Appendix

cambridge: printed by j. b. peace, m.a., at the university press.

By A. W. Verity

Milton was very fond of the organ; see Il Penseroso, 161. During his residence at Horton Milton made occasional journeys to London to hear, and obtain instruction (probably from Henry Lawes) in, music. It was an age of great musical development. See “Milton’s Knowledge of Music” by Mr W. H. Hadow, in Milton Memorial Lectures (1908).

See the paper “Milton as Schoolboy and Schoolmaster” by Mr A. F. Leach, read before the British Academy, Dec 10, 1908.

See the paper “Milton as Schoolboy and Schoolmaster” by Mr A. F. Leach, read before the British Academy, Dec 10, 1908.

His paraphrases of Psalms cxiv. cxxxvi. scarcely come under this heading. Aubrey says in his quaint Life of Milton: “Anno Domini 1619 he was ten yeares old, as by his picture [the portrait by Cornelius Janssen]: and was then a poet.”

An Apology for Smectymnuus, Prose Works, Bohn’s edn, iii. 111. Perhaps Cambridge would have been more congenial to Milton had he been sent to Emmanuel College, long a centre of Puritanism. Dr John Preston, then Master of the college, was a noted leader of the Puritan party.

Cf. Milton’s own words: “the church, to whose service, by the intentions of my parents and friends, I was destined of a child, and in my own resolutions” (The Reason of Church Government, P. W. ii. 482). What kept him from taking orders was primarily his objection to Church discipline and government: he spoke of himself as “Church-outed by the prelates”

He was closely familiar too with post-classical writers like Philo and the neo-Platonists, nor must we forget the mediæval element in his learning, due often to Rabbinical teaching.

Science—“natural philosophy,” as he terms it—is one of the branches of study advocated in his treatise On Education. Of his early interest in astronomy there is a reminiscence in Paradise Lost, ii. 708-11: where “Milton is not referring to an imaginary comet, but to one which actually did appear when he was a boy of 10 (1618), in the constellation called Ophiuchus. It was of enormous size, the tail being recorded as longer even than that of 1858. It was held responsible by educated and learned men of the day for disasters. Evelyn says in his diary, ‘The effects of that comet, 1618, still working in the prodigious revolutions now beginning in Europe, especially in Germany’ ” (Professor Ray Lankester).

Milton’s poems with their undercurrent of perpetual allusion are the best proof of the width of his reading; but interesting supplementary evidence is afforded by the Common-place Book discovered in 1874, and printed by the Camden Society, 1876. It contains extracts from about 80 different authors whose works Milton had studied. The entries seem to have been made in the period 1637-46.

His wife (who was only seventeen) was Mary Powell, eldest daughter of Richard Powell, of Forest Hill, a village some little distance from Oxford. She went to stay with her father in July, 1643, and refused to return to Milton; why, it is not certain. She was reconciled to her husband in 1645, bore him four children, and died in 1652, in her twenty-seventh year. No doubt, the scene in P. L. x. 909-36, in which Eve begs forgiveness of Adam, reproduced the poet’s personal experience, while many passages in Samson Agonistes must have been inspired by the same cause.

i.e. old style. The volume was entered on the registers of the Stationers’ Company under the date of October 6th, 1645. It was published on Jan. 2, 1645-46, with the following title-page:

“Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, Compos’d at several times. Printed by his true Copies. The Songs were set in Musick by Mr. Henry Lawes Gentleman of the Kings Chappel, and one of His Majesties Private Musick.

‘— Baccare frontem

Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro.’ Virgil, Eclog. 7. Printed and publish’d according to Order. London, Printed by Ruth Raworth for Humphrey Moseley, and are to be sold at the signe of the Princes Arms in Pauls Churchyard. 1645.”

From the prefatory Address to the Reader it is clear that the collection was due to the initiative of the publisher. Milton’s own feeling is expressed by the motto, where the words “vati futuro” show that, as he judged, his great achievement was yet to come. The volume was divided into two parts, the first containing the English, the second the Latin poems. Comus was printed at the close of the former, with a separate title-page to mark its importance. The prominence given to the name of Henry Lawes reflects Milton’s friendship.

A Latin Secretary was required because the Council scorned, as Edward Phillips says, “to carry on their affairs in the wheedling, lisping jargon of the cringing French.” Milton’s salary was £288, in modern money about £900.

Perhaps this was the saddest part of the episode. Milton tells us in the Defensio Secunda that his eyesight was injured by excessive study in boyhood: “from twelve years of age I hardly ever left my studies or went to bed before midnight.” Continual reading and writing increased the infirmity, and by 1650 the sight of the left eye had gone. He was warned that he must not use the other for book-work. Unfortunately this was just the time when the Commonwealth stood most in need of his services. If Milton had not written the first Defence he might have retained his partial vision, at least for a time. The choice lay between private good and public duty. He repeated in 1650 the sacrifice of 1639. All this is brought out in his Second Defence. By the spring of 1652 Milton was quite blind. He was then in his forty-fourth year. Probably the disease from which he suffered was amaurosis. See the Appendix on P. L. iii. 22-26. Throughout P. L. and Samson Agonistes there are frequent references to his affliction.

Milton probably began Paradise Lost in 1658; but it was not till the Restoration in 1660 that he definitely resigned all his political hopes, and became quite free to realise his poetical ambition.

An Apology for Smectymnuus, P. W. iii. 118.

The Reason of Church Government, P. W. ii. 481.

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

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, 1639. 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 published by Edward Phillips together with his memoir of Milton, 1694 (Sonnet xvii. having previously appeared in a Life of Vane). The sonnet on the “Massacre in Piedmont” is usually considered the finest of the collection, of which Mr Mark Pattison 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, Life of Milton, p. 175).

The 1673 edition also gave the juvenile piece On the Death of a Fair Infant and At a Vacation Exercise, which for some reason had been omitted from the 1645 edition.

The treatise on Christian Doctrine (unpublished during Milton’s lifetime and dating, it is thought, mainly from the period of his theological treatises) is valuable as throwing much light on the theological views expressed in the two epic poems and Samson Agonistes. See Milton Memorial Lectures (1908), pp. 109-42. The discovery of the ms. of this treatise in 1823 gave Macaulay an opportunity of writing his famous essay on Milton, which has been happily described as a Whig counterblast to Johnson’s Tory depreciation of the poet.

Milton’s History of Britain, though not published till 1670, had been written many years earlier; four of the six books, we know, were composed between 1646 and 1649.

The lines by Dryden which were printed beneath the portrait of Milton in Tonson’s folio edition of Paradise Lost published in 1688 are too familiar to need quotation; but it is worth noting that the younger poet had in Milton’s lifetime described the great epic as “one of the most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced” (prefatory essay to The State of Innocence, 1674). Further, tradition assigned to Dryden (a Roman Catholic and a Royalist) the remark, “this fellow (Milton) cuts us all out and the ancients too.”

See Marvell’s “Commendatory Verses,” 17-30.

Quo veniam daret flatum crepitumque ventris in convivio emittendi. Sueton. in Claudio.

a trivial and malignant encomium.

i.e. Bishop Hall’s A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libel intituled Animadversions upon the Remonstrant’s Defence against Smectymnuus. (Exact date uncertain: earlier than Feb. 1642.) The third of Milton’s pamphlets on the Church question (Animadversions, &c., 1641) was a criticism of Bishop Hall’s reply to Smectymnuus. In the Confutation Bishop Hall attacked Milton. Dr Hall says of the Parliament:

“The sun looks not on a braver, nobler Convocation than is that of King, Peers and Commons, whose equal justice and wise moderation shall eternally triumph, in that they have hitherto deferred to do what the sour exorbitancies on the one hand and eager solicitations on the other, not permitting them to consult with reason, would have prompted them to.”

Milton calls this praise “trivial” since it deals in commonplaces; “malignant” (disloyal to the Commonwealth) since it assumes that the Parliament is inseparable from the Crown.

the magnanimity of a triennial parliament.

After the dissolution of Parliament in 1629 (4th of Charles I) 11 years had elapsed till the long Parliament met in 1640. The Triennial Act, passed in 1641, enacted that there should never be an interval of more than three years between Parliament and Parliament; and that, if writs were not issued at the proper time, the returning officers should, without writs, call the constituencies together to elect.

prelates and cabin counsellors that usurped of late.

i.e. the Committee of Council to which Charles had entrusted a great part of the public business before the Long Parliament. Laud and Strafford were the chief members. Speaking of the whole body, Clarendon says:—“These persons made up the Committee of State which was reproachfully after called the Junto, and enviously then in the Court the cabinet” (Hist. Rebel. i. 233). Cf. Eikonoklastes: “the politic cabin at Whitehall.”

I could name him who from his private house, &c.

Isokrates in the Areopagiticus (355 bc) supposes himself to be speaking in the ekklesia; and urges the people to restore that severer form of the democracy under which the Areiopagos possessed a general censorial power.

cities and signiories.

In reference to ancient Greece, democracies and oligarchies—alluding to the correspondence of Isokrates, in particular, with despots and with oligarchical states.

Thus did Dion Prusæus. . . . . .counsel the Rhodians.

Dion Chrysostomos, the rhetorician, was born at Prusa in Bithynia about 50 ad Milton alludes to his Rhodian Discourse (Ῥοδιακὸς λόγος)—in which he remonstrates with the people of Rhodes on their practice of making old memorial statues serve again by altering the inscription (Phot. cod. 209, p. 166).

haply not the worst.

The two examples just cited of genius making itself heard from a private station were furnished by natives of a southern climate. Milton means that, though he be not equal to these men—though his genius have not all the fire of the south—yet it is “haply not the worst for two and fifty degrees of northern latitude”;—i.e. it is ardent—for England. The reading worse (instead of worst) is defensible, but less good. Milton would then mean that his genius owes to the bracing climate in which it was bred some qualities less common in the south.

that part which preserves justly every man’s copy to himself.

A book, when licensed, was entered on the register of the Stationers’ Company, with the name of the printer or publisher. It was then the “copy” of the printer or publisher; i.e. he had the copyright. The Order of the Lords and Commons, June 14, 1643, provided against the infringement of such copyright: “And that no person or persons shall hereafter print, or cause to be reprinted any Book or Books, or part of Book, or Books heretofore allowed of and granted to the said Company of Stationers for their relief and maintenance of their poore, without the licence or consent of the Master, Wardens and Assistants of the said Company; Nor any Book or Books lawfully licenced and entred in the Register of the said Company for any particular member thereof, without the licence and consent of the owner or owners thereof. Nor yet import any such Book or Books, or part of Book or Books formerly Printed here, from beyond the Seas, upon paine of forfeiting the same to the Owner, or Owners of the Copies of the said Books, and such further punishment as shall be thought fit.” (Arber’s edn of Areopagitica, p. 27.)

quadragesimal and matrimonial.

The book license might have been supposed to have expired with the quadragesimal licence and the marriage-licence. (1) The “quadragesimal,” i.e. Lenten, licence—a dispensation from fasting in Lent. Even after the Reformation such formal dispensations were often asked and given. (2) Under the Commonwealth marriages were ordinarily contracted before the civil magistrate, without a licence. For “quadragesimal”, as = lenten, cf. Cartwright’s Ordinary (1651):

that ethereal and fifth essence.

