is to ignore his political and social side. If Burke, whose whole public career consisted in a succession of speeches and pamphlets, is looked back upon as one of the greatest men of his century on their account, why should there be regret over the fact that Milton, after having been the author of Comus and Lycidas, became for a time the prose orator of his earlier and more tumultuous generation? Milton was not only the greatest pamphleteer of his generation—head and shoulders above the rest—but there is no life of that time, not even Cromwell’s, in which the history of the great Revolution in its successive phases, so far as the deep underlying ideas and speculations were concerned, may be more intimately and instructively studied than in Milton’s. Then, on merely literary grounds, what an interest in those prose remains! Not only of his Areopagitica, admired now so unreservedly because its main doctrine has become axiomatic, but of most of his other pamphlets, even those the doctrine of which is least popular, it may be said confidently that they answer to his own definition of “a good book,” by containing somehow “the precious life-blood of a master-spirit.” From the entire series there might be a collection of specimens, unequalled anywhere else, of the capabilities of that older, grander and more elaborate English prose of which the Elizabethans and their immediate successors were not ashamed. Nor will readers of Milton’s pamphlets continue to accept the hackneyed observation that his genius was destitute of humour. Though his prevailing mood was the severely earnest, there are pages in his prose writings, both English and Latin, of the most laughable irony, reaching sometimes to outrageous farce, and some of them as worthy of the name of humour as anything in Swift. Here, however, we touch on what is the worst feature in some of the prose pamphlets—their measureless ferocity, their boundless licence in personal scurrility.
While it is wrong to regard Milton’s middle twenty years of prose polemics as a degradation of his genius, and while the fairer contention might be that the youthful poet of Comus and Lycidas actually promoted himself, and became a more powerful agency in the world and a more interesting object in it for ever, by consenting to lay aside his “singing robes” and spend a portion of his life in great prose oratory, who does not exult in the fact that such a life was rounded off so miraculously at the close by a final stage of compulsory calm, when the “singing robes” could be resumed, and Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes could issue in succession from the blind man’s chamber? Of these three poems, and what they reveal of Milton, no need here to speak at length. Paradise Lost is one of the few monumental works of the world, with nothing in modern epic literature comparable to it except the great poem of Dante. This is best perceived by those who penetrate beneath the beauties of the merely terrestrial portion of the story, and who recognize the coherence and the splendour of that vast symbolic phantasmagory by which, through the wars in heaven and the subsequent revenge of the expelled archangel, it paints forth the connexion of the whole visible universe of human cognisance and history with the grander, pre-existing and still environing world of the eternal and inconceivable. To this great epic Paradise Regained is a sequel, and it ought to be read as such. The legend that Milton preferred the shorter epic to the larger is quite incorrect. All that is authentic on the subject is the statement by Edward Phillips that, when it was reported to his uncle that the shorter epic was “generally censured to be much inferior to the other,” he “could not hear with patience any such thing.” The best critical judgment now confirms Milton’s own, and pronounces Paradise Regained to be not only, within the possibilities of its briefer theme, a worthy sequel to Paradise Lost, but also one of the most artistically perfect poems in any language. Finally, the poem in which Milton bade farewell to the Muse, and in which he reverted to the dramatic form, proves that to the very end his right hand had lost none of its power or cunning. Samson Agonistes is the most powerful drama in the English language after the severe Greek model, and it has the additional interest of being so contrived that, without any deviation from the strictly objective incidents of the Biblical story which it enshrines, it is yet the poet’s own epitaph and his condensed autobiography.
Much light is thrown upon Milton’s mind in his later life, and even upon the poems of that period, by his posthumous Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrine. It differs from all his other prose writings of any importance in being cool, abstract and didactic. Professing to be a system of divinity derived directly from the Bible, it is really an exposition of Milton’s metaphysics and of his reasoned opinions on all questions of philosophy, ethics and politics. The general effect is to show that, though he is rightly regarded as the very genius of English Puritanism, its representative poet and idealist, yet he was not a Puritan of what may be called the first wave, or that wave of Calvinistic orthodoxy which broke in upon the absolutism of Charles and Laud, and set the English Revolution agoing. He belonged distinctly to that larger and more persistent wave of Puritanism which, passing on through Independency, and an endless variety of sects, many of them rationalistic and freethinking in the extreme, developed into what has ever since been known as English Liberalism. The treatise makes clear that, while Milton was a most fervid theist and a genuine Christian, believing in the Bible, and valuing the Bible over all the other books in the world, he was at the same time one of the most intrepid of English thinkers and theologians. (D. Ma.; X.)
Considerable interest attaches among collectors to the variety of prints representing portraits of Milton. So far as the original contemporary portraits are concerned, which have inspired the large number of engravings, the following may be mentioned: (1) The existing Janssen painting, 1618 (“aetatis suae 10”), which belonged to Mrs Milton. (2) An Portraits. unknown painting of 1623 (? 1620), from which was taken an engraving in the Gentleman’s Magazine for September 1787 (“aet. suae 12”). (3) The “Onslow” painting of Milton when a Cambridge scholar (lost), which belonged to Mrs Milton and in 1794 was in Lord Onslow’s possession; a copy by Van der Gucht was made for Lord Harcourt and is still at Nuneham. (4) William Marshal’s engraved frontispiece to Moseley’s edition of the poems (1645). (5) William Faithorne’s engraving of Milton from life, at the age of sixty-two, in Milton’s History of Britain (1670). (6) Faithorne’s original drawing for the above, belonging in 1909 to Sir R. H. Hobart. (7) The Bayfordbury (or Tonson) drawing (probably by Faithorne, or (?) by White or Richardson) at Bayfordbury Park near Hertford. (8) A drawing by George Vertue in Dr Williamson’s collection. (9) A clay bust (? by Pierce or Simon) at Christ’s College. (10) A miniature by Cooper (1653), which is, however, considered by Dr G. C. Williamson not to be of Milton at all. (11) A painting by Pieter Van der Plas (d. 1704) in the National Portrait Gallery. (12) An oil painting at Christ’s College. (13) The “Woodcock” miniature of Milton when about forty-eight. In Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, a bust by Rysbrack was put up in 1737. A monument in St Giles, Cripplegate, by John Bacon, R.A., was erected by Samuel Whitbread in 1793; and a modern statue by Horace Montford also stands there. A memorial window in St Margaret’s, Westminster, with an inscription by J. G. Whittier, was presented by G. W. Childs, of Philadelphia.
Bibliography.—MSS. of the poems of Milton’s earlier period in his own handwriting are preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. These are not enumerated among the gifts made by Sir Henry Newton Puckering in 1691, but presumably belonged to him, and came to the library at his death in 1700, as they were found by Charles Mason, a fellow of the college, among papers and books which had been his. They were bound in a folio volume by the care of Thomas Clarke, afterwards Master of the Rolls, in 1736. Besides the poems, with many interlineations and corrections, the MS. contains suggestions, and in some cases fully developed plans, for works generally dramatic in form. This manuscript volume, invaluable as an index to Milton’s methods of work, was reproduced in facsimile (Cambridge, 1899) by W. Aldis Wright.
The first complete edition of The Poetical Works of Mr John Milton . . . was printed by Jacob Tonson in 1695. In 1732 Richard Bentley put forward a curious edition of Paradise Lost in which long passages were rejected and placed in the margin on the ground that they were interpolations made possible by Milton’s blindness. The Latin and Italian poems, with a translation by William Cowper,
