dell. Milton’s cottage, alone of his residences, still exists, though divided into two tenements. It is a two-storey dwelling, with a garden, is built of brick, with wooden beams, musters nine rooms—though a question arises whether some of them ought not rather to be described as closets; the porch in which Milton may have breathed the summer air is gone, but the parlour retains the latticed casement at which he sat, though through it he could not see. His infirmity rendered the confined situation less of a drawback, and there are abundance of pleasant lanes, along which he could be conducted in his sightless strolls:—
“As one who long in populous
city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers
annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer’s
morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages
and farms
Adjoined, from each new thing
conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded
grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight,
each rural sound.”
Milton was probably no stranger to the neighbourhood, having lived within thirteen miles of it when he dwelt at Horton. Ellwood could not welcome him on his arrival, being in prison on account of an affray at what should have been the paragon of decorous solemnities—a Quaker funeral. When released, about the end of August or the beginning of September, he waited upon Milton, who, “after some discourses, called for a manuscript of his; which he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me and read it at my leisure. When I set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled ‘Paradise Lost.’” Professor Masson justly remarks that Milton would not have trusted the worthy Quaker adolescent with the only copy of his epic; we may be sure, therefore, that other copies existed, and that the poem was at this date virtually completed and ready for press. When the manuscript was returned, Ellwood, after “modestly, but freely, imparting his judgment,” observed, “Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found? He made no answer, but sat some time in a muse; then brake off that discourse, and fell on another subject.” The plague was then at its height, and did not abate sufficiently for Milton to return to town with safety until about February in the following year, leaving, it has been asserted, a record of himself at Chalfont in the shape of a sonnet on the pestilence regarded as a judgment for the sins of the King, written with a diamond on a window-pane—as if the blind poet could write even with a pen! The verses, nevertheless, may not impossibly be genuine: they are almost too Miltonic for an imitator between 1665 and 1738, when they were first published.
The public calamity of 1666 affected Milton more nearly than that of 1665. The Great Fire came within a quarter of a mile of his house, and though he happily escaped the fate of Shirley, and did not make one of the helpless crowd of the homeless and destitute, his means were seriously abridged by the destruction of the house in Bread Street where he had first seen the light, and which he had retained through all the vicissitudes of his fortunes. He could not, probably, have published “Paradise Lost” without the co-operation of Samuel Symmons. Symmons’s endeavours to push the sale of the book make the bibliographical history of the first edition unusually interesting. There were at least nine different issues, as fresh batches were successively bound up, with frequent alterations of title-page as reasonable cause became apparent to the strategic Symmons. First Milton’s
“John Milton, in addition to other most elegant writings of his, both in English and Latin, has recently published ‘Paradise Lost,’ a poem which, whether we regard the sublimity of the subject, or the combined pleasantness and majesty of the style, or the sublimity of the invention, or the beauty of its images and descriptions of nature, will, if I mistake not, receive the name of truly heroic, inasmuch as by the suffrages of many not unqualified to judge, it is reputed to have reached the perfection of this kind of poetry.”
The “many not unqualified” undoubtedly included the first critic of the age, Dryden. Lord Buckhurst is also named as an admirer—pleasing anecdotes respecting the practical expression of his admiration, and of Sir John Denham’s, seem apocryphal.
While “Paradise Lost” was thus slowly upbearing its author to the highest heaven of fame, Milton was achieving other titles to renown, one of which he deemed nothing inferior. We shall remember Ellwood’s hint that he might find something to say about Paradise Found, and the “muse” into which it cast him. When, says the Quaker, he waited upon Milton after the latter’s return to London, Milton “showed me his second poem, called ‘Paradise Regained,’ and in a pleasant tone said to me, ’This is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont; which before I had not thought of.’” Ellwood does not tell us the date of this visit, and Phillips may be right in believing that “Paradise Regained” was entirely composed after the publication of “Paradise Lost”; but it seems unlikely that the conception should have slumbered so long in Milton’s mind, and the most probable date is between Michaelmas, 1665, and Lady-day, 1666. Phillips records that Milton could never hear with
“Paradise Regained” is in one point of view the confutation of a celebrated but eccentric definition of poetry as a “criticism of life.” If this were true it would be a greater work than “Paradise Lost,” which must be violently strained to admit a definition not wholly inapplicable to the minor poem. If, again, Wordsworth and Coleridge are right in pronouncing “Paradise Regained” the most perfect of Milton’s works in point of execution, the proof is afforded that perfect execution is not the chief test of poetic excellence. Whatever these great men may have propounded in theory, it cannot be believed that they would not have rather written the first two books of “Paradise Lost” than ten such poems as “Paradise Regained,” and yet they affirm that Milton’s power is even more advantageously exhibited in the latter work than in the other. There can be no solution except that greatness in poetry depends mainly upon the subject, and that the subject of “Paradise Lost” is infinitely the finer. Perhaps this should not be. Perhaps to “the visual nerve purged with euphrasy and rue” the spectacle of the human soul successfully resisting supernatural temptation would be more impressive than the material sublimities of “Paradise Lost,” but ordinary vision sees otherwise. Satan “floating many a rood” on the sulphurous lake, or “up to the fiery concave towering high,” or confronting Death at the gate of Hell, kindles the imagination with quite other fire than the sage circumspection and the meek fortitude of the Son of God. “The reason,” says Blake, “why Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” The passages in “Paradise Regained” which most nearly approach the magnificence of “Paradise Lost,” are those least closely connected with the proper action of the poem, the episodes with which Milton’s consummate art and opulent fancy have veiled the bareness of his subject. The description of the Parthian military expedition; the picture, equally gorgeous and accurate, of the Roman Empire at the zenith of its greatness; the condensation into a single speech of all that
“Though
I have lost
Much lustre of my native brightness,
lost
To be beloved of God, I have
not lost
To love, at least contemplate
and admire
What I see excellent in good
or fair,
Or virtuous; I should so have
lost all sense.”
These words, though spoken with a deceitful intention, express a truth. Milton’s Satan is a long way from Goethe’s Mephistopheles. Profound, too, is the pathos of—
“I would be at the worst,
worst is my best,
My harbour, and my ultimate
repose.”
The general sobriety of the style of “Paradise Regained” is a fertile theme for the critics. It is, indeed, carried to the verge of baldness; frigidity, used by Pattison, is too strong a word. This does not seem to be any token of a decay of poetical power. As writers advance in life their characteristics usually grow upon them, and develop into mannerisms. In “Paradise Regained,” and yet more markedly in “Samson Agonistes,” Milton seems to have prided himself on showing how independent he could be of the ordinary poetical stock-in-trade. Except in his splendid episodical descriptions he seeks to impress by the massy substance of his verse. It is a great proof of the essentially poetical quality of his mind that though he thus often becomes jejune, he is never prosaic. He is ever unmistakably the poet, even when his beauties are rather those of the orator or the moralist. The following sound remark, for instance, would not have been poetry in Pope; it is poetry in Milton:—
“Who
reads
Incessantly, and to his reading
brings not
A spirit and judgment equal
or superior
(And what he brings what need
he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still
remains?
Deep versed in books and shallow
in himself.”
Perhaps, too, the sparse flowers of pure poetry are more exquisite from their contrast with the general austerity:—
“The field, all iron, cast a gleaming brown.”
“Morning
fair
Came forth with pilgrim steps
in amice gray.”
Poetic magic these, and Milton is still Milton.
“I have lately read his Samson, which has more of the antique spirit than any production of any other modern poet. He is very great.” Thus Goethe to Eckermann, in his old age. The period of life is noticeable, for “Samson Agonistes” is an old man’s poem as respects author and reader alike. There is much to repel, little to attract a young reader; no wonder that Macaulay, fresh from college, put it so far below “Comus,” to which the more mature taste is disposed to equal it. It is related to the earlier work as sculpture is to painting, but sculpture of the severest school, all sinewy strength; studious, above all, of impressive truth. “Beyond these an ancient fisherman and a rock are fashioned, a rugged rock, whereon with might and main the old man drags a great net from his cast, as one that labours stoutly. Thou wouldest say that he is fishing with all the might of his limbs, so big the sinews swell all about his neck, grey-haired though he is, but his strength is as the strength of youth."[9] Behold here the Milton of “Samson Agonistes,” a work whose beauty is of metal rather than of marble, hard, bright, and receptive of an ineffaceable die. The great fault is the frequent harshness of the style, principally in the choruses, where some strophes are almost uncouth. In the blank verse speeches perfect grace is often united to perfect dignity: as in the farewell of Dalila:—
“Fame if not double-faced
is double-mouthed,
And with contrary blast proclaims
most deeds;
On both his wings, one black,
the other white,
Bears greatest names in his
wild aery flights.
My name perhaps among the
circumcised,
In Dan, in Judah, and the
bordering tribes,
To all posterity may stand
defamed,
With malediction mentioned,
and the blot
Of falsehood most unconjugal
traduced.
But in my country where I
most desire,
In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and
in Gath,
I shall be named among the
famousest
Of women, sung at solemn festivals,
Living and dead recorded,
who to save
Her country from a fierce
destroyer, chose
Above the faith of wedlock-bands;
my tomb
With odours visited and annual
flowers.”
The scheme of “Samson Agonistes” is that of the Greek drama, the only one appropriate to an action of such extreme simplicity, admitting so few personages, and these only as foils to the hero. It is, but for its Miltonisms of style and autobiographic and political allusion, just such a drama as Sophocles or Euripides would have written on the subject, and has all that depth of patriotic and religious sentiment which made the Greek drama so inexpressibly significant to Greeks. Consummate art is shown in the invention of the Philistine giant, Harapha, who not only enriches the meagre action, and brings out strong features in the character of Samson, but also prepares the reader for the catastrophe. We must say reader, for though the drama might conceivably be acted with effect
In one point of view, however, “Samson Agonistes” deserves to be esteemed a national poem, pregnant with a deeper allusiveness than has always been recognized. Samson’s impersonation of the author himself can escape no one. Old, blind, captive, helpless, mocked, decried, miserable in the failure of all his ideals, upheld only by faith and his own unconquerable spirit, Milton is the counterpart of his hero. Particular references to the circumstances of his life are not wanting: his bitter self-condemnation for having chosen his first wife in the camp of the enemy, and his surprise that near the close of an austere life he should be afflicted by the malady appointed to chastise intemperance. But, as in the Hebrew prophets Israel sometimes denotes a person, sometimes a nation, Samson seems no less the representative of the English people in the age of Charles the Second. His heaviest burden is his remorse, a remorse which could not weigh on Milton:—
“I
do acknowledge and confess
That I this honour, I this
pomp have brought
To Dagon, and advanced his
praises high
Among the heathen round; to
God have brought
Dishonour, obloquy, and oped
the mouths
Of idolists and atheists;
have brought scandal
To Israel, diffidence of God,
and doubt
In feeble hearts, propense
enough before
To waver, to fall off, and
join with idols;
Which is my chief affliction,
shame, and sorrow,
The anguish of my soul, that
suffers not
My eye to harbour sleep, or
thoughts to rest.”
Milton might reproach himself for having taken a Philistine wife, but not with having suffered her to shear him. But the same could not be said of the English nation, which had in his view most foully apostatized from its pure creed, and most perfidiously betrayed the high commission it had received from Heaven. “This extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed, to fall back, or rather to creep back, so poorly as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship! To be ourselves the slanderers of our own just and religious deeds! To verify all the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies, who will now think they wisely discerned and justly censured us and all our actions as rash, rebellious, hypocritical, and impious!” These things, which Milton refused to contemplate as possible when he wrote his “Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth,” had actually come to pass. The English nation is to him the enslaved and erring Samson—a Samson, however, yet to burst his bonds, and bring down ruin upon Philistia. “Samson Agonistes” is thus a prophetic drama, the English counterpart of the world-drama of “Prometheus Bound.”
Goethe says that our final impression of any one is derived from the last circumstances in which we have beheld him. Let us, therefore, endeavour to behold Milton as he appeared about the time of the publication of his last poems, to which period of his life the descriptions we possess seem to apply. Richardson heard of his sitting habitually “in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather to enjoy the fresh air”—a suggestive picture. What thoughts must have been travelling through his mind, undisturbed by external things! How many of the passers knew that they flitted past the greatest glory of the age of Newton, Locke, and Wren? For one who would reverence the author of “Paradise Lost,” there were probably twenty who would have been ready with a curse for the apologist of the killing of the King. In-doors he was seen by Dr. Wright, in Richardson’s time an aged clergyman in Dorsetshire, who found him up one pair of stairs, in a room hung with rusty green “sitting in an elbow chair, black clothes, and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones.” Gout was the enemy of Milton’s latter days; we have seen that he had begun to suffer from it before he wrote “Samson Agonistes.” Without it, he said, he could find blindness tolerable. Yet even in the fit he would be cheerful, and would sing. It is grievous to write that, about 1670, the departure of his daughters promoted the comfort of his household. They were sent out to learn embroidery as a means of future support—a proper step in itself, and one which would appear to have entailed considerable expense upon Milton. But they might perfectly well have remained inmates of the family, and the inference is that domestic
“To the dead bard your fame
a little owes,
For Milton did the wealthy
mine disclose,
And rudely cast what you could
well dispose.
He roughly drew, on an old-fashioned
ground,
A chaos, for no perfect world
was found,
Till through the heap your
mighty genius shined;
He was the golden ore, which
you refined.”
These later years also produced several little publications of Milton’s own, mostly of manuscripts long lying by him, now slightly revised and fitted for the press. Such were his miniature Latin grammar, published in 1669; and his “Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio; or The Method of Ramus,” 1672. The first is insignificant; and the second even Professor Masson pronounces, “as a digest of logic, disorderly
A more important work, though scarcely worthy of Milton’s industry, was his “History of Britain” (1670). This was a comparatively early labour, four of the six books having been written before he entered upon the Latin Secretaryship, and two under the Commonwealth. From its own point of view, this is a meritorious performance, making no pretensions to the character of a philosophical history, but a clear, easy narrative, sometimes interrupted by sententious disquisition, of transactions down to the Conquest. Like Grote, though not precisely for the same reason, Milton hands down picturesque legendary matter as he finds it, and it is to those who would see English history in its romantic aspect that, in these days of exact research, his work is chiefly to be recommended. It is also memorable for what he never saw himself, the engraved portrait, after Faithorne’s crayon sketch.
“No one,” says Professor Masson, “can desire a more impressive and authentic portrait of Milton in his later life. The face is such as has been given to no other human being; it was and is uniquely Milton’s. Underneath the broad forehead and arched temples there are the great rings of eye-socket, with the blind, unblemished eyes in them, drawn straight upon you by your voice, and speculating who and what you are; there is a severe composure in the beautiful oval of the whole countenance, disturbed only by the singular pouting of the rich mouth; and the entire expression is that of English intrepidity mixed with unutterable sorrow.”
Milton’s care to set his house in order extended
The “Treatise on Christian Doctrine” is by far the most remarkable of all Milton’s later prose publications, and would have exerted a great influence on opinion if it had appeared when the author designed. Milton’s name would have been a tower of strength to the liberal eighteenth-century clergy inside and outside the Establishment. It should indeed have been sufficiently manifest that “Paradise Lost” could not have been written by a Trinitarian or a Calvinist; but theological partisanship is even slower than secular partisanship to see what it does not choose to see; and Milton’s Arianism was not generally admitted until it was here avouched under his own hand. The general principle of the book is undoubting reliance on the authority of Scripture, with which such an acquaintance is manifested as could only have been gained by years of intense study. It is true that the doctrine of the inward
“It is with a friendly and benignant feeling towards mankind that I give as wide a circulation as possible to what I esteem my best and richest possession.... And whereas the greater part of those who have written most largely on these subjects have been wont to fill whole pages with explanations of their own opinions, thrusting into the margin the texts in support of their doctrines, I have chosen, on the contrary, to fill my pages even to redundance with quotations from Scripture, so that as little space as possible might be left for my own words, even when they arise from the context of revelation itself.”
There is consequently little scope for eloquence in a treatise consisting to so large an extent of quotations; but it is pervaded by a moral sublimity, more easily felt than expressed. Particular opinions will be diversely judged; but if anything could increase our reverence for Milton it would be that his last years should have been devoted to a labour so manifestly inspired by disinterested benevolence and hazardous love of truth.
His life’s work was now finished, and finished with entire success as far as depended upon his own will and power. He had left nothing unwritten, nothing undone, nor was he ignorant what manner of monument he had raised for himself, It was only the condition of the State that afflicted him, and this, looking forward, he saw in more gloomy colours than it appears to us who look back. Had he attained his father’s age his apprehensions would have been dispelled by the Revolution: but he had evidently for some time past been older in constitution
* * * * *
Milton’s resources had been greatly impaired in his latter years by losses, and the expense of providing for his daughters. He nevertheless left, exclusive of household goods, about L900, which, by a nuncupative will made in July, 1674, he had wholly bequeathed to his wife. His daughters, he told his brother Christopher (now a Roman Catholic, and on the road to become one of James the Second’s judges, but always on friendly terms with John), had been undutiful, and he thought that he had done enough for them. They naturally thought otherwise, and threatened litigation. The interrogatories administered on this occasion afford the best clue to the condition of Milton’s affairs and household. At length the dispute was compromised, the nuncupative will, a kind of document always regarded with suspicion, was given up, and the widow received two-thirds of the estate instead of the whole, probably the fairest settlement that could have been arrived at. After residing some years in London she retired to Nantwich in her native county, where divers glimpses reveal her as leading the decent existence of a poor but comfortable gentlewoman as late as August or September, 1727. The inventory of her effects, amounting to L38 8s. 4d., is preserved, and includes: “Mr. Milton’s pictures and coat of arms, valued at ten guineas;” and “two Books of Paradise,” valued at ten shillings. Of the daughters, Anne married “a master-builder,” and died in childbirth some time before 1678; Mary was dead when Phillips wrote in 1694; and Deborah survived until August 24, 1727, dying within a few days of her stepmother. She had married Abraham Clarke, a weaver and mercer in Dublin, who took refuge in England during the Irish troubles under James the Second, and carried on his business in Spitalfields. She had several children by him, one of whom lived to receive, in 1750, the proceeds of a theatrical benefit promoted by Bishop Newton and Samuel Johnson. Deborah herself was brought into notice by Addison, and was visited by Professor Ward of Gresham College, who found her “bearing the inconveniences of a low fortune with decency and prudence.” Her last days were made comfortable by the generosity of Princess Caroline and others: it is more pleasant still to know that her affection for her father had revived. When shown Faithorne’s crayon portrait (not the one engraved in Milton’s lifetime, but one exceedingly like it) she exclaimed, “in a transport, ’’Tis my dear father, I see him, ‘tis him!’ and then she put her hands to several parts of her face, ’’Tis the very man, here! here!’”
* * * * *
Milton’s character is one of the things which “securus judicat orbis terrarum.” On one point only there seems to us, as we have frequently implied, to be room for modification. In the popular conception of Milton the poet and the man are imperfectly combined. We allow his greatness as a poet, but deny him the poetical temperament which alone could have enabled him to attain it. He is looked upon as a great, good, reverend, austere, not very amiable, and not very sensitive man. The author and the book are thus set at variance, and the attempt to conceive the character as a whole results in confusion and inconsistency. To us, on the contrary, Milton, with all his strength of will and regularity of life, seems as perfect a representative as any of his compeers of the sensitiveness and impulsive passion of the poetical temperament. We appeal to his remarkable dependence upon external prompting for his compositions; to the rapidity of his work under excitement, and his long intervals of unproductiveness; to the heat and fury of his polemics; to the simplicity with which, fortunately for us, he inscribes small particulars of his own life side by side with weightiest utterances on Church and State; to the amazing precipitancy of his marriage and its rupture; to his sudden pliability upon appeal to his generosity; to his romantic self-sacrifice when his country demanded his eyes from him; above all, to his splendid ideals of regenerated human life, such as poets alone either conceive or realize. To overlook all this is to affirm that Milton wrote great poetry without being truly a poet. One more remark may be added, though not required by thinking readers. We must beware of confounding the essential with the accidental Milton—the pure vital spirit with the casual vesture of the creeds and circumstances of the era in which it became clothed with mortality:—
“They
are still immortal
Who,
through birth’s orient portal
And death’s dark chasm
hurrying to and fro,
Clothe
their unceasing flight
In
the brief dust and light
Gathered around their chariots
as they go.
