No reader of Greek can fail to be reminded of more than one chorus in the Oedipus of Sophocles—

io geneai broton hos hymas isa chai to meden zosas enarithmo—

"Alas, ye generations of men, how utterly a thing of nought I count the life ye have to live! For what man is there who wins more of happiness than just the seeming and after the semblance a falling away. With thy fate before mine eyes, unhappy Oedipus, I can call no earthly creature blest." Here and there, as in this passage, the parallel is very close. But Milton's genius is too great and self-reliant for mere imitation. He sometimes recalls the very words of Greek poets as he {234} does those of the Bible: but that is not because he is artificially imitating either, but because he has assimilated the spirit of both and made them a part of himself.

The Chorus express their sympathy with Samson and he replies, bitterly reproaching his own folly and that of the rulers of Judah who gave him up to their enemies. But human blindness will not ultimately defeat the ways of God: and the Chorus sing their song of faith, in which rhyme is called in to give its touch of impatient contempt at the folly of the atheist.

"Just are the ways of God, And justifiable to men; Unless there be who think not God at all. If any be, they walk obscure; For of such doctrine never was there school, But the heart of the fool, And no man therein doctor but himself."

So ends the first act or episode of the drama. The second is the visit of Samson's father Manoah, whose cry is—

"Who would be now a father in my stead?"

He is trying to negotiate for his son's ransom: but Samson refuses, not desiring life, desiring rather to pay the full penalty of his sin. He cannot share his father's hopes that God will give him back the sight he so misused—

{235}

"All otherwise to me my thoughts portend, That these dark orbs no more shall treat with light, Nor the other light of life continue long, But yield to double darkness nigh at hand: So much I feel my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat; Nature within me seems In all her functions weary of herself; My race of glory run, and race of shame, And I shall shortly be with them that rest."

So Manoah leaves him, and in a noble lyric he laments over his greatest sufferings, which are not those of the body but those of the mind—

"which no cooling herb Or med'cinal liquor can assuage, Nor breath of vernal air from snowy Alp."

A choral song on the mysterious dealings of God closes this episode which is followed by the most dramatically effective in the poem, that of the visit of Dalila. The moment the blind man is told that it is "Dalila, thy wife," he cries—

"My wife! my traitress! let her not come near me:"

and his reply to her offer of penitence, affection and help, begins with the daringly expressive line—

"Out, out, hyaena! these are thy wonted arts."

A long and telling debate follows, in which {236} Dalila makes very good points, one of them recalling the scene in which Eve reproaches Adam for indulging her instead of exercising his right to command and control the weakness of her sex. To this argument Dalila receives the stern, characteristically Miltonic reply—

"All wickedness is weakness: that plea, therefore With God or man will gain thee no remission,"

He refuses her intercession with the Philistine lords, forbids her even to touch his hand;

"Not for thy life, lest fierce remembrance wake My sudden rage to tear thee joint by joint,"

and drives her to remind him defiantly that, whatever he and his Hebrews may say of her, she appeals to another tribunal of fame—

"In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath, I shall be named among the famousest Of women, sung at solemn festivals, Living and dead recorded."

So she goes out, and the Chorus make Miltonic meditations on the unhappiness of marriage and the divinely appointed subjection of women.

The next visitor is Harapha, the Philistine giant, who comes to taunt Samson, and is defied by him to mortal combat. This {237} episode is perhaps the least interesting, but it advances the action by exhibiting Samson's returning sense that God is still with him and will yet do some great work through him. It fitly leads to the chorus—

"O, how comely it is, and how reviving To the spirits of just men long oppressed, When God into the hands of their deliverer Puts invincible might, To quell the mighty of the earth, the oppressor, The brute and boisterous force of violent men, Hardy and industrious to support Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue The righteous and all such as honour truth!"

In the next scene an officer comes to demand Samson's presence at the feast of Dagon that he may entertain the Philistine lords with feats of strength. He at first dismisses the messenger with a contemptuous refusal: but, with a premonition of the end which recalls Oedipus at Colonus, he suddenly changes his mind—

"I begin to feel Some rousing motions in me, which dispose To something extraordinary my thoughts. If there be aught of presage in the mind, This day will be remarkable in my life By some great act, or of my days the last."

