Milton, JOHN, after Shakespeare the greatest English poet, was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, on December 9, 1608. His father, John Milton, was a prosperous scrivener, a Puritan but a musician, and composer of several pieces much admired by his contemporaries. He was descended from a family of yeomen settled in Oxfordshire, and had come to town upon being disinherited for his religious convictions by his father, a Catholic recusant. He appears to have from the first discerned the promise of his son, and to have determined to give him the best education he could. After studying under private tutors, young Milton was admitted about 1620 into St Paul's School, where he distinguished himself not only as a scholar, but as a poet. In February 1625 he entered Christ's College, Cambridge. His academic course was not wholly smooth; he seems to have been chastised—not, as the legend says, flogged—by his tutor, and was certainly rusticated for a short time in 1626. After his return, however, he went through the university course with credit, graduating as Bachelor at the proper time, and proceeding Master of Arts in July 1632. The condition of the church, over which Laud then ruled supreme, deterred the young Puritan from taking orders; he felt no vocation towards any other profession; and at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had retired upon the fortune he had acquired in business, he settled quietly down with the distinct purpose of making himself a poet by study and self-discipline. His poetical genius had already been attested by two noble productions, the 'Hymn on the Nativity,' and 'At a Solemn Music,' as well as much Latin verse of the highest quality; but it is remarkable how little stimulus he seems to have felt to occasional composition. During his six years' residence at Horton he produced, so far as known, only two English poems of importance which can be ascribed to direct poetical impulse from within, the Allegro and the Penseroso. Comus was written at the instance of his friend, the musician Henry Lawes, to celebrate Lord Bridgewater's assumption of the wardenship of the Welsh marches, and was performed at Ludlow before a select assemblage in September 1634. Lycidas was evoked by the death of his friend, Edward King, shipwrecked on his passage to Ireland in 1637. There is, perhaps, not another instance in literature of a great poet so entirely dependent upon circumstances for inspiration, and, while meditating the highest things, so content to bide his time in calm reliance upon his ability to do what he pleased when he pleased. The four productions of this Horton period were indeed of themselves sufficient to place him in the first rank of English poets. Their most individual characteristic is perhaps chastened exuberance—boundless poetical wealth severely controlled, and splendidly displayed without lavish- ness or ostentation. Comus and Lycidas tell us much of the man; in the former we see the scholar's disdain, perhaps slightly tinged with moroseness, for all save intellectual pleasures; in the latter the patriot and the Puritan speaks his bitter scorn of the ruling faction in the church. Perhaps he had spoken too freely; at all events very shortly after the publication of his elegy, about the beginning of 1638, as part of an obituary collection in memory of Edward King, he left England for a tour in Italy.
Milton's visit to Italy is one of the most agreeable chapters of his life. He was cordially received by the Italian literati, especially at Florence, where he made not only pleasant acquaintanceships, but permanent friendships. At Rome, notwithstanding his undaunted profession of Protestantism, he was treated with especial attention, and at Naples the venerable Marquis Manso, half a century earlier the protector of Tasso, gave him hospitality and presents, which Milton requited with an elegant Latin poem. The impression which Milton thus produced upon foreigners is a proof of something imposing and attractive in his personality, for all his solid claims to fame were of course a sealed book to the Italians. His journey home was hastened by news of the outbreak of hostilities between Charles I. and the Scots, and his return was saddened by tidings of the death of his friend Diodati, whom he celebrated in his elegy 'Damon,' the finest and the last of his Latin poems. He settled in St Bride's Churchyard, afterwards in Aldersgate Street, and devoted himself to the education of his widowed sister's children, the two young Phillipses. Unconscious of the long farewell he was about to bid to poetry, he occupied his leisure with schemes for poems mostly dramatic and scriptural, of which numerous skeleton outlines are preserved. The conception of Paradise Lost as a mystery or miracle play gradually dawned upon his mind, and Satan's address to the Sun was actually written about this time. But the Civil War came, and for long silenced Milton's muse, except for an occasional sonnet.