New
shapes they still may weave,
New
gods, new laws, receive.”
If we knew for certain which of the many causes that have enlisted noble minds in our age would array Milton’s spirit “in brief dust and light,” supposing it returned to earth in this nineteenth century, we should know which was the noblest of them all, but we should be as far as ever from knowing a final and stereotyped Milton.
[Footnote 1: A famous Presbyterian tract of the day, so called from the combined initials of the authors, one of whom was Milton’s old instructor, Thomas Young. The “Remonstrant” to whom Milton replied was Bishop Hall.]
[Footnote 2: This principle admitted of general application. For example, astrological books were to be licensed by John Booker, who could by no means see his way to pass the prognostications of his rival Lilly without “many impertinent obliterations,” which made Lilly exceeding wroth.]
[Footnote 3: Two persons of this uncommon name are mentioned in the State Papers of Milton’s time—one a merchant who imported a cargo of timber; the other a leatherseller. The name also occurs once in Pepys.]
[Footnote 4: Rossetti’s sonnet, “On the Refusal of Aid between Nations,” is an almost equally remarkable instance.]
[Footnote 5: The same is recorded of Friedrich Hebbel, the most original of modern German dramatists.]
[Footnote 6: In his “Urim of Conscience,” 1695. This curious book contains one of the first English accounts of Buddha, whom the author calls Chacabout (Sakhya Buddha, apparently), and of the “Christians of St. John” at Bassora.]
[Footnote 7: Ariosto and Marcellus Palingenius. Both these wrote before Ronsard, to whom the thought is traced by Pattison, and Valvasone, to whom Hayley deems Milton indebted for it.]
[Footnote 8: We cannot agree with Mr. Edmundson that Milton was in any respect indebted to Vondel’s “Adam’s Banishment,” published in 1664.]
[Footnote 9: Theocritus, Idyll I.; Lang’s translation.]
A.
Adam, not the hero of “Paradise Lost,” 155
Adonais compared with Lycidas, 51
Aldersgate Street, Milton’s home in, 67, 83
“Allegro, L.,” 49-50
Andreini, his “Adamo” supposed to have suggested “Paradise Lost,” 169
Anglesey, Earl of, visits Milton, 186
“Animadversions upon the Remonstrant,” 72
“Apology for Smectymnuus,” 72
“Arcades,” 44
“Areopagitica, the,” 78;
argument of, 79-82
Arian opinions of Milton, 159, 191
Ariosto, Milton borrows from, 164
Artillery Walk, Milton’s last house, 144
“At a Solemn Music,” 33
Aubrey’s biographical notices of Milton, 14, 15, 19, 24, 129, 144, 145
Ball’s Life of Preston, 23
Barbican, Milton’s house in the, 96
Baroni, Leonora, admired by Milton, 62
Beddoes, T.L., on Milton and Vondel, 170
Benrath on Ochino’s “Divine Tragedy,” 171
Blake on Milton, 179
Bradshaw, Milton’s praise of, 120
Bread Street, Milton born in, 16
Bridgewater, Lord, “Comus” written in his honour, 45
Bright, John, his admiration for Milton, 164.
British Museum, copy of Milton’s poems in, 97;
proclamation against Milton’s books
preserved in the, 139
Buckhurst, Lord, his admiration of “Paradise Lost,” 177
Caedmon, question of Milton’s indebtedness to, 169
Calderon’s “Magico Prodigioso” compared
with “Comus,” 54;
with “Paradise Lost,” 163
Cambridge in Milton’s time, 22
Cardinal Barberini receives Milton, 62
Caroline, Princess, her kindness to Milton’s daughter, 195
Chalfont St. Giles, Milton’s residence at, 173
Chappell, W., Milton’s college tutor, 24
Charles I., illegal government of, 30;
expedition against the Scots, 67;
execution of, 100;
alleged authorship of “Eikon Basilike,”
105-107;
a bad king, but not a bad man, 110
Charles II., restoration of, 138;
favour to Roman Catholics, 188
Christ’s College, Milton at, 22
“Christian Doctrine,” Milton’s treatise on, 99, 190-193
“Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes,” 132
Clarke, Deborah, Milton’s youngest daughter;
her reminiscences of her father, 195
Clarke, Mr. Hyde, his discoveries respecting Milton’s ancestry, 14, 15
Clarke, Sir T., Milton’s MSS. preserved by, 129
Coleridge, Milton compared with, 41;
on Milton’s taste for music, 63;
on “Paradise Regained,” 178
Comenius, educational method of, 76
Commonwealth, Milton’s views of a free, 136
“Comus,” production of, 38, 44, 46;
criticism on, 53-55
“Considerations on the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church,” 133
Copernican theory only partly adopted in “Paradise Lost,” 158
Cosmogony of Milton, 157
Cromwell, Milton’s character of, 121;
Milton’s advice to, 122
Dante and Milton compared, 160
Daughters, character of Milton’s, 142
Davis, Miss, Milton’s suit to, 94
Deity, imperfect conception of, in “Paradise Lost,” 154
Denham, Sir J., his admiration of “Paradise Lost,” 177
Diodati, Milton’s friendship with, 21;
verses to, 25;
letters to, 39, 41, 55;
death of, 65;
Milton’s elegy on, 43, 67
“Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” 79, 87-91
Dryden, on “Paradise Lost,” 177;
visits Milton, 187;
dramatizes “Paradise Lost,”
187
Du Moulin, Peter, author of “Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum,” 118
Edmundson, Mr. G., on Milton and Vondel, 170
Education, Milton’s tract on, 75-77
“Eikon Basilike,” authorship of, 105-107
“Eikonoklastes,” Milton’s reply to “Eikon Basilike,” 108
Ellwood, Thomas, the Quaker, reads to Milton, 145;
suggests “Paradise Regained,”
175
Elzevir, Daniel, receives and gives up the MS. of “State Letters” and the “Treatise on Christian Doctrine,” 191
Fairfax, Milton’s character of, 120
Faithorne’s portrait of Milton, 189
Galileo, Milton’s visit to, 61
Gauden, Bishop, author of “Eikon Basilike,” 106
Gentleman’s Magazine, account of Horton in, 36
Goethe on “Samson Agonistes,” 181
Gill, Mr., Milton’s master at St. Paul’s school, 20
Gosse, Mr., on Milton and Vondel, 170
Greek, influence of, on Milton, 33, 39
Grotius, Hugo, Milton introduced to, 59;
Milton’s study of, 169
Hartlib, S., Milton’s tract on Education inspired by, 75
“History of Britain” by Milton, 99, 189
Holstenius, Lucas, librarian of the Vatican, 63
Homer and Shakespeare compared, 2;
and compared with Milton, 160, 165, 167
Horton, Milton retires to, 33; poems written at, 44
Hunter, Rev. Joseph, on Milton’s ancestors, 14
“Hymn on the Nativity,” 32
Italian sonnets by Milton, 64
Italy, Milton’s journey to, 56-65
Jansen, Cornelius, paints Milton’s portrait, 19
Jeffrey, Sarah, Milton’s mother, 16
Jewin Street, Milton’s house in, 144
Johnson, Dr., on “Lycidas,” 51;
benefits Milton’s granddaughter,
195
Keats, Milton contrasted with, 41
King, Edward, “Lycidas,” an elegy on his death, 48
Landor, his Latin verse compared with Milton’s, 43
Latin grammar by Milton, 188
Latin Secretaryship to the Commonwealth, Milton’s appointment to, 102
Laud, Archbishop, Church government of, 30;
Milton’s veiled attack on, 49
Lawes, Henry, writes music to “Comus”
and “Arcades,” 44;
edits “Comus,” 47
Lee, Nathaniel, his verses on Milton, 188
Lemon, Mr. Robert, discovers MS. of “State Letters” and the “Treatise on Christian Doctrine,” 191
Letters, Milton’s official, 123
Logic, Milton’s tract on, 188
Long Parliament, meeting of the, 68;
licensing of books by, 78
Lucifer, Vondel’s, 170
Ludlow Castle, “Comus” first performed at, 46
“Lycidas,” origin of, 40, 48;
analysis of, criticism on, 50, 52
Manso, Marquis, poem on, 64
Marshall, Milton’s portrait engraved by, 97
Marriage, Milton’s views on, 94
Martineau, Harriet, reads “Paradise Lost” at seven years of age, 176
Mason, C., Milton’s MSS. preserved by, 129
Masson, Prof. David, his monumental biography
of Milton, 14;
on Milton’s ancestors, ib.;
on Milton’s college career, 23,
25;
on the scenery of Horton, 35;
on date of Divorce pamphlet, 87;
on date of “Paradise Lost,”
147;
on money received for “Paradise
Lost,” 150;
on Milton’s cosmogony, 156;
his description of Chalfont, 173;
on Milton’s portrait, 189
Milton, Christopher, John Milton’s younger brother,
birth of, 16;
a Royalist, 91;
a Roman Catholic, and one of James the
Second’s judges, 194
Milton, John, the elder, birth, 15;
a scrivener by profession, ib.;
musical compositions of, 18;
retirement to Horton, 33;
his noble confidence in his son, 37, 45;
comes to live with his son, 91;
dies, 98
Milton, John, birth, 11;
genealogy of, 14;
birthplace, 16;
his father, 17;
his education, 18-27;
knowledge of Italian, 21;
at Cambridge, 22-28;
rusticated, 25;
his degree, 1629; 25;
will not enter the church, 29;
early poems, 32;
writes “Comus,” 38;
required incitement to write, 40, 48;
correctness of his early poems, 42;
his life at Horton, 44-55;
his “Comus” and “Arcades,”
44-48;
his “Lycidas,” 48;
his mother’s death, 55;
goes to Italy, 56;
his Italian friends, 59;
visits Galileo, 61;
Italian sonnets, 64;
educates his nephews, 65;
elegy to Diodati, 67;
eighteen years’ poetic silence,
68;
takes part with the Commonwealth, 68;
pamphlets on Church government, 72;
tract on Education, 75;
“Areopagitica,” 79;
Italian sonnet, 85;
his first marriage, 86;
deserted by his wife, his treatise on
Divorce, 87;
his pupils, 91;
return of his wife, 96;
his daughter born, 98;
becomes Secretary for Foreign Tongues,
102;
his State papers, 104;
licenses pamphlets, 105;
answers “Eikon Basilike,”
108;
answers Salmasius, 111;
loses his sight, 114;
death of his wife, 116;
reply to Morus, 119;
his official duties 122;
his retirement and second marriage, 125;
projected ninety-nine themes preparatory
to “Paradise Lost,” 129;
wrote chiefly from autumn to spring, 132;
his views of a republic, 136;
escapes proscription at Restoration, 139;
unhappy relations with his daughters,
141;
third marriage, 143;
writing “Paradise Lost,” 147-150;
analysis of his work, 152-172;
compared with modern poets, 166;
his indebtedness to earlier poets, 169;
retires to Chalfont to escape the plague,
173;
he suffers from the Great Fire, 175;
his “Paradise Regained,” 177;
his “Samson Agonistes,” 180-85;
his later life, 186;
his later tracts, 188, 190;
his “History of Britain,”
189;
his Arian opinions, 192;
his death, 193;
his will, 194;
his widow and daughters, 195;
estimate of his character, 196
Milton, Richard, Milton’s grandfather, 14, 15
Minshull, Elizabeth, Milton’s third wife, 143;
Milton’s will in favour of, 194;
death, ib.
Monk, General, character of, 135
Morland, Sir Samuel, on “Paradise Lost,” 163
Morus, A., his controversy with Milton, 118-119
Myers, Mr. E., on Milton’s views of marriage, 91
Newton, Bishop, benefits Milton’s granddaughter, 195
Ochino, B., Milton’s indebtedness to, 171
“On a fair Infant,” 33
Paget, Dr., Milton’s physician, 143, 145
Palingenius, Marcellus, Milton borrows from, 164
Pamphlets, Milton’s, 72, 75, 78, 79, 87, 99, 100, 108, 113, 132, 133, 136-8
“Paradise Lost,” 128;
four schemes for, 129;
first conceived as drama, 130;
manner of composition, 147;
dates of, 147-150;
critique of, 152-172;
successive publications of, 176
“Paradise Regained,” 177;
criticism on, 178-180
“Passion of Christ,” 32
Pattison, Mark, on “Lycidas,” 51;
on Milton’s political career, 68;
on fanaticism of Commonwealth, 133;
on “Paradise Lost,” 159;
on Milton’s diction, 165
“Penseroso, Il,” 40, 49
Pepys, S., on Restoration, 135, 138
Petty France, Westminster, Milton’s home in, 117
Philaras, Milton’s Greek friend, 114
Phillips, E., Milton’s brother-in-law, 22, 65
Phillips, Edward, Milton’s nephew, on Milton’s
ancestry, 14;
educated by his uncle, 65;
his account of Milton’s separation
from his first wife, 87;
of their reconciliation, 96;
becomes a Royalist, 129;
his attention to his uncle, 145;
on “Paradise Lost,” 176;
on “Paradise Regained,” 177
“Pilot of the Galilean Lake,” 49
“Plymouth Brethren,” resemblance of Milton’s views to, 133
Powell, Mary, Milton marries, 86;
she leaves him, 87;
returns to him, 95;
her family live with Milton, 98;
her death, 116;
probable bad influence on her daughters,
163
“Prelatical Episcopacy” pamphlet, 72
“Pro Populo” pamphlet, 113
Ptolemaic system followed by Milton in “Paradise Lost,” 157
Puckering, Sir H., gave Milton’s MSS. to the University of Cambridge, 129
Reading, surrender of to Parliamentary army, 91
“Ready way to establish a Commonwealth,” 136
“Reason of Church Government” pamphlet, 72
“Reformation touching Church Discipline” pamphlet, 72
Restoration, consequences to Milton of the, 138-141
Richardson, J., on Milton’s later life, 186
Rome, Milton in, 62
Rump, burning of the, 136
St. Bride’s Churchyard, Milton lodges in, 65
St. Giles’s Cripplegate, Milton’s grave in, 194
St. Paul’s school, Milton at, 19
Salmasius, Claudius, his character, 109;
author of “Defensio Regia,”
111;
Milton’s controversy with, 112,
114
Samson, Vondel’s, 170
“Samson Agonistes,” 141, 178;
criticism on, 180-185
Satan, the hero of “Paradise Lost,” 155
Shakespeare, 2;
Milton’s panegyric on, 33, 38;
his view of tragedy compared with Milton’s,
183
Shelley, on poetical inspiration, 41;
his estimate of Milton, 156;
on tragedy and comedy, 183;
quoted, 17, 197
Skinner, Cyriack, his loan to Milton, 138
Skinner, David, endeavours to publish “State
Letters” and
“Treatise on Christian Doctrine,”
191
Sonnet, “When the assault was intended to the
City,” 84;
from the Italian, 85;
on Vaudois Protestants, 124;
to his second wife, 125;
to Henry Lawrence, 126;
inscribed on a window-pane, 175
“State Letters,” 191
Stationers’ Company and Milton, 92
Symmons, S., publisher of “Paradise Lost,” 149, 175
Symonds, Mr. J.A., on metre of “Paradise Lost,” 166
Tennyson, on Milton’s Eden, 162
“Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” 100
“Tina,” by Antonio Malatesti, 68
Tomkyns, Thomas, licenses “Paradise Lost,”
151;
and the poems, 178
Tovey, Nathaniel, Milton’s college tutor, 25
Treatise on Christian Doctrine, 190
Ulster Protestants, Milton’s subscription for, 83
Vernon Lee, 57
Vondel, Milton’s indebtedness to, 170
Wakefield, E.G., on the champions of great causes, 135
Wood, Anthony, on Restoration, 133
Woodcock, Katherine, Milton’s second wife, her marriage and death, 125
Wootton, Sir H., on “Comus,” 47
Wordsworth, quoted, 27, 65;
Milton contrasted with, 41;
on “Paradise Regained,” 178
Wright, Dr., reminiscence of his visit to Milton, 186
Young, Thomas, Milton’s private tutor, 14
BY
(British Museum).
* * * * *
I. WORKS.
II. POETICAL WORKS.
III. PROSE WORKS.
IV. SINGLE WORKS.
V. SELECTIONS.
VI. APPENDIX—
Biography,
Criticism, etc.
Magazine
Articles, etc.
VII. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS.
* * * * *
I. WORKS.
The Works of John Milton in verse and prose, printed from the original editions, with a life of the author by J. Mitford. 8 vols. London, 1851, 8vo.
Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin,
compos’d at several
times. Printed by his true copies. London
[January 2], 1645, 8vo.
First collective
edition, and the first work bearing Milton’s
name.
—— Poems, etc., upon several occasions, both English and Latin, etc., composed at several times. With a small Tractate of Education to Mr. Hartlib. 2 parts. London, 1673, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. Containing Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and his poems on several occasions. Together with explanatory notes on each book of the Paradise Lost [by P.H., i.e., Patrick Hume]. 5 parts. London, 1695, folio.
—— The Poetical Remains of Mr Milton, etc. By C. Gildon. London, 1698, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. 2 vols. London, 1707, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton. (Notes upon the twelve books of Paradise Lost, by Mr. Addison. A small Tractate of Education to Mr. Hartlib.) 2 vols. London, 1720, 4to.
—— Another edition. 2 vols. London, 1721, 12mo.
—— Another edition. 2 vols. London, 1727, 8vo.
—— Another edition. 2 vols. London, 1730, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. 2 vols. London, 1731, 8vo.
—— Another edition. 4 vols. London, 1746, 12mo.
—— Another edition, with notes of various authors, by Thomas Newton, bishop of Bristol. 3 vols. London, 1749-52, 4to.
—— The Poetical Works of Milton, etc. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1762, 8vo.
—— Another edition, by Newton. 4 vols. London, 1763, 8vo.
—— Another edition. 4 vols. London, 1766, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of Milton. With prefatory characters of the several pieces; the life of Milton, a glossary, etc. Edinburgh, 1767, 8vo.
—— Another edition. 4 vols, London, 1770, 8vo.
—— Another edition. 4 vols. London, 1773, 8vo.
—— Poems on several occasions. (British Poets, vol. iv.) Edinburgh, 1773, 8vo.
—— Another edition. 3 vols. London, 1775, 4to.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. From the text of Dr. Newton. (Bell’s Poets of Great Britain, vols. 35-38.) Edinburgh, 1776, 12mo.
—— The Poems of Milton. (Johnson’s Works of the English Poets, vols. 3-5.) London, 1779, 8vo.
—— Poems upon several occasions, English, Italian, and Latin, with translations: viz., Lycidas, L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Arcades, Comus, Odes, Sonnets, Miscellanies, English Psalms, Elegiarum Liber, Epigrammatum Liber, Sylvarum Liber. With notes critical and explanatory, and other illustrations, by T. Warton. London, 1785, 8vo.
—— Second edition, with many alterations, and large additions. London, 1791, 8vo.