Alluding to the hypothesis of four elements which compose the material world, and a fifth element peculiar to God and to the human soul. Par. L. iii. 714:

a discourse.

The treatise of Protagoras entitled Truth, or concerning the Real, which began—“As to the gods, I cannot say whether they are or are not” (Diog. Laert. ix. 51).

Vetus Comœdia.

(1) “Old Comedy” of Athens, about 458-404 bc: characteristic—personal political satire: (2) “Middle Comedy,” 404-338: general satire, political and literary: (3) “New Comedy,” 338-260: social comedy of manners and character.

Epicurus—Cyrene—the Cynic impudence.

(1) The Cyrenaics. Aristippos, their founder, a pupil of Sokrates, taught that Happiness consists in the temperate use of Pleasure. His philosophy was summed in the practical maxim, “to subdue circumstances to himself, not himself to circumstances” (Hor. Ep. i. 1. 18). (2) The Cynics. Antisthenes, another pupil of Sokrates, was the founder of the school, but Diogenes was its chief representative. The Cynic ideal, like that of the ascetics, was a war of the mind against the body. Milton’s phrase refers to the contempt of the Cynics for the decencies as well as for the pleasures of life. (3) Epicurus (342-272 bc) defined Happiness as Pleasure, but with a higher meaning than that of Aristippos. He understood by Pleasure the equable enjoyment of a whole life: and, with a view to this, enjoined strict self-control.

his royal scholar, Dionysius.

Dionysios the Elder, despot of Syracuse, 405-376 bc

the scattered works of Homer.

The story that Lykurgos was the first who collected the Homeric poems is taken by Milton from Aelian, Varia Historia, xiii. 14.

Thales.

Thales (or Thaletas) of Crete. His lyric poems were chiefly paeans and hymns for use in the choral worship of Apollo and Zeus. But he was remembered chiefly as the founder at Sparta of a new school of music—in which the solemnity of the old Apollinar ritual was blended with the animation and passion which belonged to the worship of Zeus as practised by the Curetes, his Cretan priests, and to the Asiatic worship of the Great Mother. The story that Lykurgos brought Thales to Sparta is doubtful. Lykurgos flourished about 770 bc; Thales probably about 670.

their own laconic apophthegms.

Alluding to Plutarch’s collection, under that title, of pithy sayings by Lacedaemonians.

Archilochus.

Milton’s authority for the expulsion of Archilochos is Plutarch, Instituta Laconica, p. 239 b: “Archilochus the poet, on arriving in Lacedaemon, was driven out that very hour, on being recognised as the poet who had said that it is better to throw away one’s shield than to be killed.” The account of another writer (Valerius Maximus, vi. 3) is simply that the poems of Archilochos were forbidden at Sparta.

soldierly ballads and roundels.

In “soldierly ballads” the reference is probably to the poems of Tyrtaeos. The term “roundel” (a song which comes round, or back, to a refrain) might be properly applied to some of the old Greek drinking-songs, with a burden or chorus.

Carneades and Critolaus, with the Stoic Diogenes, coming ambassadors to Rome.

In 155 bc, to pray for the remission of a fine imposed on Athens by the Roman Senate for having seized Oropos. As Diogenes (sometimes called “the Babylonian,” to distinguish him from Diogenes of Smope, the Cynic) represented the Stoic school, so Critolaos represented the Peripatetic school (the philosophy of Aristotle), and Carneades, the New Academy—the school of general scepticism. At this time the influence of Hellenism was only beginning to be faintly felt at Rome: and this was the début at Rome of Greek philosophy. “The young men who were masters of the Greek language were attracted in crowds by the scandal as well as by the lively and emphatic delivery of the celebrated man [Carneades]; but on this occasion at least Cato could not be found fault with, when he not only bluntly enough compared the dialectic arguments of the philosophers to the tedious dirges of the waiting-women, but also insisted on the senate dismissing a man who understood the art of making right wrong and wrong right, and whose defence was in fact nothing but a shameless and almost insulting confession of injustice. But such dismissals had no great effect, more especially as the Roman youth could not be prevented from hearing philosophic discourses at Rhodes and Athens.” (Mommsen, Hist. of Rome, Book iv. c. xii.: vol. iii. p. 429 in Dickson’s transl.)

at the same time.

Naevius began to exhibit comedies about 235 bc (i.e. 80 years before the embassy of Carneades); Plautus, about 224 bc

Menander and Philemon.

Poets of the New Comedy of Athens: see above, note on Vetus Comœdia.

to be set forth the second time by Cicero.

The story that the poem of Lucretius was edited after the poet’s death by Cicero is given by Jerome (probably on the authority of Suetonius) in his additions to the Eusebian chronicle. Jerome appears to mean that the poem was first published by Cicero—not “the second time,” as Milton assumes. “The poem must have been given to the world exactly as it was left by the author, with nothing added or taken from it to all appearance. If Cicero then was editor, he probably put it into the hands of some of his own amanuenses or entrusted it to the large copying establishment of Atticus; and he may have spent only a few hours in looking over it or hearing it read to him; his name rather than his time was probably wanted by the friends of Lucretius.” (Munro, Lucretius, vol. ii. p. 95.)

Lucilius—Catullus—Flaccus.

Lucilius (flourished about 110 bc?), the first great Roman satirist: only fragments of his satires remain. Catullus (60 bc) has left 116 poems in various metres and styles, some of which show the power of invective which has led Milton to name him here. The Satires of Horace are rather what satura properly meant—Miscellanies—essays in verse on social subjects.

the story of Titus Livius.

Those books of Livy’s History in which he related the civil war between the parties of Pompeius and of Octavius Caesar are lost. The bare epitomes which remain convey no hint of partiality. But Milton had in mind a passage of Tacitus (Annals, iv. 34): “Titus Livius, eminently distinguished for eloquence and for honesty, praised Cn. Pompeius so highly that Augustus called him a Pompeian; but that did not hurt their friendship.” Yet Livy, if incapable of flattering, was not backward in complimenting, Augustus: see, for instance, iv. 20.

banished in his old age.

Ovid was banished by Augustus, for an uncertain cause, in 8 ad; the poet being then 51, the emperor 68.

By this time.

Milton passes over the first three centuries of the Christian era—during which there was “little else but tyranny in the Roman Empire,” and during which, therefore, any prohibition of books must be regarded merely as part of a despotic system. He takes up his sketch again at the Christian Emperors. The first Christian Emperor was Constantine the Great (306-337 ad).

Porphyrius and Proclus.

Porphyrios (270 ad) and Proklos (450 ad) were leaders of the Neoplatonic school—the last form in which pagan philosophy made a stand against Christianity.

about the year 400.

This Council of Carthage was held in 412 ad

Padre Paolo.

Pietro Sarpi (1552-1623) took the name of Padre Paolo on entering the order of Dei Servi. He became suspected of heresy early in his priesthood, and withdrew from Rome to Venice. During the disputes between the Venetian Republic and the Holy See at the beginning of the 17th century he was prominent on the Venetian side. His History of the Council of Trent occupied the last years of his life. The first English translation was published at London in 1619.

Wicklef and Husse—the council of Trent.

Wicliff’s writing against ecclesiastical abuses began with his tract, “The Last Age of the Church,” in 1356: he died in 1384. Huss was the disciple of Wicliff: he met with Wicliff’s books during a visit to England, and brought them back with him to Prague in 1382. The Council of Constance (1414-1418) gave the first distinct expression to the alarm excited at Rome by Wicliff and Huss. It was ordered that Wicliff’s bones should be exhumed and burned—with his writings: Huss was condemned to the stake (1415). Two years later, while the Council was still sitting, Martin V became Pope, and, in view of these cases, strictly forbad the reading of heretical books. Sixtus IV (1417-1431) first established an inquisition of the press.

Milton gives Leo X (1513-1521) a prominent place in the history of the prohibitive system; but he was very unlike the Popes before and after him both in the spirit and in the measure of his restrictions. He was a liberal patron of letters—whether it be true or not that, as Ranke says of him, “his life passed in a sort of intellectual intoxication”; and his merely prudential censorship of the press appears to have been widely different from the stolid tyranny of his immediate predecessors and successors.

Paul III (1534-1549) was the institutor of that strict supervision which became more and more systematic as the Council of Trent continued its sittings. On the advice of Cardinal Caraffa, he resolved to revive the ancient Dominican Inquisition—long fallen into decay, though a special branch of it was still active under a Spanish Supreme Tribunal. A Bull of July 21, 1542, established an Universal Supreme Tribunal at Rome, designed to be the centre of a general organisation. Every branch of literature was now subjected to a rigorous inquiry. In 1543 Caraffa ordered that no book, old or new, should be printed without licence of the Inquisition; that booksellers should send their catalogues to the Holy Office, and should sell nothing without its authority; and that the officers of the customs should submit to it all packages of manuscript or printed books, before consigning them to their address. This was the origin of the Index Expurgatorius. The first of such catalogues appeared at Paris. The first Italian index, containing about 70 books, was printed by Giovanni della Casa, an intimate friend of Caraffa, at Venice. More complete catalogues appeared in 1552 at Florence and in 1554 at Milan. In 1559 a catalogue was printed at Rome in the form which long remained the model: it included the writings of Cardinals, and Casa’s own poems.

Meanwhile the Council of Trent continued its sittings (1545-1563); and the progressive severity of the enactments must have been partly due to its influence. Not only printers and booksellers were subject to these enactments; it was enjoined as a duty of conscience on all persons to inform against forbidden books. These rules were enforced with successful rigour. In 1540 a book by Aonio Paleario was published called—Of the Benefits of the Death of Christ. It gave offence to the Inquisition by appearing to depreciate works relatively to faith. The circulation was great; but very few copies seem to have escaped. (See Ranke, i. pp. 210-216: cf. pp. 140 f.)

Davanzati.

Bernardo Davanzati Bostichi, of Florence (1529-1606), best known for his translation of Tacitus.

one from Lambeth-house, another from the west end of Paul’s.

i.e. either from the Archbishop of Canterbury or from the Bishop of London. The Star-Chamber decree of 1586 had ordered that no book should be published without a license from both or at least from one of these prelates. The Star-Chamber decree of 1637 re-enacted this (Clause iii); reserving special classes of books, viz. (a) law-books, to be licensed by the Chief Justices and Chief Baron: (b) books relating to contemporary history or to state-affairs, to be licensed by the Secretaries of State, or by one of them: (c) books on heraldry, to be licensed by the Earl Marshal.

the attendant minorites, their chaplains.

i.e. Chaplains who resemble monks in the service of the Inquisition. The Franciscans were called friars minor, or minorites, because it was a rule of their order: “Let no one be called prior, but let all be called lesser brethren.”

Lullius.

Raymond Lully, (the “doctor illuminatus,”) famous for his skill in the occult sciences (1234-1315).

the sentences of three Greek poets.

(1) Acts xvii. 28, “As certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring”—a quotation from Aratos (about 270 bc), the author of two physical poems in hexameter verse: (2) 1 Cor. xv. 33, “Evil communications corrupt good manners”—from Euripides: (3) Titus i. 12, “The Cretians are alway liars,” &c.,—from Epimenides of Crete (about 600 bc).

the two Appollinarii—the historian, Socrates.

Sokrates “the Scholastic,” of Constantinople, [379-450 ad?] wrote in Greek the history of the Church during a period of 133 years (306-439 ad), from the reign of Constantine to the reign of the younger Theodosios.