It has been much debated whether the world has lost or gained more by Milton's absorption in politics. The question is somewhat idle: to wish for Milton other than he was is to wish for a succession of Comuses rather than a Paradise Lost. No man capable of conceiving such a work as Milton's epic could be unaffected by the situation of his country at that tremendous crisis, and with Milton's poetical temperament lively interest in anything signified total occupation by it for the time. The tracts which he now poured forth are as truly lyrical inspirations as any of his poems; by no means masterpieces of reasoning, but dithyrambic ecstasies of love or hate. Three appeared in 1641, two in 1642. All five relate to church government: never was diction so magnificent called forth by a theme so unpromising. In fact, however, the writer's thoughts are much higher and deeper than his subject, and, stripped of what is temporary and accidental in the latter, they appear magnificent idealisations of the possibilities of a far-off future, which to Milton seemed ever at the door. The great drawback to their enjoyment at the present day is the scurrility of their invective, which passed comparatively unperceived amid the excitement of revolution.
In 1643 Milton's activity as a public writer was diverted into a new channel by private affairs, which, however, he so handled as to render of universal concern. In June of this year, after a very short courtship, he married a young lady, Mary Powell, daughter of an Oxfordshire squire, previously known to him as a debtor to his father for money advanced on mortgage. The bride's family were cavaliers, and she would seem to have been as little suited to her husband in every other respect as by her education and connections. The idealising imagination of the poet must in all probability have been at work, and the thoughtless precipitancy of the whole transaction would alone show how greatly in many respects the popular estimate of Milton's character needs revision. The poor girl was naturally shocked at the sudden transfer from a jovial country household to the apartments of an austere scholar, whose intellect and character she was utterly unable to appreciate, and whose principles ran counter to all her prejudices. After a few weeks' trial of matrimony she went back to her friends, under a promise, Milton's nephew says, to return at Michaelmas; but doubt is cast upon this statement by the fact, discovered by Professor Masson, that Milton's first tract on divorce was written and printed at the very time of the separation. She certainly did not return, and early in the following year Milton put forth another edition of his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, greatly extended, and enriched with erudition and argument. It brought many attacks upon him, mainly from the Presbyterians, from whose views on church and state he had been more and more dissociating himself. He replied to his opponents in three supplementary pamphlets, and a threat of prosecution by a parliamentary committee, which came to nothing, occasioned the production (November 1644) of the most famous of his prose-works, Areopagitica, a Speech for the liberty of Unlicensed Printing, which has come to be regarded as almost the gospel of freedom of speech, and, if less eloquent than his tracts on church government, nevertheless contains the best known passages of his prose-writings. It must be remembered that even here Milton does not contend against the prosecution of published opinions deemed pernicious, but merely against the right to forbid publication through the instrumentality of a licenser. A few months previously he had composed and published, at the instance of his friend Samuel Hartlib, a Tractate of Education, of little practical pedagogic value, but full of inspiration and suggestion.
Milton was not the man to permit his opinions to remain empty speculations, and in the course of 1645 he was taking serious steps towards carrying the most obnoxious of them into practice by paying his addresses to 'a very handsome and witty gentleman,' when the absent wife thought it time to return. Her repentance may probably have been further stimulated by the overthrow of the Royalist cause, which had occasioned the total ruin of her family. Conscious, probably, of his own failings in temper and considerateness, Milton did not prove obdurate; and by September his household was re-established in the Barbican. She further induced him to receive her mother and other members of her impoverished family, persons whom he had little reason to love, and of whose incompatibility he complains in a letter to an Italian friend. Little else can be said of her, except that she brought him three daughters, and died in 1652. He lost the father to whom he owed so much in 1647, a year after the fruits of his education and the partial accomplishment of the purpose of his life had been manifested in a collected edition of his poetical works, English and Latin.