{238}

"Go, and the Holy One Of Israel be thy guide,"

sing the Chorus: and he leaves the scene, like Oedipus, to return no more, but to be more felt in his absence than in his presence. Manoah re-enters to utter his further hopes of ransom, in which there is a note of Sophoclean irony recalling the ignorant optimism of Oedipus in the Tyrannus; and as he and the Chorus talk they hear at first a loud shouting, apparently of triumph, and then another louder and more terrible—

Manoah.

"O what noise! Mercy of Heaven! what hideous noise was that? Horribly loud, unlike the former shout."

Chorus.

"Noise call you it, or universal groan, As if the whole inhabitation perished?"

They dare not enter the city: and, as they speculate on what this great event can be, a Hebrew spectator of the catastrophe comes up and, after some brief exchange of question and answer exactly in the manner of the Greek tragedians, tells the whole story at length. The end has come. Samson is dead, but death is swallowed up in victory: what has happened is the last and most tremendous {239} triumph of the divinely chosen hero whose death is more fatal to his country's enemies than even his life had been. There is nothing left to do but to close the drama, as most Greek tragedies close, with a brief choral song of submission to the divine governance of the world:

"All is best, though we oft doubt What the unsearchable dispose Of Highest Wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close. Oft He seems to hide his face, But unexpectedly returns, And to his faithful champion hath in place Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns, And all that band them to resist His uncontrollable intent. His servants He, with new acquist Of true experience from this great event, With peace and consolation hath dismissed, And calm of mind, all passion spent."

Such is Milton's drama: a thing worth dwelling on as entirely unique in any modern language. Some good judges have thought it the finest of his works. That will not be admitted if poetry is to be judged either by universality of appeal or by extent and variety of range. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso will always have far more readers: and Paradise Lost embraces an immeasurably {240} greater span of human life. But, if not the greatest, Samson is probably for its own audience the most moving of Milton's works. It is not everybody who has in him the grave emotions to which it appeals: but whoever has will find them stirred by Samson as few other books in all the literature of the world can stir them.

It is curious to think of Milton composing such a drama in the midst of the theatrical revival of the Restoration. Did ever poet set himself in such opposition to the literary current of his day? Dryden's unbounded admiration for him is well known: but he understood the genius of Paradise Lost so little as to make an opera out of it, and he must have understood even less of Samson. The drama was then so much the most fashionable form of literature that he may have felt that in writing The State of Innocence and its preface he was taking the best means of directing public attention to Paradise Lost. But he would scarcely have tried to do the same for Samson. He had wished, perhaps, as Mr. Verrall has suggested, to write an epic and had failed to do so: hence his profound reverence for the man who had not failed. But he had written many dramas and here he had succeeded: he had pleased both his {241} contemporaries and himself. He would feel no need there to take lessons from Milton. Nor is he to be blamed. He and his fellow dramatists are justly criticized for many things, but there is nothing to complain of in their unlikeness to Milton. They wrote for the stage. He avowedly did not. They wrote in the spirit of the theatre of their day, with the object of providing themselves with a little money and "the town" with a few hours of more or less intellectual amusement. He wrote out of his own mind and soul, not for the entertainment of the idle folk of his own or any other day, but for men who in all times and countries should prove capable of knowing a great work when they saw it. Besides, his contemporary dramatists followed, quite legitimately, the theatrical traditions of England or France: he the very different dramatic system of the Greeks. His drama is what Greek tragedies were, an act of religion. It could take its place quite naturally, as they did, as part of a great national religious festival performed on a holy day. It is like them in the solemn music of its utterance: in its deep sense of the gravity of the issues on which human life hangs. It is like them also in technical points such as the use of a Chorus to give expression to the {242} spectator's emotions, the paucity of actors present on the stage at any moment, the curious imitation, to be seen also in Comus, of the Greek stichomuthia, in which a verbal passage of arms is conducted on the principle of giving each speaker one line for his attack or retort.

There are, indeed, some fundamental differences. They are important enough to have led so great a critic as Professor Jebb to argue that Milton's drama is too Hebrew to be Hellenic at all. His point is that Greek tragedy aims at producing an imaginative pleasure by arousing a "sense, on the one hand, of the heroic in man; on the other hand, of a superhuman controlling power"; and he asserts that this is not the method adopted by Milton in Samson. Samson is throughout a free man; his misfortunes are the fruit of his own folly. God is still on his side and his death is a patriotic triumph, not, like the death of Heracles, who resembles him in so many ways, merely the final proof of the all-powerful malignity of fate.