The story of the two Apollinarii, to which Milton refers here, is thus told by Sokrates, Eccl. Hist. iii. 16:

“Howbeit, the law of the king [Julian the Apostate, 361-363 ad], which forbad the Christians to participate in the Hellenic culture, gave to the Apollinarii, who have already been named, a yet greater lustre. Each had skill in literature; the father as a grammarian, the son as a rhetorician: and both did good service to Christianity at this crisis. The father, in his quality of grammarian, promptly reduced the Art of Grammar to a form specially designed for Christians. At the same time he translated the Books of Moses, with the other historical portions of the Old Testament, into hexameters; he also rendered them dramatically in tragedies; and, indeed, used every manner of metre, that no fashion of Hellenic utterance might be strange to the ear of Christians. The younger Apollinarius, using his rhetorical accomplishments, put forth the Gospels and the teaching of the Apostles in the form of dialogues resembling Plato’s among the Greeks. Thus did they show themselves serviceable to Christianity, and baffle by their private labours the stratagem of the emperor.”

all the seven liberal sciences.

i.e.

whipped St Jerome in a lenten dream.

St Jerome himself relates the story to his disciple Eustochium, to deter her from reading the writers of pagan Rome. After describing the fascination which the classical writers had for him, and the distaste with which he turned from them to the Scriptures, he goes on: “While the old serpent was thus fooling me, about midlent a fever entered my marrow and seized on my wornout body; and without respite so preyed upon my unhappy limbs that scarce did I cleave to my bones. Meanwhile my funeral was being made ready; and, as the chill crept over my whole frame, a vital heat now throbbed only in my poor lukewarm breast;—when suddenly, caught up in the spirit, I was dragged before the tribunal of the Judge: where there was so much light, such splendour from the brightness of those who stood round about, that I cast myself to the earth and dared not look up. Asked of my state, I answered that I was a Christian. Thou liest, He saith, thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where thy treasure is, there will be thy heart also. Straightway I was dumb, and under the lash (for He had commanded me to be scourged), was tormented yet more by the fire of conscience, thinking over that verse in my heart, Who shall confess to Thee in hell? Then began I to cry and to wail, Have mercy on me, O Lord, have mercy. Those words resounded amid the blows.” (Hieronym. tom. iv. p. 42. Benedict. ed.)

Basil.

Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia (b. 329: d. 379).

Margites.

A mock-heroic poem, so called after its hero, Margites (“a mad, silly fellow”)—who seems to have been represented as a stupid man with a great belief in his own powers. Plato (Second Alkibiades, p. 147 c) and Aristotle (Poetics, iv. 10) agree in ascribing it to Homer. Aristotle regards it as the earliest Greek type of comedy, as the Iliad and Odyssey were precursors of tragedy. Only four lines are extant. One of them became proverbial: “He knew many works—but knew them all badly.”

Morgante.

Il Morgante Maggiore, a mock-romantic poem by Luigi Pulci (1432-1487), was published at Venice in 1481. It consists of 28 cantos written in the eight-line stanza; and might be described, in Hallam’s words, as a parody by anticipation of the Orlando Furioso; bearing the same relation to the poetry as Don Quixote bears to the prose of chivalrous romance.

Dionysius Alexandrinus.

Bishop of Alexandria from 247 to 265, and noted chiefly as antagonist of the Sabellians.

Mr Selden.

John Selden (1584-1654), one of the first lawyers and probably the most learned man of Milton’s time. Among his earliest works were (1) Titles of Honour, 1614, still an authority on questions of heraldry, and the occasion of Ben Jonson’s Epistle to Master John Selden containing the couplet

(2) De Dis Syris—On the Syrian Gods, 1617: (3) History of Tithes, 1618—of which two works the former excited the admiration, and the second the displeasure, of the clergy. Selden was summoned before the High Commission Court, and required to recant. He submitted “with grim facility”; and from that time became more decidedly “a leader among the English liberals, as well in ecclesiastical as in secular politics.” (Masson, Life of Milton, i. p. 484.)

The “volume of natural and national laws” to which Milton refers here was published in 1640. It was entitled De Jure Naturali et Gentium, juxta disciplinam Hebraeorum, On Natural Law and the Law of Nations, according to the system of the Hebrews. In the last chapter of Milton’s Essay on The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) the book is cited: “That all this is true, whoso desires to know at large with least pains, and expects not overlong rehearsals of that which is by others already so judiciously gathered, let him hasten to be acquainted with that noble volume written by our learned Selden, Of the Law of Nature and of Nations, a work more useful and more worthy to be perused by whosoever studies to be a great man in wisdom, equity, and justice than all those ‘decretals and sumless sums’ which the pontifical clerks have doted on.”

Psyche.

Venus was jealous of Cupid’s love for Psyche; and, Psyche having come into her power, treated her as a slave, and set her many tasks; under which she would have died, had not Cupid helped her to do them, and at last to vanquish the hatred of Venus. (Apuleius, Metamorphoses, iv. 28.)

Scotus.

Duns Scotus, the schoolman (1265-1308).

Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas, “the angelic doctor” (1224-1274).

the cave of Mammon.

Faerie Queene II. vii. 3:

Talmudist.

The Talmud is a code, first committed to writing probably about 550 ad, of those Jewish laws, civil and canonical, which had come down from early times by oral tradition, as distinguished from the written law of the Pentateuch.

Keri—Chetiv.

Keri (pass. part.) “read”; chetiv, “written.” The Rabbinical commentators on the Hebrew Scriptures, when a word seemed to them for any reason to require alteration, avoided changing the written text by putting in the margin the word which was to be read. The latter is the keri: the former is the “chetiv” or cethib. Compare Milton’s Apology for Smectymnuus (1642): “God who is the author both of purity and eloquence, chose this phrase as fittest in that vehement character wherein he spake. Otherwise that plain word might easily have been forborne: which the Masoreths and Rabbinical scholiasts not well attending, have often used to blur the margent with Keri instead of Chetiv, and gave us this insulse rule out of their Talmud”—viz. that all unseemly words in the Law “must be changed to more civil words.”

that Eusebian book of evangelic preparation.

A work entitled A Preparation for the Gospel (εὐαγγελικη̂ς ἀποδείξεως προπαρασκευή), by Eusebios the ecclesiastical historian (265-338 ad). It is an attempt to extract from ancient pagan thought everything which can prepare the mind to receive Christianity; and forms a collection, in 15 books, of quotations or facts from old writers, chiefly from philosophers.

criticisms of sin.

i.e. subtle varieties, niceties of sin. A criticism is properly an act of discriminating: “criticisms” are here the things discriminated: a use of the word which does not occur elsewhere.

that notorious ribald of Arezzo.

Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), a writer of burlesques and satires. “It appears extraordinary that, in an age so little scrupulous as to political or private revenge, some great princes, who had never spared a worthy adversary, thought it not unbecoming to purchase the silence of an odious libeller, who called himself their scourge” (Hallam, Introd. to the Lit. of Eur. ii. 192).

I name not him.

It has been supposed that Milton alludes to Skelton, or to Andrew Borde (author of The Madmen of Gotham). Holt White suggests that the reference may be to a certain Gray, of whom Puttenham (writing about 1590) speaks in his Arte of English Poesie as having gained the favour of Henry VIII “for making certaine merry Ballades.”

by the north of Cataio eastward.

Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. lxiv. (vol. viii. p. 10, note 22, ed. Dr Smith): “In Marco Polo and the Oriental geographers the names of Cathay and Mangi distinguish the northern and southern empires [of China], which, from ad 1234 to 1279, were those of the great Khan and of the Chinese. The search of Cathay, after China had been found, excited and misled our navigators of the sixteenth century in their attempts to discover the north-east passage.” Milton alludes to this quest in Paradise Lost, x. 291:

Sorbonists.

Robert de Sorbonne founded at Paris in 1252 the college which took its name from him; a society of ecclesiastics devoted to study and to gratuitous teaching. As a faculty of theology the Sorbonne had a wide reputation from the 14th to the 17th century. It was dissolved in 1789.

Arminius.

James Arminius, a Dutch theologian (1560-1609), was commissioned by Martin Lydius, Professor of Divinity at Franeker, to answer a book in which certain ministers of Delft had impugned Beza’s doctrine of predestination. Arminius undertook the task; but, in the course of preparation for it, became a convert to the opinion which he had been engaged to refute.

Plato.

“Music [in the Greek sense—including poetry] and Gymnastic are regarded by Plato mainly as they bear upon and influence the emotional character of his citizens. Each of them is the antithesis, and at the same time the supplement, to the other. Gymnastic tends to develope exclusively the courageous and energetic emotions:—anger and the feeling of power—but no others. Whereas Music (understood in the Platonic sense) has a far more multifarious and varied agency: it may develope either those, or the gentle and tender emotions, according to circumstances. In the hands of Tyrtaeus and Aeschylus it generates vehement and fearless combatants: in the hands of Euripides and other pathetic poets it produces tender, amatory, effeminate natures, ingenious in talk but impotent for action.” (Grote, Plato, vol. iii. p. 177.)

It was from a fear of a demoralising influence in some forms of Poetry and Music, and of the power which they might, in other forms, give to the fancy over the reason, that Plato so strictly regulated Poetry and Music in his ideal Commonwealth. He proscribed especially (1) fictions which impute bad deeds to the gods: (2) fictions which portray vice in men: (3) fictions which impress on the mind the terror of death. Of the four “modes” or styles of music, he tolerated the Phrygian, expressive of lofty passion or inspiration, and the Dorian, with its stirring military strains; but banished the plaintive Lydian and the soft Ionian (Republic, i. p. 195).

The villages also must have their visitors to enquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebbeck reads even to the ballatry.

Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury in August, 1633. In 1634, at his instance, the king issued to the bishops a new edition of the royal instructions of 1629; requiring, among other matters, that every bishop should exercise a strict censorship over all lecturers in his diocese, and should annually report the state of his diocese to his metropolitan. The bishops now began to hold strict visitations; and in every parish the church-wardens were bound by special oaths to assist in procuring exact information on certain questions, of which lists, called Articles of Visitation, were drawn up by the bishops.

Laud’s ecclesiastical system for every parish must now, says Milton, be applied to the literature and poetry of every village. There must be inspectors to scrutinize the discourse with which the bagpipe and the fiddle accompany the rustic ballads sung to them.

rebbeck.

An instrument like the violin; it had three strings tuned in fifths, and was played with a bow. The “rebeb” was brought into Spain by the Moors; Chaucer and Lydgate call it the “ribible”: then it came to be called “rebeck” (French “rebec,” Italian “ribecca”).

these are the countryman’s Arcadias, and his Monte Mayors.

(1) Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance, Arcadia, (published in part in 1590, and complete in 1593,) was the only good contribution which England made to the romantic literature of the 16th century. (2) George de Montemayor (1520-1562), a Castilian poet, was the author of the Diana, a pastoral romance in prose, intermingled with lyric verse. The Diana is said to have been, in its own department, a model almost as popular as Amadis in the romance of chivalry.

hears ill.

Is ill spoken of.

Atlantic and Eutopian polities.

