"... To Paul's Church Yarde, and there looked upon the second part of Hudibras, which I buy not, but borrow to read, to see if he be as good as the first, which the world do cry so mightily up, though it hath not a good liking in me...." Octavo. COLLATION: _Title; A-R, in eights_. * It should be noted that some copies of the volume have the record of the license and some have none. JOHN MILTON (1608-1674) 33. Paradiſe loft. | A | Poem | Written in | Ten Books | By John Milton. | Licenſed and Entred according | to Order. | London | Printed, and are to be ſold by Peter Parker | under Creed Church neer Aldgate; And by | Robert Boulter at the Turks Head in Biſhopſgate-ſtreet; | And Matthias Walker, under St. Dunſtons Church | in Fleet-ſtreet, 1667. Milton began his great epic in 1658, and is said to have finished it in 1663. It was licensed after some delay, occasioned by the hesitation of the deputy of the Archbishop of Canterbury over the lines: "As when the Sun, new ris'n Looks through the Horizontal Misty Air Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon In dim Eclips, disastrous twilight sheds On half the Nations, and with fear of change Perplexes Monarchs." He may, as Professor Masson has pointed out, have had difficulty in finding a publisher able and willing to venture upon the printing of a work by one "whose attacks on the Church and defenses of the execution of Charles I. were still fresh in the memory of all, and some of whose pamphlets had been publicly burnt by the hangman after the Restoration." Few probably of those whose shops had centered around Paul's Churchyard, the very heart of the book-trade, could have done so, for they were, if not ruined, certainly inconvenienced by the loss of their stock and shops in the Great Fire of the year before. It is small wonder that Simmons, to whom, through some agency or other, the poet did come, drove a hard bargain when the agreement for the copyright was entered into, April 27, 1667. The original of this agreement came into the possession of the Tonsons, the proprietors of the copyright, and was finally presented to the British Museum by Samuel Rogers, who acquired it from Pickering the publisher. "Milton was to receive 5 l. down, and 5 l. more upon the sale of each of the first three editions. The editions were to be accounted as ended when thirteen hundred copies of each were sold 'to particular reading customers,' and were not to exceed fifteen hundred copies apiece. Milton received the second 5 l. in April, 1669, that is 15 l. in all. His widow in 1680 settled all claims upon Simmons for 8 l. and Simmons became proprietor of the copyright, then understood to be perpetuated."