No one will venture to differ from Jebb on such a question without a sense of great temerity. But perhaps the truth is that one who had lived all his life, as Jebb had, in the closest intimacy with the Greek drama, would be apt to feel small differences from {243} it too much and broad resemblances too little. To the shepherd all his sheep differ from each other: the danger for him is to forget, what the ignorant stranger sees, that they are also all very much alike. So Jebb is no doubt perfectly right in the distinction he makes: but he is surely blinded by his own knowledge when he argues from it that Samson Agonistes "is a great poem and a noble drama; but neither as poem nor as drama is it Hellenic." Of that question comparative ignorance is perhaps a better judge. For it can still see that the broad division which separates the world's drama into two kinds is a real thing, and that Milton's drama belongs in spite of differences unquestionably to the Greek kind and not to the other, both by its method and by its spirit. There can be no real doubt that it is far more like the Prometheus or the Oedipus than it is like Hamlet or All for Love. Probably no great tragedy of any sort can be made without that sense of the contrast between man's will and the "superhuman controlling power" of which Jebb speaks as peculiarly Greek. Certainly it is present in the greatest of Shakspeare's tragedies, and not seldom finds open expression. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends."

{244}

But the point is that in Samson, the note of which is always the classical, never the mystical or romantic, this sense is present, not in Shakspeare's way, but substantially in the Greek way. The fact that Samson is free and that his God is his friend does not prevent his feeling just in the Greek way that God's ways are dark and inscrutable, past man's finding out, and far above out of the reach of his control. It does not prevent his being helpless as well as heroic, fully conscious that all his strength leaves him still a weak child at the absolute disposal of incomprehensible Omnipotence. So the whole atmosphere of the play, as well as its formal mould, will always recall the Greek tragedies. And rightly: the likenesses of every kind are far greater than the differences. The distinctions which led Jebb to declare it was not Hellenic at all are far less important than the kinship which made a still greater critic, the poet Goethe, declare that it had "more of the antique spirit than any production of any other modern poet."

A more obvious and perhaps more important difference than that on which Jebb lays such stress is, of course, the fundamental one that the Greek plays were written for performance and that many of them have {245} elaborately contrived "plots." No one supposes that Samson would be effective on the stage; but the modern dramatist who could make his play as exciting to the spectator as the Oedipus Tyrannus or Electra of Sophocles, or the Hippolytus or Medea of Euripides, would assuredly be no ordinary playwright. This Milton did not attempt. His drama resembles rather the earlier Greek tragedies where the lyrical element is still the principal thing while the "plot" and the persons who act its story play a comparatively subordinate part. It is, at any rate in form, more like Aeschylus than Sophocles, and more like the Persae and the Prometheus than the Oresteian Trilogy. To the Prometheus, indeed, it bears particularly close and obvious resemblances; for instance, both have a heroic and defiant prisoner as their principal figure, and as their minor figures a succession of friends and enemies who visit him.

However, literary parallels and precedents of this kind are perhaps rather interesting than important. Milton's greatness is his own. Only the fact remains that, as it was of an order that need not fear to measure itself with the Greeks and as he happened to put its dramatic expression into a Greek form, he has given us something which comes far {246} nearer to producing on us the particular impression of sublimity made by the greatest Greek dramas than anything else in English or perhaps in any modern language. In English nothing worth mentioning of the kind has been attempted, till in our own day the present Poet Laureate wrote his Prometheus the Fire-Giver and Achilles in Scyros. But, interesting and beautiful as these are, they make no pretence to rival Samson Agonistes. They are altogether on a smaller scale of art, of thought, of emotion.