(1) Atlantis, the Island of Atlas, is first mentioned in Plato’s Timaeos (pp. 24 e-25 a). Solon and a priest of Sais in Egypt are conversing about ancient history. To prove that Egyptian records go back further than Athenian, the priest tells Solon that, 9000 years before that time, Europe and Asia had been threatened with enslavement by invaders from the Atlantic. Before the Pillars of Hercules (i.e. just to the W. of the Straits of Gibraltar) lay an island called Atlantis, larger than Africa and Asia put together. In this island arose a great dynasty of kings, who became masters of the neighbouring islands, of Africa up to Egypt and of Europe up to Tyrrhenia. Then they gathered their forces to conquer the rest of the countries on the Mediterranean: but the Athenians drove them back and freed all the peoples east of the Pillars of Hercules. The victory was followed by great earthquakes and floods: the earth swallowed up the victorious Athenians: the sea engulphed the island of Atlantis.

It has often been asked whether this legend was a pure fiction, or was suggested by dim rumours of a western continent. A passage in Seneca’s Medea is said to have made a deep impression on the mind of Columbus:

In his unfinished New Atlantis Bacon made the fabled island the seat of an imaginary Commonwealth.

(2) Sir Thomas More (1480-1535) had described another imaginary Commonwealth in his Utopia—so called from a king Utopus,—a name itself formed from οὐ and τόπος (place), so that Utopia means the Land of Nowhere; not the Happy Land, the meaning implied by the spelling Eutopia. The Utopia has no resemblance to Plato’s Republic or Laws; and it was only in the most general sense that More owed to Plato the idea of his perfect society.

such an Adam as he is in the motions.

“Motion” = puppet-show. Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, ii. 1, “O excellent motion! O exceeding puppet!”—Winter’s Tale, iv. 3, “then he compassed a motion of the Prodigal Son,” i.e. succeeded in re-enacting his vagrant life.

that continued court-libel.

The Mercurius Aulicus (“Court Mercury”), a periodical which appeared weekly from the beginning of 1643 to the end of 1645; afterwards occasionally. It was written chiefly by Sir John Berkenhead, and was designed to support the cause of the King against the Parliament.

officials.

At this time a technical term:—officers of those Ecclesiastical Courts to which the Bishops delegated the cognizance of spiritual offences. In 1641 Sir Edward Dering presented to the Long Parliament a “bill for the utter eradication of Bishops, Deans and Chapters; with all Chancellors, Officials, and all Officers and other Persons belonging to either of them” (Clarendon, Hist. Rebell. i. 368, 8vo. 1807). In his tract Of Reformation, &c. (1641), Milton contends that the true function of a Bishop is not “to go about circled with a band of rooking Officials with cloke-bagges full of Citations.”

the model of Trent and Sevil.

Compare p. 12, where Catalogues and Indexes are said to have been devised jointly by the Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition. When the Holy Office was reestablished in Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella (1480), Seville became its chief seat.

wish themselves well rid of it.

In 1649 Gilbert Mabbot actually sought, and obtained, discharge from the office of licenser, on the grounds that the licensing system was wrong in principle and ineffectual in practice (Symmons’s Life of Milton, p. 220 note).

a punie.

A minor. Compare the tract Of Reformation, &c.: “how the puny law may be brought under the wardship and controul of lust [pleasure] and will.”

his patriarchal licenser.

The epithet “patriarchal” contains a special allusion. According to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Henry VIII sent the Duke of Norfolk to Francis I “offering aid for a war in Piedmont, if he would suffer no more monies to go out of his Realm to Rome, and instead of the Pope to erect a Patriarch, which it seems was one of the private Articles treated betwixt them at the interview” (of 1520: Herbert, p. 386, fol. 1682). Compare A true Delineation, or rather Parallel, between Cardinal Wolsey, Arch-bishop of York, and Wm. Laud, Arch-bishop of Canterbury (1641): “They both favored the See of Rome and respected his holinesse in it: the Cardinal did professe it publickly, the Arch-bishop did professe it privately. The Cardinal’s ambition was to be Pope: the Arch-bishop strove to be Patriarch: they both bid fairly for it; yet lost their aime.” A copy of satirical verses called Lambeth Faire (1641) had on the title-page:

from Sir Francis Bacon.

The reference is to a piece of Lord Bacon’s entitled An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England (in the common 10 vol. edition, vol. ii. p. 505: in Spedding’s Letters and Life of Bacon, vol. i. p. 78): “And indeed we see it ever falleth out that the forbidden writing is thought to be certain sparks of a truth that fly up in the faces of those that seek to choke it and tread it out; whereas a book authorized is thought to be but temporis voces, the language of the time.”

Knox.

John Knox, the Scottish reformer (1505-1572).

to what an author this violence hath been lately done.

Milton probably alludes to the posthumous volumes of Coke’s Institutes. Sir Edward Coke died in 1634. Parts ii., iii., iv. of his Institutes were published in 1641. Holt White notices that Prynne, on the title-page to his Animadversions on Part iv. of the Institutes, speaks of that portion of the work as having been printed “with some disadvantage” after the author’s death. Bishop Nicholson, referring to Prynne’s severe criticism, says: “The learned Authour [Coke] is more severely reflected on than he ought to have been for a posthumous Work, wherein we know not what injustice might be done him by the Publishers of his orphan labours” (Engl. Hist. Library, p. 199, fol. 1714). It has also been conjectured that Milton alludes to the three last books of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. These, too, were posthumous; but they were first published in 1648-62, some years later than the Areopagitica.

monopolized.

For the metaphor, comp. Cowley’s verses to Lord Falkland:

traded in by tickets, and statutes, and standards.

(1) Tickets: acknowledgements for goods received but not paid for: “to take on ticket” = to take on credit. Now “go on tick.” Comp. Beaumont and Fletcher, The Scornful Lady, iii. i.—“I am but new come over: direct me with your ticket to your tailor, and then I shall be fine.” (2) statutes: bonds or securities given for debts contracted by the purchase of merchandise. Blount’s Glossographia (5th ed. 1681) accounts for the name by the fact that such bonds “are made according to the form of certain statutes.” Comp. Hamlet, v. i, “This fellow might be in ’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries.” See, too, Sonnet, cxxxiv. (3) standards: weights and measures; perhaps with an allusion to the rates called “tunnage and poundage” which had been so great a grievance in the late reign.

Enchiridion.

With an allusion to the double meaning of the word—(1) hand-knife: (2) hand-book.

Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition.

Galileo, born in 1564 (Shakespeare’s birth-year), was 74 years old when Milton saw him at his villa near Florence in 1638.

In 1616 Galileo’s writings had been condemned by the Inquisition, as involving the scientific heresies of Copernicus. In 1632 he published his Dialogues on the Ptolemaic and Copernican Systems. This was the cause of his second condemnation and imprisonment. In Dec 1633 he was released from confinement and allowed to return to Tuscany; but under restrictions imposed by the Holy Office, which justify Milton in calling him its “prisoner.” The last eight years of his life were passed at the Villa d’Arcetri, near Florence, on the south side; where a tower which was his observatory, and the house in which he lived, are still shown. “Here, in a select circle, when graver subjects were not on hand, his strong old face would relax, and he would be as charming as a child On such occasions he would recite poems of his own which were asked for, or play his own music, or descant on the Latin and Italian poets, and especially on his favourite Ariosto.......On fine evenings he would still be in his observatory using his telescope. At last, in 1637, when he was in his seventy-fourth year, blindness came suddenly over him, and the eyes that had so long scanned the heavens could see their orbs no more Precisely at the time when Milton arrived in Italy, Galileo’s blindness had become total.” (Masson, Life of Milton, i. p 716.)

if without envy.

i.e. “if I may say so much without incurring jealousy—without presumption”: modo invidia absit verbo.

a mystical pluralist.

A covert pluralist.

Covenants and Protestations.

Alluding to (1) The Solemn League and Covenant, 1638: (2) The Covenant or League between England and Scotland—a modification of the former Covenant—adopted by the Parliament, Sept. 25, 1643. (3) The “Protestation” (= Declaration) by which, in 1641, the Lords and Commons bound themselves to maintain constitutional liberties.

this obstructing violence.

Alluding especially to the indignation excited by the barbarous sentences inflicted by the Star-Chamber (1) in 1630 on Leighton, author of Zion’s Plea against Prelacy: (2) in 1634 on Prynne, author of the Histriomastix: (3) in 1637 on Prynne again, and on Bastwick and Burton, two other Puritan pamphleteers. Clarendon says, speaking of the feeling excited by these measures, “Men begun no more to consider their [the sufferers’] manners, but the Men; and each Profession with anger and indignation enough, thought their education and degrees and quality would have secured them from such infamous judgments, and treasured up wrath for the time to come.” (Hist. Rebell i. 146. 8vo. 1807.)

“The punishing of wits enhances their authority,” saith the Viscount St Albans.

“The Viscount St Albans”—Bacon The reference is to the same Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England for which, as “Sir Francis Bacon,” he is quoted above (p. 36): “Wherein I might advise that side out of a wise writer, who hath set it down that punitis ingeniis gliscit auctoritas” (“when men of genius are punished, their influence gathers new force”). The “wise writer” is Tacitus, Annals, iv. 35. For the rest of Milton’s quotation from Bacon, see the note at p. 36

professors.

Those who profess a pure and strict Christianity: a term especially applied to Puritans, and used here of rigid Protestants, or Puritans, as opposed to devout Roman Catholics. Compare May’s History of the Parliament, p. 55, 4to, “a Diocese in which there were as many strict Professors of Religion (commonly called Puritans) as in any part of England.”

dividual.

divisible, separable. Par. Lost, xii. 83:

tunaging and poundaging.

The levying of rates called Tunnage and Poundage on every tun of wine and on every pound of other goods, imported or exported, began in England about 1350, and was the origin of the “Customs.” One of the grievances urged by the Parliament which Charles I dissolved in 1629 was that these rates were then levied by the King on his own authority.

at his Hercules’ pillars.

At the goal of his ambition. The two rocks—“Calpe” on the Spanish side, “Abyla” on the African side—which guard the entrance of the Mediterranean at the eastern extremity of the Straits of Gibraltar were fabled to be pillars set up by Hercules to mark the limit of his wanderings into the far west. Pindar says of Theron, a victor in the Olympian games: “Now Theron reaches the utmost limit in deeds of prowess, and in his own strength touches the Pillars of Hercules.” (Ol. iv. 44.)

a topic folio.

A book of commonplaces (τόποι, topi = loci communes).

alphabet or sol-fa.

Guido Aretino (1020?) is said to have given this name to two notes of the gamut from the two first words of a Latin hymn, Sol facit.

loitering gear.

appliances, helps, to indolence.

trading St Thomas—St Martin—St Hugh.

London parish-churches, notorious, apparently, for the sale of sermons in the vestry-room.

antichristian malice and mystery.

“Mystery” here = “fraud.” “Mystery” was first used to denote the close guild of a trade. Then, like “craft” and “art,” it came to imply secret dealing, trickery.—Par. Regained, iii. 248:

the mortal glass.

Milton is thinking first of 1 Cor. xiii. 12, “for now we see through a glass, darkly”; and then also of the magic mirror of medieval romance—like that in which Surrey on his travels was shown Geraldine (then in England) by Cornelius Agrippa. In Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale the mysterious knight who gives to Canace “the virtuous ring and glass” (Il Penseroso, 113) describes the power of the mirror; it can foreshow calamities to the kingdom and to Canace; it can discover friends and foes; it can reveal the falseness of lovers.

as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon.

