ablest things, not1 presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have within himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy." Again, in estimating the qualifications which the writer of an epic such as he contemplated should possess, he is careful to include "insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs."

How politics

fluenced the poet.

Truth usually lies half-way between extremes: perhaps it does so here. No doubt, Milton did gain may have in- very greatly by breathing awhile the larger air of public life, even though that air was often tainted by impurities. No doubt, too, twenty years of unrest and controversy must have left their mark even on Milton. In one of the very few places where he "abides our question," Shakespeare writes:

"O! for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Than public means, which public manners breeds:
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand."

Milton's genius was subdued in this way. If we compare him, the Milton of the great epics and of Samson Agonistes, with Homer or Shakespeare-and none but the greatest can be his parallel-we find in him a certain want of humanity, a touch of narrowness. He lacks the large-heartedness, the genial, generous breadth of Shakespeare; the tolerant sympathy with his fellow men that even in Troilus and Cressida or Timon of Athens is there for those who have eyes wherewith to see it. Milton reflects many of the less gracious aspects of

1

- Puritanism, its intolerance, want of humour, one-sided intensity. He is stern and austere, and it seems natural to assume that this narrowness was to a great extent the price he paid for many years of ceaseless special pleading and dispute. The real misfortune of his life lay in the - fact that he fell on evil, angry days when there was no place for moderate men. He had to be one of two - things: either a controversialist or a student: there was no via media. Probably he chose aright; but we could wish that there had been no necessity to make the choice.

From the Restoration to Milton's death.

The last part of Milton's life, 1660-1674, passed quietly. At the age of fifty-two he was thrown back upon poetry, and could at length discharge his self-imposed obligation. The early poems he had never regarded as a fulfilment of the debt due to his Creator; even when the fire of political strife burned at its hottest Milton never lost sight of the purpose which had been with him since his boyhood. The main difficulty lay in the selection of a suitable subject. He had weighed themes drawn from the Scriptures and others taken from the history of his own country. For a time he was evidently inclined to choose the Arthurian story1, the only cycle of events in British history or legend which seems to lend itself naturally to epic treatment. Had he done so we should have lost the Idylls of the King. The rough drafts of his projected schemes, now among the Milton

His great work; the subject and treatment.

1 This project is not mentioned among the schemes enumerated in the Trinity Mss. But cf. the Epitaphium Damonis, 162-178, and the poem Mansus, 80-84. See also Comus, 826-842, Lycidas, 160 (note). Among Milton's prose works was a History of Britain, written for the most part about 1649, but not printed till 1670. In it he used the materials collected for his abandoned epic on the story of King Arthur.

MSS. at Trinity College1, shew that exactly ninety-nine possible themes occupied his thoughts from time to time; but even as early as 1641 the story of the lost Paradise began to assume prominence. Still, even when the subject was definitely chosen, the question of its treatmentdramatic or epic-remained. Milton contemplated the foriner. He even commenced work upon a drama of which Satan's address to the sun in the fourth book of Paradise Lost2 formed the exordium. These lines were written about 1642. Milton recited them to his nephew Phillips at the time of their composition. Possibly, had Milton not been distracted and diverted from poetry by political and other interests, he might from 1642 onwards have continued this drama, and thus produced a dramatic masterpiece akin to Samson Agonistes. As things fell out, the scheme was dropped, and never taken up again. When he finally addressed himself to the composition of Paradise Lost he had decided in favour of the epic or narrative form.

Lost begun.

Following Aubrey (from Aubrey and Phillips most of Paradise our information concerning Milton is derived) we may assume that Milton began to write He worked continuously at It was finished in 1663, the Two more years, however,

Paradise Lost about 1658. the epic for some five years. year of his third marriage.

1 They include the original drafts of Arcades, Comus, Lycidas, and some of the minor poems, together with Milton's notes on the design of the long poem he meditated composing, and other less important papers. The Mss. were presented to Trinity by a former member of the college, Sir Henry Newton Puckering, who died in 1700. It is not known how they originally came into his possession.

2 Bk. IV. ll. 32 et seq.

3 Milton's second marriage took place in the autumn of 1656, i.e. after he had become blind. His wife died in February, 1658. Cf. the Sonnet, "Methought I saw my late espoused were spent in the necessary revision, and in 1665 Milton placed the completed poem in the hands of his friend Thomas Ellwood1. In 1667 Paradise Lost The poem was issued from the press. Milton received published. £5. Before his death he was paid a second instalment, £5. Six editions of the poem had been published by the close of the century.

When Ellwood returned the MS. of Paradise Lost to Milton he remarked: "Thou hast said much here of

Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Paradise found?" Possibly we owe Paradise Regained: Regained to these chance words; or the poem, Samostes. forming as it does a natural pendant to its predecessor, may have been included in Milton's original design. In any case he must have commenced the second epic about the year 1665. Samson Agonistes appears to have been written a little later. The two poems were published together in 1671.

In giving this bare summary of facts it has not been

saint," the pathos of which is heightened by the fact that he had never seen her.

1 Cf. the account given in Ellwood's Autobiography: "after some common discourses had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his; which, being brought, he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me and read it at my leisure, and, when I had so done, return it to him with my judgment thereupon. When I came home, and had set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he intituled Paradise Lost."

2 The delay was due to external circumstances. Milton had been forced by the Plague to leave London, settling for a time at Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, where Ellwood had taken a cottage for him. On his return to London, after "the sickness was over, and the city well cleansed," the Great Fire threw everything into disorder; and there was some little difficulty over the licensing of the poem. For these reasons the publication of Paradise Lost was delayed till the autumn of 1667 (Masson).

our purpose to offer any criticism upon the poems. It would take too much space to show why Samson Agonistes is in subject-matter the poet's threnody over the fallen form of Puritanism, and in style the most perfectly classical poem in English literature; or again, why some great writers (among them Coleridge and Wordsworth) have pronounced Paradise Regained to be in point of artistic execution the most consummate of Milton's works-a judgment which would have pleased the author himself since, according to Phillips, he could never endure to hear Paradise Regained "censured to be much inferior to Paradise Lost." The latter speaks for itself in the rolling splendour of those harmonies which Tennyson has celebrated and alone in his time equalled.

In 1673 Milton brought out a reprint of the 1645 Close of edition of his Poems, adding most of the Milton's life. sonnets1 written in the interval. The last four years of his life were devoted to prose works of no

1 The number of Milton's sonnets is twenty-three (if we exclude the piece on "The New Forcers of Conscience"), five of which were written in Italian, probably during the time of his travels in Italy, 1638-9. Ten sonnets were printed in the edition of 1645, the last of them being that entitled (from the Cambridge MS.) "To the Lady Margaret Ley." The remaining thirteen were composed between 1645 and 1658. The concluding sonnet, therefore (to the memory of Milton's second wife), immediately preceded his commencement of Paradise Lost. Four of these poems (XV. XVI. XVII. XXII.) could not, on account of their political tone, be included in the edition of 1673. They were first published by Edward Phillips at the end of his memoir of Milton, 1694. The sonnet on the "Massacre in Piedmont" is usually considered the finest of the collection, of which the late Rector of Lincoln College edited a well-known edition, 1883. The sonnet inscribed with a diamond on a window pane in the cottage at Chalfont where the poet stayed in 1665 is (in the judgment of a good critic) Miltonic, if not Milton's (Garnett's Life of Milton, p. 175).