Produced by Charles Aldorondo, Tiffany Vergon, Marc D'Hooghe and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. MILTON by MARK PATTISON, B.D. RECTOR OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD CONTENTS. FIRST PERIOD. 1608-1639. CHAPTER I. FAMILY--SCHOOL--COLLEGE CHAPTER II. RESIDENCE AT HORTON--L'ALLEGRO--IL PENSEROSO--AUCADES --COMUS--LYCIDAS CHAPTER III. JOURNEY TO ITALY SECOND PERIOD. 1640-1660. CHAPTER IV. EDUCATIONAL THEORY--TEACHING CHAPTER V. MARRIAGE AND PAMPHLET ON DIVORCE CHAPTER VI. PAMPHLETS CHAPTER VII. BIOGRAPHICAL. 1640-1649 CHAPTER VIII THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP CHAPTER IX. MILTON AND MORUS--BLINDNESS CHAPTER X. MILTON AND MOSES--THE SECOND DEFENSE--THE DEFENSE FOR HIMSELF CHAPTER XI. LATIN SECRETARYSHIP COMES TO AN END--MILTON'S FRIENDS THIRD PERIOD. 1660--1674 CHAPTER XII. BIOGRAPHICAL--LITERARY OCCUPATION--RELIGIOUS OPINIONS CHAPTER XIII.PARADISE LOST--PARADISE REGAINED--SAMSON AGONISTES INDEX MILTON. _FIRST PERIOD_. 1608-1639. CHAPTER I. FAMILY--SCHOOL--COLLEGE. In the seventeenth century it was not the custom to publish two volumes upon every man or woman whose name had appeared on a title-page. Nor, where lives of authors were written, were they written with the redundancy of particulars which is now allowed. Especially are the lives of the poets and dramatists obscure and meagrely recorded. Of Milton, however, we know more personal details than of any man of letters of that age. Edward Phillips, the poet's nephew, who was brought up by his uncle, and lived in habits of intercourse with him to the last, wrote a life, brief, inexact, superficial, but valuable from the nearness of the writer to the subject of his memoir. A cotemporary of Milton, John Aubrey (b.1625), "a very honest man, and accurate in his accounts of matters of fact," as Toland says of him, made it his business to learn all he could about Milton's habits. Aubrey was himself acquainted with Milton, and diligently catechised thepoet's widow, his brother, and his nephew, scrupulously writing down each detail as it came to him, in the minutee of lives which he supplied to Antony Wood to be worked up in his _Athenae_ and _Fasti_. Aubrey was only an antiquarian collector, and was mainly dependent on what could be learned from the family. None of Milton's family, and least of all Edward Phillips, were of a capacity to apprehend moral or mental qualities, and they could only tell Aubrey of his goings out and his comings in, of the clothes he wore, the dates of events, the names of his acquaintance. In compensation for the want of observation on the part of his own kith and kin, Milton himself, with a superb and ingenuous egotism, has revealed the secret of his thoughts and feelings in numerous autobiographical passages of his prose writings. From what he directly communicates, and from what he unconsciously betrays, we obtain an internal life of the mind, more ample than that external life of the