During all this time Milton's calling, apart from his studies and polemics, had been educational; other pupils, mostly sons of friends, had been gradually added to his nephews, and he seemed to the world a schoolmaster. He was now to enter public life. The execution of Charles I., January 30, 1649, was followed within a fortnight by his defence of the deed, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Having thus definitively cast in his lot with the ruling party, he was appointed on March 15 to a post which no other man in England was so competent to fill, that of 'Secretary of Foreign Tongues,' whose duty it was to draft diplomatic correspondence with foreign powers, then carried on in Latin. Milton had few equals in that age as a Latinist, whether in prose or verse, and his public letters were an honour to himself and his country, but there is no reason to suppose that he was ever much more than the mouthpiece of the government. His services were more conspicuous in another department, his justification of the king's execution in his reply to Salmasius's Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Cælum, a pamphlet whose publication had been a European event. Milton's Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651) was pronounced, even by those who condemned it, a great controversial victory. In erudition, Latinity, and, it must be added, scurrility, the combatants were well matched, but Milton spoke from the heart, and Salmasius from a brief. This work, now so little read, made Milton famous all over Europe, and is memorable as the immediate occasion of the loss of his eyesight, deliberately yielded up by him in the cause of his country. By 1652 the impaired vision had wholly failed, and it was necessary to provide him with an assistant in his official duties. His domestic life at this period was tranquil, distinguished chiefly by his second marriage and the loss of his wife (1656-58), and the pleasing intimacy of young friends, recorded in his sonnets. The magnificent sonnet on the massacre of the Vaudois was written in 1655. Several controversial pamphlets with Alexander Morus followed his contest with Salmasius, chiefly remarkable for the fortitude and dignity of his references to his affliction, and for his flattering portraits of the great men of the Commonwealth, especially Cromwell. Always leaning to the more radical side, he had supported Cromwell in all his extra-legal measures, though the disappointment of his early republican ideal must have cost him many pangs. He retained his secretaryship until the abdication of Richard Cromwell, when the condition of public affairs again made him a pamphleteer. His writings of this period, greatly inferior in splendour of diction to his first productions of the kind, are still most interesting as passionate protests, conclusive of his entire lack of practical statesmanship and his essentially poetical temperament. The Restoration drove him into concealment. Few had more bitterly exasperated the Royalist party; but the new government was not bloodthirsty, and about the beginning of 1661 he found himself settled in Jewin Street (afterwards in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields), honourably released from politics with the gratifying consciousness of having done his duty and his best, and free to devote himself entirely to the permanent purpose of his life.
Paradise Lost was probably commenced some time before the Restoration, and completed about 1663—a striking instance of rapid composition, considering the magnitude and perfection of the work, the interruption by political revolution, and the fact that Milton's poetical vein only flowed freely between the autumnal equinox and the vernal. It was chiefly composed at night, and necessarily dictated to some amanuensis, usually one of his daughters. Plague and fire for a time warred against the publication, which at length, after some difficulty on the licenser's part had been surmounted, took place in August 1667. Every one knows that the copyright was sold for five pounds: it is not always remembered that that sum represented three times its value at the present day, and that there were contingencies which, had Milton lived to benefit by them, would have raised his enrolment to about £70 of our money. The sale of thirteen hundred copies within twenty months is certainly no discredit to the taste of the age. Milton's claim to a place among the great poets of his country seems to have been admitted from the first, though in the absence of reviews his fame travelled slowly. The year 1671 witnessed the publication of Paradise Regained, probably written in 1665-66, and of Samson Agonistes, written later still. The former was composed at the suggestion of the Quaker Ellwood, working on the suspicion Milton could not but entertain that he had after all made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost. Samson Agonistes, dramatic in form, is lyrical in substance, a splendid lament over the author's forlorn old age, and the apostasy, as he deemed it, of his nation. Both pieces evince the continued tendency of his style towards simplicity, which sometimes degenerates into baldness. They are noble pendants to Paradise Lost, but the more their relation to this palmary work is studied the more one feels that it and it alone places him among the supreme poets of the world.