—— Poems. Another edition. (Johnson’s Works of the English Poets, vols. 10-12.) London, 1790, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. To which is prefixed the life of the author. (Anderson’s Poets of Great Britain, vol. v.) Edinburgh, 1792, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. With a life of the author, by W. Hayley [and engravings after Westall]. 3 vols. London, 1794-97, folio.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, from the text of Dr. Newton. With the life of the author, and a critique on Paradise Lost, by J. Addison. Cooke’s edition. Embellished with engravings. 2 vols. London, 1795-96, 12mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. With the principal notes of various commentators. To which are added illustrations, with some account of the life of Milton. By H.J. Todd. (Mr. Addison’s criticism on the Paradise Lost. Dr. Johnson’s Remarks on Milton’s Versification. Dr. C. Burney’s observations on the Greek verses of Milton.) 6 vols. London, 1801, 8vo.
—— Second edition, with considerable additions, and with a verbal index to the whole of Milton’s poetry, etc. 7 vols. London, 1809, 8vo.
—— Third edition, with other illustrations, etc. 6 vols. London, 1826, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton.
With a preface, biographical and critical, by J. Aikin.
(Life of Milton by Dr. Johnson.) 3 vols. London,
1805, 8vo.
Vols. xii.-xv.
of an edition of “The Works of the English Poets.
With preface by
Dr. Johnson.”
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. With a preface, biographical and critical, by S. Johnson. Re-edited, with new biographical and critical matter, by J. Aikin, M.D. 3 vols. London, 1806, 12mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. 2 vols. London, 1806, 16mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. 4 vols. (Park’s Works of the British Poets, vols. i.-iii.) London, 1808, 16mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, with the life of the author. By S. Johnson. 3 vols. London, 1809, 16mo.
—— Cowper’s Milton. [Edited,
with a life of Milton, by W. Hayley. Together
with “Adam: a sacred drama, translated from
the Italian of G.B. Andreini,” by W. Cowper
and W. Hayley.] 4 vols. Chichester, 1810, 8vo.
The British Museum
copy contains MS. notes by J. Mitford.
—— The Poems of John Milton. (Chalmers’ Works of the English Poets, vol. vii.) London, 1810, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. With the life of the author, by S. Johnson. (Select British Poets.) London, 1810, 8vo.
—— Poems on several occasions. Lycidas, L’Allegro, Il Penseroso. London, 1817, 12mo.
—— Another edition, with Fenton’s life and Dr. Johnson’s criticism. 2 vols. London, 1817, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton;
to which is prefixed the life of the author.
London, 1818, 12mo.
This forms part
of “Walker’s British Classics.”
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, with a life of the author, by E. Sanford. (Works of the British Poets, vols. vii., viii.) 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1819, 12mo.
—— The Poems of John Milton. (British Poets, vols. xvi.-xviii.) Chiswick, 1822, 12mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, with notes of various authors, principally from the editions of T. Newton, C. Dunster, and T. Warton; to which is prefixed Newton’s life of Milton. By E. Hawkins. 4 vols. Oxford, 1824, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost. A new edition,
with notes, critical and explanatory, by J.D.
Williams. (Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and
Poems.) 2 vols. London, 1824, 12mo.
The British Museum
copy contains copious MS. notes by the editor.
—— Poetical Works, with Cowper’s Translations of the Latin and Italian poems, and life of Milton by his nephew, E. Philips, etc. 3 vols. London, 1826, 8vo.
—— Poems on several occasions. [With Westall’s plates.] London, 1827, 16mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton.
[Edited by J. Mitford, with life of Milton by the
editor.] 3 vols. London, 1832, 8vo.
Part of the “Aldine
Edition of the British Poets.”
—— Another edition. 3 vols. London, 1866, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. Printed from the text of Todd and others. A new edition. With the poet’s life by E. Philips. Leipzig, 1834, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. Edited by Sir Egerton Brydges, Bart. [With a life of Milton, by Sir E.B.] 6 vols. London, 1835, 8vo.
—— The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton: with explanatory notes and a life of the author, by the Rev. H. Stebbing. To which is prefixed Dr. Channing’s essay on the poetical genius of Milton. London, 1839, 12mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, J. Thomson, and E. Young. Edited by H.F. Cary. With a biographical notice of each author. 3 pts. London, 1841, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, with a memoir and critical remarks on his genius and writings, by J. Montgomery, and one hundred and twenty engravings from drawings by W. Harvey. 2 vols. London, 1843, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton: with life and notes. Edinburgh [1848], 24mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. (Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors, vol. 194.) Leipzig, 1850, 8vo.
—— Poetical Works. (Cabinet Edition of the British Poets, vol. i.) London, 1851, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, with notes and a life by the Rev. H. Stebbing, etc. London, 1851, 12mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. (Universal Library. Poetry, vol. i.) London, 1853, 8vo.
—— Milton’s Poetical Works.
With life, critical dissertation, and notes by G.
Gilfillan. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1853, 8vo.
One of a series
entitled, “Library Edition of the British Poets.”
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, with life. London, 1853, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton: with a life of the author, preliminary dissertations on each poem, notes critical and explanatory, and a verbal index. Edited by C.D. Cleveland. Philadelphia, 1853, 12mo.
—— The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, with life. Edinburgh [1855], 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. With a life by J. Mitford. 3 vols. Boston [U.S.], 1856, 8vo.
—— The Poems of John Milton, with notes by T. Keightley. 2 vols. London, 1859, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, with a memoir and critical remarks on his genius and writings, by J. Montgomery, and one hundred and twenty engravings. New edition, etc. 2 vols. (Bohn’s Illustrated Library.) London, 1861, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. With illustrations by C.H. Corbould and J. Gilbert. London, 1864, 8vo.
—— English Poems by John Milton. Edited, with life, introduction, and selected notes, by R.C. Browne. (Clarendon Press Series.) 2 vols. Oxford, 1870, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. Illustrated by F. Gilbert. [With life of Milton.] London, 1870, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton.
Edited, with a critical memoir, by W.M. Rossetti.
Illustrated by T. Seccombe. London [1871], 8vo.
Reprinted in 1880
and 1881.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. With life of the author, and an appendix containing Addison’s Critique upon the Paradise Lost, and Dr. Channing’s Essay on the poetical genius of Milton. With illustrations. London [1872], 8vo.
—— The Complete Poetical Works of
Milton and Young. London [1872], 8vo.
Part of “Blackwood’s
Universal Library of Standard Authors.”
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. Reprinted from the Chandos Poets. With memoir, explanatory notes, etc. (Chandos Classics.) London [1872], 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, printed from the original editions, with a life of the author by A. Chalmers. London [1873], 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton.
With life, critical dissertation, and explanatory
notes [by G. Gilfillan], The text edited by C.C.
Clarke. 2 vols. London [1874], 8vo.
Part of “Cassell’s
Library Edition of British Poets.”
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton: edited, with introductions, notes, and an essay on Milton’s English, by D. Masson. [With portraits.] 3 vols. London, 1874, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton.
With introductions and notes by
D. Masson. 2 vols. London, 1874, 8vo.
Forming part of
the “Golden Treasury Series.”
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. Edited by Sir E. Brydges, Bart. Illustrated. A new edition. London [1876], 8vo.
—— The Globe edition. The Poetical Works of John Milton. With introductions by D. Masson. London, 1877, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. London [1878], 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. Edited, with Notes, explanatory and philological, by J. Bradshaw. 2 vols. London, 1878, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of Milton and Marvell. With a memoir of each [that of Milton by D. Masson. With notes to the poems of Milton by J. Mitford]. 4 vols. in 2. Boston, 1878, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. 2 vols. London, 1880, 16mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton.
A new edition revised from the text of T. Newton [by
T.A.W. Buckley]. London [1880], 8vo.
Part of the “Excelsior
Series.”
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton.
With life, etc. Edinburgh [1881], 8vo.
Part of “The
Landscape Series of Poets.”
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, printed from the original editions. With a life of the author by A. Chalmers. With twelve illustrations by R. Westall. London, 1881, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton; edited, with memoir, introductions, notes, and an essay on Milton’s English and Versification, by D. Masson. 3 vols. London, 1882, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. With biographical notice. New York [1884], 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited by J. Bradshaw. Second edition. 2 vols. London, 1885, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton. 2 vols. London [1886], 24mo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton,
with biographical notice by J.
Bradshaw. London, 1887, 12mo.
One of the “Canterbury
Poets” Series.
—— Poetical Works. 2 vols. London, 1887, 8vo.
—— The Poetical Works of John Milton.
Edited by J. Bradshaw. Paradise
Regained. Minor Poems. London, 1888, 8vo.
One of the “Canterbury
Poets” Series.
* * * * *
Paradise Lost, etc. The life of John Milton.
[By E. Fenton.] Paradise
Regained.—Poems upon several occasions.—Sonnets.—Of
Education. 2
vols. London, 1751, 12mo.
The copy in the
British Museum Library contains MS. Notes by C.
Lamb.
Milton’s Italian Poems, translated and addressed
to a gentleman of
Italy. By Dr. Langhorne. London, 1776, 4to.
Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.
With explanatory notes by
J. Edmondston. London, 1854, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1855, 16mo.
Paradise Lost, etc. (Paradise Regained:
and other Poems.—The Life of
John Milton [by E. Fenton.]) 2 vols. London,
1855, 32mo.
Paradise Regained. To which is added Samson Agonistes: and poems upon several occasions. A new edition. By T. Newton. London, 1777, 4to.
Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the Minor
English Poems.
London, 1886, 16mo.
Part of the “Religious
Tract Society Library.”
Latin and Italian poems of Milton translated into English verse, and a fragment of a commentary on Paradise Lost, by the late W. Cowper, with a preface and notes by the Editor (W. Hayley), and notes of various authors. Chichester, 1808, 4to.
The Latin and Italian Poems of Milton. Translated
into English verse by
J.G. Strutt. London, 1814, 8vo.
Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Lycidas.
With illustrative notes by J.
Hunter. London, 1870, 8vo.
Milton’s Earlier Poems, including the translations by William Cowper of those written in Latin and Italian. (Cassell’s National Library, vol. xxxiv.) London, 1886, 8vo.
Miscellaneous Poems, Sonnets, and Psalms, etc.
London [1886], 8vo.
Part of “Ward,
Lock, & Co.’s Popular Library of Literary
Treasures.”
The Minor Poems of John Milton, Edited, with notes,
by W.J. Rolfe. New
York, 1887, 8vo.
The Sonnets of John Milton. Edited by Mark Pattison.
London, 1883, 8vo.
Part of the “Parchment
Library.”
L’Allegro, Il Penseroso [revised by C. Jennens],
ed il Moderato [by C.
Jennens]. Set to musick by Mr. Handel. London,
1740, 4to.
The words only.
—— Another edition. London, 1740, 4to.
—— L’Allegro, Il Penseroso as set to musick. [London, 1750], 8vo.
—— L’Allegro ed Il Penseroso. [Arranged for music.] [London, 1779], 8vo.
L’Allegro ed Il Penseroso. And a song for
St. Cecilia’s day, by Dryden.
Set to musick by G.F. Handel. London, 1754,
4to.
The words without
the music.
L’Allegro ed Il Penseroso. Another edition. London [1754], 4to.
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Glasgow, 1751, 4to.
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. With thirty illustrations designed expressly for the Art Union of London [by G. Scharf, H. O’Neil, and others]. [London], 1848, 4to.
Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, illustrated
with [Thirty] Etchings
on Steel by B. Foster. London, 1855, 8vo.
There is a copy
in the British Museum Library which contains the
autographs and
photographs of George Cruikshank and his wife.
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, illustrated by engravings on steel after designs by Birket Foster. London, 1860, 8vo.
L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, and other poems. Illustrated. Boston, 1877, 16mo.
Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. With notes by J. Aikin. Poona [1881], 8vo.
L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, and the Hymn on the Nativity. Illustrated. London, 1885, 8vo.
Milton’s Comus, L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso. With numerous illustrative notes adapted for use in training colleges. By John Hunter. London, 1864, 12mo.
—— Revised edition. London [1874], 8vo.
Comus, Lycidas, L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, and selected Sonnets. With notes by H.R. Huckin. London, 1871, 16mo.
Milton’s Arcades and Sonnets. With notes by J. Hunter. London, 1880, 12mo.
The Lycidas and Epitaphium Damonis. Edited, with notes and introduction (including a reprint of the rare Latin version of the Lycidas, by W. Hogg, 1694), by C.S. Jarram. London, 1874, 8vo.
—— Second edition, revised. London, 1881, 8vo.
The Works of Mr. John Milton. [In English Prose.]
[London], 1697, fol.
Not mentioned
by Lowndes or Watt, but a copy is in the British
Museum.
A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political, and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton, both English and Latin. With some papers never before publish’d. To which is prefixed the life of the author, etc. [By J. Toland]. 3 vols. Amsterdam [London], 1698, fol.
A Complete Collection of Historical, Political, and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton, correctly printed from the original editions, with an account of the life and writings of the author (by T. Birch), containing several original papers of his never before published. 2 vols. London, 1738, fol.
The Works of John Milton, Historical, Political, and Miscellaneous. Now more correctly printed from the originals than in any former edition, and many passages restored which have been hitherto omitted. To which is prefixed an account of his life and writings (by T. Birch). (Edited by T. Birch and R. Barron?). London, 1753, 8vo.
The Prose Works of John Milton; with a life of the author, interspersed with translations and critical remarks, by C. Symmons. 7 vols. London, 1806, 8vo.
The Prose Works of John Milton. With an introductory review by R. Fletcher. London, 1833, 8vo.
Select Prose Works of Milton. Account of his studies. Apology for his early life and writings. Tractate on Education. Areopagitica. Tenure of Kings. Eikonoclastes. Divisions of the Commonwealth. Delineation of a Commonwealth. Mode of establishing a Commonwealth. Familiar Letters. With a preliminary discourse and notes by J.A. St. John. (Masterpieces of English Prose Literature.) 2 vols. London, 1836, 8vo.
Extracts from the Prose Works of John Milton, containing the whole of his writings on the church question. Now first published separately. Edinburgh, 1836, 12mo.
The Prose Works of John Milton. With a biographical introduction by R.W. Griswold. 2 vols. New York, 1847, 8vo.
The Prose Works of John Milton, with a preface, preliminary remarks, and notes by J.A. St. John. 5 vols. (Bohn’s Standard Library.) London, 1848-53, 8vo.
Areopagitica, Letter on Education, Sonnets and Psalms. (Cassell’s National Library, vol. cxxi.) London, 1888, 8vo.
Accedence commenc’t Grammar, supply’d with sufficient rules, for the use of such as are desirous to attain the Latin tongue with little teaching and their own industry. London, 1669, 12mo.
An account of an original autograph sonnet by John Milton, contained in a copy of Mel Heliconium written by Alexander Rosse, 1642, etc. London, 1859, 8vo.
L’Allegro, illustrated by the Etching Club. London, 1849, fol.
—— L’Allegro. [With illustrations engraved by W.J. Linton.] London, 1859, 8vo.
—— L’Allegro. [With illustrations.]
London [1875], 8vo.
Forming part of
“The Choice Series.”
—— Milton’s L’Allegro. Edited, with interpretation, notes, and derivations, by F. Main. London, 1877, 8vo.
Animadversions upon the Remonstrant’s defence [i.e., the defence of J. Hall, Bishop of Norwich?] against Smectymnuus. London, 1641, 4to.
Apographum literarum serenissimi protectoris, etc. [Leyden?] 1656, 4to.
An apology against a Pamphlet [by J. Hall?] called A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus. London, 1641, 4to.
Areopagitica; a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parliament of England. London, 1644, 4to.
—— Areopagitica Another edition. With a preface by another hand. London, 1738, 8vo.
—— Another edition, with prefatory remarks, copious notes, and excursive illustrations, by T. Holt White, etc. London, 1819, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1772, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1780, 12mo.
—— Another edition, edited by James Losh. London, 1791, 8vo.
—— Areopagitica. (Occasional Essays, etc.) London, 1809, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London [1834], 8vo.
—— Areopagitica, etc.
London, 1840, 8vo.
Tracts for
the People, No. 10.
—— English Reprints. John Milton. Areopagitica. Carefully edited by Edward Arber. London, 1868, 18mo.
—— English Reprints. John Milton. Areopagitica. Carefully edited by Edward Arber. London, 1869, 8vo.
—— A Modern Version of Milton’s Areopagitica: with notes, appendix, and tables. By S. Lobb. Calcutta, 1872, 12mo.
—— Milton, Areopagitica. Edited, with introduction and notes, by J.W. Hales. Oxford, 1874, 8vo.
—— Milton’s Areopagitica. (Morley’s Universal Library, vol. 43.) London, 1886, 8vo.
Autobiography of John Milton: or Milton’s Life in his own words. Edited by J.J.G. Graham. London, 1872, 8vo.
A brief history of Moscovia; and other less known countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay. Gather’d from the writings of several eye-witnesses. London, 1682, 8vo.
The Cabinet-Council; containing the Chief Arts of Empire, and Mysteries of State discabineted. By Sir Walter Raleigh, published by John Milton. London, 1658, 8vo.
—— Another edition. The Arts of Empire and Mysteries of State discabineted. By Sir Walter Raleigh, published by John Milton. London, 1692, 8vo.
Colasterion, a reply to a nameles [sic] answer against “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.” By the former author, J[ohn] M[ilton]. [London] 1645, 4to.
A Common-Place Book of John Milton, and a Latin essay
and Latin verses presumed to be by Milton. Edited
from the original MSS. in the possession of Sir F.W.
Graham, Bart., by A.J. Horwood. London, 1876,
4to.
Printed for the
Camden Society.
—— Revised edition. London, 1877, 4to.
A Maske [Comus] presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634:
on Michaelmasse night,
before the right honorable John, Earle of Bridgewater,
Viscount Brackly,
Lord President of Wales. [Edited by H. Lawes.] London,
1637, 4to.
The first edition
of Comus.
—— Comus: a mask, etc. Glasgow, 1747, 12mo.
—— Comus, a mask presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, before the Earl of Bridgewater, with notes critical and explanations by various commentators, and with preliminary illustrations; to which is added a copy of the mask from a manuscript belonging to his Grace the Duke of Bridgewater; by H.J. Todd. Canterbury, 1798, 8vo.
—— Comus, a mask; presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634. To which are added, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso; and Mr. Warton’s account of the origin of Comus. London, 1799, 8vo.
—— Comus: a mask. With annotations. London, 1808, 8vo.
—— Comus: a masque. (Cumberland’s British Theatre, vol. 32.) London [1829], 12mo.
—— Comus. A mask with thirty illustrations by Pickersgill, B. Foster, H. Weir, etc. London, 1858, 4to.
—— Milton’s Comus. Published under the direction of the Committee appointed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. London [1860], 12mo.
—— Comus: a mask. With explanatory notes. Published under the direction of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. London [1861], 12mo.
—— Milton’s Comus. With notes [by W. Wallace]. London, 1871, 16mo.
—— The Mask of Comus. Edited, with copious notes, by H.B. Sprague. New York, 1876, 8vo.
—— Milton’s “Comus” annotated, with a glossary and notes. With three introductory essays upon the masque proper, and upon the origin and history of the poem. By B.M. Ranking and D.F. Ranking. London, 1878, 8vo.
—— Milton’s Comus, with introduction
and notes. London, 1884, 8vo.
Forming part of
“Chambers’s Reprints of English Classics.”
—— Milton’s Comus. Edited, with introduction and notes, by A.M. Williams. London, 1888, 8vo.
—— —— Songs, Duets, Choruses, etc., in Milton’s Comus: a masque in two acts, with additions from the author’s poem “L’Allegro,” and from Dryden’s opera of “King Arthur.” London [1842], 8vo.
Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church. Wherein is also discourc’d of Tithes, Church-Fees, Church-Revenues, and whether any maintenance of ministers can be settl’d by law. The author J. M[ilton]. London, 1659, 12mo.
—— Another edition. London, 1717, 12mo.
Another edition. London, 1723, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London [1834], 8vo.
A Declaration, or Letters Patents of the Election of this present King of Poland, John the Third. Translated [by John Milton]. London, 1674, 4to.
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce restor’d to the good of both sexes from the Bondage of Canon Law and other mistakes to Christian freedom, guided by the rule of charity, etc. London, 1643, 4to.
—— The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Now the second time revis’d and much augmented. London, 1644, 4to.
—— Another edition. London, 1645, 4to.
Eikonoklastes, in answer to a book intitl’d Eikon Basilike, the Portrature of his Sacred Majesty in his solitudes and sufferings. [By J. Gauden, Bishop of Exeter?] The author J[ohn] M[ilton]. London, 1649, 4to.
—— Eikonoklastes. Published now the second time, and much enlarg’d. London, 1650, 4to.
—— Eikonoklastes in answer to a book entitled Eikon Basilike, the Portraiture of his sacred majesty King Charles the first in his solitudes and sufferings. Amsterdam, 1690, 8vo.
—— Eikonoklastes: in answer to a book intitled Eikon Basilikon, the portraiture of his sacred majesty in his solitudes and sufferings. Now first published from the author’s second edition, printed in 1650; with many enlargements, by R. Baron. With a preface shewing the transcendent excellency of Milton’s prose works. To which is added an original Letter [from J. Wall] to Milton, never before published. London, 1756, 4to.
—— A new edition, corrected by the late Reverend R. Baron. London, 1770, 8vo.
The History of Britain, that part especially now call’d England, from the first traditional beginning, continu’d to the Norman Conquest. Collected out of the antientest and best authors by John Milton. London, 1670, 4to.
The History of Britain. Another edition. London, 1677, 8vo.
—— Second edition. London, 1678, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1695, 8vo.
Il Penseroso. With designs by J.E.G.; etched
by J.E.G. and H.P.G. on
India paper. London, 1844, folio.
—— Milton. Il Penseroso. (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford, 1874, 8vo.
Joannis Miltoni Angli, Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio, ad Petri Rami Methodum concinnata. Adjecta est Praxis Analytica and P. Rami vita. Londini, 1672, 12mo.
Joannis Miltoni Angli de Doctrina Christiana libri duo posthumi, quos ex schedis manuscriptis deprompsit, et typis mandari primus curavit C.R. Sumner. Cantabrigiae, 1825, 4to.
—— Another edition. Brunsvigae, 1827, 8vo.
—— A Treatise of Christian Doctrine, compiled from the Holy Scriptures alone. Translated from the original by C.R. Sumner. Cambridge, 1825, 4to.
—— John Milton’s last thoughts on the Trinity. Extracted from his Treatise on Christian Doctrine. London, 1828, 12mo.
—— New edition. London, 1859, 8vo.
Joannis Miltonii Angli Epistolarum familiarium liber unus: quibus accesserunt ejusdem jam olim in collegio adolescentis prolusiones quaedam oratoriae. Londini, 1674, 12mo.
—— Milton’s familiar letters. Translated from the Latin, with notes, by J. Hall. Philadelphia, 1829, 8vo.
Joannis Miltoni Angli pro populo Anglicano defensio, contra Claudii Anonymi, alias Salmasii, defensionem regiam. Cum indice. Londini, 1651, 12mo.
—— Another edition. Londini, 1651, 4to.
—— Another edition. Londini, 1651, 12mo.
—— Editio emendatior. Londini, 1651, folio.
—— Another edition. Londini, 1652, 12mo.
—— Editio correctior et auctior, ab autore denuo recognita. Londini, 1658, 8vo.
—— A Defense of the People of England in answer to Salmasius’s defence of the king. [Translated from the Latin by Mr. Washington, of the Temple.] [London?] 1692, 8vo.
Joannis Miltoni pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda. Contra infamem libellum anonymum [by P. Du Moulin] cui titulus, Regii sanguinis clamor ad coelum adversus parricidas Anglicanos. Londini, 1654, 8vo.
—— Another edition. [With preface by G. Crantzius.] 2 parts. Hagae Comitum, 1654, 12mo.
—— Milton’s Second Defence
of the People of England [translated by
Archdeacon Wrangham]. London, 1816, 8vo.
Included in Scraps
by the Rev. Francis Wrangham.
Joanni Miltoni pro se defensio contra Alexandrum Morum Ecclesiastes [or rather P. Du Moulin] Libelli famosi, cui titulus, Regii sanguinis clamor ad coelum adversus Parricidas Anglicanos, authorem recte dictum. Londini, 1655, 8vo.
The judgement of Martin Bucer concerning divorce, now Englisht [by John Milton]. Wherein a late book [by John Milton] restoring the doctrine and discipline of divorce is heer confirm’d, etc. London, 1644, 4to.
A Letter written to a Gentleman in the Country, touching the dissolution of the late Parliament, and the reasons thereof. [By John Milton, signed N. Ll.] London [May 26], 1653, 4to.
Literae ab Olivario protectore ad sacram regiam majestem Sueciae. [Leyden?] 1656, 4to.
Literae Pseudo-Senatus Anglicani, Cromwellii, reliquorumque Perduellium nomine ac jussu conscriptae a Joanne Miltono. [London] 1676, 12mo.
—— Another edition. Literae nomine Senatus Anglicani Cromwellii Richardique ad diversos in Europa principes et Respublicas exaratae a Joanne Miltono, quas nunc primum in Germania recudi fecit J.G. Pritius. Lipsiae Francofurti, 1690, 12mo.
—— Milton’s Republican-Letters, or a collection of such as were written by Comand of the late Commonwealth of England, etc. [Amsterdam?] 1682, 4to.
—— Letters of State written by Mr.
John Milton to most of the Sovereign princes and Republicks
of Europe, from the year 1649 till 1659. To which
is added an Account of his Life [by E. Phillips],
together with several of his poems, etc.
London, 1694, 12mo.
The “several
poems” consist of four sonnets only.
—— Oliver Cromwell’s Letters to Foreign Princes and States for strengthening and preserving the Protestant Religion, etc. [Translated from the Latin of John Milton.] London, 1700, 4to.
Lycidas. [First edition.] (Justa Edouardo King
naufrago, ab Amicis
moerentibus, etc.) 2 pts. Cantabrigiae,
1638, 4to.
Part II., “Obsequies
to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King,” has a
distinct title-page
and pagination, and contains the first edition
of Lycidas.
—— Milton’s Lycidas, with notes, critical, explanatory, and grammatical, by a Graduate. Melbourne, 1869, 8vo.
—— Lycidas. Reprinted from the first edition of 1638, and collated with the autograph copy in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. With a version in Latin hexameters. By F.A. Paley. London, 1874, 8vo.
—— Milton. Lycidas. With introduction and notes. By T.D. Hall. Manchester [1876], 8vo.
—— Second edition. London [1880], 8vo.
—— Milton’s Lycidas. Edited, with interpretation and notes, by F. Main, etc. London, 1876, 8vo.
—— Second edition. London, 1876, 8vo.
Mr. John Milton’s character of the Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines, in 1641. Omitted in his other works, and never printed. [Edited by J. Tyrrell? or by Arthur, Earl of Anglesey?] London, 1681, 4to.
Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. Illustrated by eminent artists. London, 1868, 8vo.
Mr. John Milton’s Satyre against hypocrites. Written whilst he was Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell. [By John Phillips?] London, 1710, 8vo.
Milton’s unpublished Poem, corrected by J.E.
Wall from a defective copy
found by Mr. Morley in the British Museum. Epitaph
on a Rose Tree
confined in a Garden Tub. [London, 1873?] s. sh. 8vo.
The original is
in the King’s Library, British Museum, and is
written on the
last leaf of a copy of “Poems of Mr. John Milton,”
1646.
Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels, on the Letter of Ormond to Col. Jones, and the Representation of the Presbytery at Belfast. (Articles of Peace made and concluded with the Irish Rebels, by James Earle of Ormond, etc.) London, 1649, 4to.
Of Education. To Master S. Hartlib. [London, 1644] 4to.
—— Milton’s Tractate on Education. A facsimile reprint from the edition of 1673. Edited by Oscar Browning. (Pitt Press Series.) Cambridge, 1883, 8vo.
Original Letters and Papers of State, addressed to Oliver Cromwell, concerning the affairs of Great Britain from 1649 to 1658, found among the political collections of John Milton, published from the originals. By John Nickolls. London, 1743, folio.
Of Prelatical Episcopacy, and whether it may be deduc’d from the Apostolical times by vertue of those Testimonies which are alledg’d to that purpose in some late Treatises of James, Archbishop of Armagh. London, 1641, 4to.
Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in England: and the causes that hitherto have hindred it. London, 1641, 4to.
Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, Toleration, and what best means may be used against the growth of Popery. The author J[ohn] M[ilton]. London, 1673, 4to.
—— New edition, with preface by Bp. Burgess. London, 1826, 8vo.
Paradise Lost. A poem written in ten books by
John Milton. Licensed and
entred according to order. London, 1667, 4to.
First edition.
Without argument or preface. There are nine
distinct variations
of the title and preliminary pages.
—— Paradise Lost. A poem in
ten books. The author J. Milton. (The
argument. The verse.) London, 1668, 4to.
The same edition
as the preceding, with a new title-page, and with
the addition of
the argument.
—— Paradise Lost. A poem in
ten books. The author John Milton. London,
1669, 4to.
The same edition
as the two preceding, with a new title-page and
some slight alterations
in the text. There is another copy in the
British Museum
which differs slightly. It has also the title-page
dated 1668, and
Marvell’s commendatory verses in MS.
—— Paradise Lost. A poem, in
twelve books. The author John Milton.
Second edition, revised and augmented by the same
author. London,
1674, 8vo.
To this edition
are prefixed the commendatory verses of Barrow and
Marvell.
In another copy in the British Museum conjectural
emendations from
the quarto edition, 1749, and the octavo
edition, 1674,
corrected by the quarto edition, 1668, printed on
two leaves, have
been inserted.
—— The third edition. Revised and augmented by the same author. London, 1678, 8vo.
—— The fourth edition. Adorn’d
with sculptures. London, 1688, folio.
The first illustrated
edition.
—— Another edition [with cuts]. London, 1692, folio.
—— Another edition. With copious and learned notes by P[atrick] H[ume]. London, 1695, folio.
—— Seventh edition. Adorn’d with sculptures. London, 1705, 8vo.
—— Eighth edition. Adorn’d with sculptures. 2 vols. London, 1707, 8vo.
—— Ninth edition. Adorn’d
with sculptures. London, 1711, 12mo.
The British Museum
copy is said to be the only one on thick paper.
—— Tenth edition. With sculptures. London, 1719, 12mo.
—— Another edition. Dublin, 1724, 8vo.
—— Twelfth edition. To which is prefixed an account of his life [by E. Fenton]. London, 1725, 12mo.
—— Thirteenth edition. To which is prefixed an account of his life [by E. Fenton]. London, 1727, 8vo.
—— Fourteenth edition. To which is prefixed an account of his life [by E. Fenton]. London, 1730, 8vo.
—— New edition [with notes and proposed
emendations] by R. Bentley.
London, 1732, 4to.
One of the copies
in the British Museum contains MS. notes by B.
Stillingfleet,
and another MS. notes by W. Cole. A third copy
has
inserted plates,
a pencil sketch of Milton’s house at Chalfont
St.
Giles, and a cutting
from the Literary Gazette, May 29th, 1830,
relating to Bentley.
—— Another edition. London, 1737, 8vo.
—— Another edition [with life by E. Fenton]. London, 1738, 8vo.
—— Another edition. (The life of John Milton by E. Fenton.) 2 vols. London, 1746, 1747, 12mo.
—— Another edition. Dublin, 1747, 8vo.
—— Another edition. Compared and revised by John Hawkey. Dublin, 1748, 8vo.
—— New edition. With notes of various authors, by T. Newton. (The life of Milton [by the editor]. A critique on Paradise Lost. By Mr. Addison.) 2 vols. London, 1749, 4to.
—— Another edition. According to the author’s last edition, in the year 1672. Glasgow, 1750, 8vo.
—— Second edition. With notes of various authors, by T. Newton. 2 vols. London, 1750, 8vo.
—— Third edition. With notes of various authors, by T. Newton. 2 vols. London, 1754, 4to.
Paradise Lost. Another edition. With notes, etymological, critical, classical, and explanatory; collected from Dr. Bentley, Dr. Pearce, Richardson and Son, Addison, Paterson, Newton, and other authors. By J. Marchant. London, 1751, 12mo.
—— Another edition. 2 vols.
London, 1752, 51, 12mo.
Vol. ii. is a
duplicate of the corresponding vol. of the previous
edition.
—— Another edition. [To which is prefixed the life of Milton, by E. Fenton.] London, 1753, 12mo.
—— Another edition. [With the life of Milton, by E. Fenton, and a glossary.] 2 vols. Paris, 1754, 16mo.
—— Another edition [in prose]. With historical, critical, and explanatory notes. From Raymond de St. Maur. London, 1755, 8vo.
—— Another edition. From the text of T. Newton. Birmingham, 1758, 4to.
—— Another edition. From the text of T. Newton. Birmingham, 1759, 4to.
—— Another edition. (The life of Milton [by T. Newton]). London, 1760, 12mo.
—— Another edition. [With the life of John Milton, by E. Fenton. Illustrated.] London, 1761, 8vo.
—— Sixth edition. With notes of various authors, by T. Newton. 2 vols. London, 1763, 8vo.
—— Seventh edition. With notes of various authors, by T. Newton. 2 vols. London, 1770, 8vo.
—— New edition. To which is added the life of the author, by E. Fenton. Edinburgh, 1765, 12mo.
—— New edition. To which is added historical, philosophical, and explanatory notes, translated from the French of Raymond de St. Maur. [Edited by John Wood, and preceded by a life of Milton by E. Fenton.] Edinburgh, 1765, 12mo.
—— Another edition [in prose]. With historical, philosophical, critical, and explanatory notes, from Raymond de St. Maur. Embellished with fourteen copper-plates. London, 1767, 8vo.
—— Second edition, adorned with copper-plates. London [1770], 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost, a poem. The
author, John Milton. Glasgow, 1770,
folio.
The copy in the
British Museum was presented to George III. by the
binder, J. Scott.
—— Paradise Lost. (The life of Milton, by Dr. Newton.) London, 1770, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost, a poem in twelve books. 2 vols. Glasgow, 1771, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost. (British Poets, vols. i.-ii.) Edinburgh, 1773, 8vo.
—— New edition. 2 vols. London, 1775, 12mo.
—— Another edition, from the text of T. Newton. London, 1777, 12mo.
—— Eighth edition, with notes of various authors, by T. Newton. 2 vols. London, 1778, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost. (The Life of Milton, by Dr. Newton.) London, 1778, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost. With a biographical and critical account of the author and his writings [by E. Fenton]. Kilmarnock, 1785, 12mo.
—— Another edition, illustrated with texts of Scripture by J. Gillies. [With life by E. Fenton.] London, 1788, 12mo.
—— Ninth edition, with notes of various authors, by T. Newton [and a portrait of Milton], 2 vols. London, 1790, 8vo.
—— Another edition. Printed from the first and second editions collated. The original system of orthography restored, the punctuation corrected and extended. With various readings; and notes, chiefly rythmical. By Capel Lofft. [Book i.] Bury St. Edmunds, 1792, 4to.
—— Paradise Lost. Books i.-iv.
[London, 1792-95], 4to.
The British Museum
copy contains the first four books only. With
illustrations
after Stothard, engraved by Bartolozzi. Without
title-page.
—— Milton’s Paradise Lost, illustrated with texts of Scripture by J. Gillies. Second edition. [With life by E. Fenton.] London, 1793, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost; a poem, in twelve books. [With engravings.] London, 1794, 4to.
—— Milton’s Paradise Lost. (The Life of John Milton [by E. Fenton]. Criticism on Paradise Lost by S. Johnson.) London, 1795, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost. Printed from the text of Tonson’s edition of 1711. With notes and the life of the author by T. Newton and others. [Edited by C.M.] 3 vols. London, 1795, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost, with notes selected from Newton and others. With a critical dissertation on the poetical works of Milton by S. Johnson. 2 vols. London, 1796, 8vo.
—— Milton’s Paradise Lost, with a life of the author [by J. Evans]. To which is prefixed the celebrated critique by S. Johnson. London, 1799, 8vo.
—— Milton’s Paradise Lost. A new edition. Adorned with plates [engraved chiefly by F. Bartolozzi, from designs by W. Hamilton and H. Fuseli.] 2 vols. London, 1802, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost, with a life of the author [by E. Fenton], and a critique on the poem [by S. Johnson]. A new edition. London, 1802, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost. A new edition. London, 1803, 12mo.
—— Milton’s Paradise Lost, illustrated with texts of Scripture, by J. Gillies. Third edition, with additions. [Life of Milton, by E. Fenton.] London, 1804, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost. A poem. Printed from the text of Tonson’s correct edition of 1711. London, 1804, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost. Printed from the text of Tonson’s edition of 1711. A new edition, with plates, etc. London, 1808, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost, a poem, etc. (The life of Milton [by E. Fenton].) London, 1805, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost, a poem. (The life of Milton [by E. Fenton].) London, 1812, 16mo.
—— Another edition. To which is prefixed the life of the author [by E. Fenton]. London, 1813, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost, a poem in twelve books. [With the life of John Milton by E. Fenton, and “A critique upon the Paradise Lost” by J. Addison.] Romsey, 1816, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost. To which are prefixed the life of the author [by E. Fenton]; and a criticism on the poem by S. Johnson. London, 1817, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost. London, 1817, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost. [With engravings from the designs of R. Westall.] 2 vols. London, 1817, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost. To which is prefixed a life of the author [by E. Fenton]. London, 1818, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost. To which is prefixed the life of the author [by E. Fenton]. London, 1820, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost. [With a life of the author, by E. Fenton.] Boston, 1820, 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost. To which are prefixed the life of the author by E. Fenton, and a criticism of the poem by Dr. Johnson. London, 1821, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost, etc. 2 vols. London, 1825, 12mo.
—— The Paradise Lost of Milton, with illustrations designed and engraved by J. Martin. 2 vols. London, 1827, folio.
—— Paradise Lost, etc. [With the life of J. Milton, by E. Fenton.] London [1830], 16mo.
—— Paradise Lost. With a memoir of the author [by E. Fenton]. New edition. London, 1833, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost: with copious notes, also a memoir of his life by J. Prendeville. London, 1840, 8vo.
—— [Paradise Lost. Edited by A.J. Ellis? Phonetically printed.] [London], 1846, 16mo.
—— The Paradise Lost, with notes explanatory and critical. Edited by J.R. Boyd. New York, 1851, 12mo.
—— Milton’s Paradise Lost, with notes, critical and explanatory, original and selected, by J.R. Major. London, 1853, 8vo.
—— Milton’s Paradise Lost. Published under the direction of the Committee of General Literature and Education [appointed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge]. London [1859], 8vo.
—— Milton’s Paradise Lost.
In twelve books. London, 1861, 16mo.
One of “Bell
& Daldy’s Pocket Volumes.”
—— Paradise Lost. To which is prefixed a life of the author, and Dr. Channing’s Essay on the poetical genius of Milton. London, 1862, 12mo.
—— Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Illustrated by Gustave Dore. Edited, with notes
and a life of Milton, by R. Vaughan. London [1866],
folio.