“Osiris...civilized the Egyptians, taught them the culture of the fields and of the grape, gave them law and the worship of the gods; then went the world over, and after his return, by a trick of Typhon, who had conspired against him with twelve accomplices and the Ethiopian king Aso, was shut up in a coffin. The searching and sorrowful Isis is now delineated exactly like Demeter, the stories running parallel word for word. At last she finds the coffin, that had been thrown into the sea, cast upon the shore at Byblos, and hides it; but Typhon comes at the moment and cuts up the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces and throws them away....Isis sought for and found the pieces and buried them; and thus there are so many graves of Osiris, namely fourteen. The mutilation of the corpse of Osiris is a feature plainly indebted for its origin to the existing number of the tombs of Osiris and their pretensions to the possession of the real body.” (Döllinger, The Gentile and the Jew, transl. by Darnell, vol. i. p. 445.)

The application of the story was perhaps suggested to Milton by a passage in Plutarch’s treatise On Isis and Osiris: “Now Isis is a Greek name [Plutarch connects ἴσις with Ἶσημι, as if the name meant Knowledge], and Typhon is hostile to the goddess, being puffed up [τετυϕωμένος—whence Τυϕω̂ν] with ignorance and falseness; who rends asunder and puts out of sight that sacred wisdom which the goddess collects and puts together and delivers to those who are initiated into the divine nature.”

combust.

A planet, when in conjunction with the sun, or apparently very near to it, was said to be combust, “burnt up.” Compare the Reliquiae Wottonianae (Remains of the writings of Sir Henry Wotton), It is not wise “to build too near a great neighbour, which were, in truth, to be as unfortunately seated on the Earth as Mercury is in the Heavens, for the most part ever in combustion or obscurity under brighter beams than his own.”

Zuinglius.

Zwingli, the Swiss reformer (1484-1531).

Calvin.

Pythagoras.

Drayton in his Polyolbion, Song 1, ascribes to the Druids the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls:

Selden, in his “Illustrations” of the Polyolbion (1612), says on this passage: “Lipsius [Justus Lipsius the critic, 1547-1606] doubts whether Pythagoras received it [this doctrine] from the Druids, or they from him, because in his travels he converst as well with Gaulish as Indian Philosophers.”

the Persian wisdom.

Pliny the Elder, commenting on resemblances between the Druidic and the Persian theology, says—“To this day Britain observes that religion with such solemn rites, that the Persians might be supposed to have got it from Britain.” Natural History, xxx. 4.

the grave and frugal Transylvanian.

Nothing seems to be known from other sources about this mission (to judge from Milton’s words, regularly annual) of theological students from Transylvania to England.

the Hercynian wilderness.

The “Hercynian Wood” was in antiquity a general name for nearly all the mountains of Southern and Central Germany, from the sources of the Danube to Transylvania—including the Schwarzwald, the Thüringer Wald and the Harz.

Jerome.

Jerome of Prague (1378-1416).

first to his Englishmen.

Milton, who himself had much of the spirit of a Hebrew prophet, delighted to think that his countrymen were, like the Hebrews, a chosen people. See his tract Of Reformation, &c. (1641): “England had this Grace and Honour from God to be the first that should set up a Standard for the recovery of lost Truth and blow the first Evangelick Trumpet to the Nations.” Again, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643): “It would not be the first or second time since our ancient Druides (by whom this Island was the Cathedrall of Philosophy to France) left off their Pagan Rites, that England hath had this Honour vouchsaft from Heav’n to give out Reformation to the world. Who was it but our English Constantine that baptiz’d the Roman Empire? Who but the Northumbrian Willibrode, and Winifride of Devon with their followers, were the first Apostles of Germany? Who but Alcuin and Wiclef our Countrymen open’d the eyes of Europe, the one in Arts, the other in Religion? Let not England forget her precedence of teaching Nations how to live.”

the plates and instruments of armed Justice.

In illustration of “plates” it may be remembered that in the year in which the Areopagitica was published (1644) the cuirassiers of the Parliament were prominent in the battle of Marston Moor.

notions and ideas.

Milton perhaps intends the same distinction between these words which was afterwards drawn by Bolingbroke; notions being general in their nature and particular only by their application; ideas particular in their nature and general only by their application.

this prelatical tradition.

For tradition in this bad sense, compare Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, iii. 2: Ananias (a Puritan), “I hate traditions, I do not trust them......they are Popish all.”

would cry out as Pyrrhus did.

After his victory at Heraclea, on the gulf of Tarentum, in the first year of his war with the Romans (280-275 bc), Pyrrhus is said to have exclaimed “How easy it would be to seize the empire of the earth—for me, with Roman soldiers—for the Romans, with me for King!” (Florus, i. 18).

marching up, even to her walls and suburb trenches.

In Nov. 1642 the King advanced suddenly from Colnbrook—took possession of Brentford—and appeared to intend an attack on London. This was the occasion of Milton’s 8th sonnet. The forces of the Parliament marched out to Turnham Green: and after the two armies had faced each other awhile, the King drew off to Reading. Next summer (1643), in view of this warning, the “suburb trenches” were dug. See May’s History of the Parliament, p. 214 (ed. 1812): “London was then [summer of 1643] altogether unfortified; no Works were raised; nor could they, if their Enemies (who were then Masters of the field) had come upon them, have opposed any Walls but such as old Sparta used for their Guard, the hearts of courageous Citizens. But at that time London begun her large entrenchments; which encompassed not onely the City but the whole Suburbs on every side, containing about twelve miles in circuit. That great work was by many hands compleated in a short time, it being then a custome every day to go out by thousands to digge, all Professions Trades and Occupations taking their Turnes.”

bought that piece of ground.

Livy, xxvi. 11: “Other things, too—a small one and a great one—began to lessen his hope. The great one was this—that when he was himself encamped under arms before the walls of Rome, he heard that a detachment of troops had set out to reinforce the army in Spain. The trivial discouragement was this: it was learned from a captive that during those days the very ground (as it happened) on which he himself was encamped had been sold without any depreciation of its value on that account. Now this seemed such haughtiness—such insolence—that a buyer should have been found at Rome for soil which he himself occupied and possessed by right of conquest—that he immediately summoned an auctioneer and ordered that the money-changers’ shops, which then stood about the Roman forum, should be sold.”

muing her mighty youth.

To mew or mue [French muer, German mausen: connected, like Lat. moveo, muto, mutus, with a Sanskrit root mê, to change] “to cast feathers or slough.” To “mue her youth” is to renew her youth by casting old feathers. Dryden uses the word as = “change”:

Nine times the moon had mewed her horns.

Not he who takes up arms for coat and conduct, and his four nobles of Danegelt.

Milton says to the Parliament: “If you turn away from the real friends of liberty, who will be your ally? Not the men who have rebelled on account of oppressive taxes—such as (1) the tax for clothing troops and conducting them to their destination, and (2) ‘Danegelt’—shipmoney.”

(1) Coat and conduct. Rates levied by the county assessment for clothing new levies of men and maintaining them on their march to join the corps to which they were attached. Clarendon says that in 1641 petitions were presented to the Long Parliament “against Lord Lieutenants of Counties and their Deputy Lieutenants, for having levied money upon the country for conducting and clothing of soldiers.” (Hist. Rebell. i. 279. 8vo. 1807.)

(2) Danegelt. Shipmoney was first levied about 1007, to form a navy to oppose the Danes. “This impost, levied by Charles I in 1634-6, was much opposed, and led to the revolution. He assessed London in seven ships of 4000 tons, and 1560 men; Yorkshire in ships of 600 tons, or £12,000; Bristol in one ship of 100 tons; Lancashire in one ship, of 400 tons. John Hampden refused to pay the tax, and was tried in the Exchequer in 1636. The judges declared the tax illegal, 12 June, 1637. Shipmoney was included in a redress of grievances in 1641.” (Haydn’s Dict. of Dates, 13th edit. ed. Vincent, 1871.)

The Counsel for the Crown in Hampden’s case had expressly cited the old Danegelt as a precedent. A noble was 6s. 8d. Four nobles (= £1. 6s. 8d.) is named here as the amount levied on the individual taxpayer.

the Lord Brook.

Robert Grevil, Lord Brooke [not the son of Sir Fulke Greville, as Mr Arber says, p. 80, but his cousin’s son]: the most prominent of the extreme Puritans among the Peers. In Nov. 1641 he published a pamphlet called A Discourse opening the nature of Episcopacy, dedicated to the Parliament; and containing (see ii. ch. 6, 7) precepts of toleration for which Milton praises it here. He was killed March 2, 1642, while commanding the forces of the Parliament in an attack on the Cathedral-close at Lichfield, by a shot fired from the roof of the Cathedral.

The temple of Janus, with his two controversal faces.

“The war between Authority and Inquiry has now fairly broken out: it cannot be arrested until it has been decided: the temple of Janus must stand open until Truth has conquered, or has been conquered by Falsehood.”

“Controversal faces”—faces looking opposite ways. “The double head of this god’s image was significant of his peculiar province as god of opening, the most ancient gateways being constructed with two arches and a chamber between them, and the shape of his temple was probably that of a gateway chamber open at both ends. Hence the word ianus was generally applied in Latin to all archways....... The well-known custom of keeping the doors of Janus’s temple open during war, and shut during peace, was usually explained by the story of a repulse inflicted on the Sabines by the god’s interference. A deeper meaning may be found in the idea that Janus was the power who presided over the beginning of every act, and who gave his blessing to the troops marching out through the city gate to war.” (Burn, Rome and the Campagna, p. 87.)

that hand-writing nailed to the cross.

Epistle to the Colossians ii. 14.

manners.

here = morals: as in “evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Cor. xv. 33).

one while in the old convocation house, and another while in the chapel at Westminster.

The powers of Convocation—the general assembly of the national clergy—were transferred (with enlargements) by the Long Parliament to the Westminster Assembly of divines and laymen (149 in all), which met for the first time in July, 1643, empowered to consider all questions relating to the Church, and to report on them to the Parliament. The place of meeting was Henry VII’s Chapel and afterwards the Jerusalem Chamber.

that order published next before this.

i.e. the Order of the Commons of Jan. 29, 1642 (for the Order of the Commons of Mar. 9, 1643, is here treated as one with the Order of the Lords and Commons of June 14, 1643, which was merely a stronger and fuller expression of it). The Order of 1642 directed “that the Printers doe neither print, nor reprint anything without the name and consent of the Author: And that if any Printer shall notwithstanding print or reprint any thing without the consent and name of the Author, that he shall then be proceeded against, as both Printer and Author thereof, and their names to be certified to this House.” (Arber, p. 24.)

this authentic Spanish policy.

This genuinely Spanish policy; the policy of the Spanish Inquisition (see p. 12 &c.), and the policy of Philip and Mary, in whose reign (1557) the privilege of printing and publishing books was restricted to the Stationers’ Company. For authentic = genuine, comp. Par. L. iv. 719:

On him who had stole Jove’s authentic fire.

fallen from the stars.

The court of Star-Chamber is usually said to have taken its name from the camera stellata, a chamber of which the ceiling was adorned with stars, in the palace at Westminster. (Hume, note a to Bk iv. c. xix.) Others have derived it from the slarra or Jewish covenants deposited with the court by order of Richard I.

glosing.