Samson Agonistes is Milton's last word and on the whole his saddest. Yet the final effect of great art is never sad. The sense of greatness transcends all pain. In the preface of Samson Milton alludes to Aristotle's remark that it is the function of tragedy to effect through pity and fear a proper purgation of these emotions. Whatever be the precise meaning of that famous and disputed sentence, there is no doubt that Milton gives part of its general import truly enough when he paraphrases it "to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated." And its application extends far beyond the mere field of tragedy. So far as other kinds of poetry, or indeed any of the arts, deal with {247} subjects that arouse any of the deeper human emotions, the law of purification by a kind of delight is one by which they stand or fall. A crucifixion which is merely painful, as many primitive crucifixions are, or merely disgusting, as many later ones are, is so far a failure. It has not done the work art has to do. Shakspeare knew this well enough, though he very likely never thought about it. The final word of his great tragedies is one of sorrow overpassed and transformed. "The rest is silence;" "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep?" "I have almost forgot the taste of fears;" "My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but he was true to me!" This is the note always struck before the very end comes. And Milton, so unlike Shakspeare both as man and as artist, is no less conspicuous than he in the strict observance of this practice. All his poems, without exception, end in quietness and confidence. The beauty of the last lines of Paradise Lost, to which early critics were so strangely blind, is now universally celebrated—

"Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose {248} Their place of rest, and Providence their guide. They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way."

The storm and stress of day are over and are followed by the passionless quiet of evening. So in Paradise Regained. A modern poet would have been tempted to end at line 635, with a kind of dramatic fall of the curtain—

"on thy glorious work Now enter, and begin to save Mankind."

Not so Milton. As after the most aweinspiring death known to literature the Oedipus Coloneus closes on the note of acquiescent peace—

"Come, cease lamentation, lift it up no more; for verily these things stand fast;"

so Milton ends the long debate of his poem, not with victory, but with silence—

"He, unobserved, Home to his mother's house private returned."

It is indeed just the opposite in one way of the conclusion of Paradise Lost. The man and woman who had fallen before the Tempter had no home to return to: they must seek a new "place of rest" elsewhere in the new world that was before them. The Man who {249} had vanquished him could go back quietly to the home of his childhood. But the contrast is external, the likeness essential. For the first man as well as the second there is an appointed place of rest and a Providence to guide: the two poems can both end on the same note of that peace which follows upon the right understanding of all great experiences.

This, which is only implied in his earlier poems, is almost expressly set forth in the last of all Milton's words, the already quoted conclusion of Samson—

"His servants He, with new acquist Of true experience from this great event, With peace and consolation hath dismissed, And calm of mind, all passion spent."

Milton was a passionate man who lived in passionate times. Neither his passions nor those of the men of his day are of very much matter to us now. But the art in which he "spent" them, in which, that is to say, he embodied, transcended and glorified them, till through it he and we alike attain to consolation and calm, is an eternal possession not only of the English race but of the whole world.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature that in one way or another deals with Milton is, of course, immense. His name fills more than half of one of the volumes of the great British Museum Catalogue, more than sixteen pages being devoted to the single item of Paradise Lost. They afford perhaps the most striking of all proofs of the universality of his genius; for they include translations into no fewer than eighteen languages, many of which possess a large choice of versions. Into more than a very small fraction of such a vast field it is obviously impossible to enter here. Only a few notes can be given, under the four headings of Poetry, Prose, Biography and Criticism.

POETRY

Of the poetry, it may be worth saying, though MSS. hardly come within the scope of a brief bibliography of this sort, that a manuscript, mainly in the handwriting of Milton himself and containing many of his early poems, is preserved in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The printed copies, of course, begin with those published in his own lifetime. They contain practically the whole of his poetry. The most important are the volume containing his early poems issued in 1645, Paradise Lost which first appeared in 1667, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes which followed in 1671, and a re-issue in 1673, with additions, of the volume of his minor poems already printed in 1646. The first complete edition was The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton, issued by Jacob Tonson in 1695.