A re-issue appeared
in 1871-72.
—— Paradise Lost, in ten books. The text exactly reproduced from the first edition of 1667. With an appendix containing the additions made in later issues and a monograph on the original publication of the poem. [By R.H.S., i.e., R.H. Shepherd?] London, 1873, 4to.
—— Paradise Lost, as originally published, being a fac-simile of the first edition. With an introduction by D. Masson. London, 1877 [1876], 4to.
—— Paradise Lost. Illustrated by thirty-eight designs in outline by F. Thrupp. [Containing only fragments of the text.] London, 1879, obl. folio.
—— Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Illustrated by Gustave Dore. Edited, with notes
and a life of Milton, by R. Vaughan. London, 1882,
4to.
Re-issued in 1888.
—— Paradise Lost. The text emended, with notes and preface by M. Hull. London, 1884, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost. London, 1887,
16 mo.
Part of “Routledge’s
Pocket Library.”
—— Paradise Lost. (Cassell’s National Library, vols. 162, 163.) London, 1889, 8vo.
—— —— The Story of our first Parents; selected from Milton’s Paradise Lost: for the use of young persons. By Mrs. Siddons. London, 1822, 8vo.
Paradise Regain’d. A Poem in four books. To which is added Samson Agonistes. The author, J. Milton. 2 pts. London, 1671, 8vo.
—— Paradise Regain’d. To which is added Samson Agonistes. London, 1680, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1688, folio.
—— Paradise Regained. Samson Agonistes, and the smaller poems. Sixth edition. London, 1695, folio.
—— Paradise Regain’d. To which is added Samson Agonistes, and poems upon several occasions, compos’d at several times. Fourth edition. London, 1705, 8vo.
—— Paradise Regain’d. To which is added Samson Agonistes, etc. The fifth edition. London, 1707, 8vo.
—— Paradise Regain’d. To which is added Samson Agonistes, etc. Fifth edition. Adorned with cuts. London, 1713, 12mo.
—— Sixth edition, corrected. London, 1725, 8vo.
—— Seventh edition, corrected. 3 pts. London, 1727, 8vo.
—— Seventh edition, corrected. London, 1730, 12mo.
—— Eighth edition. London, 1743, 8vo.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. London, 1747, 12mo.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. Glasgow, 1747, 12mo.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. A new edition. With notes of various authors, by T. Newton. London, 1752, 4to.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. Glasgow, 1752, 12mo.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. The second edition, with notes of various authors, by T. Newton. 2 vols. London, 1753, 8vo.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. London, 1753, 12mo.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. London, 1756, 12mo.
—— Paradise Regained, etc. Birmingham, 1758, 4to.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. London, 1760, 12mo.
—— Paradise Regain’d (British Poets, vol. iii.). Edinburgh, 1773, 8vo.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. 2 vols. Glasgow, 1772, 12mo.
—— A new edition. 2 vols. London, 1773, 8vo.
—— A new edition. By T. Newton. London, 1777, 4to.
—— A new edition, with notes of various authors, by T. Newton. 2 vols. London, 1785, 8vo.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. London, 1779, 12mo.
—— Paradise Regain’d, etc. Alnwick, 1793, 12mo.
—— A new edition, with notes of various authors, by C. Dunster. London. 1795. 4to.
—— Another edition. London [1800], 4to.
—— Milton’s Paradise Regained; with select notes subjoined: to which is added a complete collection of his Miscellaneous Poems, both English and Latin. London, 1796, 8vo.
—— Paradise Regained. With select notes subjoined, etc. London, 1817, 8vo.
—— Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, Comus, and Arcades. London, 1817, 12mo.
—— Paradise Regained, and other poems. London, 1823, 16mo.
—— Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, Comus, and Arcades. [With Westall’s plates.] London, 1827, 16mo.
—— Paradise Regained; and other poems. London, 1832, 16mo.
—— Milton’s Paradise Regained,
and other poems. London, 1861, 16mo.
One of “Bell
& Daldy’s Pocket Volumes.”
The readie and easie way to establish a free Commonwealth, and the excellence thereof, compar’d with the inconveniences and dangers of re-admitting Kingship in this nation. The author J[ohn] M[ilton]. London, 1660, 4to.
The Reason of Church-Government urg’d against Prelaty. In two books. London, 1641, 4to.
Samson Agonistes. London, 1688, folio.
First appeared
with the Paradise Regained in 1671.
—— Samson Agonistes. London,
1695, folio.
Reprinted from
the preceding edition.
—— Samson Agonistes. (Bell’s British Theatre, vol. 34.) London, 1797, 8vo.
—— Samson Agonistes. London [1869], 8vo.
—— Milton. Samson Agonistes. Edited by John Churton Collins. (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford, 1883, 8vo.
Scriptum Dom. Protectoris contra Hispanos. [By John Milton.] Londini, 1655, 4to.
—— A Manifesto of the Lord Protector against the Depredations of the Spaniards. Written in Latin by John Milton. London, 1738, 8vo.
—— A true Copy of Oliver Cromwell’s Manifesto against Spain, dated October 26, 1655 [written by John Milton]. London, 1741, 4to.
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; proving that it is lawfull, and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to account a tyrant or wicked king, and after due conviction to depose and put him to death, etc. The author J[ohn] M[ilton]. London, 1649, 4to.
—— Another edition, with additions. London, 1650, 4to.
Tetrachordon: expositions upon the foure chief
places in Scripture which
treat of mariage, or nullities in manage, wherein
the doctrine and
discipline of divorce, as was lately publish’d,
is confirm’d. By the
former author J. M[ilton]. London, 1645 [1644
O.S.], 4to.
The author’s
name appears in full at the end of the address “To
the Parliament.”
A Treatise on Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes; shewing that it is not lawfull for any power on earth to compell in matter of religion. The author J[ohn] M[ilton]. London, 1659, 12mo.
—— A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes. First printed anno 1659. London, reprinted 1790, 8vo.
—— A Treatise on Civil Power in
Ecclesiastical Causes, etc. London, 1839,
8vo.
Tracts for
the People, No. I.
—— On the Civil Power in Ecclesiastical
Causes; and on the likeliest means to remove Hirelings
out of the Church. London, 1851, 8vo.
Part XI. of “Buried
Treasures.”
The Beauties of Milton, Thomson, and Young. Dublin, 1783, 12mo.
The Beauties of Milton; consisting of selections from his poetry and prose, by A. Howard. London [1834], 12mo.
The Poetry of Milton’s Prose; selected from his various writings; with notes, and an introductory essay [by C.]. London, 1827, 12mo.
Readings from Milton. With an introduction by
Bishop H.W. Warren.
Boston, 1886, 8vo.
Part of the “Chatauqua
Library—Garnet Series.”
Selected Prose Writings of John Milton, with an introductory
essay by E.
Myers. London, 1883, 8vo.
Fifty copies only
printed.
Selections from the Prose Writings of John Milton. Edited, with memoir, notes, and analyses, by S. Manning. London, 1862, 8vo.
Selections from the Prose Works of John Milton. With critical remarks and elucidations. Edited by J.J.G. Graham. London, 1870, 8vo.
Shakespeare and Milton Reader; being scenes and other extracts from the writings of Shakespeare and Milton, etc. London [1883], 8vo.
BIOGRAPHY, CRITICISM, ETC.
Acton, Rev. Henry.—Religious opinions and examples of Milton, Locke, and Newton. A lecture, with notes. London, 1833, 8vo.
Addison, Rt. Hon. Joseph.—Notes upon
the twelve books of Paradise Lost.
Collected from the Spectator. London,
1719, 12mo.
Appeared originally
in the Spectator, Dec. 31, 1711—May
3,
1712.
Ademollo, A.—La Leonora di Milton e di Clemente IX. Milano [1886], 8vo.
Andrews, Samuel.—Our Great Writers; or,
Popular chapters on some
leading authors. London, 1884, 8vo.
Milton, pp. 84-112.
Arnold, Matthew.—Mixed Essays. London,
1879, 8vo.
A French Critic
on Milton, pp. 237-273.
—— Essays in Criticism. Second
Series. London, 1888, 8vo.
Milton, pp. 56-68.
Bagehot, Walter.—Literary Studies. 2 vols.
London, 1879, 8vo.
John Milton, vol.
i., pp. 173-220.
—— Third edition. 2 vols. London, 1884, 8vo.
Balfour, Clara Lucas.—Sketches of English
Literature, etc. London,
1852, 8vo.
Milton and his
Literary Contemporaries, pp. 151-173.
Barron, William.—Lectures on Belles Lettres
and Logic. 2 vols. London,
1806, 8vo.
Milton, vol. ii.,
pp. 281-300.
Baumgarten, Dr.—John Milton und das Verlorene Paradies. Coburg [1875], 4to.
Bayne, Peter.—The Chief Actors in the Puritan
Revolution. London,
1878, 8vo.
Milton, pp. 297-346.
Bentley, Richard.—Dr. Bentley’s emendations
on the twelve books of
Milton’s Paradise Lost. London, 1732, 12mo.
Bickersteth, E.H.—Milton’s Paradise
Lost. (The St. James’s Lectures,
Second Series.) London, 1876, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1877, 8vo.
Birrell, Augustine.—Obiter Dicta.
Second series. London, 1887, 8vo.
Milton, pp. 1-50.
Blackburne, Francis.—Remarks on Johnson’s Life of Milton. To which are added Milton’s Tractate of Education and Areopagitica. London, 1780, 16mo.
Blair, Hugh.—Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles
Lettres, etc. 2 vols.
London, 1783, 4to.
Paradise Lost,
vol. ii., pp. 471-476.
Bodmer, J. Jacob.—J.J. Bodmer’s
critische Abhandlung, von dem
Wunderbaren in der Poesie in einer Vertheidigung des
Gedichtes J.
Milton’s von dem verlohrnen Paradiese, etc.
Zuerich, 1740, 8vo.
Bradburn, Eliza W.—The Story of Paradise Lost, for children. Portland, 1830, 16mo.
Brooke, Stopford A.—Milton. [An account
of his life and works.]
London, 1879, 8vo.
Part of the series
entitled Classical Writers, ed. J.R.
Green.
Bruce, Archibald.—A critical account of the life, character, and discourses of Mr. Alexander Morus, in which the attack made upon him in the writings of Milton is particularly considered. Edinburgh, 1813, 8vo.
Brydges, Sir Samuel Egerton.—The Life of John Milton. London [1835], 8vo.
Bulwer Lytton, E.—The Siamese Twins, etc.
London, 1831, 8vo.
Milton, a poem,
pp. 315-362.
Burney, Charles.—Remarks on the Greek Verses of Milton. [London, 1790], 8vo.
Buckland, Anna.—The Story of English Literature.
London, 1882, 8vo.
Milton, pp. 230-296.
Callander, John.—Letter and Report respecting
the Unpublished
Commentary on Milton’s Paradise Lost, by the
late John Callander, of
Craigforth, Esq., in the possession of the Society.
(Archaeologia
Scotica, vol. iii., 1831, pp. 83-91.) Edinburgh,
1831, 4to.
Camerini, Eugenio.—Profili Letterari.
Firenze, 1870, 8vo.
Milton e l’Italia,
pp. 264-274.
Cann, Miss Christian.—A scriptural and
allegorical glossary to
Milton’s Paradise Lost. London [1828],
8vo.
Carpenter, William.—The Life and Times of John Milton. London [1836], 8vo.
Channing, William Ellery.—Remarks on the Character and Writings of John Milton; occasioned by the publication of his lately discovered “Treatise on Christian Doctrine.” From the Christian Examiner, vol. iii., No. 1. Boston, 1826, 8vo.
Charles I.—By the King. A Proclamation for calling in and suppressing of two books written by John Milton: the one Intituled Johannis Miltoni Angli pro Populo Anglicano defensio, etc., and the other, The Pourtraicture of his Sacred Majesty, etc. London, 1660, s. sh. fol.
—— The Life and Reigne of King Charls;
or, the Pseudo-Martyr
discovered, etc. London, 1651, 8vo.
In the Bodleian
Catalogue this work is erroneously stated to be by
John Milton.
Chassang, A., and Marcou, F.L.—Les Chefs-d’Oeuvre
Epiques de tous les
peuples. Paris, 1879, 8vo.
Milton, pp. 279-297.
Clarke, Samuel.—Some reflections on that part of a book called Amyntor, or the defence of Milton’s life, which relates to the writings of the primitive fathers, etc. (Letter to Mr. Dodwell, etc., pp. 451-475.) London, 1781, 8vo.
Cleveland, C.D.—A Complete Concordance
to the Poetical Works of John
Milton. London, 1867, 8vo.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.—Seven lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, etc. London, 1856, 8vo.
Darby, Samuel.—A letter to T. Warton, on his late edition of Milton’s Juvenile Poems [entitled “Poems upon several occasions, English, Italian, and Latin.”] London, 1785, 8vo.
Dawson, George.—Biographical Lectures.
London, 1886, 8vo.
John Milton, pp.
82-88.
De Morgan, J.—John Milton considered as
a Politician. (Men of the
Commonwealth, No. 1.) [London, 1875], 16mo.
Dennis, John.—Heroes of Literature.
English Poets. London, 1883, 8vo.
John Milton, pp.
114-147.
De Quincey, T.—Works. 16 vols. London,
1853-60, 8vo.
Milton, vol. vi.,
pp. 311-325; Life of Milton, vol. x., pp. 79-98.
Des Essarts, E.—De Veterum poetarum tum Graeciae tum Romae apud Miltonem imitatione thesim proponebat E. Des Essarts. Parisiis, 1871, 8vo.
Diderot, Denis.—An Essay on Blindness, etc. Interspersed with several anecdotes of Sanderson, Milton, and others. Translated from the French. London [1750], 12mo.
Dobson, W.T.—The Classic Poets, their lives
and their times, etc.
London, 1879, 8vo.
Milton’s
Paradise Lost, pp. 394-446; Paradise Regained,
pp. 446-452.
Donoughue, Edward Jones.—Milton: a lecture. London, 1843, 8vo.
Douglas, John.—Milton vindicated from the charge of plagiarism brought against him by Mr. Lauder, etc. London, 1751, 8vo.
—— Milton no plagiary; or, a detection of the forgeries contained in Lauder’s essay, etc. Second edition. London, 1756, 8vo.
Dowden, Edward.—Transcripts and Studies.
London, 1888, 8vo.
The Idealism of
Milton, pp. 454-473.
Dowling, William.—Poets and Statesmen;
their homes and haunts in the
neighbourhood of Eton and Windsor. London, 1857,
8vo.
Milton, pp. 1-39.
Dryden, John.—The State of Innocence, and
Fall of Man; an opera, etc.
London, 1677, 4to.
Du Moulin, P.—Regii sanguinis clamor ad
coelum adversus parricidas
Anglicanos. [A reply to Milton’s “Defensio
pro populo Anglicano.”] Hagae
Comitum, 1652, 4to.
—— Editio secunda. Hagae Comitum, 1661, 12mo.
Dunster, C.—Considerations on Milton’s early reading, and the prima stamina of his Paradise Lost, etc. London, 1800, 8vo.
Edmonds, Cyrus R.—John Milton; a biography. Especially designed to exhibit the ecclesiastical principles of that illustrious man. London, 1851, 8vo.
Edmundson, George.—Milton and Vondel.
A curiosity of literature.
London, 1885, 8vo.
Ellwood, Thomas.—Reflections of [Thomas Ellwood] with John Milton (Arber’s English Garner, vol. iii., pp. 473-486). London, 1880, 8vo.
English Poets.—Cursory remarks on some of the ancient English poets, particularly Milton. [By P. Neve.] London, 1789, 8vo.
Epigoniad.—A critical essay on the Epigoniad, wherein the author’s abuse of Milton is examined. Edinburgh, 1757, 8vo.
Eyre, Charles.—The Fall of Adam, from Milton’s Paradise Lost. London [1852], 8vo.
Filmer, Sir Robert.—Observations concerning the originall of Government upon Mr. Hobs Leviathan, Mr. Milton against Salmasius, H. Grotius De Jure Belli. London, 1652, 4to.
—— The Free-holders grand inquest, etc. (Reflections concerning the Original of Government upon Mr. Milton against Salmasius.) London, 1679, 8vo.
Flatters, J.J.—The Paradise Lost of Milton,
translated into fifty-four designs, by J.J. Flatters,
sculptor. London, 1843, folio.
Without letterpress.
Fry, Alfred A.—A lecture on the writings, prose and poetic, and the character, public and personal, of John Milton. London, 1838, 8vo.
Geffroy, Mathieu A.—Etude sur les pamphlets politiques et religieux de Milton. Paris, 1848, 8vo.
Gilfillan, George.—A Second Gallery of
Literary Portraits. London, 1850, 8vo.
John Milton, pp.
1-39.
—— Modern Christian Heroes, etc.
London, 1869, 8vo.
John Milton, pp.
81-118.
Giraud, Jane E.—Flowers of Milton. London, 1850, 4to.
Godwin, William.—Lives of E. and J. Philips,
nephews and pupils of
Milton, to which are added: I. Collections for
the life of Milton, by J.
Aubrey, printed from the manuscript copy in the Ashmolean
Museum. II.
The Life of Milton, by E. Philips, printed 1694.
London, 1815, 4to.
Goodwin, Thomas.—The Student’s Practical
Grammar of the English
Language; together with a commentary on the first
book of Milton’s
Paradise Lost. London, 1855, 12mo.
Greenwood, F.W.P.—The Miscellaneous Writings
of F.W.P. Greenwood.
Boston, 1846, 8vo.
Milton’s
Prose Works, pp. 208-226.
Grotius, H. de.—The Adamus Exul of Grotius; or, the prototype of Paradise Lost. Translated from the Latin, by Francis Barham. London, 1839, 8vo.
Guerle, Edmond de.—Milton, sa vie et ses oeuvres. Paris, 1868, 8vo.
Guentzer, C.—Dissertationis ad quaedam
loca Miltoni pars posterior.
Argentorati, 1657, 4to.
Hamilton, W. Douglas.—Original Papers,
illustrative of the life and
writings of John Milton, including sixteen letters
of State written by
him, now first published from MSS. in the State Paper
Office, etc.
London, 1859, 4to.
Printed for the
Camden Society.
Hamilton, Walter.—Parodies of the Works
of English and American
Authors, collected and annotated by W. Hamilton.
London, 1885, 4to.
John Milton, vol.
ii., pp. 217-236.
Hare, Julius Charles.—Essays and Tales.
2 vols. London, 1848, 8vo.
Milton, vol. i.,
pp. 73-86.
Harrington, James.—The Censure of the Rota
upon Mr. Milton’s book, entitled The Ready and
Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. [Signed
J. H(arrington); a satire.] London, 1660, 4to.
Reprinted in the
Harleian Miscellany.
Hayley, William.—The Life of Milton; to
which are added conjectures on
the origin of Paradise Lost. (The second edition enlarged.)
London,
1796, 4to.
This life appeared
originally in 1794 in vol. i. of Milton’s
Poetical Works.
Hillebrand, C.—De sacro apud Christianos carmine epico dissertationem seu Dantis, Miltonis, Klopstockii poetarum collationem proponebat C. Hillebrand, Parisiis, 1861, 8vo.
Hodgson, Shadworth H.—Outcast Essays, etc.
London, 1881, 8vo.
The supernatural
in English poetry; Shakespere; Milton; Wordsworth
Tennyson, pp.
99-180.
Holloway, Laura C.—The Mothers of Great
Men and Women, etc. New York,
1884, 8vo.
Milton’s
Wives, pp. 457-478.
Hood, Edwin Paxton.—John Milton: the Patriot and Poet. London, 1852, 18mo.
