A text with Critical Notes by W. Aldis Wright was issued by the Cambridge University Press in one volume, 1903. The text of the earliest printed editions of the several poems was reprinted in 1900 in an edition prepared for the Clarendon Press by the Rev. H. C. Beeching. It may be worth while adding that Milton's Latin and Italian poems were translated by the poet Cowper and printed in 1808 by his biographer, Hayley, in a beautiful quarto volume with designs by Flaxman. These translations are reprinted in the "Aldine" edition of Milton, 1826. Masson has also given translations of most of them in his _Life of Milton_ and in his 1890 library edition of the Poems. PROSE The Prose works were, of course, mostly issued as books or pamphlets in Milton's lifetime. They were collected by Toland in three volumes _folio_, 1698. There are several more modern editions; as that published in 1806 in seven volumes {252} with a _Life_ by Charles Symmons; that of Pickering, who included them in his fine eight-volume edition. _The Works of John Milton in Verse and Prose, Edited by John Mitford, 1851_; and that in Bohn's Standard Library, in six volumes, edited, with some notes of a somewhat controversial character, by J. A. St. John, 1848. The first volume of a new edition edited by Sir Sidney Lee appeared in 1905. One of the most curious of the prose works, the _De Doctrina Christiana_ or _Treatise of Christian Doctrine_, was not known till 1823, when it was discovered in the State Paper Office. It was edited, with an English translation, by the Rev. C. R. Sumner in 1825 and is included in Bohn's edition. BIOGRAPHY The earliest sources for the biography of Milton, outside his own works, are the account given in the _Fasti Oxonienses_ of Anthony a Wood, 1691, the _Brief Lives of John Aubrey_, and the Life prefixed by the poet's nephew, Edward Phillips, to an edition of the _Letters of State_, printed in 1694. A very large number of _Lives of Milton_ have been written since, based on these materials and those collected from a few other sources. The most famous and in some ways the best, in spite of its unfairness, is that of Johnson, to be found in his _Lives of the Poets_. The best short modern Life is Mark Pattison's masterly, though occasionally wilful, little book in the English Men of letters Series. For the library and for students all other biographies have been superseded by the great work of David Masson, who spared no labours to investigate every smallest detail of the life of Milton and to place the whole in the setting of an elaborate history of England in Milton's day. The value of the book is somewhat impaired by the very strong Puritan and anti-Cavalier partisanship of the writer; and its style suffers from an imitation of Carlyle. But nothing can seriously detract from the immense debt every student of Milton owes to the author of this monumental biography which appeared in seven volumes, 1859-1894.