So much for the bare text. Annotation naturally soon followed. The earliest commentator was Patrick Hume who published an edition of the poems with notes on Paradise Lost in 1695. But the most famous, though also least important, of Milton's early critics was the greatest of English scholars, Richard Bentley, who in 1732 issued an edition of Paradise Lost in which whole passages were relegated to the margin as the spurious interpolations of an imaginary editor. Such a book is, of course, merely a curiosity connecting two {251} great names. The real beginning in the work of editing Milton as a classic should be edited was made by Thomas Newton, afterwards Bishop of Bristol, who in 1749 brought out an edition of Paradise Lost, "with Notes of Various Authors," and followed it in 1752 with a similar volume including Paradise Regained and the minor poems. Newton's work was often reprinted, and remained the standard edition till it was superseded by that of the Rev. H. J. Todd which first appeared in 1801. The final issue of Todd is that of 1826 in six volumes which, in spite of many notes which are defective, many which are antiquated and some which are superfluous, may still claim to be the best library edition of Milton. Among the best of those which have appeared since are Thomas Keightley's, published in 1859, which contains excellent notes, and Prof. David Masson's, which is the work of the most learned and devoted of all Milton's editors. Both of these have the advantage of Todd in some respects; Keightley in acuteness and penetration, Masson in completeness of knowledge. But no single editor's work can be a perfect substitute for a variorum edition like that of Todd, giving the comments and suggestions of many different minds. The most complete edition of Masson's work is the final library one in three volumes, 1890; there is also a convenient smaller issue, based on this, but omitting some of its editorial matter. It was last printed in three volumes 1893. It contains a Memoir, rather elaborate Introductions to all the poems, an Essay on Milton's English and Versification, and reduced Notes.

A text with Critical Notes by W. Aldis Wright was issued by the Cambridge University Press in one volume, 1903. The text of the earliest printed editions of the several poems was reprinted in 1900 in an edition prepared for the Clarendon Press by the Rev. H. C. Beeching.

It may be worth while adding that Milton's Latin and Italian poems were translated by the poet Cowper and printed in 1808 by his biographer, Hayley, in a beautiful quarto volume with designs by Flaxman. These translations are reprinted in the "Aldine" edition of Milton, 1826. Masson has also given translations of most of them in his Life of Milton and in his 1890 library edition of the Poems.

PROSE

The Prose works were, of course, mostly issued as books or pamphlets in Milton's lifetime. They were collected by Toland in three volumes folio, 1698. There are several more modern editions; as that published in 1806 in seven volumes {252} with a Life by Charles Symmons; that of Pickering, who included them in his fine eight-volume edition. The Works of John Milton in Verse and Prose, Edited by John Mitford, 1851; and that in Bohn's Standard Library, in six volumes, edited, with some notes of a somewhat controversial character, by J. A. St. John, 1848. The first volume of a new edition edited by Sir Sidney Lee appeared in 1905. One of the most curious of the prose works, the De Doctrina Christiana or Treatise of Christian Doctrine, was not known till 1823, when it was discovered in the State Paper Office. It was edited, with an English translation, by the Rev. C. R. Sumner in 1825 and is included in Bohn's edition.

BIOGRAPHY

The earliest sources for the biography of Milton, outside his own works, are the account given in the Fasti Oxonienses of Anthony a Wood, 1691, the Brief Lives of John Aubrey, and the Life prefixed by the poet's nephew, Edward Phillips, to an edition of the Letters of State, printed in 1694. A very large number of Lives of Milton have been written since, based on these materials and those collected from a few other sources. The most famous and in some ways the best, in spite of its unfairness, is that of Johnson, to be found in his Lives of the Poets. The best short modern Life is Mark Pattison's masterly, though occasionally wilful, little book in the English Men of letters Series. For the library and for students all other biographies have been superseded by the great work of David Masson, who spared no labours to investigate every smallest detail of the life of Milton and to place the whole in the setting of an elaborate history of England in Milton's day. The value of the book is somewhat impaired by the very strong Puritan and anti-Cavalier partisanship of the writer; and its style suffers from an imitation of Carlyle. But nothing can seriously detract from the immense debt every student of Milton owes to the author of this monumental biography which appeared in seven volumes, 1859-1894.

An interesting critical discussion of the various portraits representing or alleged to represent Milton is prefixed to the Catalogue of the Exhibition held at Christ's College Cambridge during the Milton Tercentenary in 1908. It is by Dr. G. C. Williamson.