Milton's domestic life during this period had not been fortunate. The great cause of sorrow was the unfruitfulness of his daughters—very ordinary young women, it would seem, who felt no sympathy or admiration to counterbalance their natural impatience of their heavy task as his readers and amanuenses. The blind poet on his part was no doubt often stern and exacting; and on the whole the history of his household is one of sordid sadness up to his marriage (1663) with Elizabeth Minshull, a pretty and domestic woman of twenty-five, the daughter of a Cheshire yeoman. She restored comfort to his house, but failed to conciliate his daughters, who, after being taught embroidery at their father's expense, left to set up for themselves. The accounts we have of him in his later years convey a generally pleasing picture of a not uncheerful retirement solaced by music and the attention of friends. When the poetic impulse had departed he addressed himself vigorously to other unfulfilled designs of his youth, writing the early history of England and endeavouring to amend men's conceptions of grammar and logic. These writings are indeed of little value; but his Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrines, though devoid of all pretensions to eloquence, is a memorable work. His theology had become profoundly modified in the course of his life; he is now an Arian as regards the person of Christ; he is indifferent to all rites and ceremonies; he is as anti-Sabbatarian as Luther; he would even tolerate polygamy. The charm of the treatise consists in its dignified candour, and the absence of all polemic virulence. The tranquillity of evening was indeed closing around him as he penned this last legacy, the MS. of which, confiscated and mislaid, was not to see the light for a hundred and fifty years. Reduced still further in means by losses through the great fire of 1666, but still above want; exonerated as a regicide by the majority of his countrymen, but already acclaimed by the discerning as the first poet of his age; worn by attacks of gout, but cheerful and even joyous in the intervals of pain, he closed his chequered life on November 8, 1674. He was interred in St Giles's, Cripplegate.
Milton is one of the poets respecting whose place in literature there has been least question, whether as regards the literature of their own country or that of the world. He stands at the head of those epic poets whose themes have not, like Homer's or Virgil's, been national, or have not, like Dante's, condensed the essence of the belief of ages. He is indebted for this superiority partly to his felicitous choice of the finest subject which yet remained for epical treatment, partly to his exceptional qualifications for treating it, but most of all to the actual superiority of his genius. After Homer there is no poet to whom the sublime is so much a native element, who rises into it with so little apparent effort, and remains in it for so long together. Another circumstance which would alone make him a poet for the world is that in him and in him alone the Hebraic and the Hellenic spirit appear thoroughly at one. His theme and his creed connect him with the Scriptures, but his literary tastes and models are the tastes and models of the Renaissance. As an English poet he fills up the great gap which would otherwise yawn between the age of Shakespeare and the age of Dryden, and, like Wren in architecture, proves that the classical style need not necessarily be synonymous with pedantry or inanity. In the artful harmony of blank verse he surpasses every English poet, though he may not have caught the 'wood-notes wild' of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His magnanimity as a man matched his sublimity as a poet; but he had perhaps more than a usual share of the failings attendant upon the magnanimous character, and at first sight appears arrogant and unamiable. It is not until we consider that the circumstances of his life forced these characteristics into prominence, and that biographers have too commonly thought the softer and more familiar traits unworthy of record; until we remember that the company of this austere idealist was frequented by the young, and that the pleasures of the social hour have been exquisitely sung by him; above all, until we note his almost entire dependence for composition upon external impulse, the rashness of some of his actions and the chivalry of others, that we perceive him to have possessed his full share of the emotional temperament common to poets.
The principal contemporary authority for Milton's life is his nephew, Edward Phillips. Toland has added some interesting notices. Symmons, Mitford, Todd, and others wrought usefully in their day in collecting and investigating particulars, but their labours have been entirely superseded by Professor Masson (6 vols. 1876-79), who has left nothing unexplored, and whose verdict is in most cases decisive. Johnson's short biography, however, must always be read for its literary merit, and as a remarkable instance of insuperable antipathy striving to be just. Milton's Life has been written on a small scale by Mark Pattison ('Men of Letters,' 1880) and by Richard Garnett ('Great Writers,' 1889); and there is Professor Raleigh's Study (1900). There is an excellent and comprehensive German biography by Alfred Stern (2 vols. Leip. 1877-79). Addison, Johnson, Channing, and Macaulay are especially distinguished among Milton's critics. The standard edition of Milton's works is that by Professor Masson (3 vols. 1874; new ed. 1882).