Museum, with Samuel Simmons, printer, of Aldersgate Street, London, to dispose of the copyright for £5 down, the promise of another £5 after the sale of the first edition of 1300 copies, and the further promise of two additional sums of £5 each after the sale of two more editions of the same size respectively. It was as if an author now were to part with all his rights in a volume for £17, 10s. down, and a contingency of £52, 10s. more in three equal instalments. The poem was duly entered by Simmons as ready for publication in the Stationers’ Registers on the 20th of the following August; and shortly after that date it was out in London as a neatly printed small quarto, with the title Paradise Lost: A Poem written in Ten Books: By John Milton. The reception accorded to Paradise Lost has been quoted as an example of the neglect of a great work, but the sale of an edition of 1300 copies in eighteen months proves that the poem found a wide circle of readers. “This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too” is the saying attributed to Dryden on the occasion; and it is the more remarkable because the one objection to the poem which at first, we are told, “stumbled many” must have “stumbled” Dryden most of all. Except in the drama, rhyme was then thought essential in anything professing to be a poem; blank verse was hardly regarded as verse at all; Dryden especially had been and was the champion of rhyme, contending for it even in the drama. That, notwithstanding this obvious blow struck by the poet at Dryden’s pet literary theory, he should have welcomed the poem so enthusiastically and proclaimed its merits so emphatically, says much at once for his critical perception and for the generosity of his temper. According to Aubrey, Dryden requested Milton’s leave to turn the poem into a rhymed drama, and was told he might “tag his verses if he pleased.” The result is seen in Dryden’s opera, The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man (1675). One consequence of Milton’s renewed celebrity was that visitors of all ranks again sought him out for the honour of his society and conversation. His obscure house in Artillery Walk, Bunhill, we are told, became an attraction now, “much more than he did desire,” for the learned notabilities of his time.
Accounts have come down to us of Milton’s personal appearance and habits in his later life. They describe him as to be seen every other day led about in the streets in the vicinity of his Bunhill residence, a slender figure, of middle stature or a little less, generally dressed in a grey cloak or overcoat, and wearing sometimes a small silver-hilted sword, evidently in feeble health, but still looking younger than he was, with his lightish hair, and his fair, rather than aged or pale, complexion. He would sit in his garden at the door of his house, in warm weather, in the same kind of grey overcoat, “and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts, as well as quality.” Within doors he was usually dressed in neat black. He was a very early riser, and very regular in the distribution of his day, spending the first part, to his midday dinner, always in his own room, amid his books, with an amanuensis to read for him and write to his dictation. Music was always a chief part of his afternoon and evening relaxation, whether when he was by himself or when friends were with him. His manner with friends and visitors was extremely courteous and affable, with just a shade of stateliness. In free conversation, either at the midday dinner, when a friend or two happened, by rare accident, to be present, or more habitually in the evening and at the light supper which concluded it, he was the life and soul of the company, from his “flow of subject” and his “unaffected cheerfulness and civility,” though with a marked tendency to the satirical and sarcastic in his criticisms of men and things. This tendency to the sarcastic was connected by some of those who observed it with a peculiarity of his voice or pronunciation. “He pronounced the letter r very hard,” Aubrey tells us, adding Dryden’s note on the subject: “litera canina, the dog-letter, a certain sign of a satirical wit.” He was extremely temperate in the use of wine or any strong liquors, at meals and at all other times; and when supper was over, about nine o'clock, “he smoked his pipe and drank a glass of water, and went to bed.” He suffered much from gout, the effects of which had become apparent in a stiffening of his hands and finger-joints, and the recurring attacks of which in its acute form were very painful. His favourite poets among the Greeks were Homer and the Tragedians, especially Euripides; among the Latins, Virgil and Ovid; among the English, Spenser and Shakespeare. Among his English contemporaries, he thought most highly of Cowley. He had ceased to attend any church, belonged to no religious communion, and had no religious observances in his family. His reasons for this were a matter for curious surmise among his friends, because of the profoundly religious character of his own mind; but he does not seem ever to have furnished the explanation. The matter became of less interest perhaps after 1669, when his three daughters ceased to reside with him, having been sent out “to learn some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture that are proper for women to learn, particularly embroideries in gold or silver.” After that the household in Bunhill consisted only of Milton, his wife, a single maid-servant, and the “man” or amanuensis who came in for the day.
The remaining years of Milton’s life, extending through that part of the reign of Charles II. which figures in English history under the name of the “Cabal Administration,” were by no means unproductive. In 1669 he published, under the title of Accedence commenced Grammar, a small English compendium of Latin grammar that had been lying among his papers. In 1670 there appeared, with a prefixed portrait of him by Faithorne, done from the life, his History of Britain . . . to the Norman Conquest, being all that he had been able to accomplish of his intended complete history of England; and in the same year a Latin digest of Ramist logic, entitled Artis logicae plenior institutio, of no great value, and doubtless from an old manuscript of his earlier days. In 1671 there followed his Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, bound together in one small volume, and giving ample proof that his poetic genius had not exhausted itself in the preceding great epic. In 1673, at a moment when the growing political discontent with the government of Charles II. and the conduct of his court had burst forth in the special form of a “No-Popery” agitation and outcry, Milton ventured on the dangerous experiment of one more political pamphlet, in which, under the title “Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what best means may be used against the growth of Popery,” he put forth, with a view to popular acceptance, as mild a version as possible of his former principles on the topics discussed. In the same year appeared the second edition of his Poems . . . both English and Latin, which included, with the exception of the Sonnets to Cromwell, Fairfax, Vane and the second address to Cyriack Skinner, all the minor poems.
Thus we reach the year 1674, the last of Milton’s life. One incident of that year was the publication of the second edition of Paradise Lost, with the poem rearranged as now—into twelve books, instead of the original ten. Another was the publication of a small volume[1] containing his Latin Epistolae familiares, together with the Prolusiones oratoriae of his student-days at Cambridge—these last thrown in as a substitute for his Latin state-letters in his secretaryship for the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, the printing of which was stopped by order from the Foreign Office. A third publication of the same year, and probably the very last thing dictated by Milton, was a translation of a Latin document from Poland, relating to the recent election of the heroic John Sobieski to the throne of that kingdom, with the title A Declaration or Letters Patents of the Election of this present King of Poland, John the Third. It seems to have been out in London in August or September 1674. On Sunday the 8th of the following November Milton died, in his house in Bunhill, of “gout struck in,” at the age of sixty-five years and eleven months. He was buried, the next Thursday, in the church of St Giles, Cripplegate, beside his father; a considerable concourse attending the funeral.
Before the Restoration, Milton—what with his inheritance from his father, what with the official income of his Latin secretaryship—must have been a man of very good means indeed. Family Since then, however, various heavy losses, and the cessation of all official income, had greatly reduced his estate, so that he left but £900 (worth about or over £2700 now) besides Family. furniture and household goods. By a word-of-mouth will, made in presence of his brother Christopher, he had bequeathed the whole to his widow, on the ground that he had done enough already for his “undutiful” daughters, and that there remained for them his interest in their mother’s marriage portion of £1000, which had never been paid, but which their relatives, the Powells of Forest Hill, were legally bound for, and were now in
- ↑ Joannis Miltonii Angli epistolarum familiarum liber unus; quibus accesserunt ejusdem ( jam olim in collegio adolescentis) prolusiones quaedam oratoriae (1674; translation by J. Hall, 1829).