CRITICISM

A poet at once so learned and so great as Milton inevitably invited criticism. The first and most generous of his critics {253} was his great rival Dryden, who, in a few words of the preface to The State of Innocence, published the year after Milton's death, led the note of praise, which has been echoed ever since by speaking of Paradise Lost as "one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." The next great name in the list is that of Addison, who contributed a series of papers on Milton to the Spectator in 1712. Like all criticism except the work of the supreme masters, they are written too exclusively from the point of view of their own day to retain more than a small fraction of their value after two hundred years have passed. But they are of considerable historical interest and may still be read with pleasure, like everything written by Addison. A less sympathetic but finer piece of work is the critical part of Johnson's famous Life. It is full of crudities of every sort, such as the notorious remark that "no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure had he not known the author"; and perhaps nothing Johnson over wrote displayed more nakedly the narrow limits of his appreciation of poetry. But, in spite of all its defects, it exhibits its writer's great gifts; and its absolute and unshrinking sincerity, its half-reluctant utterance of some of the truest praise ever spoken of Milton, its profound knowledge of the way in which the human mind approaches both literature and life, will always preserve it as one of the most interesting criticisms which Milton has provoked. Johnson's friend, Thomas Warton, in his edition of the minor poems issued in 1785, led the way to an understanding of much in Milton to which Johnson and his school were entirely blind. This movement has continued ever since, and is seen in the immense influence Milton had upon the poets of the nineteenth century, especially upon Wordsworth and Keats; an influence of exactly the opposite sort to that which he exercised with such disastrous effect upon many poets of the century immediately succeeding his own. It is also seen in the finer intelligence of the critical studies of his work. These are far too many to mention here. Among the best are Hazlitt's Lecture on Shakspeare and Milton in his Lectures on the English Poets; Matthew Arnold's speech at the unveiling of a Milton memorial, printed in the second series of his Essays in Criticism; Sir Walter Raleigh's volume, Milton, published in 1900, and The Epic, by Lascelles Abercrombie, 1914, which is full of fine and suggestive criticism of Milton. Milton's Prosody by Robert Bridges, 1901, is the best study of the metre and scansion of Milton's later poems, especially of Paradise Lost.



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INDEX TO PRINCIPAL PERSONS, PLACES, AND WORKS MENTIONED

Abercrombie, L., 136-7, 253 Absalom and Achitophel, 105 Achilles in Scyros, 246 Addison, Joseph, 77, 253 Adonais, 125 Ad Patrem, 39-40. Aeneid, The, 150, 175, 196 Aeschylus, 245 A Kempis, Thomas, 147 Aldersgate Street, 46 All for Love, 243 Allegro, L', 41, 70, 93, 99, 106 et sqq., 123, 239 Anglesey, Earl of, 72, 82 Annesley, Arthur, 72 Aquinas, Thomas, 157 Arbuthnot, Epistle to, 105 Arcades, 41, 42 Arcadia, 58 Areopagitica, 44, 49, 64 Arianism, 204 Ariosto, 153 Aristotle, 86, 200 Arnold Matthew, 164, 253 Arthurian Epic (planned), 45, 148-9 At a Solemn Music, 13, 42, 97, 100, 103, 147 Athens, 205-6, 209 Aubrey, John, 29, 252

Barbican, the, 54 Baroni, Leonora, 44-5 Barrow, Samuel, 82 Beeching, Rev. H. C., 251 Bentley, Richard, 250 Bibliography, 250-3 Blake, Admiral, 57 Bohn's Standard Library, 252 Bow Church, 25 Bread Street, 24, 75 Bridges, Robert, 26, 108, 222, 223, 246, 253 Brief Lives, 252 Buckingham, Duke of, 58 Byron, Lord, 90

Cambridge, 28, 29, 30, 31-7, 39, 42, 85, 120, 121, 124, 250, 252 Carlyle, Thomas, 262 Caroline, Queen, 77 Charles I, 11, 28, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 86 Charles II, 47, 60, 65, 71, 73, 82, 86 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 90, 111 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 60 Christ's College, Cambridge, 28, 29, 120, 121, 124, 252 Clarendon, Earl of, 73 Clarges, Sir Thomas, 72 Coleridge, S. T., 206 Comus, 13, 41, 42, 95, 100, 110, 112-13 et sqq., 128, 242 Constable, 135 Coriolanus, 85 Cowper, William, 69, 251 Criticisms, 252-3 Cromwell, Oliver, 55, 57, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 133, 139, 176

