MILTON, John (1608-74), was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, at the Sign of the Spread Eagle, the house of his father. John Milton the elder, a scrivener and composer of music. He was educated at St. Paul’s School, where he became friendly with ‘Diodati, then at Chnst’, College, Cambridge, where he acquired the nickname ‘the Lady of Christ’s’, and may have alienated his fellow students by, in his Own words, ‘a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness’. He was briefly rusticated in 1626 became BA in 1629, and MA in 1632. During his Cambridge period, while considering himself destined for the ministry, he began to write poetry in Latin and Italian, and also in English on both sacred and secular themes. His first known attempt at English verse, ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’ (in a complex stanza repeated in the opening of the ‘Nativity Ode’), was probably written in 1628 on the death of his niece Anne Phillips (although P. Levi, TLS, 25 March 1983, suggests an earlier date and a different occasion), and ‘At a Vacation Exercise’ probablv belongs to the same year. His first distinctively Miltonic work, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ written at Christmas 1629, shows a growing mastery of stanza and structure, an exuberant and at times baroque use of imagery, and the love of resounding proper names so marked in his later work. His fragmentary ‘The Passion’ was probably written at Easter 1630, and the "Arcades’ possibly in the same year. ‘On Shakespeare’, his two epitaphs for Hobson, the university carrier, and ‘An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’ belong to 1631. His twin poems, "L’Allegro’ and "II Penseroso’, may have been written at Cambridge, or possibly at Hammersmith, whither Milton the elder moved 1631/2.’ Milton himself on leaving Cambridge adopted no profession, but enbarked on an ambitious course of private study at his father’s home in preparation for a future as poet or clergyman; his Latin poem ‘Ad Patrem’ (1634) appears to be an attempt to persuade his father that the two pursuits were reconcilable. His ‘masque’ Comus published anonymously in 1637, was written, and performed at Ludlow, in 1634. In 1635 the Miltons moved to Horton, Buckinghamshire, where John pursued his studies in Greek. Latitn, and Italian, devoting much time to the Church Fathers. In 1637 he wrote Lycidas, an elegy, which dwells on fears of premature death, unfulfilled ambition, and wasted dedication; during the 20 years that elapsed between this and his composition of Paradise Lost Milton wrote no poetry, apart from some Latin and Italian pieces, and some sonnets, of which the most notable are those ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont his blindness., on his deceased wife

whether the first or second wife is disputed), his addresses to CromweIl, Fairfax, and Vane, and those to Lawes (with whom he had collaborated on the ‘Arcades’ and Comus) and to his young friends and students Edward Lawrence and Gyriack ‘Skinner. From 1637 to 1639 Milton travelled abroad, chiefly in Italy; he met Grotius In Paris and *Galileo, still under official condemnation at his villa just outside Florence. On his return he established himself in London and became tutor to his nephews Edward and John Phillips: he appears at this time to have been contemplating an epic on an Arthurian theme, which he mentions in his Latin epitaph on his friend Diodati, Epitaphium Damonis:; Diodati died while Milton was abroad. The epitaph was written in 1639, and privately printed and distributed.

His attentions were now diverted by historical events to many years of pamphleteering and political activity, and to a tireless defence of religious, civil, and domestic liberties. In 1641 he published a series of five pamphlets against episcopacy, engaging in controversy with bishops Hall and Ussher, and displaying from the first (Of Reformation in England and the Causaes that Hitherto Have Hindered it ) a vigorous, colourful Ciceronian prose, and a keenly polemic spirit which could yet rise to visions of apocalyptic grandeur. The Reason of Church Government (1642) was the first to which he put his name; it was followed in the same year by An Apology against a Pamphlet - . . against ‘Smectymnuus, which contains interesting autobiographical details. In June 1642 Milton married Mary Powell, daughter of royalist parents; he was 33, she 17. Within six weeks he consented to her going home to her parents at Forest Hill, near Oxford (the royalist stronghold), on condition that she returned by Michaelmas. She did not do so, for reasons perhaps connected with the outbreak of the Civil War. Milton published in 1643 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, arguing among other points that a true marriage was of mind as well as of body, and that the chaste and modest were more likely to find themselves ‘chained unnaturally together’ in Unsuitable unions than these who had in youth lived loosely and enjoyed more varied experience. This pamphlet made him notorious, but he pursued his arguments in three more on the subject of divorce in 1644—5, including Tetrachordon, and also published in his own support a translation of Martin Bucer’s views on the same theme. Of Education, addressed to his friend Hartlib, appeared in 1644, as did his great defence of the liberty of the press, Areopagitica. It was at this period that he became aware of his growing blindness; by 1651 he was to be totally blind. His wife rejoined him in I645, and their first daughter Anne was born a year later: a second daughter Mary was born in

1648 and Deborah in 1652. A son, John, born 1651, died in infancy.