Hopkins, J.—Milton’s Paradise Lost, imitated in rhyme; in the fourth, sixth, and ninth books, etc. London, 1699, 8vo.
Howitt, William.—Homes and Haunts of the
most eminent British Poets.
Third edition. London, 1857, 8vo.
John Milton, pp.
46-68.
Huet, C.B.—Litterarische Fantasien en Kritieken.
Haarlem [1883], 8vo.
Milton, 12th Deel,
pp. 150-220.
Hunt, Theodore W.—Representative English
Prose and Prose Writers. New
York, 1887, 8vo.
The prose style
of John Milton, pp. 246-264.
Hutton, Laurence.—Literary Landmarks of
London. London, 1885, 8vo.
John Milton, pp.
210-216, etc.
Ivimey, Joseph.—John Milton; his life and times; religious and political opinions; with an appendix, containing animadversions upon Dr. Johnson’s Life of Milton, etc. London, 1833, 8vo.
Jackson, W.—Lycidas: a musical entertainment.
The words altered from
Milton. London, 1767, 8vo.
Jane, Joseph.—The Image Unbroaken a perspective of the Impudence, Falshood, Vanitie, and Prophannes, in a Libell entitled Eikonoklastes. [London], 1651, 4to.
Johnson, Samuel.—Prefaces to Milton and Butler. (Prefaces to the Works of the English Poets, vol. ii.) London, 1779, 8vo.
—— Court and Country: a paraphrase upon Milton. [In a dialogue.] By the author of Hurlothrumbo [i.e., Samuel Johnson]. London [1780], 8vo.
Jortin, John.—Remarks on Spenser’s
Poems. London, 1734, 8vo.
Remarks on Milton,
pp. 171-186.
Keightley, Thomas.—An account of the Life,
Opinions, and Writings of
John Milton. With an introduction to Paradise
Lost. London, 1855, 8vo.
Keogh, Rt. Hon. William.—Milton’s Prose. (Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art, delivered in the Theatre of the Museum of Industry, Dublin, 1865, 3rd Series.) London, 1866, 8vo.
Lamartine, M.L.A. de.—Heloise et Abelard
[Biographies]. Paris, 1864, 12mo.
Includes a biography
of Milton, pp. 113-215.
Lauder, William.—An essay on Milton’s use and imitation of the moderns in his Paradise Lost. [With a preface by Dr. Johnson.] London, 1750, 8vo.
—— A letter to the reverend Mr. Douglas, occasioned by his vindication of Milton, etc. [Written by Dr. Johnson.] London, 1751, 4to.
—— An apology for Mr. Lauder [written by himself] in a letter most humbly addressed to his grace the Archbishop of Canterbury. London, 1751, 8vo.
—— Delectus auctorum sacrorum, Miltono facem praelucentium. 2 tom. London, 1752, 8vo.
—— King Charles I. vindicated from the charge of plagiarism brought against him by Milton, etc. To the whole is subjoined the Judgment of several learned and impartial authors concerning Milton’s political writings. London, 1754, 8vo.
L’Estrange, R.—No Blind Guides, in answer to a seditious pamphlet of Milton’s, intituled Brief notes upon a late sermon titl’d The fear of God and the King, preach’d and since publish’d. By M. Griffith, etc. London, 1660, 4to.
Letters.—Letters concerning poetical translations and Virgil’s and Milton’s Arts of Verse, etc. London, 1739, 8vo.
Liebert, Gustav.—Milton. Studien zur
Geschichte des englischen Geistes.
Hamburg, 1860, 8vo.
Lotheissen, Ferdinand.—Studien ueber John Milton’s poetische Werke. Budingen, 1860, 4to.
Lowell, James Russell.—Among my Books.
Second series. London, 1876, 8vo.
Milton, pp. 252-302.
M.J.A.—An introduction to the Study of
Shakespeare and Milton. [By
J.A.M. With selections from their works.] London
[1884], 8vo.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington.—Critical and
historical essays contributed
to the Edinburgh Review. 2 vols. London, 1854,
8vo.
Milton, vol. i.,
pp. 1-28.
—— The Miscellaneous Writings of
Lord Macaulay. London, 1860, 8vo.
Conversation between
Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton
touching the great
Civil War, vol. i., pp. 101-124.
—— An Essay on the Life and Works of John Milton, together with the imaginary conversation between him and H. Cowley. London, 1868, 8vo.
—— Milton’s Essay on Milton. From the Edinburgh Review. With introductory notice and notes. London, 1872, 16mo.
—— John Milton. [A biographical sketch.] Boston, 1877, 16mo.
—— Macaulay’s Milton, edited to illustrate the laws of Rhetoric and Composition, by Alexander Mackie. London, 1884, 8vo.
Maceuen, Malcolm.—Celebrities of the Past
and Present. Philadelphia, 1874, 8vo.
Milton and Poetry,
pp. 195-202.
Mackenzie, Sir George.—Jus Regium: or, the just and solid foundations of monarchy in general maintain’d against Buchanan, Dolman, Milton, etc. Edinburgh, 1684, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1684, 8vo.
McNicoll, Thomas.—Essays on English Literature.
London, 1861, 8vo.
Milton and Pollok,
pp. 65-111.
Marquis, G.A.—Select Poetical Pieces, with a logical arrangement, or practical commentary on Milton’s Paradise Lost. Second edition enlarged. Paris, 1842, 12mo.
Marsh, John F.—Papers connected with the
affairs of Milton and his
family. Edited by J.F. Marsh. Manchester,
1851, 4to.
In vol. i. of
the Chetham Miscellanies, published by the Chetham
Society.
—— Notice of the inventory of the
effects of Mrs. Milton, widow of the
poet. Liverpool, 1855, 8vo.
Extracted from
the proceedings of the Historic Society of
Lancashire and
Cheshire.
—— On the engraved portrait and pretended portraits of Milton. Extracted from the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. Liverpool, 1860, 8vo.
Martyn, W. Carlos.—Life and Times of John
Milton. [Published by the
“American Tract Society.” With portrait.]
New York [1866], 12mo.
Mason, W.—Musaeus; a monody to the memory of Mr. Pope in imitation of Milton’s Lycidas. London, 1747, 4to.
Massey, William.—Remarks upon Milton’s Paradise Lost, etc. London, 1761, 12mo.
Masson, David.—Essays biographical and
critical: chiefly on English
poets. Cambridge, 1856, 8vo.
Milton’s
Youth, pp. 37-52; The Three Devils: Luther’s,
Milton’s,
and Goethe’s,
pp. 53-87.
—— The Three Devils: Luther’s, Milton’s, and Goethe’s. London, 1874, 8vo.
—— The Life of John Milton; narrated in connexion with the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of his time. 6 vols. Cambridge, 1859-80, 8vo.
—— New and revised edition. London, 1881, etc., 8vo.
—— John Milton. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. xvi., pp. 324-340.) London, 1883, 4to.
Meadowcourt, Richard.—A critique on Milton’s Paradise Regained. London, 1732, 4to.
—— A Critical Dissertation, with notes, on Milton’s Paradise Regain’d. The second edition corrected. London, 1748, 8vo.
Milton, John.—An answer to a book [by John Milton], intituled, The Divorce and Discipline of Divorce, etc. London, 1644, 4to.
—— Carolus I. Britanniarum Rex, a Securi et Calamo Miltonii vindicatus. Dublini, 1652, 12mo.
—— Areopagitica Secunda: or, speech of the shade of John Milton on Mr. Sergeant Talfourd’s Copyright Extension Bill. London, 1838, 8vo.
—— Comus, a mask: (now adapted to the stage) as alter’d [by J. Dalton] from Milton’s Mask. London, 1738, 8vo.
—— Second edition. London, 1738, 8vo.
—— Third edition. London, 1738, 8vo.
—— Another edition. Dublin, 1738, 8vo.
—— Sixth edition. London, 1741, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1750, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1759, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1760, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1762, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1777, 8vo.
—— Comus, a masque [altered by J.
Dalton from John Milton], London, 1791, 8vo.
In vol. i. of
“Bell’s Theatre.”
—— Comus [altered from Milton by
J. Dalton]. London, 1811, 8vo.
In the “Modern
British Drama,” vol. ii.
—— Comus: a mask, altered from
Milton. [By J. Dalton.] London, 1815, 16mo.
In vol. x. of
Dibdin’s “London Theatre.”
—— Comus. [Adapted to the stage
by J. Dalton.] London, 1826, 8vo.
In the “British
Drama,” vol. ii.
—— Comus: a masque [in two acts]. Altered from Milton [by G. Colman]. As performed at the Theatre-Royal in Covent Garden. The musick composed by Dr. Arne. London, 1772, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1774, 8vo.
—— Comus: a masque. Altered by Mr. Colman. (Bell’s British Theatre, vol. ix.) London, 1777, 12mo.
—— Comus: a masque. Altered
from Milton [by G. Colman]. Edinburgh, 1786,
12mo.
Vol. iv. of the
“British Stage.”
—— Comus. Altered for the stage by Colman. (Modern British Drama, vol. v.) London, 1811, 8vo.
—— Comus: a masque. Altered from Milton, by G. Colman. (Inchbald’s Collection of Farces, vol. vii.) London, 1815, 12mo.
—— Milton’s Comus: a
masque, in two acts [altered from Milton], as
revised at Covent Garden, April 28, 1815. London,
1815, 8vo.
There is a copy
in the British Museum with the autograph of Sir
Henry Bishop.
—— Comus: a masque. Altered
from Milton [by G. Colman]. London [1824], 8vo.
Vol. ii. of “The
London Stage.”
—— Comus. Altered from Milton.
[By G. Colman, the elder.] London, 1872, 8vo.
In the “British
Drama,” vol. xii.
—— Comus: a masque. Altered from Milton. (Supplement to Bell’s British Theatre, vol. iv.) London, 1784, 12mo.
—— Miltonis epistola ad Pollionem. Edidit et notis illustravit F.S. Cantabrigiensis. Londini, 1738, folio.
—— Editio altera. Londini, 1738, folio.
—— Milton’s Epistle to Pollio. Translated from the Latin, and illustrated with notes. London, 1740, folio.
—— Milton restor’d and Bentley depos’d, containing, I. Some observations on Dr. Bentley’s preface. II. His various readings and notes on Paradise Lost and Milton’s text, set in opposite columns, with remarks therein. III. Paradise Lost, attempted in rime. Book I., Numb. I. From Dean Swift. London, 1732, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost: a poem attempted in Rhime. [Altered from Milton.] London, 1740, 8vo.
—— Paradise Lost. An oratorio [in three acts and in verse] altered and adapted to the stage from Milton [by B. Stillingfleet]. London, 1760, 4to.
—— Paradise Lost. An oratorio in four parts. The words selected from the works of Milton by J.L. Ellerton. London [1862], 12mo.
—— Paradise Lost. Oratorio in three parts, from the poem of Milton. English version by J. Pittman. London [1880], 8vo.
—— The State of Innocence and Fall of Man described in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Render’d into prose with notes from the French of Raymond [or rather Nicolas Francois Dupre] de St. Maur. By a gentleman of Oxford [George Smith Green?]. London, 1745, 8vo.
—— Another edition. Aberdeen, 1770, 12mo.
—— A verbal Index to Milton’s Paradise Lost; adapted to every edition but the first, etc. London, 1741, 12mo.
—— An essay upon Milton’s imitations of the Ancients in his Paradise Lost. With some observations on the Paradise Regain’d. London, 1741, 8vo.
—— A new occasional Oratorio [on
the suppression of the Rebellion],
the words taken from Milton, Spenser, etc., and
set to musick by Mr.
Handel. London, 1746, 4to.
The words only.
—— The Progress of Envy, a poem occasioned by Lauder’s attack on the character of Milton. London, 1751, 4to.
—— A familiar explanation of the poetical works of Milton. To which is prefixed Mr. Addison’s criticism on Paradise Lost. With a preface by Rev. Mr. Dodd. London, 1672, 12mo.
—— The Recovery of Man: or, Milton’s Paradise Regained. In Prose. After the manner of the Archbishop of Cambray. To which is prefixed the life of the author. [London], 1771, 12mo.
—— Samson. An Oratorio [in
three acts]. As it is performed at the Theatres-royal.
Altered from the Samson Agonistes of Milton [by N.
Hamilton]. Set to musick by Mr. Handel. London
[1742], 8vo.
The words only.
—— Another edition. London [1742], 4to.
—— Another edition. London [1742], 4to.
—— Another edition. London, 1743, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1751, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1759, 4to.
—— Samson: an oratorio [altered and adapted to the stage from the Samson Agonistes by N. Hamilton]. [Oxford], 1749, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1762, 4to.
—— Samson. Set to musick by Mr. Handel. London, 1762, 4to.
—— Samson. An oratorio [altered from the Samson Agonistes, by N. Hamilton]. Salisbury, 1765, 8vo.
—— Handel’s oratorio, Samson. The words chiefly from Milton. [Compiled by T. Morell.] London [1840], 4to.
—— The Life of John Milton. Published under the direction of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. London [1861], 8vo.
—— A Milton Memorial. A sketch of the life of John Milton, compiled with reference to the proposed restoration of the Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate (where he was buried). By Antiquitatis historicae studiosus. London, 1862, 8vo.
Mirabeau, Count de.—Theorie de la Royaute d’apres la Doctrine de Milton. [Translated from the Defence of the People of England. With a preliminary dissertation, “Sur Milton et ses ouvrages”; by H.G. Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau?] [Paris], 1789, 8vo.
Moers, F. Josephus.—De fontibus Paradisi Amissi Miltoniani. Dissertatio philologica, etc. Bonnae [1865], 8vo.
Morris, Joseph W.—John Milton: a vindication, specially from the charge of Arianism. London [1862], 8vo.
Mortimer, Charles Edward.—An historical memoir of the Political Life of John Milton. London, 1805, 4to.
Morus, Alexander.—A. Mori Fides Publica, contra calumnias Joannis Miltoni. Hagae-Comitum, 1654, 12mo.
Mouron, H.—Jean Milton. Conference. Deuxieme edition. Strasbourg, 1875, 8vo.
Munkacsy, M.—Opinions of the Continental Press on M. Munkacsy and his latest picture, “Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters.” Paris, 1879, 8vo.
Neve, Philip.—A narrative of the disinterment of Milton’s coffin in the Parish Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, 4th August 1790; and of the treatment of the corpse during that and the following day. London, 1790, 8vo.
Nicoll, Henry J.—Landmarks of English Literature.
London, 1883, 8vo.
John Milton, pp.
112-125.
Paterson, James.—A complete commentary
on Milton’s Paradise Lost, etc.
London, 1744, 8vo.
Pattison, Mark.—Milton. [An account of
his life and works.] London,
1879, 8vo.
One of the “English
Men of Letters” series.
Pauli, Reinhold.—Aufsaetze zur Englischen
Geschichte. Leipzig, 1869, 8vo.
John Milton, pp.
348-391.
Pearce, Z., Bishop of Rochester.—A review of the text of Milton’s Paradise Lost; in which the chief of Dr. Bentley’s Emendations are consider’d; and several other emendations and observations are offer’d to the public. London, 1732, 8vo.
—— Another edition. London, 1733, 8vo.
Peck, Francis.—New Memoirs of the Life
and Poetical Works of Mr. John
Milton, etc. London, 1740, 4to.
—— Memoirs of the life and actions of Oliver Cromwell: as delivered in three panegyrics of him. The first, as said, by Don Juan Rodriguez de Saa Meneses; the second, as affirmed by a certain Jesuit; yet both, it is thought, composed by Mr. John Milton, as was the third, etc. London, 1740, 4to.
Penn, John.—Critical, poetical, and dramatic
works. 2 vols. London,
1798, 8vo.
Samson Agonistes,
vol. ii., pp. 213-263.
Philips, John.—Poems attempted in the style of Milton, etc. London, 1762, 12mo.
Philo-Milton, pseud.—Milton’s Sublimity asserted: in a poem occasion’d by a late piece entituled Cyder, a poem [by J. Philips]. In blank verse. London, 1709, 4to.
—— A vindication of the Paradise Lost from the charge of exculpating Lord Byron’s “Cain, a Mystery.” London, 1822, 8vo.
Plaint.—The Plaint of Freedom. (To the Memory of Milton. In verse.) Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1852, 4to.
Prendergast, G.L.—A complete concordance to the poetical works of Milton. Madras, 1856-57, 4to.
Prodromus.—Verax Prodromus in Delirum. [An invective against John Milton.] [Amsterdam? 1656?] 4to.
R * *—Lettres critiques a Mr. le comte * * * sur le Paradis perdu, et reconquis, de Milton, par R * * [outh]. Paris, 1731, 8vo.
Reed, Henry.—Lectures on the British Poets.
2 vols. Philadelphia, 1858, 8vo.
Milton, pp. 199-232.
Rice, Allen Thorndike.—Essays from the
North American Review. New York, 1879, 8vo.
John Milton, by
Ralph Waldo Emerson, pp. 99-122.
Richardson, Jonathan.—Explanatory notes and remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost. By J. Richardson, father and son. London, 1734, 8vo.
Richardson, Jonathan.—Zoilomastix; or, a vindication of Milton from all the invidious charges of W. Lauder. With several new remarks on Paradise Lost. London, 1747, 8vo.
Ring, Max.—John Milton und seine Zeit. Historischer Roman. Frankfurt a. Main, 1857, 8vo.
—— John Milton and his times, a historical novel. Translated by J. Jefferson. Manchester, 1889, 8vo.
Rolli, P.—Sabrina; an opera [in three acts and in verse. Founded on the “Comus” of Milton]. Ital. and Eng. London, 1737, 8vo.
Rossetti, William Michael.—Lives of Famous
Poets. London, 1878, 8vo.
John Milton, pp.
65-79.
Rowland, J.—Pro Rege et Populo Anglicano apologia, contra Joannis Polypragmatici (alias Miltoni Angli) defensionem destructivam Regis et Populi Anglicani. Antwerpiae, 1651, 12mo.
—— Another edition. Antwerpiae, 1652, 12mo.
S.G.—The dignity of Kingship asserted: in answer to Mr. Milton’s Ready and Easie way to establish a free Commonwealth. By G.S. (George Searle?), a lover of loyalty. London, 1660, 8vo.
Saintsbury, George.—A History of Elizabethan
Literature. London, 1887, 8vo.
Milton, pp. 315-329.
Salmasius, Claudius de.—Claudii Salmasii ad Johannem Miltonum Responsio. Opus posthumum. Londini, 1660, 12mo.
Say, Samuel.—Poems on several occasions: and two critical Essays—viz., the first on the harmony, variety, and power of numbers, whether in prose or verse; the second, on the numbers of Paradise Lost. [With a portrait of Milton, etched by J. Richardson.] London, 1745, 4to.
Scherer, Edmond.—Etudes sur la Litterature
Contemporaine. Paris, 1882, 8vo.
Milton et le Paradis
Perdu, tom. vi., pp. 161-194.
Scolari, Filippo.—Saggio di Critica sul Paradiso Perduto, Poema di Giovanni Milton, e sulle annotazioni a quello di Giuseppe Addison. Aggiuntovi l’Adamo sacra rappresentazione di G.B. Andreini, etc. Venezia, 1818, 8vo.
Scott, John.—Critical Essays on some of
the poems of several English poets, etc.
London, 1785, 8vo.
On Milton’s
Lycidas, pp. 37-64.
Seeley, J.R.—Lectures and Essays.
London, 1870, 8vo.
Milton’s
Political Opinions, pp. 89-119; Milton’s Poetry,
pp. 120-154.
Shenston, J.B.—The Authority of Jehovah asserted, ... with some remarks on the article on Milton’s Essay on the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day, which appeared in the Evangelical Review, 1826. London, 1826, 8vo.
