Page:Paradise Lost (1667).djvu/9



HOUGH ready for the press in 1665, Paradise Lost was not published till two years afterwards. Milton, in the fifty-ninth year of his age, and in the fifteenth or sixteenth of his total blindness, was then residing, with his third wife, and his three daughters by his first wife, in Artillery Walk, near Bunhill Fields, an obscure suburb of London, on the edge of that vast ruin of all the central parts of the City which had been caused by the Great Fire of September, 1666. The disturbance to business occasioned by that disaster, following so closely as it did on the Great Plague of 1665–6, may have had something to do with the delay of the publication. It was necessary, moreover, that the manuscript should be submitted to the proper authorities for licence; and the particular person who had to grant the licence in this case—viz. the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, M.A., minister of the parish of St. Mary Aldermary, and one of the chaplains of the Archbishop of Canterbury—is said to have hesitated over a work by so notorious an old Republican and Anti-State-Churchman as Milton, and to have taken especial exception to one passage in the First Book of the poem. The difficulty was overcome, however; and there still exists the actual copy of that First Book as it had been submitted to Mr. Tomkyns, in the handwriting of one of Milton's amanuenses or paid scribes, with the word "Imprimatur" written by Mr. Tomkyns on the inside