After the execution of Charles I, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates arguing in general terms that a people ‘free by nature’ had a right to depose and punish and attacking the Presbyterians, who his view a growing threat to freedom appointed Latin secretary to the newly Council of State. He replied officially to Eikon Basilke in Eikonoklastes (i.e. Image-breaker. 1649), and to

Salmasius in Pro Populo Angucano Defensio (1651), a work which created a furor on the Continent and was publicly burned in Paris and Toulouse; also to Du Moulin’s Clamor (which be attributed to Alexander More, or Motus) in Dejet sin Secunda (1654), which contains some self-defensive autobiographical passages and reflections on his blindness. He was now assisted in his secretarial duties successively by G. It. Weckherlin, Philip Meadows, and Marvell. His first wife died in 1652, three days after the birth of their third daughter, and in 1656 he married Katherine Woodcock. then aged 28, who died in 1658, having given birth to a daughter who survived only a few months. He retained his post as Latin secretary until the Restoration, having lived during most of this period at Petty France, Westminster. On the eve ofthe Restoration, he boldly published The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a last-minute attempt to defend the ‘Good old Cause’ of republicanism and to halt the growing tide of royalism and the ‘defection of the misguided and abused multitude’. At the Restoration he went into hiding briefly, then was arrested, fined, and released: D’Avenant and Marvel are said to have interceded on his behalf he now returned to poetry and set about the composition of Paradise Lost; he had shown his nephews a sketch of lines from Book 4 as early as1642, and his notebooks show that he had earlier contemplated a drama on a similar theme. In 1663 he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull (who survived him), and moved to what is now Bunhill Row, where he spent the remaining years of his life, apart from a brief visit to Chalfont St Giles in 1665, to avoid the plague, organized by his Quaker friend "Ellwood. Paradise Lost is said by ‘Aubrey to have been finished in 1663, but the agreement for his copyright was not signed until 1667. Paradise Regained was published in 1671 with ‘Samson Agonistes: the composition dates of the latter have been much discussed, and the assumption that it was his last, or even one or his latest poems has been strongly challenged. In these late years he also published various works written earlier in his life, including a History of Britain (1670), from legendary times to the Norman Conquest, and a compendium of Ramus's Logic (1672). In 1673 appealed a second edition of his Poems, originally published in 1645, including most of his minor verse. His A Brief History of Moscotvia, drawn from the Hakluyt and Purchas collections, appeared posthumously in 1682.

Of Milton’s Latin poems, the finest is his epitaph to Diodati, but his epistle ‘Ad Patrem’ and his address to ‘Mansus’ (Giovanni Battista Manso, intimate friend of Tasso and Marmi) also have great interest: the latter was probably written in 1639.

The State Papers that he wrote as Latin secretary (discovered in 1743) are mostly concerned with the routine work of diplomacy, but include an interesting series of dispatches, 1655— 8, on the subject of the expulsion and massacre of the Protestant Vaudois by the orders of the Prince of Savoy, who had commanded them to abandon their faith. These breathe the same indignation that found more impassioned expression in his sonnet ‘Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d Saints’. The Latin prose writings include his De Doctrina a Christiana, printed in 1825, which for many confirms the suspicions raised by Paradise Lost that Milton was theologically unorthodox, with strong Arian leanings. His Commonplace Book, with interesting insights into his studies and plans for composition, came to light in 1874.

Milton died from ‘gout struck in’ and was buried beside his father in St Giles’, Cripplegate. There are full biographies by D. Masson (1859-94) and W. R. Parker (1968). His personality continues to arouse as much discussion as his works; as a man he has been variously presented as sociable, good-natured, and increasingly serene, as a domestic tyrant who bullied his daughters, as a strict Puritan. a misogynist, a libertine, and, recently, as a radical heretic. (See C.Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 1977.) As a writer, his towering stature was recognized early. Although appreciated as a master of polemical prose as well as of subtle lyric harmony, his reputation rests largely on Paradise Lost, which Dryden (who made a rhymed version of it) was describing by 1677 as ‘one of the greatest, most noble and sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced’. Poets and critics in the 18th cent. were profoundly influenced by Milton’s use of blank verse (previously confined largely to drama) and his treatment of the Sublime, and he inspired many serious and burlesque imitations and adaptations.