= flattering (Gk glossa, a tongue: to gloze, to deal in mere phrases): comp. Comus 161, “words of glozing courtesy.”

sophisms and elenchs of merchandise.

Plots and counterplots of tradesmen:—tricks of trade. Sophism—a fallacious argument: elench—a refutation of it. Compare Bacon, Advancement of Learning: “the more subtile forms of Sophisms and Illaqueations with their Redargutions, which is that which is termed Elenches.”

By A. W. Verity

liberty. The guiding-star of Milton’s life. He fought for liberty all his life. The seventeenth century writer Aubrey (reflecting, no doubt, what he had heard from Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips and others acquainted with the poet) tells us that Milton’s intense “zeal to the liberty of mankind,” and his republicanism, came largely from his admiration of the Roman writers and Roman Commonwealth. And for Milton the great enemies, in their respective spheres, of liberty are “tyranny and superstition” (l. 22). Cf. his treatise A Defence of the People of England, xii., “the two greatest mischiefs of this life, and most pernicious to virtue, tyranny and superstition”; and The Ready Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, “the most prevailing usurpers over mankind, superstition and tyranny” (Prose Works, Bohn’s ed. i. 212, ii. 113). There is a good deal about “tyrants” and “tyranny” in a Commonplace Book of Milton’s which is extant. Tyrannicide is justified in his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.

trophy. In the etymological sense “monument, memorial.” Cf. Hamlet, iv. 5. 214, Coriolanus, i. 3. 43. Literally “a monument of an enemy’s defeat” = Gk τρόπαιον, from τροπή, “a turning, putting to flight” (τρέπειν, “to turn”).

statists, statesmen; an obsolete use, the word now being limited to the sense “statistician,” i.e. one who deals with statistics. Milton speaks of the Greek “statists” (i.e. statesmen) in the great passage on Greece in Paradise Regained, iv. 354. Cf. Hamlet, v. 2. 33, 34:

I could name him. Isocrates is, of course, “that old man eloquent” of Milton’s Sonnet (x.), “To the Lady Margaret Ley,” and his λόγος Ἀρεοπαγιτικός supplied obviously the title of this treatise. In On Education Milton speaks of “those ancient and famous schools of Pythagoras, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle.” A small portion of the orations of Isocrates is extant.

The Areopagus, Gk Ἄρεος πάγος, “hill of Ares” (= Mars), was “a hill at Athens where the highest judicial court of the city held its sittings; hence used for the court itself, and [so] of any important tribunal”—New English Dictionary.

signiories. “Principalities, provinces”; cf. The Tempest, i. 2. 71. In Richard II., iii. 1. 21, the sense is “manor, estate” = the legal term seignory, from O.F. seignorie, “the property of a seigneur” (Ital. signore, Lat. senior).

The second interpretation (with the reading worse) mentioned but rejected by Professor Jebb is clearly opposed to other passages of Milton. Thus in his poem Mansus (1638) he apologises for his Latin poems on the ground that he was reared in the chill north; while in the History of Britain he complains that the English lack “the sun [which] ripens wits as well as fruits” (Prose Works, v. 240). We find the same idea in The Reason of Church Government, Preface to book ii., “if there be nothing adverse in our climate,” i.e. adverse to the composition of a great poem, and in Paradise Lost, ix. 44, 45. Illustrations might be quoted from Pope’s Essay on Criticism, ii., and Gray’s Alliance of Education and Government Yet, oddly enough, we know from Phillips’s Memoir of Milton, 1694, and from other sources, that during the years he was engaged over Paradise Lost Milton could only compose freely during the cold months of the year.

the prelates. Milton’s feeling is summed up in his words that he was “Church-outed by the prelates,” i.e. debarred from taking Holy Orders by his dissent from episcopacy. See the brief Life of Milton prefixed to this volume.

dragon’s teeth. See the story of Cadmus.

spill; in the sense of O.E. spillan, “to destroy.” Cf. Chaucer’s phrase to “save or spill,” i.e. “to save the life of or kill,” The Clerk’s Tale, 503; used by Spenser, The Faerie Queene, i. 3. 43, “Herself a yielded prey to save or spill.” See King Lear, iii. 2. 8. That spill has this sense here may be inferred from the general wording of the passage; cf. “a kind of homicide,” “a kind of massacre,” “slays an immortality.” In diction, Milton was essentially Elizabethan—“the last of the Elizabethans.”

Athens. The theme of one of his most famous passages—Paradise Regained, iv. 237-80; “the eye of Greece, mother of arts,” etc. A good deal in that book (iv.) serves to illustrate more or less the Greek references here.

event. In the common Elizabethan sense “issue, result” = Lat. eventus. Par. Lost, i. 624, ii. 82.

Cf. the reference to “the Cynic tub” (of Diogenes) in Comus, 708.

pontific. “The collegium of the Pontifices was the most important priesthood of ancient Rome”; presided over by a Pontifex Maximus. Probably Milton intends also a sarcastic allusion to the sense “belonging to the Supreme Pontiff,” i.e. the Pope. There may be the same purpose in “pontifical,” used quibblingly, in Par. Lost, x. 313. Milton often satirises in this way the technicalities of Roman Catholicism. Thus in Par. Lost, i. 795, he applies the ecclesiastical word “conclave” to the assembly of the fallen angels in Hell: that being the title of “the Meeting or Assembly of the Cardinals for the Election [of the Pope], or for any important affair of the Church” (Blount). So with “consistory” in Par. Regained, i. 42.

impeachment, i.e. hindrance (F. empêcher, Low Lat. impedicare, “to fetter”). “And these perhaps were the chief impeachments of a more sound rectifying the church in the Queen’s time” (Of Reformation in England, i., Prose Works, ii. 374). So in Henry V., iii. 6. 137. The verb meant originally “to hinder, stop”; then “to stop a man and charge him with a crime.”

St Peter . . . the keys. Lycidas, 108-12:

The doctrines based by the Roman Catholic Church upon St Matthew xvi. 18, 19, are discussed in Milton’s Christian Doctrine, xxix., his views upon the special point of “the power of the keys, as it is called, or the right of binding or loosing,” being such as might be expected from a strong Puritan. It is of course a favourite poetic allusion; cf. Comus, 13, 14; Par. Lost, iii. 484, 485. In one of his Latin poems he mentions the Apostolicae custodia clavis (In Quintum Novembris, 101).

In Paradise Lost “the bottomless pit” is the lowest region of Hell—“the fiery gulf” on which the fallen angels are depicted as tossing in i. 52. In the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 3, Milton calls it “that uttermost and bottomless gulf of chaos, deeper from holy bliss than the world’s diameter multiplied.” Similar allusions occur in The Tenure of Kings (end), and Of Reformation in England, ii. (Prose Works, ii. 47, 417).

voutsafe; cf. again p. 24, l. 14. One of the peculiarities of Milton’s spelling which ought, I now think, to be retained. So in Par. Lost, ii. 332, vii. 80, viii. 8. Milton probably wished to avoid the awkward sound ch before s, just as in proper names he always avoids sh; cf. “Basan,” “Hesebon,” “Beërsaba,” “Silo,” “Sittim”; in each case he followed the form of the name in the Septuagint or Vulgate (or both) to get rid of the cacophony sh. In such matters his ear was delicately fastidious.

piatza; a reminiscence of his Italian visit. What follows reads like a hit at foreign ecclesiastics.

From the numerous quotations in the New English Dictionary it is clear that “piazza” had become a familiar word to English readers. By the spelling “piatza” Milton probably intended to reproduce the Italian pronunciation. Properly “a public square or marketplace”; hence “any open space surrounded by buildings.”

the spunge; cf. Par. Regained, iv. 329; referring to the Roman way of writing on wax-tablets.

our prelates and their chaplains. We may remember that Paradise Lost had to pass this ordeal. According to tradition, the chaplain of the Archbishop of Canterbury to whom it was submitted hesitated to give his imprimatur on account of the lines in the first book about eclipses perplexing monarchs with fear of change (i. 596-99). The Licenser of the poem might well have objected to Milton’s attacks on the Church, e.g. in xii. 507-37; and Samson Agonistes must have presented difficulties. But Milton was treated with consideration at the Restoration. We are told that the influential poet-politician Andrew Marvell, who had been Milton’s assistant as Secretary to the Council, and whose own poetry shows Milton’s influence clearly (see Lycidas, 40, note), “acted vigorously in his behalf and made a considerable party for him” (Phillips, Memoir).

our English. Compare his early poem the Vacation Exercise, commencing “Hail, native language,” and his Epitaphium Damonis (162-71), where he declares his intention of giving up Latin verse for English. Still more significant is a passage in the long piece of autobiography in his pamphlet on The Reason of Church Government (1641) e.g. “I applied myself to that resolution which Ariosto followed . . . to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue . . . not caring to be once named abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, but content with these British Islands as my world” (Prose Works, ii. 478). It is a clear announcement of his ambition to rank as a great national poet, and to do for his own country and tongue what Dante had done for his. A strain of autobiography runs through all Milton’s works: you feel it constantly in this treatise, e.g. in his picture of the ideal student (p. 33, ll. 21-27).

original. Used twice as a noun = “originator” or “origin” in Par. Lost, ii. 375, ix. 150. “Run questing up as high as Adam to fetch their original,” Church Government, i. 3.

limboes. Referring to the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Limbus Patrum and the Limbus Infantium, regions on the outskirts of hell in which dwelt respectively the souls of the just who died before Christ and the souls of infants who die in original sin. Later arose the popular belief, used with grim satire in Paradise Lost, iii. 444-97, in a third region, the Limbus Fatuorum, the “Paradise of Fools” (iii. 496) after death and receptacle of all foolish things. Lat. limbus, “a fringe.”

obvious In Milton the word has always something of its literal Latin sense “lying in the way” (obvius), and so “easy for any man to light on.”

Alchemy (“the Egyptian art”) and its partner astrology were so much studied in the early seventeenth century that technical terms like “sublimate” (= “to raise a solid substance into vapour by heat”—a chemist’s word still) were more familiar to readers then. The locus classicus, of course, in alchemy is Ben Jonson’s play, The Alchemist. The foundation of the Royal Society later in Milton’s life must have dealt a blow at pseudo-science. The parallel forms alchemy and alchymy are due to confusion about the origin of this difficult word; one still sometimes sees the old-fashioned form chymist.

Milton has the same reference to Euripides (?), with the same purpose, in the Preface to Samson Agonistes. Actually the quotation (which has also been assigned to the Thais of Menander) is not given as a pure iambic line in any of the mss. of 1 Cor. xv. 33; so that sentence here (= Lat. sententia, “a maxim, aphorism”) is perhaps more precise than “verse” in S.A. It occurs often in patristic writings as a proverbial saying, without any mention of its author; e.g. in Tertullian’s Latin version, bonos corrumpunt mores congressus mali. “Sentence” is specially applicable to Euripides, so famous for his γνω̂μαι—“brief sententious precepts,” Par. Regained, iv. 264. We know that Euripides (“sad Electra’s poet,” Sonnet viii.) was one of Milton’s favourite authors.

The elder Apollinarius has been thought (but it is improbable) by some writers to be the author of the famous post-classical tragedy Christus Patiens mentioned in the Preface to Samson Agonistes but there attributed, as commonly then, to Gregory Nazianzen, Bishop of Constantinople.