Dante, 10, 11-12, 33, 120, 153-7 Daphnaida, 125 Davenant, William, 72 Defensio Regia, 60, 61 Defensio Secunda, 61 De Quincey, Thomas, 96 Diodati, Charles, 42, 124, 125 Divina Commedia, La, 120, 157 Divorce pamphlets, 50 et sqq. Doctrina Christiana, De, 252 Dorset, Earl of, 81 Dowland, Robert, 28 Drayton, Michael, 124 Drummond, William, 124, 135 Dryden, John, 80-2, 90, 103, 104-5, 117, 241, 253

Eikon Basilike, the, 57-8 Eikonoklastes, 58, 61 Electra, The, 245 Elizabeth, Queen, 85 English Men of Letters Series, 252 Epic, The, 253 Epigrams, Latin, on La Baroni, 45 Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, 36, 37, 97, 103 Epitaphium Damonis, 124 Essays in Criticism, 253 Euripides, 77, 82, 245 Excursion, The, 136, 228-9

Faerie Queen, The, 115 Fairfax, General, 139, 171 Faithful Shepherdess, The, 115 Fasti Oxonienses, 252 Faust, 196 Fire of London, 75 Flaxman, John, 251 Fletcher, John, 107, 115 Florence, 43, 44, 46 France, 43, 46, 59

Galileo, 44, 45 Gerusalemme Conquistata (Tasso), 45 Gibbons, Orlando, 28 Goethe, J. W. von, 230, 244 Gorges, Mrs., 125 Grotius, Hugo, 43

Hamlet, 24, 243 Hampden, John, 171 Hayley, William, 251 Hazlitt, William, 253 Hippolytus, 245 History of Britain, 78 Homer, 77, 82, 84, 89, 152, 153, 155, 171, 230 Horace, 69 Horton, 37, 40, 41, 42, 111 Hume, Patrick, 250

Iliad, The, 154, 155, 157, 162 Imitation, The, of Christ, 147-8 Indemnity, Act of, 72, 73, 74 Independent Army, The, 55, 56 Italian travels, 43-6

James I, 58 Jebb, Prof., 242-3, 244 Job, Book of, 21, 82 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 125, 126, 160, 162, 175, 194, 196, 206, 207, 227, 252, 253 Jones, Inigo, 16, 114 Jonson, Ben, 114, 115

Keats, John, 79, 90, 102, 110, 125, 253 Keightley, Thomas, 251 King, Edward, 42, 91, 124, 125, 127, 128-31

Landor, Walter Savage, 132 Lawes, Henry, 41, 82, 91, 116, 119 Lawrence, Henry, 69-70, 133 Lectures on the English Poets, 253 Lee, Sir Sidney, 252 Letters of State, 252 Lives of Milton, 251, 252, 253 Lives of the Poets, 252 London, 25, 49; fire of, 75 Long Parliament, 47, 63, 64, 171 Lycidas, 13, 41, 42, 90, 91, 100, 106, 123 et sqq.

Mackail, J. W., 94-5, 206, 211 Manso, Giovanni, 45 Marini, 45 Marlowe, Christopher, 107 Marvell, Andrew, 69, 73 Massacres in Piedmont, sonnets on, 68, 133, 139, 140-1 Masson, D., 24, 52, 68, 73, 75, 251 Medea, The, 245 Meredith, George, 134 Milton, 253 Milton's Prosody, 224, 253 Milton's relations:— Daughters, 11, 54, 69, 75-77, 218 Deborah, 77-8 Father, 27, 29, 37, 38-40, 42, 43, 49, 54, 75 Infant son, 76 Mother, 40 Nephews, 46, 54, 61, 70, 252 Wives— First, see Powell, Mary. Second, 54, 69, 71 Third, 54 Mitford, John, 252 Monk, General, 72 Morley, Thomas, 28 Morrice, —, 72 Morus, 69

Napoleon, 9, 139 Newbolt, Henry, 120 Newton, Thomas, 251

Ode on the Nativity, 35-6, 37, 91, 93-4, 97, 98-103 Odyssey, The, 162, 196 Oedipus Coloneus, 237, 248 Oedipus Tyrannus, 233, 238, 243 On Attaining the Age of Twenty-three, sonnet, 91, 133 On His Blindness, sonnet, 62-3, 133 On the Death of a Fair Infant, 35, 97-9 Orations, 34-5 Othello, 150 Ovid, 33, 77, 124

