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Read Ebook: An Introduction to the Prose and Poetical Works of John Milton Comprising All the Autobiographic Passages in His Works the More Explicit Presentations of His Ideas of True Liberty. by Milton John Corson Hiram Editor
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Ebook has 359 lines and 146498 words, and 8 pages
PAGES INTRODUCTION xiii-xxxii
MILTON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1-103
From A Defence of the English People 2-6
From Second Defence of the People of England 6-27
To Charles Diodati 28-30
To Alexander Gill, Jr. 30, 31
To Thomas Young 31
To Charles Diodati 31-33
Prolusiones quaedam Oratoriae 33-35
To Father 35-40
English letter to a friend who, it appears, had been calling him to account for his apparent indifference as to his work in life 40-43
Sonnet: On his having arrived at the age of twenty-three 42, 43
To Alexander Gill, Jr. 43-44
To Charles Diodati 44-46
To Benedetto Bonmattei of Florence 46
From Mansus, Latin poem addressed to Manso, Marquis of Villa 47
From Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing 48, 49
To Lucas Holstenius in the Vatican at Rome 49, 50
Epitaphium Damonis 50, 51
From Of Reformation in England 52-54
From Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence, etc. 54-56
From The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty 56-65
From Apology for Smectymnuus 65-82
To Carlo Dati, Nobleman of Florence 82-84
Sonnet: On his Blindness 84, 85
To the most distinguished Leonard Philaras, of Athens, Ambassador from the Duke of Parma to the King of France 85, 86
To Henry Oldenburg, agent for the city of Bremen in Lower Saxony with the Commonwealth 87, 88
To Leonard Philaras, Athenian 88-90
Sonnet: To Cyriac Skinner 91
Sonnet: On his deceased wife 91
To the most accomplished Emeric Bigot 92
To Henry Oldenburg 93
From Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to remove Hirelings out of the Church 94-96
Autobiographic passages in the Paradise Lost 96-102
To the very distinguished Peter Heimbach, Councillor to the Elector of Brandenburg 102, 103
Passages in Milton's prose and poetical works in which his idea of true liberty, individual, domestic, civil, political, and religious, is explicitly set forth 104-125
Comus: a Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, before the Earl of Bridgewater, then President of Wales 126-164
Lycidas 165-179
Samson Agonistes 181-244
NOTES 245-303
INTRODUCTION
Milton's prose works are perhaps not read, at the present day, to the extent demanded by their great and varied merits, among which may be named their uncompromising advocacy of whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report; their eloquent assertion of the inalienable rights of men to a wholesome exercise of their intellectual faculties, the right to determine for themselves, with all the aids they can command, what is truth and what is error; the right freely to communicate their honest thoughts from one to another,--rights which constitute the only sure and lasting foundation of individual, civil, political, and religious liberty; the ever-conscious sentiment which they exhibit, on the part of the poet, of an entire dependence upon 'that Eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases'; the ever-present consciousness they exhibit of that stewardship which every man as a probationer of immortality must render an account, according to the full measure of the talents with which he has been intrusted--of the sacred obligation, incumbent upon every one, of acting throughout the details of life, private or public, trivial or momentous, 'as ever in his great Task-Master's eye.'
Dr. Richard Garnett, in his 'Life of Milton,' pp. 68, 69, takes substantially the same view as does Professor Smith: 'To regret with Pattison that Milton should, at this crisis of the State, have turned aside from poetry to controversy, is to regret that "Paradise Lost" should exist. Such a work could not have proceeded from one indifferent to the public weal. . . . It is sheer literary fanaticism to speak with Pattison of "the prostitution of genius to political party." Milton is as much the idealist in his prose as in his verse; and although in his pamphlets he sides entirely with one of the two great parties in the State, it is not as its instrument, but as its prophet and monitor.'
A man constituted as Milton was could not have kept himself apart from the great conflicts of his time. He was a patriot in every fibre of his being. He realized in the cultivation of himself his definition of education, given in his tractate 'Of Education. To Master S. Hartlib': 'I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.' Of course he did not mean that that was all of education. And in his 'Areopagitica,' he says, after defining 'the true warfaring Christian,' 'I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.'
Although the direct subjects of his polemic prose works may not have an interest for the general reader at the present day, they are all, independently of their direct subjects, charged with 'truths that perish never,' most vitally expressed. And this is as true of the 'Treatises on Divorce' as it is of any of the other prose works. They are full of bright gems of enduring truth.
Lord Macaulay's article was occasioned by the publication of an English version, by Rev. Charles Richard Sumner, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, of Milton's 'Treatise on Christian Doctrine,' the existence of which was unknown up to the year 1823, when the original manuscript in Latin was found in a press of the old State Paper office, in Whitehall.
In this essay the author sets forth an opinion, still widely entertained, it may be, by a large number of cultivated people, namely, that as learning and general civilization, and science, with its applications to the physical needs and comforts of life, advance, Poetry recedes, and 'hides her diminished head,' and men become more and more subject to facts as facts, losing sight more and more of the poetical, that is, spiritual, relations of facts.
'Milton knew,' Macaulay tells us, 'that his poetical genius derived no advantage from the civilization which surrounded him, or from the learning which he had acquired; and he looked back with something of regret to the ruder age of simple words and vivid impressions.'
'Though we admire,' Lord Macaulay continues, 'those great works of imagination which have appeared in dark ages, we do not admire them the more because they have appeared in dark ages. On the contrary, we hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age. We cannot understand why those who believe in that most orthodox article of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the exception. Surely the uniformity of the phenomenon indicates a corresponding uniformity in the cause.'
Of all the flimsy theories in regard to the conditions of poetic creativeness that the mind of man could devise, this is certainly the flimsiest. It is only necessary to give a hasty glance at the works of those poets who are regarded as Masters of Song in the various literatures of the ancient and the modern world, to learn the secret of their vitality and power--that secret being, first, that they all possessed the best knowledge and learning of their times and places; and, secondly, that they all held the widest and most intimate relations with their several ages and countries, and drank deepest of, and most intensely reflected, the spirit of those ages and countries. If Shakespeare was not a learned man, he was the best educated man that ever lived. He had a fulness of life, intellectual and spiritual, and an easy command of all his faculties, to which but few of the sons of men have ever attained; and he lived in an age the most favorable in human history for the exercise of dramatic genius, and an age, on the whole, more civilized than any that had ever preceded it.
The greater impressibility and its resultant, the keener, more penetrating insight , which pre?minently distinguish poetic genius from ordinary natures, render great poets the truest historians of their times and the truest prophets. The poetic and dramatic literature of a people is a mirror in which is most clearly reflected their real and essential life. History gives rather their phenomenal life. It is the essential spirit only of an age, the permanent, the absolute, in it, as assimilated and 'married to immortal verse' by a great poet, that can retain a hold upon the interests and sympathies of future generations.
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