The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His TimeMasson, David
History
The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time
Masson, David
Milton, John, 1608-1674; Poets, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography
The Du Moulins were a French family, well known in England. The
father, Dr. Peter Du Moulin the elder (called _Molinæus_ in
Latin), was a French Protestant theologian of great celebrity. He had
resided for a good while in England in the reign of James I.,
officiating as French minister in London, and in much credit with the
King and others; but, on the death of James, he had returned to
France. At our present date he was still alive at the age of
eighty-seven, and still not so much out of the world but that people
in different countries continued to think of him as a contemporary
and to quote his writings. There are references to him, far from
disrespectful, in one of Milton's Anti-Episcopal Pamphlets in reply
to Bishop Hall.[1] Two of his sons, both born in France, had settled
permanently in England, and had become passionately interested in
English public affairs, though in very different directions.--The
younger of these, LEWIS DU MOULIN, born 1606, having taken the degree
of Doctor of Physic at Leyden, had come to England when but a young
man, and, after having been incorporated in the same degree at
Cambridge (1684), had been in medical practice in London. At the
beginning of the Long Parliament, he had taken the Parliamentarian
side, and had written, under the name of "Irenæus Philalethes," two
Latin pamphlets against Bishop Hall's _Episcopacy by Divine
Right_--pamphlets very much in the same vein of root-and-branch
Church Reform as those of the Smectymnuans and Milton at the same
time. Since then, still adhering to the Parliament through the Civil
War, he had become well known as an Independent--much, it is said, to
the chagrin of his old father, who was a Presbyterian, with leanings
to moderate Episcopacy; and in 1647, in the Parliamentary visitation
of the University of Oxford, he had been rewarded with the Camden
Professorship of History in that University. He had been made M.D. of
Oxford in 1649. At least three publications had come from his pen
since his appointment to the Professorship, one of them a Translation
into Latin (1650) of the first chapter of Milton's
_Eikonoklastes_. From this we should infer, what is
independently likely, that he was acquainted with Milton
personally.[2]--Very different from the Independent and
Commonwealth's man Lewis Du Monlin. M.D. and History Professor of
Oxford, was his elder brother PETER DU MOULIN, D.D. Born in 1600, he
had been educated, like his brother, at Leyden, and had taken his
D.D. degree there. He is first heard of in England in 1640, when he
was incorporated in the same degree at Cambridge; and at the
beginning of the Civil War he was so far a naturalised Englishman as
to be Rector of Wheldrake, near York. From that time, though a
zealous Calvinist theologically, he was as intensely Royalist and
Episcopalian as his brother was Parliamentarian and Independent. So
we learn most distinctly from a brief MS. sketch of his life through
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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