There is a great deal in old writers about the distinction between “vision,” the highest channel of divine illumination, and “dream,” a less certain form. “I fell at last into this vision; or if you please to call it but a dream, I shall not take it ill, because the father of poets [Homer, Iliad, i. 63] tells us even dreams, too, are from God” (Cowley, Essays, p. 21, Pitt Press ed.). Adam was vouchsafed a vision (Par. Lost, xi. 377), Eve only a dream (xii. 611), a characteristic mark of Milton’s view of the relation of the sexes.

Psyche. See the beautiful allusion in Comus, 1003-1011. The story of Cupid and Psyche is applied similarly in The Faerie Queene, iii. 6. 49, 50. Compare also Keats’s Ode. An allegory of the soul (ψυχή) which, after undergoing trials and tortures, is purified by pain and eventually reaches happiness and rest.

not without dust. Lat. non sine; a classical turn of phrase (meiosis); cf. Par. Lost, v. 178. For the Horatian reminiscence cf. Odes, i. 1.

we bring not innocence into the world. The exact opposite of Wordsworth’s teaching in the Ode on Intimations of Immortality?

excremental. “Of the nature of an outgrowth or excrescence,” and so here “merely superficial.” Lat. excrementum, “outgrowth,” from ex + crescere, “to grow.”

Cf. the reference to “our admired Spenser” in the Animadversions (Prose Works, iii. 84), where Milton quotes at some length from the Shepheards Cal. Maye. He was, says Dryden, “the poetical son of Spenser. Milton has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original.” And this relation was emphasised in the publisher’s preface to the first edition (1645) of Milton’s minor poems: “I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser wrote; whose poems in these...are as rarely imitated as sweetly excelled.” Spenser, of course, is meant in Il Penseroso, 116-20. The notice of Spenser in the Theatrum Poetarum (1675) of Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips is very significant in this connection. Spenser has been called aptly “the poets’ poet.” Cowley e.g. in the essay Of Myself, says that his first impulse to write verses came from reading Spenser. Keats was another Spenserian.

temperance. A word of very frequent occurrence in Milton’s writings; embodying an idea very dear to him—“perhaps pre-eminently the Miltonic idea,” says Masson. Comus is an allegory of the beauty of temperance. There is a striking passage in one of Milton’s Latin poems, the sixth Elegy, on the relation of temperance to the ideal that should inspire and regulate the poetic life.

scout into the regions. But for the dates, any one would have said that he had in mind his own Satan voyaging through Chaos on his quest of the new-created world (Par. Lost, ii. 629 et seq.).

not nicely, i.e. in a plain-spoken manner. In Milton’s works nice has always something of its common Elizabethan sense—“fastidious, dainty, finicking”: derived from Lat. nescius, “ignorant,” it often meant “foolish,” and so “foolishly particular.” “Nothing will please the difficult and nice” = people too hard to please (French difficiles)—Paradise Regained, iv. 157.

Cataio. Cathay is a corruption of Kitai, the name by which China proper is still known in Russia and in many Asiatic countries. But in those days China was supposed to extend right up to the Arctic Ocean. The references to Cathay in Milton’s History of Moscovia show that for him it included what we call Eastern Siberia. See notes on Paradise Lost, x. 292, 293, xi. 388, 390.

The secret proselytism carried on then by the Roman Catholics in England underlies the allusion in the lines in Lycidas about “the grim wolf” (128, 129). This Roman Catholic reaction was strong at Cambridge. See Birrell’s Life (pp. 12-14) of Marvell, who joined the Roman Church about 1639, though he was soon reconverted. Another convert was the poet Crashaw, Milton’s contemporary at Cambridge, who died under mysterious circumstances at Loretto (see p. 43, l. 30). Milton’s brother Christopher and one of his Phillips nephews became Roman Catholics. The Milton family had R.C. traditions (see Life, p. vii).

pound up. A village-pound or pinfold (King Lear, ii. 2. 8) (an enclosure for strayed cattle) was more familiar then than now. Old English pyndan, “to pen up.” Milton speaks of human beings as “Confined and pester’d [= shackled] in this pinfold here” (i.e. the world)—Comus, 7.

want, i.e. do without.

prevented. “Anticipated”; a common Scriptural sense. “Mine eyes prevent the night watches,” Psalm cxix. 148. Literally “to come before,” Lat. praevenire.

airy. “Imaginary.”

fond; in its usual Elizabethan sense “foolish.” “I am a very foolish fond old man,” King Lear, iv. 7. 60. It is still quite common as a dialect-word = “daft.”

grave and Doric. See the great description of the warrior-music of Satan’s host, Paradise Lost, i. 549-59:

where Milton has in mind the account in Thucydides (v. 70) of the Spartans advancing at the battle of Mantinea ὑπὸ αὐλητω̂ν πολλω̂ν, “to the strains of many flute-players” (Keightley). The Dorian mode (= mood) is called by Plato “the true Hellenic mode,” and “the strain of courage” (ἀνδρεία). Many old German chorales are written in this mode. For its opposite, the Lydian mode, see L’Allegro, 136, note. Milton himself was an accomplished musician, especially on the organ, and delights in the use of musical terms (cf. “madrigals,” p. 27, l. 7). The importance of the teaching of music is emphasised in his treatise On Education.

madrigal; strictly, “a pastoral song.” Ital. madrigale, from Gk μάνδρα, “a fold, stable.” Cf. Comus, 495, where he is paying a compliment to his friend the musician Henry Lawes, a master of the madrigal. It was one of the most characteristic forms of old English music. See the chapter on “Music” in Shakespeare’s England, 1916, vol. ii.; also that on “Ballads,” which shows the immense popularity and social importance of the ballad in the England of Shakespeare and Milton.

Probably many of Milton’s readers had never seen a balcony. It was essentially a feature of Italian architecture, suitable to the Italian climate. The earliest instance of the use of the word given in the New English Dictionary dates from 1618, and its spelling is balcone (Ital.), as here. Literally “a structure supported by balks” (i.e. beams, pillars).

It is commonly thought that Shakespeare owed something to “Monte Mayor” both in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the love-juice part). The earliest extant English version of Diana, by Bartholomew Yong, was not published till 1598, too late a date to be assigned to either of these plays, but Shakespeare may have known “the French copies” of the romance to which the English translator Yong refers in his preface. A play called The History of Felix and Philiomena, based probably upon Diana (in which these names occur), was acted in 1585. And Sidney’s Arcadia is said to show unmistakably the influence of Diana. There is indeed no class of work in which “family-resemblance” is more conspicuous than in the pastoral romance, verse or prose (often combined).

hears ill. Milton uses this classicism (male audit, κακω̂ς κλύει) in Par. Lost, iii. 7, as in his Latin poems, e.g. the Epitaphium Damonis, 209.

One form of “mixed conversation” was certainly not to Milton’s taste, viz. mixed dancing, a practice greatly disliked by the Puritans. “Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,” Par. Lost, iv. 768. In Of Reformation in England he had united “gaming, wassailing, and mixed dancing” in one condemnation (Prose Works, ii. 402).

reason...freedom. One of the dominant thoughts, naturally, of Par. Lost; cf. especially iii. 96-128, v. 524-40, and ix. 351, 352:

There is of course much bearing on the subject in chapters 3 and 4—on “The Divine Decrees” and “Predestination”—of Milton’s theological treatise, The Christian Doctrine, i.

Why...affect a rigour? Milton argues a little like his own Magician (Comus).

many sects. Perhaps later he would have instanced the Waldenses or Vaudois, whose terrible sufferings a few years later (1655) evoked the Sonnet (xviii.) “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints,” commonly considered the finest of the series; “a Collect in verse,” as Macaulay said. It was believed that this sect reached back to almost Apostolic times, and in his later prose works Milton speaks more than once of its extreme antiquity and purity of doctrine.

in a hand scarce legible. Milton’s own beautifully clear handwriting survives in the Trinity mss., a thin volume of 54 pages which had served Milton as a note-book and contains the original drafts of several of his early poems, notably Arcades, Lycidas and Comus, with many of the Sonnets. The greatest treasure of the library of Trinity College, it may be studied in the fine facsimile published by the Cambridge University Press. The original transcript of Paradise Lost submitted to the Licenser is also extant, but this of course was in the handwriting of an amanuensis, probably Milton’s devoted nephew Edward Phillips. It is one of the many literary treasures that have gone to America.

For the different types of old English handwriting see the chapter on “Handwriting” in Shakespeare’s England, 1916.

sensible. “Sensitive,” a common Shakesperian meaning, cf The Tempest, ii. 1. 174. Bacon says “be not too sensible or too remembering of thy place in conversation” (Essay Of Great Place) The word occurs only once in Milton’s poetry and then as a noun—“the sensible of pain,” Par. Lost, ii. 278. “Sensibly” in Samson Agonistes, 913, means “sensitively.”

The verb “dash” here has practically the same sense as “discourage”; in fact they form together a single alliterative phrase. “I see this hath a little dash’d your spirits” (i.e. depressed, cast down), Othello, iii. 3. 214. Milton uses the word, which has perhaps lost something of its dignity, several times in his poetry; cf. Comus, 451; Par. Lost, x. 577.

The oft-quoted sentiment of Lycidas, 70-72:

Etiam sapientibus cupido gloriae novissima exuitur (Tacitus, Histories, iv. 6).

a free...spirit. Shakespeare’s favourite epithet; and Ben Jonson spoke of Shakespeare’s “open and free nature.” “Free” seems, in all its shades of meaning, peculiarly descriptive of the Anglo-Saxon character.

ferular...fescu. Ferular (to keep the seventeenth century spelling) is Lat. ferula, “giant hemlock,” the stalk of which was used by the Romans as a cane for whipping. Fescu (now fescue) is Lat. festuca, “a straw, rush, twig”; hence “a small stick or pointer,” used in pointing out the letters to children learning to read. The New English Dictionary quotes aptly from Milton’s pamphlet the Animadversions, “fescu’d to a formal injunction of his rote-lesson.” Milton speaks as an ex-schoolmaster; on his return from Italy he had kept a small school for his nephews and a few other boys: hence his treatise On Education.

Cf. Il Penseroso, 85, 86. Palladian. “Pertaining to Pallas, the goddess of wisdom,” and so “pertaining to knowledge, study.” The word, of course, is much commoner as an architectural term, with quite different associations.

An essentially autobiographic touch. Milton spent three years, 1663-65, on the revision of Paradise Lost. And the mss. of his early poems are full of corrections and changes.

ding. This vigorous old word (“to strike heavily,” and so “to dash, fling”) now practically obsolete, was once in quite common use, as the numerous quotations in the New English Dictionary show.

Monopoly was a word of peculiarly odious associations in the early seventeenth century when it came first into general use, as may be seen from the quotations in the New English Dictionary. One of the greatest social abuses of those days was the system of Monopolies by which a “Company” or high-placed individual obtained from the Crown, at a price, the exclusive right of dealing in an article. “Many of the commonest necessaries of life were the subjects of monopolies, by which their price was grievously enhanced.” Shakespeare glances satirically at the system in King Lear, i. 4, but the passage was cautiously omitted by the editors of the First Folio, published in 1623, when the scandal and public indignation were at their height. The champion monopolist, Sir Giles Mompesson, is commonly thought to be the original of Massinger’s famous character Sir Giles Overreach, “a cruel extortioner,” in A New Way to pay Old Debts (1633). A sketch of the whole business is given in the chapter on “Commerce” in Shakespeare’s England, 1916. Gk μονοπωλία, “exclusive sale” (μόνος, “only, sole” + πωλεɩ̂ν, “to sell”).

