Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 13.djvu/580

MILTON. he was eminently fitted. In 1652 he lost his eyesight, already long impaired, but with the aid of assistants—one of whom was Andrew Marvell—he performed the duties of his post till the abdication of Richard Cromwell (1659). In the meantime (November, 1656) he had married a Catharine Woodcock, who died in February, 1658. She was honored by one of Milton's most beautiful sonnets (xxiii.). The Restoration put an end to his active career. In 1661 he settled in Jewin Street, Aldersgate, from which he removed two years later to a house in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, his last residence. Here he fulfilled the literary task he had long ago planned and since begun. To the annoyance of his daughters, he married a third wife, thirty years his junior, named Elizabeth Minshull. His relations with these daughters were most unhappy. Brought up in ignorance, they revolted from the service that he demanded of them—reading to him Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which of course they could not understand. Toward the end Milton stood aloof from religious sects and never went to religious services. He died November 8, 1674, and was buried in Saint Giles's, Cripplegate.

Milton's literary career is clearly divided by the outbreak of the Civil War and by the Restoration into three periods: (1) 1626-40; (2) 1640-60; (3) 1660-74.

First Period. Milton began writing English and Latin verse while a schoolboy. The earliest extant specimens of these exercises are paraphrases of the 114th and 136th Psalms, composed at the age of fifteen. Other early poems are a group of graceful Latin elegies and sylvæ (1626-29); On the Death of a Fair Infant (1626); At a Vacation Exercise (1628); Hymn on the Nativity (1629); At a Solemn Music (1630); On Shakespeare; and sonnets To the Nightingale and On Arriving at the Age of Twenty-three. The Latin verses are undoubtedly the best ever written by an Englishman, and the last five of the English poems display high poetical genius. While at Horton, Milton composed four absolutely perfect poems: the two descriptive lyrics, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (1634); Comus, a masque performed at Ludlow Castle on Michaelmas night, 1634, in honor of Lord Bridgewater's appointment to the wardenship of the Welsh marches; and Lycidas, a pastoral elegy in memory of his college friend Edward King, drowned on his passage to Ireland (August 10, 1637). Of these poems, which by themselves would place Milton among the great names in English literature, only a few had been published. The lines on Shakespeare appeared in the second folio of the dramatist's works (1632); Henry Lawes, who composed the music for Comus, published the masque anonymously (London, 1637), and Lucidas formed one in a collection of memorial poems (Cambridge, 1638). To this period belong six sonnets in Italian and Milton's two finest Latin poems: Mansus (1638), addressed to the Marquis of Manso, the friend of Tasso, who in his old age hospitably received Milton at Naples; and Epitaphium Damonis, an elegy on the death of his college friend Charles Diodati.

Second Period. For full eighteen years Milton was distracted from poetry by domestic perplexities and the revolutions in Church and State. The separation from his wife led to

pamphlets on divorce, of which the most important are The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (August 1, 1643), and The Tetrachordon (1645). Against episcopacy he launched, in 1641-42, five tracts, of which the best known is The Reason of Church Government Against Prelaty. In 1644 appeared the valuable letter Of Education and a noble plea for the freedom of the press under the title Areopagitica. The execution of Charles I. and the establishment of the Commonwealth were defended against Continental criticism in The Tenure of Kings and Maqistrates (1649), Eikonoklastes (1649), Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, and sequels. These tracts, vehement and often scurrilous in style, contain autobiographical passages of interest. Throughout this period Milton wrote almost no verse. He composed, however, at intervals his magnificent sonnets, as On His Blindness, To Fairfax, To Cromwell, and The Massacre in Piedmont; and in 1645 appeared a volume of collected poems in English and Latin. Besides this he wrote some Greek and Latin verse and made a few translations. In 1902 there appeared a valuable work called Nova Solyma: the Ideal City of Zion; or Jerusalem Regained: translated from the Latin by the Rev. Walter Begley, and by him attributed to John Milton. This romance was published in London (1648) with the title Novæ Solymæ Libri Sex. Whether or not the work belongs to Milton, it undoubtedly shows strongly many of his characteristics in thought and style. The romance is written in prose and in verse, and is wholly in Latin. It shows advanced theories on education, it considers love philosophically, and deals with the philosophy of religion, with conversion, salvation, the brotherhood of man, with almsgiving, self-control, angels, the fall of man, and man's eternal fate. It contains some 256 hexameters of a projected epic on the Armada, and there runs through it a vein of adventures with tales of outlaws, robbers, sea-rovers, and fighting on sea. There is an account of a man possessed by the devil, and an allegory of Philomela's Kingdom of Pleasure.

Third Period. The great epic that Milton now composed is the spiritual summary of his life of lost ideals. As early as his return from Italy, he had meditated the production of some great poem. By 1642 his mind was turning toward a mystery play on the loss of paradise. When he resumed the subject in 1658, it took the form of an epic. Paradise Lost, in ten books, completed by 1665, perhaps even by 1663, was first published on August 10, 1667. After several reprints with slight changes, it was enlarged to twelve books (1674). For this poem, of which 1300 copies were sold in eighteen months, Milton received from his publisher in all £10. At the suggestion of Thomas Ellwood, a Quaker friend of the poet, Milton wrote Paradise Regained, which was published with Samson Agonistes, an intense lyrical drama, in 1671. Once Milton was known mainly as the author of Paradise Lost. Since the romantic revival, this epic has been unfavorably compared with the so-called minor poems. The fascinating imaginative style in which the early lyrics were conceived certainly departed from Milton during the civil conflict. But as years went on, his imagination became invested with sublimity. Had Paradise Lost been written in 1642, it would have been a perfect mystery play, as Comus is a