circumstances to make good. The daughters, with the Powells probably abetting them, went to law with the widow to upset the will; and the decision of the court was that they should receive £100 each. With the £600 thus left, the widow, after some further stay in London, retired to Nantwich in her native Cheshire. There, respected as a pious member of a local Baptist congregation, she lived till 1727, having survived her husband fifty-three years. By that time all the three daughters were also dead. The eldest, Ann Milton, who was somewhat deformed, had died not long after her father, having married “a master-builder,” but left no issue; the second, Mary Milton, had died, unmarried, before 1694; and only the third, Deborah, survived as long as her step-mother. Having gone to Ireland, as companion to a lady, shortly before her father’s death, she had married an Abraham Clarke, a silk-weaver in Dublin, with whom she returned to London about 1684, when they settled in the silk-weaving business in Spitalfields, rather sinking than rising in the world, though latterly some public attention was paid to Deborah, by Addison and others, on her father’s account. One of her sons, Caleb Clarke, had gone out to Madras in 1703, and had died there as “parish-clerk of Fort George” in 1719, leaving children, of whom there are some faint traces to as late as 1727, the year of Deborah’s death. Except for the possibility of further and untraced descent from this Indian grandson of Milton, the direct descent from him came to an end in his granddaughter, Elizabeth Clarke, another of Deborah’s children. Having married a Thomas Foster, a Spitalfields weaver, but afterwards set up a small chandler’s shop, first in Holloway and then in Shoreditch, she died at Islington in 1754, not long after she and her husband had received the proceeds of a performance of Comus got up by Dr Johnson for her benefit. All her children had predeceased her, leaving no issue. Milton’s brother Christopher, who had always been on the opposite side in politics, rose to the questionable honour of a judgeship and knighthood in the latter part of the reign of James II. He had then become a Roman Catholic—which religion he professed till his death in retirement at Ipswich in 1692. Descendants from him are traceable a good way into the 18th century. Milton’s two nephews and pupils, Edward and John Phillips, both of them known as busy and clever hack-authors before their uncle’s death, continued the career of hack-authorship, most industriously and variously, though not very prosperously, through the rest of their lives: Edward in a more reputable manner than John, and with more of enduring allegiance to the memory of his uncle. Edward died about 1695; John was alive till 1706. Their half-sister, Ann Agar, the only daughter of Milton’s sister by her second husband, had married, in 1673, a David Moore, of Sayes House, Chertsey; and the most flourishing of all the lines of descent from the poet’s father was in this Agar-Moore branch of the Miltons.
Of masses of manuscript that had been left by Milton, some portions saw the light posthumously. Prevented, in the last year of his life from publishing his Latin State Letters in the same volume with his Latin Familiar Epistles, he had committed the charge of the State Letters, prepared for the press, together with the completed manuscript of his Latin Posthumous Publications. Treatise of Christian Doctrines, to a young Cambridge scholar, Daniel Skinner, who had been among the last of his amanuenses, and had, in fact, been employed by him especially in copying out and arranging those two important MSS. Negotiations were on foot, after Milton’s death, between this Daniel Skinner and the Amsterdam printer, Daniel Elzevir, for the publication of both MSS., when the English government interfered, and the MSS. were sent back by Elzevir, and thrown aside, as dangerous rubbish, in a cupboard in the State Paper Office. Meanwhile, in 1676, a London bookseller, named Pitt, who had somehow got into his possession a less perfect, but still tolerably complete, copy of the State Letters, had brought out a surreptitious edition of them, under the title Literae pseudo-senatus anglicani, Cromwellii . . . nomine et jussu conscriptae a Joanne Miltono. No other posthumous publications of Milton’s appeared till 1681, when another bookseller put forth a slight tract entitled Mr John Milton’s Character of the Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines, in 1641, consisting of a page or two, of rather dubious authenticity, said to have been withheld from his History of Britain in the edition of 1670. In 1682 appeared A Brief History of Moscovia, and of other less-known Countries lying Eastward of Russia as far as Cathay . . . undoubtedly Milton’s, and a specimen of