Philistines. The original edition has the peculiar form Philistims. Similarly Milton has Cherubims in Of Reformation in England (Prose Works, ii. 406), but the correct Cherubim in his poetry (Heb. Kherūbhīm). Cherubims is obviously a sort of Anglicised plural, and the remark applies to Philistims. The Revised Version of the Bible gives Cherubim.

diffident; in the etymological sense “distrustful.” Milton’s diction is, of course, full of these Latinisms.

made all other books unsaleable. Milton’s early poems, first printed in a collected form in 1645, a year after Areopagitica, were not reprinted till 1673. From the Preface to the Poems, it is clear that the initiative was due to the publisher rather than the poet, less hopeful of success in times of such stress.

the castle of St Angelo. The Castello S. Angelo, the great fortress at Rome; near the Vatican.

Galileo is the only one of Milton’s contemporaries alluded to directly in Paradise Lost; cf. i. 287-291 (“the Tuscan artist”) and v. 262 (where his name occurs). A similar but indirect reference is iii. 588-590. There is true pathos in those passages: Milton was revisiting in memory scenes associated with what was perhaps the happiest period of his life, viz. his stay in Italy—“times when...I tasted bliss without alloy” (Letter, 1647). He always spoke of Italy with the deepest affection, like so many of our poets, e.g. Shelley and Browning.

bishops and presbyters are the same. The best commentary on Milton’s bitter feeling towards the Presbyterians is his satirical piece, a sort of burlesque Sonnet, On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament, which closes with the couplet:

the word priest being a contraction of presbyter, from Gk πρεσβύτερος, “elder.” As episcopacy represents priesthood, he says here that “bishop” is practically identical in “name” with presbyter = priest.

Commute is a word with marked religious and legal associations = “to change a hard obligation or sentence into a lighter one.”

conventicle; another touch of his bitterness against the Presbyterians with their “packed” meetings; see On the New Forcers of Conscience.

Conventiculum, “a little meeting” (diminutive of conventus, “a meeting”), was the regular mediaeval term for a meeting of sectaries, i.e. Dissenters from the Church; and conventicle kept this idea and its associations.

The sketches of “a wealthy man” and “a parochial minister” (pp. 45, 46) are quite in the style of that favourite class of seventeenth century literature called “Characters” (i.e. portraits of types), of which Earle’s Microcosmographie is the best known example.

It is generally recognised that humour was not one of Milton’s gifts. The typical illustration is the scene of the introduction of artillery in Paradise Lost, vi. 558-67. The humour of his controversial writings is always very grim.

beatific vision. Visio Beatifica was the phrase used by the Schoolmen to express “seeing” God (Mat. v. 8); rendered literally by Milton in his Ode on Time, 18, as “happy-making sight.” Cf. Par. Lost, i. 684. The Cherubim, representing Contemplation (Il Penseroso, 54), were supposed to enjoy this faculty in a peculiar degree.

the Egyptian Typhon...Osiris...Isis. Milton’s interest in Egyptology is conspicuous in The Nativity Ode, 211-20, Par. Lost, i. 476-82. Other illustrations might be given from his prose-works and Latin poems.

the blaze...stark blind. Cf. Gray’s fine lines (The Progress of Poesy) on Milton’s blindness:

where there is an echo of Par. Lost, iii. 380-82.

He is probably glancing at his own ill-assorted marriage. He uses very similar language in his Divorce pamphlets.

Milton’s debt to the Italian poets was immense, especially, of course, to Dante; see Dr Paget Toynbee’s Dante in English Literature, i. 2, 120, 486, ii. 587. The only French writer, as far as I know, to be mentioned in connection with Milton is the poet Du Bartas. His long poem on the Creation and the early history of the Jews, in the exceedingly Spenserian translation of John Sylvester (1563-1618) entitled The Divine Weeks and Works, had great influence on Milton and is certainly one of the works of which account must be taken in considering the genesis of Paradise Lost and the literary references that moulded Milton’s style. Spenser himself admired Du Bartas greatly; and Dryden confessed that he had once preferred Sylvester to Spenser. “That Poem [i.e. The Divine Weeks] hath ever had great admirers among us,” is the suggestive comment of Milton’s nephew in his Theatrum Poetarum (1675).

This allusion seems connected with Milton’s friend Samuel Hartlib, a Pole born in Germany who settled in England as a merchant and achieved some note as an educational theorist. Milton dedicated his treatise On Education, published in the same year (1644) as Areopagitica, to Hartlib. Though the visit was not ‘yearly,’ Milton may have had in mind the visit to London of John Amos Comenius, a native of Moravia, in September 1641-August 1642, on Hartlib’s invitation, in furtherance of a scheme whereby “men might be called from various parts of the world and maintained in residence while prosecuting their learned researches.” S. S. Laurie, John Amos Comenius, p. 75.

Hercynian. Not to be confused with Shakespeare’s Hyrcanian (Hamlet, ii. 2. 472, Macbeth, iii. 4. 101), referring to Hyrcania, a province of the ancient Persian Empire.

despair, i.e. despair of. “Peace is despaired” (pax desperatur) Par. Lost, i. 660; so in vi. 495. “Despair thy charm,” Macbeth, v. 8. 13.

considerate, i.e. considering, reflecting; as in Par. Lost, i. 603.

its. I know but one other instance of its in Milton’s prose, viz. in The Reason of Church Government (Prose Works, ii. 471). There are three instances in his poems, viz. the Nativity Ode, 106, Par. Lost, i. 254 (“the mind is its own place”), and iv. 813. The regular neuter possessive pronoun was his up till about 1600: “it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis iii. 15). About 1600 its came into use, but slowly. Bacon has its rarely; the Bible of 1611 never; there are only nine examples in the posthumous First Folio (1623) of Shakespeare, whose normal idiom is shown in Julius Caesar, i. 2. 123, 124, “that same eye...did lose his lustre.” Milton, being an Elizabethan in his diction, clearly avoids its: either by retaining the old neuter use of his, or by personifying the noun, e.g. with abstract words like “virtue,” “truth,” etc., and then using her. “The modern its first appears, so far as is known, in Florio’s Italian Dictionary of 1598, and Florio uses its also in his translation of Montaigne,” Shakespeare’s England, 1916, ii. 557 (“Shakespeare’s English”).

His own Samson Agonistes.

muing; properly a term of falconry, as the metaphor here indicates; O.F. mue = (1) “a moulting” (Lat. mutare), (2) “the cage where the hawk was kept during the time of mewing or moulting.” Hence Shakespeare’s use = “to shut up,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream, i. 1. 71, “For aye to be in shady cloister mew’d.” Milton in Of Reformation has “they must mew their feathers” (Prose Works, ii. 375). The word only survives in the plural mews, a range of stabling, so called “because the royal stables were rebuilt (1534) in a place where the royal falcons had been kept” (Skeat). How popular falconry was is shown by the number of terms (mostly of French origin) peculiar to the sport which Shakespeare and the poets of the 16th-17th centuries use. “Pitch” (p. 41, l. 4) was one, signifying the height to which a hawk soars. See the chapter on falconry in Shakespeare’s England, 1916.

the influence of heaven. In Milton generally (if not always) the word influence has its astrological idea of the power supposed to descend from the celestial bodies and to affect the character and fortunes of men; “planetary influence,” King Lear, i. 2. 136; “skyey influences,” Measure for Measure, iii. 1. 9. For instances in Paradise Lost, see ii. 1034, iv. 669, vii. 374, 375, etc. Late Lat. influentia = “a flowing in upon.”

coat and conduct. “It was the custom from the reign of Henry the Seventh to give a recruit of the levies of the shire what was called ‘coat and conduct money,’ that is to say, a fixed sum to enable him to obtain a white smock with a red cross upon it, and to pay the expenses of his journey to the rendezvous”—Shakespeare’s England, 1916, i. 125 (“The Army”). A footnote there states that the odd word “cassock” (F. casaque) “displaced the simpler name of the soldier’s uniform” (cf. All’s Well that Ends Well, iv. 3. 192). In the famous recruiting-scene in 2 Henry IV, iii. 1, Falstaff (311) bids Bardolph give “coats” to the “pressed” (i.e. impressed and reluctant) soldiers.

i. to lay ambushments. The Civil War left its mark on Milton’s writings: witness the military metaphors that occur in this treatise. So in Paradise Lost, especially in bk vi., describing the great contest in Heaven. These war-touches must have appealed with the force of personal experience to many of his readers. The same thing is felt in reading Bunyan, especially the Holy War. To us at home such phrases are still phrases.

old Proteus. Par. Lost, iii. 604. The prophetic old man of the sea—ἅλιος γέρων; “the Carpathian wizard” of Comus, 872 (because the island of Carpathos, between Crete and Rhodes, was his dwelling-place, according to one tradition).

a linen decency; a hit at the use of the surplice?

affect; always used by Milton in the Latin sense “to aim at, seek to obtain” (affectare), e.g. in Par. Lost, v. 763, “Affecting all equality with God.”

slight. Milton himself was rather below the middle height, but of a notable refinement of appearance and complexion which won for him in his Cambridge days the nick-name “The Lady of Christ’s.” In after years it was a consolation to him that his blindness (amaurosis)—the weakness of sight was inherited from his mother—made no external change. Cf. his second Sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, and his pamphlet the Second Defence: “so little do they [his eyes] betray any external appearance of injury, that they are as unclouded and bright as the eyes of those who most distinctly see” (Prose Works i. 235).

contemptible to see to. A biblical turn of phrase: “all of them princes to look to,” Ezekiel xxiii. 15; “a great altar to see to,” Joshua xxii. 10. Cf. Comus, 619, 620:

For the idiom here, so common in Greek, cf. The Reason of Church Government, i. 7, “the Englishman of many other nations is least atheistical” (Prose Works, ii. 469). So in the famous couplet of Par. Lost (iv. 323, 324):

It is common in our old writers; Sir Thomas Browne, Vulgar Errors, i. 1, refers to Adam as (in the opinion of some) “the wisest of all men since.” Bacon might be quoted, e.g. The Advancement of Learning, i. 4. 8, and 5. 11.

let; i.e. hindrance. “By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!” Hamlet, i. 4, 85. So in the Bible: “oftentimes I purposed to come unto you, but was let hitherto,” Romans i. 13. O.E. lettan, “to hinder,” literally “to make late.”

The biblical reference, of course, is to Isaiah xiv. 12, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer,” where, however, the Revised Version should be consulted. Cf. Par. Lost, vii. 131-35.

glosing. The word glose or gloze got the idea of falsehood, deception (especially false, flattering speech) from the Late Lat. glossa, “an explanation of a word”—too often a false explanation!

colours; in the common Elizabethan sense “pretexts” (Lat. colores); cf. Samson Agonistes, 901, 902:

(i.e. Dalila).

advertisement. In the Elizabethan sense “advice, instruction”; cf. 1 Henry IV, iv. 1. 36, 37:

and Much Ado about Nothing, v. 1. 31, 32:

answerable to; corresponding with, in harmony with; cf. Par. Lost, ix. 20, xii. 582.