Smectymnuus, pseud. [i.e., Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy etc.]—A modest confutation of a slanderous and scurrilous libell, entituled, Animadversions [by John Milton] upon the remonstrants’ defense against Smectymnuus. [London] 1642, 4to.
Sotheby, Samuel Leigh.—Ramblings in the elucidation of the Autograph of Milton. [With plates.] London, 1861, 4to.
Steel, David.—Elements of Punctuation, and critical observations on some passages in Milton. London, 1786, 8vo.
Stern, Alfred.—Milton und seine Zeit. 2 Thle. Leipzig, 1877-79, 8vo.
—— Milton und Cromwell. Berlin,
1875, 8vo.
Serie x., Hft.
236 of Virchow and Holtzendorff’s “Sammlung
gemeinverstaendlicher
wissenschaftlicher Vortraege, etc.”
Symmons, Charles.—The Life of John Milton, etc. London, 1806, 8vo.
—— Second edition. London, 1810, 8vo.
—— Third edition. London, 1882, 8vo.
Taine, H.A.—Histoire de la Litterature
Anglaise. 4 tom. Paris, 1863-4,
8vo.
Milton, tom, ii.,
pp. 327-435.
—— History of English Literature.
Translated by H. Van Laun. 4 vols.
Edinburgh, 1873-4, 8vo.
Milton, vol. ii.,
pp. 239-318.
Tasso, Torquato.—Il Tasso, a dialogue.
The speakers, John Milton,
Torquato Tasso. London, 1762, 8vo.
Todd, Henry John.—Some account of the life
and writings of John Milton.
Second edition, with additions, and with a verbal
index to the whole of
Milton’s poetry. London, 1809, 8vo.
This forms vol.
i. of the 1809 edition of Todd’s Milton; a certain
number of copies
being printed off with a distinct title-page.
—— Some account of the life and writings of John Milton, derived principally from documents in His Majesty’s State-paper Office, now first published. London, 1826, 8vo.
Toland, John.—The Life of John Milton, containing, besides the history of his works, several extraordinary characters of men and books, sects, parties, and opinions. [Signed J.T., i.e. J. Toland.] London, 1699, 8vo.
—— Amyntor; or, a Defence of Milton’s Life, etc. London, 1699, 8vo.
—— The Life of John Milton; with Amyntor; or a Defence of Milton’s Life, etc. London, 1761, 8vo.
Tomlinson, John.—Three Household Poets—viz., Milton, Cowper, Burns, etc. London, 1869, 8vo.
Tulloch, John.—English Puritanism and its leaders, Cromwell, Milton, Baxter, Bunyan. Edinburgh, 1861, 8vo.
Vericour, Raymond de.—Milton et la poesie epique, etc. Paris, 1838, 8vo.
Ward, Thomas H.—The English Poets; selections,
with critical introductions, etc. 4 vols.
London, 1880, 8vo.
John Milton, by
Mark Pattison, vol. ii., pp. 293-379.
Warton, Thomas.—A Letter to T. Warton on his editon of Milton’s juvenile poems. [By S. Darby?] London, 1785, 8vo.
White, Thomas Holt.—A Review of Johnson’s criticism on the style of Milton’s English Prose, etc. London, 1818, 8vo.
Wilson, J.—Vindiciae Carolinae; or a defence of Eikon Basilike, etc. London, 1692, 8vo.
Yonge, Charles Duke.—Three Centuries of
English Literature. London, 1872, 8vo.
Milton, pp. 185-210.
Zicari da Paola, F.—Sulla scoverta dell’ originale Italiano da cui Milton trasse il suo poema del Paradiso Perduto. Napoli, 1844, 12mo.
Ziegler, C.—C. Ziegleri circa regicidium Anglorum exercitationes. Accedit Jacobi Schalleri Dissertatio ad loca quaedam Miltoni. Lugd. Batavorum, 1653, 12mo.
Milton, John.—Edinburgh Review, by T.B.
Macaulay, vol. 42, 1825,
pp. 304-346.
—Christian Examiner, by W.E.
Channing, vol. 3, 1826, pp. 29-77;
same article, Pamphleteer,
vol. 29, pp. 507-547.
—United States Literary Gazette,
vol. 4, 1826, pp. 278-293.
—Quarterly Review, by J.J.
Blunt, vol. 36, 1827, pp. 29-61.
—American Quarterly Review,
vol. 5, 1829, pp. 301-310.
—American Quarterly Observer,
vol. 1, 1833, pp. 115-125.
—Congregational Magazine, vol.
9, 1833, pp. 193-211.
—North American Review, by
R.W. Emerson, vol. 47, 1838, pp. 56-73.
—Blackwood’s Magazine,
vol. 46, 1839, pp. 775-780.
—Penny Magazine, vol. 10, 1841,
pp. 97-101.
—National Review, vol. 9, 1859,
pp. 150-186.
—Chambers’s Journal,
vol. 11, 1859, pp. 117-119.
—Radical, by B.W. Wall,
vol. 3, 1868, pp. 718-723.
—Contemporary Review, by P.
Bayne, vol. 22, 1873, pp. 427-460;
same article, Eclectic Magazine,
vol. 18 N.S., pp. 565-585;
Littell’s Living Age,
vol. 3, 5th ser., pp. 643-662.
—New Monthly Magazine, vol.
4 N.S., 1873, pp. 27-35.
—Congregationalist, by T.H.
Gill, vol. 3, 1874, pp. 705-714.
—Macmillan’s Magazine,
by Mark Pattison, vol. 31, 1875, pp. 380-387;
same article, Littell’s
Living Age, vol. 10, 5th ser., pp. 323-329.
—Western, by H.H. Morgan,
vol. 5, 1879, pp. 107-138.
—Modern Review, by H. New,
vol. 2, 1881, pp. 103-128;
same article, Littell’s
Living Age, vol. 148, pp. 515-525.
—— and the Commonwealth.
British Quarterly Review, vol. 10, 1849, pp. 224-254;
same article, Eclectic Magazine,
vol. 18, pp. 346-362.
—— and Dante. St. James’s Magazine, vol. 15, 1866, pp. 243-250.
—— and Galileo. Fraser’s Magazine, by Sir Richard Owen, vol. 79, 1869, pp. 678-684.
—— and his daughters. People’s Journal, by Mrs. Leman Gillies, vol. 5, 1848, pp. 227, 228.
—— and Homer contrasted. Analectic Magazine, vol. 14, 1819, pp. 224-229.
—— and Macaulay. De Bow’s Review, by G. Fitzhugh, vol. 28, 1860, pp. 667-679.
—— and Masenius. Month, vol. 8, 1868, pp. 542-550.
—— and the Daughters of Eve. St. Paul’s, vol. 13, 1873, pp. 405-418.
—— and Vondel. Academy,
by Edmund Gosse and G. Edmundson, vol. 28,
1885, pp. 265, 266, 293, 294, 342; and by J.R.
Mac Ilraith, pp. 308, 309.
—Athenaeum, Nov. 7, 1885, pp.
599, 600.
—Nation, vol. 42, 1886, pp.
264, 265.
—— and Wordsworth. Temple Bar, vol. 60, 1880, pp. 106-115.
—— Angels of. New Englander, by John A. Himes, vol. 43, 1884, pp. 527-543.
—— Areopagitica. Retrospective Review, vol. 9, 1824, pp. 1-19.
—— as a Reformer. Methodist Quarterly Review, by F.H. Newhall, vol. 39, 1857, pp. 542-559.
—— At Cambridge. American Journal of Education, vol. 28, 1878, pp. 383-400.
—— Bibliographical account of his works. Retrospective Review, vol. 14, 1826, pp. 282-305.
—— Blank Verse of. Fortnightly Review, by J.A. Symonds, vol. 16 N.S., 1874, pp. 767-781.
—— Blindness of. Chambers’s Journal, vol. 3 N.S., 1845, pp. 392-394.
—— Byron and Southey. De Bow’s Review, by G. Fitzhugh, vol. 29, 1860, pp. 430-440.
—— Channing on. Edinburgh
Review, by H. Brougham, vol. 69, 1839,
pp. 214-230.
—Monthly Review, vol. 7 N.S.,
1828, pp. 471-478.
—Fraser’s Magazine, vol.
17, 1838, pp. 627-635.
—— Christian Doctrine.
Quarterly Review, vol. 32, 1835, pp. 442-457.
—North American Review, by
S. Willard, vol. 22, 1826, pp. 364-373.
—United States Literary Gazette,
vol. 3, 1826, pp. 321-327.
—Monthly Review, vol. 107,
1825, pp. 273-294.
—Congregational Magazine, vol.
8, 1825, pp. 588-592.
—Eclectic Review, vol. 25 N.S.,
1826, pp. 1-18, 114-141.
—— Comus. New Monthly Magazine, vol. 7, 1823, pp. 222-229.
—— Comus, and Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess. Manchester Quarterly, by W.E.A. Axon, vol. 1, 1882, pp. 285-295.
—— Dante and AEschylus. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 20 N.S., 1853, pp. 513-525, 577-587, 641-650.
—— De Vericour’s Lectures on. Monthly Review, vol. 2 N.S., 1838, pp. 342-351.
—— Doctrinal Error of his later life. Bibliotheca Sacra, by T. Hunt, vol. 42, 1885, pp. 251-269.
—— Doctrine of Divorce. Monthly Review, vol. 93, 1820, pp. 144-158.
—— Early Life. Methodist Quarterly Review, by P. Church, vol. 48, 1866, pp. 580-595.
—— Effigies of. Historical Magazine, vol. 2, 1858, pp. 230-233.
—— Familiar Letters.
Southern Review, vol. 6, 1830, pp. 198-206.
—American Quarterly Review,
vol. 5, 1829, pp. 301-310.
—— French Critic on.
Quarterly Review, vol. 143, 1877, pp. 186-204;
same article, Littell’s Living Age,
vol. 132, pp. 579-589.
—— Genius of. Tait’s
Edinburgh Magazine, by G. Gilfillan, vol. 15
N.S., 1848, pp. 511-522;
same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol.
15, pp. 196-212.
—— History of England. Retrospective Review, vol. 6, 1822, pp. 87-100.
—— Hollis’ Bust of. Scribner’s Monthly, by C. Cook, vol. 11, 1876, pp. 472-476.
—— Home, School, and College Training of. American Journal of Education, vol. 14, 1864, pp. 159-190.
—— Idealism of. Contemporary
Review, by E. Dowden, vol. 19, 1872, pp. 198-209;
same article, Littell’s Living Age,
vol. 112, 1872, pp. 408-414.
—— in our Day. Christian Examiner, by S. Good, vol. 57, 1854, pp. 323-340.
—— Italian Element in. Penn Monthly Magazine, by O.H. Kendall, vol. 1, 1870, pp. 388-400.
—— Keble’s Estimate of. Macmillan’s Magazine, by J.C. Shairp, vol. 31, 1875, pp. 554-560.
—— Keightley’s Life of. North American Review, by H.A. Whitney, vol. 82, 1856, pp. 388-404. Littell’s Living Age (from the Saturday Review), vol. 63, 1859, pp. 226-229.
—— Lamartine on. Littell’s Living Age (from the Literary Gazette), vol. 44, 1855, pp. 497-499.
—— Latin Poems of, Cowper’s Translations. Eclectic Review, Sept. 1808, pp. 780-791.
—— Life of. North British
Review, by D. Masson, vol. 16, 1852,
pp. 295-335;
same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol.
25, 1852, pp. 433-447.
—New Quarterly Review, vol.
8, 1859, pp. 40-54.
—— Life and Poetry of.
Hogg’s Instructor, vol. 1 N.S., 1853, pp. 234-242;
same article, Eclectic Magazine, vol.
30, pp. 364-372.
—— Lycidas. American
Monthly Magazine, vol. 5 N.S., 1838, pp. 341-353.
—Quarterly Review, vol. 158,
1884, pp. 162-183.
—— —— Language of Lycidas. Sharpe’s London Magazine, vol. 25 N.S., 1864, pp. 293-296.
—— —— Notes on Lycidas. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, by A.C. Brackett, vol. 1, 1867, pp. 87-90.
—— Masson’s Life of.
British Quarterly Review, vol. 29, 1859, pp.
185-214; vol. 59, 1874, pp. 81-100.
—North British Review, vol.
30, 1859, pp. 281-308;
same article, Littell’s
Living Age, vol. 61, pp. 731-747.
—Dublin University Magazine,
vol. 53, 1859, pp. 609-623.
—New Monthly Magazine, vol.
115, 1859, pp. 163-172.
—Eclectic Review, vol. 1 N.S.,
1859, pp. 1-21.
—Christian Examiner, by G.E.
Ellis, vol. 66, 1859, pp. 401-431.
—Old and New, vol. 4, 1871,
pp. 704-708.
—Nation, by W.F. Allen,
vol. 13, 1871, pp. 91, 92; vol. 17, 1873,
pp. 165, 166; vol. 31, 1880,
pp. 15, 16.
—International Review, by H.C.
—— Minor Poems. Dublin University Magazine, vol. 63, 1864, pp. 619-625.
—— Mitford’s Life of. New Monthly Magazine, vol. 34, 1832, pp. 581, 582.
—— Nephews of. Edinburgh Review, by Sir J. Mackintosh, vol. 25, 1815, pp. 485-501.
—— Newly-discovered Prose Writings of. Hours at Home, by E.H. Gillett, vol. 9, 1869, pp. 532-536.
—— Ode to. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, by A.A. Lipscomb, vol. 20, 1860, pp. 771-778.
—— On the Divinity of Christ. Christian Examiner, vol. 2, 1825, pp. 423-429.
—— Paradise Lost. Journal of Sacred Literature, by F.A. Cox, vol. 1, 1848, pp. 236-257.
—— —— Chateaubriand’s Translation of Paradise Lost. Foreign Quarterly Review, vol. 19, 1837, pp. 35-50.
—— —— Cosmology of Paradise Lost. Lutheran Quarterly, by J.A. Himes, vol. 6, p. 187, etc.
—— —— De Lille’s Translation of Paradise Lost. Edinburgh Review, vol. 8, 1806, pp. 167-190.
—— —— First Edition of Paradise Lost. Book-Lore, vol. 3, 1886, pp. 72-75. Leisure Hour, April 28, 1877, pp. 269, 270.
—— —— Moral Estimate of the Paradise Lost. Christian Observer, vol. 22, 1822, pp. 211-218, 278-284.
—— —— Mull’s
edition of Paradise Lost. Spectator, December
6, 1884, pp. 1635, 1636.
—Saturday Review, vol. 58,
pp. 570, 571.
—— —— Origin of the Paradise Lost. North American Review, by L.E. Dubois, vol. 91, 1860, pp. 539-555.
—— —— Plan of Paradise Lost. New Englander, by Professor Himes, vol. 42, 1883, pp. 196-211.
—— —— Prendeville’s edition of Paradise Lost. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 47, 1840, pp. 691-716.
—— —— Sorelli’s Italian Translation of Paradise Lost. Foreign Quarterly Review, vol. 10, 1832, pp. 508-513.
—— —— Theism of the Paradise Lost. Unitarian Review, by H. Carpenter, vol. 5, pp. 302, etc.
—— Poetry of. Edinburgh
Review, vol. 42, 1825, pp. 304-324.
—Selections from the Edinburgh
Review, vol. 2, 1835, pp. 34-64.
—Macmillan’s Magazine,
by J.R. Seeley, vol. 17, 1868, pp. 299-311;
vol. 19, pp. 407-421.
—Temple Bar, vol. 39, 1873,
pp. 458-473.
—— Political Writings. Nation, by Goldwin Smith, vol. 30, 1880, pp. 30-32.
—— Prose Writings of.
New Monthly Magazine, vol. 40, 1834, pp. 39-50.
—Congregational Magazine, vol.
10 N.S., 1834, pp. 217-224.
—American Monthly Magazine,
vol. 1 N.S., 1836, pp. 142-146.
—Eclectic Review, vol. 25 N.S.,
1849, pp. 507-521.
—Spectator, Oct. 3, 1885, pp.
1317, 1318.
—Athenaeum, Sept. 20, 1884,
pp. 359, 360.
—— Public Conduct of.
Edinburgh Review, vol. 42, 1825, pp. 324-346.
—Selections from
the Edinburgh Review, vol. 2, 1835, pp. 48-64.
—— Relics of, at Cambridge. Chambers’s Journal, vol. 8, 1857, pp. 319, 320.
—— Religious Life and Opinions of. Bibliotheca Sacra, by A.D. Barber, vol. 16, 1859, pp. 557-603; vol. 17, pp. 1-42.
—— Rural Scenes of. Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 23, 1841, pp. 519-528.
—— Satan of. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 1, 1817, pp. 140-142.
—— —— and Lucifer of Byron Compared. Knickerbocker, vol. 30, 1847, pp. 150-155.
—— —— Satan of Paradise Lost. Dublin University Magazine, vol. 88, 1876, pp. 707-714.
—— Select Prose Works. Boston Quarterly Review, vol. 5, 1842, pp. 322-342.
—— Shadow of the Puritan War in. Catholic Presbyterian, by A. Macleod, vol. 9, 1883, pp. 169-176, 321-330.
—— Sonnets of, Pattison’s
edition. Academy, by J.A. Noble, vol. 24,
1883, pp. 57, 58.
—Saturday Review, vol. 56,
1883, pp. 252, 253.
—Spectator, Aug. 18, 1883,
pp. 1062, 1063.
—Athenaeum, Sept. 1, 1883,
pp. 263-265.
—— Spenser, and Shakspere. Victoria Magazine, vol. 25, 1875, pp. 856-868, 1059-1065; vol. 26, pp. 24-31, 108-117.
—— State Papers relating to. London Magazine, vol. 6 N.S., 1826, pp. 377-396.
—— Theology of. Boston Monthly Magazine, vol. 1, 1825, pp. 489-491.
—— Todd’s Life of.
Quarterly Review, vol. 36, 1827, pp. 29-61.
—Monthly Review, vol. 3 N.S.,
1826, pp. 258-273.
—Museum of Foreign Literature,
vol. 10, p. 67, etc.; vol. 11, pp. 114,
etc., 385, etc.
—Congregational Magazine, vol.
3, 1827, pp. 33-40.
—— Treatise on Christian Doctrine. Evangelical Magazine, vol. 4 N.S., 1826, pp. 371-375.
—— versus Robert Montgomery. Knickerbocker, vol. 3, 1834, pp. 120-134.
—— Works of. American Church Review, by J.H. Hanson, vol. 2, pp. 153, etc.
—— Youth of. Edinburgh
Review, vol. 111, 1860, pp. 312-347;
same article, Littell’s Living Age,
vol. 65, pp. 579-597.
—Argosy, vol. 6, 1868, pp.
267-273.
* * * * *
A Maske [Comus] 1637
Lycidas
1638
(In Justa Edouardo King Naufrago)
Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in England 1641
Of Prelatical Episcopacy 1641
Animadversions upon the Remonstrant’s defence against Smectymnuus 1641
The Reason of Church-Government urg’d against Prelaty 1641
Apology against a Pamphlet called A Modest Confutation
of the
Animadversions, etc.