Pamphlets, 49, 56, 69, 71 Paradise Lost, 13, 24, 25, 28, 44, 47, 55, 71, 78, 79, 80, 82, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 101, 104, 106, 112, 113, 118, 120, 123, 125, 137, 142 et sqq., 196, 197 et sqq., 239, 240, 247, 248, 250, 251, 253 Paradise Regained, 13, 24, 44, 78, 167, 196 et sqq., 227, 248, 250, 251 Passion, The, 103 Pattison, Mark, 131, 132, 197, 252 Penseroso, Il, 41, 70, 93, 100, 106 et sqq., 239 Persae, The, 245 Petrarch, 33, 134, 135 Phillips, Edward, 252 Pickering, William, 252 Pindar, 117 Plato, 8, 9-10, 21, 111, 156 Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 115 Poems, editions of, 250-1, 252 Poetical Works, The, of Mr. John Milton, 250 Pope, A., 85, 90, 91, 105, 222, 223 Portraits, 252 Powell family, 50, 53 Powell, Mary, 50-4, 69, 71 Prelude, The, 136, 228-9 Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, 60, 61 Prometheus the Fire-Giver, 246 Prometheus Unbound, 102 Prometheus Vinctus, 21, 243, 245 Prose Works, 47 et sqq., 251-2 Psalms, the, 139-40; paraphrases of, 95 Purcell, Henry, 16 Pym, John, 171

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 198, 253 Ranelagh, Lady, 69 Ready and Easy Way A, to Establish a Free Commonwealth, 65 Reason, The, of Church Government, 13, 37 Regicides, the, 55, 63, 71, 74 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 16 Rome, 44, 209 Rossetti, Dante G., 133, 135

St. Brides', Fleet Street, 46 St. Giles' Church, Cripplegate, 79 St. John, J. A., 252 St. Paul, 9, 144, 218 St. Paul's Cathedral, 89, 193 Salmasius, 59-62, 69, 218 Samson Agonistes, 13, 20, 24, 78, 83, 99, 199, 219 et sqq., 250 Sansovino's Library, Venice, 193 Saumaise, see Salmasius. Scudamore, Lord, 43 Shakspeare, W., 9, 14, 17, 32, 35, 36, 80, 85, 90, 103, 114, 118, 145, 166, 247; sonnets, 133-5, 253 Shelley, P. B., 20, 29, 50, 79, 90, 99, 102, 111, 125, 228 Shelley, Mrs. P. B., 50 Sidney, Sir Philip, 58, 98, 124, 135 Skinner, Cyriack, 62, 133 Smithfield, 72 Song on May Morning, 36, 107 Sonnets, 47, 54, 62-3, 68, 69, 91, 106, 131 et sqq. Sophocles, 82, 233, 245 Spectator, The, 253 Spenser, Edmund, 93, 97, 98, 111, 115, 116, 124, 125, 153 State, The, of Innocence, 240, 253 Statius, 157 Strafford, Earl of, 171 Sumner, Rev. C. R., 252 Symmons, Charles, 252

Tasso, Torquato, 45, 82, 153, 164 Tennyson, Alfred, 69, 90, 197 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 56, 58, 75 Theocritus, 124 Todd, Rev. H. J., 251 Toland, John, 251 Tonson, Jacob, 250 Treatise of Christian Doctrine, 252 Trinity College Library, 89, 250 Turner, J. W. M., 16 Tyburn, 71, 90

Verrall, A. W., 240 Virgil, 82, 84, 89, 91, 124, 139, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 163, 175 Vita Nuova, La, 120

Waller, Edmund, 104 Warton, Joseph, 118, 126, 214 Warton, Thomas, 253 Whitehall, 58, 70, 74, 219 Williamson, Dr. G. C., 252 Winchester, Marchioness of, 36 Windsor, 37 Windsor Castle, 40 Wood, Anthony a, 31, 35, 252 Wordsworth, W., 26, 34, 79, 90, 131, 133, 135, 137, 140, 141, 206, 227-30; sonnets, 137-41, 253 Works, The, of John Milton, in Prose and Verse, 252 Wren, Sir Christopher, 16, 89 Wright, W. Aldis, 251

Young, Thomas, 27

THE END