those prose compilations with which he sometimes occupied his leisure. Of the fate of his collections for a new Latin Dictionary, which had swelled to three folio volumes of MS., all that is known is that, after having been used by Edward Phillips for his Enchiridion and Speculum, they came into the hands of a committee of Cambridge scholars, and were used for that Latin dictionary of 1693, called The Cambridge Dictionary, on which Ainsworth’s Dictionary was based. In 1698 there was published in three folio volumes, under the editorship of John Toland, the first collective edition of Milton’s prose works, professing to have been printed at Amsterdam, though really printed in London. A very interesting folio volume, published in 1743 by “John Nickolls, junior,” under the title of Original Letters and Papers of State addressed to Oliver Cromwell, consists of a number of intimate Cromwellian documents that had somehow come into Milton’s possession immediately after Cromwell’s death, and were left by him confidentially to the Quaker Ellwood. Finally, a chance search in the London State Paper Office in 1823 having discovered the long-lost parcel containing the MSS. of Milton’s Latin State Letters and his Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrine, as these had been sent back from Amsterdam a hundred and fifty years before, the Treatise on Christian Doctrine was, by the command of George IV., edited and published in 1825 by the Rev. C. R. Sumner, keeper of the Royal Library, and afterwards bishop of Winchester, under the title of Joannis Miltoni Angli de doctrina christiana libri duo posthumi. An English translation, by the editor, was published in the same year. Those state papers of Milton which had not been already printed were edited by W. D. Hamilton for the Camden Society, in 1859.
Milton’s literary life divides into three almost mechanically distinct periods: (1) the time of his youth and minor poems, (2) his middle twenty years of prose polemics, and (3) the time of his later Muse and greater poems.
Had Milton died in 1640, when he was in his thirty-second year, and had his literary remains been then collected, he would have been remembered as one of the best Latinists of his generation and one of the most exquisite of minor English poets. In the latter character, more particularly, he would have taken his place as one of that Character-istics. interesting group or series of English poets, coming in the next forty years after Spenser, who, because they all acknowledged a filial relationship to Spenser, may be called collectively the Spenserians. In this group or series, counting in it such other true poets of the reigns of James I. and Charles I. as Phineas and Giles Fletcher, William Browne and Drummond of Hawthornden, Milton would have been entitled, by the small collection of pieces he had left, and which would have included his Ode on the Nativity, his L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, his Comus and his Lycidas, to recognition as indubitably the very highest and finest. There was in him that peculiar Spenserian something which might be regarded as the poetic faculty in its essence, with a closeness and perfection of verbal finish not to be found in the other Spenserians, or even in the master himself. Few as the pieces were, and owning discipleship to Spenser as the author did, he was a Spenserian with a difference belonging to his own constitution—which prophesied, and indeed already exhibited, the passage of English poetry out of the Spenserian into a kind that might be called the Miltonic. This Miltonic something, distinguishing the new poet from other Spenserians, was more than mere perfection of literary finish. It consisted in an avowed consciousness already of the os magna soniturum, “the mouth formed for great utterances,” that consciousness resting on a peculiar substratum of personal character that had occasioned a new theory of literature. “He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter on laudable things ought himself to be a true poem” was Milton’s own memorable expression afterwards of the principle that had taken possession of him from his earliest days; and this principle of moral manliness as the true foundation of high literary effort, of the inextricable identity of all literary productions in kind, and their coequality in worth, with the personality in which they have their origin, might have been detected, in more or less definite shape, in all or most of the minor poems. It is a specific form of that general Platonic doctrine of the invincibility of virtue which runs through his Comus.
That a youth and early manhood of such poetical promise should have been succeeded by twenty years of all but incessant prose polemics has been a matter of regret with many. But this