1641
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce 1643
Of Education. To Master S. Hartlib 1644
The Judgment of Martin Bucer, now Englisht 1644
Areopagitica 1644
Tetrachordon 1644
Colasterion 1645
Poems 1645
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 1649
Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels (Articles of Peace, etc.) 1649
Eikonoklastes 1649
Pro populo Anglicano defensio contra Salmasium 1651
A Letter touching the Dissolution of the late Parliament 1653
Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda 1654
Scriptum Dom-Protectoris contra Hispanos 1655
Pro se defensio contra A. Morum 1655
Treatise on Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes 1659
Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church 1659
Ready and easy way to establish a free Commonwealth 1660
Paradise Lost 1667
Accedence commenc’t Grammar 1669
History of Britain 1670
Paradise Regained 1671
Samson Agonistes
1671
(With preceding work)
Artis Logicae plenior Institutio 1672
Of true Religion, Heresie, Schism, Toleration, and what best means may be used against the growth of Popery 1673
Epistolarum familiarium liber 1674
Declaration or Letters Patents of the Election of
this present
King of Poland, John the Third
1674
* * * * *
Literae Pseudo-Senatus Anglicani, Cromwellii, etc. 1676
Character of the Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines in 1641 1681
Brief History of Moscovia 1682
Works [in prose] 1697
Historical, political, and miscellaneous works 1698
Original Letters and Papers of State addressed to Oliver Cromwell 1743
De Doctrina Christiana 1825
Common Place Book 1876
Printed by WALTER SCOTT_, Felling, Newcastle-on-Tyne._
Crown 8vo, Cloth. Price 3s. 6d. per Vol.; Hlf. Mor. 6s. 6d.
THE CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE SERIES.
EDITED BY HAVELOCK ELLIS.
Most of the vols. will be illustrated, containing between 300 and 400 pp. The first vol. will be issued on Oct. 25, 1889. Others to follow at short intervals.
* * * * *
The contemporary science series will bring within general reach of the English-speaking public the best that is known and thought in all departments of modern scientific research. The influence of the scientific spirit is now rapidly spreading in every field of human activity. Social progress, it is felt, must be guided and accompanied by accurate knowledge,—knowledge which is, in many departments, not yet open to the English reader. In the Contemporary Science Series all the questions of modern life—the various social and politico-economical problems of to-day, the most recent researches in the knowledge of man, the past and present experiences of the race, and the nature of its environment—will be frankly investigated and clearly presented.
* * * * *
The first volumes of the Series will be:—
THE EVOLUTION OF SEX. By Prof. PATRICK GEDDES
and J. ARTHUR
THOMSON. With 90 Illustrations, and about 300
pages. [Now Ready.
ELECTRICITY IN MODERN LIFE. By G.W. DE TUNZELMANN.
With 88
Illustrations. [Ready 25th November.
THE ORIGIN OF THE ARYANS. By Dr. ISAAC TAYLOR.
With numerous
Illustrations. [Ready 25th December.
The following Writers, among others, are preparing
volumes for this
Series:—
Prof. E.D. Cope, Prof. G.F. Fitzgerald,
Prof. J. Geikie, G.L. Gomme,
E.C.K. Gonner, Prof. J. Jastrow (Wisconsin),
E Sidney Hartland, Prof.
C.H. Herford, J. Bland Sutton, Dr. C. Mercier,
Sidney Webb, Dr. Sims
Woodhead, Dr. C.M. Woodward (St. Louis, Mo.),
etc.
* * * * *
LONDON: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.
A NEW SERIES OF CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES.
Edited by Professor ERIC S. ROBERTSON, M.A.
MONTHLY SHILLING VOLUMES.
VOLUMES ALREADY ISSUED—
LIFE OF LONGFELLOW. By Prof. Eric S. Robertson.
“A most readable little work.”—Liverpool
Mercury.
LIFE OF COLERIDGE. By Hall Caine.
“Brief and vigorous, written throughout with
spirit and great literary
skill.”—Scotsman.
LIFE OF DICKENS. By Frank T. Marzials. “Notwithstanding the mass of matter that has been printed relating to Dickens and his works ... we should, until we came across this volume, have been at a loss to recommend any popular life of England’s most popular novelist as being really satisfactory. The difficulty is removed by Mr. Marzials’s little book.”—Athenaeum.
LIFE OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI By J. Knight. “Mr. Knight’s picture of the great poet and painter is the fullest and best yet presented to the public.”—The Graphic.
LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. By Colonel F. Grant. “Colonel Grant has performed his task with diligence, sound judgment good taste, and accuracy.”—Illustrated London News.
LIFE OF DARWIN. By G.T. Bettany.
“Mr. G.T. Bettany’s Life of Darwin
is a sound and conscientious
work.”—Saturday Review.
LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By A. Birrell.
“Those who know much of Charlotte Bronte will
learn more, and those who
know nothing about her will find all that is best
worth learning in Mr.
Birrell’s pleasant book.”—St.
James’ Gazette.
LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. By R. Garnett, LL.D. “This is an admirable book. Nothing could be more felicitous and fairer than the way in which he takes us through Carlyle’s life and works.”—Pall Mall Gazette.
LIFE OF ADAM SMITH. By R.B. Haldane, M.P.
“Written with a perspicuity seldom exemplified
when dealing with
economic science.”—Scotsman.
LIFE OF KEATS. By W.M. Rossetti.
“Valuable for the ample information which it
contains.”—Cambridge
Independent.
LIFE OF SHELLEY. By William Sharp.
“The criticisms ... entitle this capital monograph
to be ranked with the
best biographies of Shelley.”—Westminster
Review.
LIFE OF SMOLLETT. By David Hannay.
“A capable record of a writer who still remains
one of the great masters
of the English novel”—Saturday
Review.
LIFE OF GOLDSMITH. By Austin Dobson. “The story of his literary and social life in London, with all its humorous and pathetic vicissitudes, is here retold, as none could tell it better."-Daily News.
LIFE OF SCOTT. By Professor Yonge.
“For readers and lovers of the poems and novels
of Sir Walter Scott,
this is a most enjoyable boot.”—Aberdeen
Free Press.
LIFE OF BURNS. By Professor Blackie.
“The editor certainly made a hit when he persuaded
Blackie to write
about Burns.”—Pall Mall Gazette.
LIFE OF VICTOR HUGO-By Frank T. Marzials. “Mr. Marzials’s volume presents to us, in a more handy form than any English, or even French handbook gives, the summary of what, up to the moment in which we write, is known or conjectured about the life of the great poet.”—Saturday Review.
LIFE OF EMERSON. By Richard Garnett, LL.D. “As to the larger section of the public, ... no record of Emerson’s life and work could be more desirable, both in breadth of treatment and lucidity of style, than Dr. Garnett’s.”—Saturday Review.
LIFE OF GOETHE. By James Sime. “Mr. James Sime’s competence as a biographer of Goethe, both in respect of knowledge of his special subject, and of German literature generally, is beyond question.”—Manchester Guardian.
LIFE OF CONGREVE. By Edmund Gosse. “Mr. Gosse has written an admirable and most interesting biography of a man of letters who is of particular interest to other men of letters."-The Academy.
LIFE OF BUNYAN. By Canon Venables.
“A most intelligent, appreciative, and valuable
memoir.”—Scotsman.
LIFE OF CRABBE. By T.E. Kebbel. “No English poet since Shakespeare has observed certain aspects of nature and of human life more closely; ... Mr. Kebbel’s monograph is worthy of the subject.”—Athenaeum.
LIFE OF HEINE. By William Sharp. “This is an admirable monograph ... more fully written up to the level of recent knowledge and criticism of its theme than any other English work.”—Scotsman.
LIFE OF MILL. By W.L. Courtney.
“A most sympathetic and discriminating memoir.”—Glasgow
Herald.
LIFE OF SCHILLER. By Henry W. Nevinson. “Presents the leading facts of the poet’s life in a neatly rounded picture, and gives an adequate critical estimate of each of Schiller’s separate works and the effect of the whole upon literature.”—Scotsman.
LIFE OF CAPTAIN MARRYAT. By David Hannay. “We have nothing but praise for the manner in which Mr. Hannay has done justice to him whom he well calls ’one of the most brilliant and the least fairly recognised of English novelists.’”—Saturday Review.
Complete Bibliography to each volume, by J.P. ANDERSON, British Museum.
* * * * *
Volumes are in preparation by Goldwin Smith, Frederick Wedmore, Oscar Browning, Arthur Symons, W.E. Henley, Hermann Merivale, H.E. Watts, T.W. Rolleston, Cosmo Monkhouse, Dr. Garnett, Frank T. Marzials, W.H. Pollock, John Addington Symonds, Stepniak, etc., etc.
* * * * *
LIBRARY EDITION OF “GREAT WRITERS.”—Printed on large paper of extra quality, in handsome binding, Demy 8vo, price 2s. 6d.
* * * * *
London: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.
Monthly Shilling Volumes. Cloth, cut or uncut edges.
THE CAMELOT SERIES.
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS. VOLUMES ALREADY ISSUED—
ROMANCE OF KING ARTHUR. Edited by E.
Rhys.
THOREAU’S WALDEN. Edited
by W.H. Dircks.
ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. Edited by William
Sharp.
LANDOR’S CONVERSATIONS. Edited
by H. Ellis.
PLUTARCH’S LIVES. Edited
by B.J. Snell, M.A.
RELIGIO MEDICI, &c. Edited by J.A.
Symonds.
SHELLEY’S LETTERS. Edited
by Ernest Rhys.
PROSE WRITINGS OF SWIFT. Edited by W.
Lewin.
MY STUDY WINDOWS. Edited by R.
Garnett, LL.D.
GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS. Edited by W.
Sharp.
LORD BYRON’S LETTERS. Edited
by M. Blind.
ESSAYS BY LEIGH HUNT. Edited by A.
Symons.
LONGFELLOW’S PROSE. Edited
by W. Tirebuck.
GREAT MUSICAL COMPOSERS. Edited by E.
Sharp.
MARCUS AURELIUS. Edited by Alice
Zimmern.
SPECIMEN DAYS IN AMERICA. By Walt Whitman.
WHITE’S SELBORNE. Edited
by Richard Jefferies.
DEFOE’S SINGLETON. Edited
by H. Halliday Sparling.
MAZZINI’S ESSAYS. Edited
by William Clarke.
PROSE WRITINGS OF HEINE. Edited by H.
Ellis.
REYNOLDS’ DISCOURSES. Edited
by Helen Zimmern.
PAPERS OF STEELE & ADDISON. Edited by W.
Lewin.
BURNS’S LETTERS. Edited
by J. Logie Robertson, M.A.
VOLSUNGA SAGA. Edited by H.H.
Sparling.
SARTOR RESARTUS. Edited by Ernest
Rhys.
WRITINGS OF EMERSON. Edited by Percival
Chubb.
SENECA’S MORALS. Edited
by Walter Clode.
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. By Walt Whitman.
LIFE OF LORD HERBERT. Edited by Will
H. Dircks.
ENGLISH PROSE. Edited by Arthur
Gallon.
IBSEN’S PILLARS OF SOCIETY. Edited
by H. Ellis.
FAIRY AND FOLK TALES. Edited by W.B.
Yeats.
EPICTETUS. Edited by T.W.
Rolleston.
THE ENGLISH POETS. By James Russell
Lowell.
ESSAYS OF DR. JOHNSON. Edited by Stuart
T. Reid.
ESSAYS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT. Edited by F.
Carr.
LANDOR’S PENTAMERON, &c. Edited
by H. Ellis.
POE’S TALES AND ESSAYS. Edited
by Ernest Rhys.
VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. By Oliver Goldsmith.
POLITICAL ORATIONS. Edited by William
Clarke.
CHESTERFIELD’S LETTERS. Selected
by C. Sayle.
THOREAU’S WEEK. Edited
by Will H. Dircks.
STORIES from CARLETON. Edited by W.B.
Yeats.
Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. By O.W.
Holmes.
JANE EYRE. By Charlotte
Bronte.
* * * * *
London: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.
The Canterbury Poets.
EDITED BY WILLIAM SHARP.
In SHILLING Monthly Volumes, Square 8vo. Well printed on fine toned paper, with Red-line Border, and strongly bound in Cloth.
Cloth, Red Edges 1s. Cloth, Uncut Edges 1s. Red Roan, Gilt Edges 2s. 6d. Pad. Morocco, Gilt Edges 5s.
THE FOLLOWING VOLUMES ARE NOW READY.
KEBLE’S CHRISTIAN YEAR.
COLERIDGE. Ed. by J. Skipsey.
LONGFELLOW. Ed. by E. Hope.
CAMPBELL. Ed. by J. Hogben.
SHELLEY. Edited by J. Skipsey.
WORDSWORTH. Edited by A.J.
Symington.
BLAKE. Ed. by Joseph
Skipsey.
WHITTIER. Ed. by Eva Hope.
POE. Edited by Joseph
Skipsey.
CHATTERTON. Edited by John
Richmond.
BURNS. Poems} Edited by
BURNS. Songs} Joseph Skipsey.
MARLOWE. Ed. by P.E.
Pinkerton.
KEATS. Edited by John
Hogben.
HERBERT. Edited by E. Rhys.
HUGO. Trans. by Dean
Carrington.
COWPER. Edited by Eva
Hope.
SHAKESPEARE.
Songs, Poems, and Sonnets. Edited
by William Sharp.
EMERSON. Edited by W. Lewin.
SONNETS of this CENTURY. Edited by William
Sharp.
WHITMAN. Edited by E. Rhys.
SCOTT. Marmion, etc.
SCOTT. Lady of the Lake, etc. Edited
by William Sharp.
PRAED. Edited by Fred. Cooper.
HOGG. By his Daughter,
Mrs Garden.
GOLDSMITH. Ed. by W. Tirebuck.
MACKAY’S LOVE LETTERS.
SPENSER. Edited by Hon.
R. Noel
CHILDREN OF THE POETS. Edited by Eric
S. Robertson.
JONSON. Edited by J.A.
Symonds.
BYRON (2 Vols.) Ed. by M. Blind.
THE SONNETS OF EUROPE. Edited by S. Waddington.
RAMSAY. Ed. by J.L.
Robertson
DOBELL. Edited by Mrs.
Dobell.
DAYS OF THE YEAR. With Introduction
by Wm. Sharp.
POPE. Edited by John
Hogben.
HEINE. Edited by Mrs.
Kroeker.
BEAUMONT & FLETCHER. Edited by J.S.
Fletcher.
BOWLES, LAMB, &c. Edited by William
Tirebuck.
EARLY ENGLISH POETRY. Edited by H. Macaulay
Fitzgibbon.
SEA MUSIC. Edited by Mrs
Sharp.
HERRICK. Edited by Ernest
Rhys.
London: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.
Crown 8vo, about 350 pp. each, Cloth Cover, 2s. 6d. per vol. Half-polished Morocco, gilt top, 5s.
COUNT TOLSTOI’S WORKS.
Arrangements have been made to publish, in Monthly Volumes, a series of translations of works by the eminent Russian Novelist, Count Lyof. N. Tolstoi. The English reading public will be introduced to an entirely new series of works by one who is probably the greatest living master of fiction in Europe. To those unfamiliar with the charm of Russian fiction, and especially with the works of Count Tolstoi, these volumes will come as a new revelation of power.
The following Volumes are already issued—
A RUSSIAN PROPRIETOR.
THE COSSACKS.
IVAN ILYITCH, AND OTHER STORIES.
THE INVADERS, AND OTHER STORIES.
MY RELIGION.
LIFE.
MY CONFESSION.
CHILDHOOD, BOYHOOD, YOUTH.
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF WAR.
ANNA KARENINA. (2 VOLS.)
WHAT TO DO?
WAR AND PEACE. (4 VOLS.)
* * * * *
Ready November 25th.
THE LONG EXILE, AND OTHER STORIES FOR CHILDREN.
OTHERS TO FOLLOW.
* * * * *
London: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.
Small Crown 8vo.
Printed on Antique Laid Paper. Cloth Elegant,
Gilt Edges, Price 3/6.
SUMMER LEGENDS.
BY RUDOLPH BAUMBACH.
TRANSLATED BY MRS. HELEN B. DOLE.
This is a collection of charming fanciful stories translated from the German. In Germany they have enjoyed remarkable popularity, a large number of editions having been sold. Rudolph Baumbach deals with a wonderland which is all his own, though he suggests Hans Andersen in his simplicity of treatment, and Heine in his delicacy, grace, and humour. These are stories which will appeal vividly to the childish imagination, while the older reader will discern the satirical or humorous application that underlies them.
* * * * *
London: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane.
Windsor Series of Poetical Anthologies.
Printed on Antique Paper. Crown 8vo. Bound in Blue Cloth, each with suitable Emblematic Design on Cover, Price 3s. 6d. Also in various Calf and Morocco Bindings.
Women’s Voices. An Anthology of the most
Characteristic Poems by
English, Scotch, and Irish Women. Edited by Mrs.
William Sharp.
Sonnets of this Century. With an Exhaustive Essay on the Sonnet. Edited by Wm. Sharp.
The Children of the Poets. An Anthology from
English and American
Writers of Three Centuries. Edited by Professor
Eric S. Robertson.
Sacred Song. A Volume of Religious Verse.
Selected and arranged by
Samuel Waddington.
A Century of Australian Song. Selected and Edited
by Douglas B.W.
Sladen, B.A., Oxon.
Jacobite Songs and Ballads. Selected and Edited,
with Notes, by G.S.
Macquoid.
Irish Minstrelsy. Edited, with Notes and Introduction,
by H. Halliday
Sparling.
The Sonnets of Europe. A Volume of Translations. Selected and arranged by Samuel Waddington.
Early English and Scottish Poetry. Selected and
Edited by H. Macaulay
Fitzgibbon.
Ballads of the North Countrie. Edited, with Introduction,
by Graham R.
Tomson.
Songs and Poems of the Sea. An Anthology of Poems
Descriptive of the
Sea. Edited by Mrs. William Sharp.
Songs and Poems of Fairyland. An Anthology of English Fairy Poetry, selected and arranged, with an Introduction, by Arthur Edward Waite.
Songs and Poems of the Great Dominion. Edited
by W.D. Lighthall, of
Montreal.
* * * * *
London: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.
RECENT VOLUMES OF VERSE.
Edition de Luxe. Crown 4to, on Antique Paper,
Price 12s. 6d.
SONNETS OF THIS CENTURY.
BY WILLIAM SHARP.
Crown 8vo, Cloth, Bevelled Boards, Price 3s. 6d. each.
IN FANCY DRESS.
“IT IS THYSELF.”
BY MARK ANDRE RAFFALOVICH.
Crown 8vo, Cloth, Bevelled Boards, Price 3s. 6d.
CAROLS FROM THE COAL-FIELDS: AND OTHER SONGS
AND BALLADS.
BY JOSEPH SKIPSEY.
Cloth Gilt, Price 3s.
LAST YEAR’S LEAVES.
BY JOHN JERVIS BERESFORD, M.A.
Crown 8vo, Cloth Gilt, Price 3s. 6d.
BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS.
BY GEORGE ROBERTS HEDLEY.
Fourth Edition, Crown 8vo, Cloth Gilt, Price 3s. 6d.
TALES AND BALLADS OF WEARSIDE.
BY JOHN GREEN.
Second Edition. Price 3s.
ROMANTIC BALLADS AND POEMS OF PHANTASY.
BY WILLIAM SHARP.
Parchment Limp, 3s.
DEATH’S DISGUISES AND OTHER SONNETS.
BY FRANK T. MARZIALS.
* * * * *
London: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.
Crown 8vo, in White Embossed Boards, Gilt Lettering, One Shilling each.
BY COUNT LEO TOLSTOI.
WHERE LOVE IS, THERE GOD IS ALSO.
THE TWO PILGRIMS.
WHAT MEN LIVE BY.
Published originally in Russia, as tracts for the people, these little stories, which Mr. Walter Scott will issue separately early in February, in “booklet” form, possess all the grace, naivete, and power which characterise the work of Count Tolstoi, and while inculcating in the most penetrating way the Christian ideas of love, humility, and charity, are perfect in their art form as stories pure and simple.
ADAPTED FOR PRESENTATION AT EASTER.
* * * * *
London: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane.