Chapter V: Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (2)

They dare not enter the city: and, as they speculate on what this great event can be, a Hebrew spectator of the catastrophe comes up and, after some brief exchange of question and answer exactly in the manner of the Greek tragedians, tells the whole story at length. The end has come. Samson is dead, but death is swallowed up in victory: what has happened is the last and most tremendous {239} triumph of the divinely chosen hero whose death is more fatal to his country's enemies than even his life had been. There is nothing left to do but to close the drama, as most Greek tragedies close, with a brief choral song of submission to the divine governance of the world:

"All is best, though we oft doubt
What the unsearchable dispose
Of Highest Wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
Oft He seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns,
And to his faithful champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns,
And all that band them to resist
His uncontrollable intent.
His servants He, with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent."

Such is Milton's drama: a thing worth dwelling on as entirely unique in any modern language. Some good judges have thought it the finest of his works. That will not be admitted if poetry is to be judged either by universality of appeal or by extent and variety of range. _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ will always have far more readers: and _Paradise Lost_ embraces an immeasurably {240} greater span of human life. But, if not the greatest, _Samson_ is probably for its own audience the most moving of Milton's works. It is not everybody who has in him the grave emotions to which it appeals: but whoever has will find them stirred by Samson as few other books in all the literature of the world can stir them.

It is curious to think of Milton composing such a drama in the midst of the theatrical revival of the Restoration. Did ever poet set himself in such opposition to the literary current of his day? Dryden's unbounded admiration for him is well known: but he understood the genius of _Paradise Lost_ so little as to make an opera out of it, and he must have understood even less of Samson. The drama was then so much the most fashionable form of literature that he may have felt that in writing _The State of Innocence_ and its preface he was taking the best means of directing public attention to _Paradise Lost_. But he would scarcely have tried to do the same for _Samson_. He had wished, perhaps, as Mr. Verrall has suggested, to write an epic and had failed to do so: hence his profound reverence for the man who had not failed. But he had written many dramas and here he had succeeded: he had pleased both his {241} contemporaries and himself. He would feel no need there to take lessons from Milton. Nor is he to be blamed. He and his fellow dramatists are justly criticized for many things, but there is nothing to complain of in their unlikeness to Milton. They wrote for the stage. He avowedly did not. They wrote in the spirit of the theatre of their day, with the object of providing themselves with a little money and "the town" with a few hours of more or less intellectual amusement. He wrote out of his own mind and soul, not for the entertainment of the idle folk of his own or any other day, but for men who in all times and countries should prove capable of knowing a great work when they saw it. Besides, his contemporary dramatists followed, quite legitimately, the theatrical traditions of England or France: he the very different dramatic system of the Greeks. His drama is what Greek tragedies were, an act of religion. It could take its place quite naturally, as they did, as part of a great national religious festival performed on a holy day. It is like them in the solemn music of its utterance: in its deep sense of the gravity of the issues on which human life hangs. It is like them also in technical points such as the use of a Chorus to give expression to the {242} spectator's emotions, the paucity of actors present on the stage at any moment, the curious imitation, to be seen also in _Comus_, of the Greek _stichomuthia_, in which a verbal passage of arms is conducted on the principle of giving each speaker one line for his attack or retort.

There are, indeed, some fundamental differences. They are important enough to have led so great a critic as Professor Jebb to argue that Milton's drama is too Hebrew to be Hellenic at all. His point is that Greek tragedy aims at producing an imaginative pleasure by arousing a "sense, on the one hand, of the heroic in man; on the other hand, of a superhuman controlling power"; and he asserts that this is not the method adopted by Milton in _Samson_. Samson is throughout a free man; his misfortunes are the fruit of his own folly. God is still on his side and his death is a patriotic triumph, not, like the death of Heracles, who resembles him in so many ways, merely the final proof of the all-powerful malignity of fate.

No one will venture to differ from Jebb on such a question without a sense of great temerity. But perhaps the truth is that one who had lived all his life, as Jebb had, in the closest intimacy with the Greek drama, would be apt to feel small differences from {243} it too much and broad resemblances too little. To the shepherd all his sheep differ from each other: the danger for him is to forget, what the ignorant stranger sees, that they are also all very much alike. So Jebb is no doubt perfectly right in the distinction he makes: but he is surely blinded by his own knowledge when he argues from it that _Samson Agonistes_ "is a great poem and a noble drama; but neither as poem nor as drama is it Hellenic." Of that question comparative ignorance is perhaps a better judge. For it can still see that the broad division which separates the world's drama into two kinds is a real thing, and that Milton's drama belongs in spite of differences unquestionably to the Greek kind and not to the other, both by its method and by its spirit. There can be no real doubt that it is far more like the _Prometheus_ or the _Oedipus_ than it is like _Hamlet_ or _All for Love_. Probably no great tragedy of any sort can be made without that sense of the contrast between man's will and the "superhuman controlling power" of which Jebb speaks as peculiarly Greek. Certainly it is present in the greatest of Shakspeare's tragedies, and not seldom finds open expression. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends."

{244}

But the point is that in _Samson_, the note of which is always the classical, never the mystical or romantic, this sense is present, not in Shakspeare's way, but substantially in the Greek way. The fact that Samson is free and that his God is his friend does not prevent his feeling just in the Greek way that God's ways are dark and inscrutable, past man's finding out, and far above out of the reach of his control. It does not prevent his being helpless as well as heroic, fully conscious that all his strength leaves him still a weak child at the absolute disposal of incomprehensible Omnipotence. So the whole atmosphere of the play, as well as its formal mould, will always recall the Greek tragedies. And rightly: the likenesses of every kind are far greater than the differences. The distinctions which led Jebb to declare it was not Hellenic at all are far less important than the kinship which made a still greater critic, the poet Goethe, declare that it had "more of the antique spirit than any production of any other modern poet."

A more obvious and perhaps more important difference than that on which Jebb lays such stress is, of course, the fundamental one that the Greek plays were written for performance and that many of them have {245} elaborately contrived "plots." No one supposes that _Samson_ would be effective on the stage; but the modern dramatist who could make his play as exciting to the spectator as the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or _Electra_ of Sophocles, or the _Hippolytus_ or _Medea_ of Euripides, would assuredly be no ordinary playwright. This Milton did not attempt. His drama resembles rather the earlier Greek tragedies where the lyrical element is still the principal thing while the "plot" and the persons who act its story play a comparatively subordinate part. It is, at any rate in form, more like Aeschylus than Sophocles, and more like the _Persae_ and the _Prometheus_ than the Oresteian Trilogy. To the _Prometheus_, indeed, it bears particularly close and obvious resemblances; for instance, both have a heroic and defiant prisoner as their principal figure, and as their minor figures a succession of friends and enemies who visit him.

However, literary parallels and precedents of this kind are perhaps rather interesting than important. Milton's greatness is his own. Only the fact remains that, as it was of an order that need not fear to measure itself with the Greeks and as he happened to put its dramatic expression into a Greek form, he has given us something which comes far {246} nearer to producing on us the particular impression of sublimity made by the greatest Greek dramas than anything else in English or perhaps in any modern language. In English nothing worth mentioning of the kind has been attempted, till in our own day the present Poet Laureate wrote his _Prometheus the Fire-Giver_ and _Achilles in Scyros_. But, interesting and beautiful as these are, they make no pretence to rival _Samson Agonistes_. They are altogether on a smaller scale of art, of thought, of emotion.

_Samson Agonistes_ is Milton's last word and on the whole his saddest. Yet the final effect of great art is never sad. The sense of greatness transcends all pain. In the preface of _Samson_ Milton alludes to Aristotle's remark that it is the function of tragedy to effect through pity and fear a proper purgation of these emotions. Whatever be the precise meaning of that famous and disputed sentence, there is no doubt that Milton gives part of its general import truly enough when he paraphrases it "to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated." And its application extends far beyond the mere field of tragedy. So far as other kinds of poetry, or indeed any of the arts, deal with {247} subjects that arouse any of the deeper human emotions, the law of purification by a kind of delight is one by which they stand or fall. A crucifixion which is merely painful, as many primitive crucifixions are, or merely disgusting, as many later ones are, is so far a failure. It has not done the work art has to do. Shakspeare knew this well enough, though he very likely never thought about it. The final word of his great tragedies is one of sorrow overpassed and transformed. "The rest is silence;" "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep?" "I have almost forgot the taste of fears;" "My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but he was true to me!" This is the note always struck before the very end comes. And Milton, so unlike Shakspeare both as man and as artist, is no less conspicuous than he in the strict observance of this practice. All his poems, without exception, end in quietness and confidence. The beauty of the last lines of _Paradise Lost_, to which early critics were so strangely blind, is now universally celebrated--

"Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
{248}
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."

The storm and stress of day are over and are followed by the passionless quiet of evening. So in _Paradise Regained_. A modern poet would have been tempted to end at line 635, with a kind of dramatic fall of the curtain--

"on thy glorious work
Now enter, and begin to save Mankind."

Not so Milton. As after the most aweinspiring death known to literature the _Oedipus Coloneus_ closes on the note of acquiescent peace--

"Come, cease lamentation, lift it up no more;
for verily these things stand fast;"

so Milton ends the long debate of his poem, not with victory, but with silence--

"He, unobserved,
Home to his mother's house private returned."

It is indeed just the opposite in one way of the conclusion of _Paradise Lost_. The man and woman who had fallen before the Tempter had no home to return to: they must seek a new "place of rest" elsewhere in the new world that was before them. The Man who {249} had vanquished him could go back quietly to the home of his childhood. But the contrast is external, the likeness essential. For the first man as well as the second there is an appointed place of rest and a Providence to guide: the two poems can both end on the same note of that peace which follows upon the right understanding of all great experiences.

This, which is only implied in his earlier poems, is almost expressly set forth in the last of all Milton's words, the already quoted conclusion of Samson--

"His servants He, with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent."

Milton was a passionate man who lived in passionate times. Neither his passions nor those of the men of his day are of very much matter to us now. But the art in which he "spent" them, in which, that is to say, he embodied, transcended and glorified them, till through it he and we alike attain to consolation and calm, is an eternal possession not only of the English race but of the whole world.

{250}

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature that in one way or another deals with Milton is, of course, immense. His name fills more than half of one of the volumes of the great British Museum Catalogue, more than sixteen pages being devoted to the single item of _Paradise Lost_. They afford perhaps the most striking of all proofs of the universality of his genius; for they include translations into no fewer than eighteen languages, many of which possess a large choice of versions. Into more than a very small fraction of such a vast field it is obviously impossible to enter here. Only a few notes can be given, under the four headings of Poetry, Prose, Biography and Criticism.

POETRY

Of the poetry, it may be worth saying, though MSS. hardly come within the scope of a brief bibliography of this sort, that a manuscript, mainly in the handwriting of Milton himself and containing many of his early poems, is preserved in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The printed copies, of course, begin with those published in his own lifetime. They contain practically the whole of his poetry. The most important are the volume containing his early poems issued in 1645, _Paradise Lost_ which first appeared in 1667, _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_ which followed in 1671, and a re-issue in 1673, with additions, of the volume of his minor poems already printed in 1646. The first complete edition was _The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton_, issued by Jacob Tonson in 1695.

So much for the bare text. Annotation naturally soon followed. The earliest commentator was Patrick Hume who published an edition of the poems with notes on _Paradise Lost_ in 1695. But the most famous, though also least important, of Milton's early critics was the greatest of English scholars, Richard Bentley, who in 1732 issued an edition of _Paradise Lost_ in which whole passages were relegated to the margin as the spurious interpolations of an imaginary editor. Such a book is, of course, merely a curiosity connecting two {251} great names. The real beginning in the work of editing Milton as a classic should be edited was made by Thomas Newton, afterwards Bishop of Bristol, who in 1749 brought out an edition of _Paradise Lost_, "with Notes of Various Authors," and followed it in 1752 with a similar volume including _Paradise Regained_ and the minor poems. Newton's work was often reprinted, and remained the standard edition till it was superseded by that of the Rev. H. J. Todd which first appeared in 1801. The final issue of Todd is that of 1826 in six volumes which, in spite of many notes which are defective, many which are antiquated and some which are superfluous, may still claim to be the best library edition of Milton. Among the best of those which have appeared since are Thomas Keightley's, published in 1859, which contains excellent notes, and Prof. David Masson's, which is the work of the most learned and devoted of all Milton's editors. Both of these have the advantage of Todd in some respects; Keightley in acuteness and penetration, Masson in completeness of knowledge. But no single editor's work can be a perfect substitute for a _variorum_ edition like that of Todd, giving the comments and suggestions of many different minds. The most complete edition of Masson's work is the final library one in three volumes, 1890; there is also a convenient smaller issue, based on this, but omitting some of its editorial matter. It was last printed in three volumes 1893. It contains a Memoir, rather elaborate Introductions to all the poems, an Essay on Milton's English and Versification, and reduced Notes.

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 à 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.

An interesting critical discussion of the various portraits representing or alleged to represent Milton is prefixed to the Catalogue of the Exhibition held at Christ's College Cambridge during the Milton Tercentenary in 1908. It is by Dr. G. C. Williamson.

CRITICISM

A poet at once so learned and so great as Milton inevitably invited criticism. The first and most generous of his critics {253} was his great rival Dryden, who, in a few words of the preface to _The State of Innocence_, published the year after Milton's death, led the note of praise, which has been echoed ever since by speaking of _Paradise Lost_ as "one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." The next great name in the list is that of Addison, who contributed a series of papers on Milton to the _Spectator_ in 1712. Like all criticism except the work of the supreme masters, they are written too exclusively from the point of view of their own day to retain more than a small fraction of their value after two hundred years have passed. But they are of considerable historical interest and may still be read with pleasure, like everything written by Addison. A less sympathetic but finer piece of work is the critical part of Johnson's famous _Life_. It is full of crudities of every sort, such as the notorious remark that "no man could have fancied that he read _Lycidas_ with pleasure had he not known the author"; and perhaps nothing Johnson over wrote displayed more nakedly the narrow limits of his appreciation of poetry. But, in spite of all its defects, it exhibits its writer's great gifts; and its absolute and unshrinking sincerity, its half-reluctant utterance of some of the truest praise ever spoken of Milton, its profound knowledge of the way in which the human mind approaches both literature and life, will always preserve it as one of the most interesting criticisms which Milton has provoked. Johnson's friend, Thomas Warton, in his edition of the minor poems issued in 1785, led the way to an understanding of much in Milton to which Johnson and his school were entirely blind. This movement has continued ever since, and is seen in the immense influence Milton had upon the poets of the nineteenth century, especially upon Wordsworth and Keats; an influence of exactly the opposite sort to that which he exercised with such disastrous effect upon many poets of the century immediately succeeding his own. It is also seen in the finer intelligence of the critical studies of his work. These are far too many to mention here. Among the best are Hazlitt's Lecture on Shakspeare and Milton in his _Lectures on the English Poets_; Matthew Arnold's speech at the unveiling of a Milton memorial, printed in the second series of his _Essays in Criticism_; Sir Walter Raleigh's volume, _Milton_, published in 1900, and _The Epic_, by Lascelles Abercrombie, 1914, which is full of fine and suggestive criticism of Milton. _Milton's Prosody by Robert Bridges, 1901_, is the best study of the metre and scansion of Milton's later poems, especially of _Paradise Lost_.

{254}

INDEX TO PRINCIPAL PERSONS, PLACES, AND WORKS MENTIONED

Abercrombie, L., 136-7, 253
_Absalom and Achitophel_, 105
_Achilles in Scyros_, 246
Addison, Joseph, 77, 253
_Adonais_, 125
_Ad Patrem_, 39-40.
_Aeneid, The_, 150, 175, 196
Aeschylus, 245
À Kempis, Thomas, 147
Aldersgate Street, 46
_All for Love_, 243
_Allegro, L'_, 41, 70, 93, 99, 106 _et sqq._, 123, 239
Anglesey, Earl of, 72, 82
Annesley, Arthur, 72
Aquinas, Thomas, 157
_Arbuthnot, Epistle to_, 105
_Arcades_, 41, 42
_Arcadia_, 58
_Areopagitica_, 44, 49, 64
Arianism, 204
Ariosto, 153
Aristotle, 86, 200
Arnold Matthew, 164, 253
Arthurian Epic (planned), 45, 148-9
_At a Solemn Music_, 13, 42, 97, 100, 103, 147
Athens, 205-6, 209
Aubrey, John, 29, 252

Barbican, the, 54
Baroni, Leonora, 44-5
Barrow, Samuel, 82
Beeching, Rev. H. C., 251
Bentley, Richard, 250
Bibliography, 250-3
Blake, Admiral, 57
Bohn's Standard Library, 252
Bow Church, 25
Bread Street, 24, 75
Bridges, Robert, 26, 108, 222, 223, 246, 253
_Brief Lives_, 252
Buckingham, Duke of, 58
Byron, Lord, 90

Cambridge, 28, 29, 30, 31-7, 39, 42, 85, 120, 121, 124, 250, 252
Carlyle, Thomas, 262
Caroline, Queen, 77
Charles I, 11, 28, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 86
Charles II, 47, 60, 65, 71, 73, 82, 86
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 90, 111
Christina, Queen of Sweden, 60
Christ's College, Cambridge, 28, 29, 120, 121, 124, 252
Clarendon, Earl of, 73
Clarges, Sir Thomas, 72
Coleridge, S. T., 206
_Comus_, 13, 41, 42, 95, 100, 110, 112-13 _et sqq._, 128, 242
Constable, 135
Coriolanus, 85
Cowper, William, 69, 251
Criticisms, 252-3
Cromwell, Oliver, 55, 57, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 133, 139, 176

Dante, 10, 11-12, 33, 120, 153-7
_Daphnaïda_, 125
Davenant, William, 72
_Defensio Regia_, 60, 61
_Defensio Secunda_, 61
De Quincey, Thomas, 96
Diodati, Charles, 42, 124, 125
_Divina Commedia, La_, 120, 157
Divorce pamphlets, 50 _et sqq._
_Doctrina Christiana, De_, 252
Dorset, Earl of, 81
Dowland, Robert, 28
Drayton, Michael, 124
Drummond, William, 124, 135
Dryden, John, 80-2, 90, 103, 104-5, 117, 241, 253

_Eikon Basilike_, the, 57-8
_Eikonoklastes_, 58, 61
_Electra, The_, 245
Elizabeth, Queen, 85
_English Men of Letters Series_, 252
_Epic, The_, 253
Epigrams, Latin, on La Baroni, 45
_Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester_, 36, 37, 97, 103
_Epitaphium Damonis_, 124
_Essays in Criticism_, 253
Euripides, 77, 82, 245
_Excursion, The_, 136, 228-9

_Faerie Queen, The_, 115
Fairfax, General, 139, 171
_Faithful Shepherdess, The_, 115
_Fasti Oxonienses_, 252
_Faust_, 196
Fire of London, 75
Flaxman, John, 251
Fletcher, John, 107, 115
Florence, 43, 44, 46
France, 43, 46, 59

Galileo, 44, 45
_Gerusalemme Conquistata_ (Tasso), 45
Gibbons, Orlando, 28
Goethe, J. W. von, 230, 244
Gorges, Mrs., 125
Grotius, Hugo, 43

_Hamlet_, 24, 243
Hampden, John, 171
Hayley, William, 251
Hazlitt, William, 253
_Hippolytus_, 245
_History of Britain_, 78
Homer, 77, 82, 84, 89, 152, 153, 155, 171, 230
Horace, 69
Horton, 37, 40, 41, 42, 111
Hume, Patrick, 250

_Iliad, The_, 154, 155, 157, 162
_Imitation, The, of Christ_, 147-8
Indemnity, Act of, 72, 73, 74
Independent Army, The, 55, 56
Italian travels, 43-6

James I, 58
Jebb, Prof., 242-3, 244
_Job, Book of_, 21, 82
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 125, 126, 160, 162, 175, 194, 196, 206,
207, 227, 252, 253
Jones, Inigo, 16, 114
Jonson, Ben, 114, 115

Keats, John, 79, 90, 102, 110, 125, 253
Keightley, Thomas, 251
King, Edward, 42, 91, 124, 125, 127, 128-31

Landor, Walter Savage, 132
Lawes, Henry, 41, 82, 91, 116, 119
Lawrence, Henry, 69-70, 133
_Lectures on the English Poets_, 253
Lee, Sir Sidney, 252
_Letters of State_, 252
Lives of Milton, 251, 252, 253
_Lives of the Poets_, 252
London, 25, 49; fire of, 75
Long Parliament, 47, 63, 64, 171
_Lycidas_, 13, 41, 42, 90, 91, 100, 106, 123 _et sqq._

Mackail, J. W., 94-5, 206, 211
Manso, Giovanni, 45
Marini, 45
Marlowe, Christopher, 107
Marvell, Andrew, 69, 73
Massacres in Piedmont, sonnets on, 68, 133, 139, 140-1
Masson, D., 24, 52, 68, 73, 75, 251
_Medea, The_, 245
Meredith, George, 134
_Milton_, 253
_Milton's Prosody_, 224, 253
Milton's relations:--
Daughters, 11, 54, 69, 75-77, 218
Deborah, 77-8
Father, 27, 29, 37, 38-40, 42, 43, 49, 54, 75
Infant son, 76
Mother, 40
Nephews, 46, 54, 61, 70, 252
Wives--
First, _see_ Powell, Mary.
Second, 54, 69, 71
Third, 54
Mitford, John, 252
Monk, General, 72
Morley, Thomas, 28
Morrice, --, 72
Morus, 69

Napoleon, 9, 139
Newbolt, Henry, 120
Newton, Thomas, 251

_Ode on the Nativity_, 35-6, 37, 91, 93-4, 97, 98-103
_Odyssey, The_, 162, 196
_Oedipus Coloneus_, 237, 248
_Oedipus Tyrannus_, 233, 238, 243
_On Attaining the Age of Twenty-three_, sonnet, 91, 133
_On His Blindness_, sonnet, 62-3, 133
_On the Death of a Fair Infant_, 35, 97-9
_Orations_, 34-5
_Othello_, 150
Ovid, 33, 77, 124

Pamphlets, 49, 56, 69, 71
_Paradise Lost_, 13, 24, 25, 28, 44, 47, 55, 71, 78, 79,
80, 82, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 101, 104, 106, 112, 113,
118, 120, 123, 125, 137, 142 _et sqq._, 196, 197 _et sqq._,
239, 240, 247, 248, 250, 251, 253
_Paradise Regained_, 13, 24, 44, 78, 167, 196 _et sqq._,
227, 248, 250, 251
_Passion, The_, 103
Pattison, Mark, 131, 132, 197, 252
_Penseroso, Il_, 41, 70, 93, 100, 106 _et sqq._, 239
_Persae, The_, 245
Petrarch, 33, 134, 135
Phillips, Edward, 252
Pickering, William, 252
Pindar, 117
Plato, 8, 9-10, 21, 111, 156
_Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue_, 115
_Poems, editions of_, 250-1, 252
_Poetical Works, The, of Mr. John Milton_, 250
Pope, A., 85, 90, 91, 105, 222, 223
Portraits, 252
Powell family, 50, 53
Powell, Mary, 50-4, 69, 71
_Prelude, The_, 136, 228-9
_Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio_, 60, 61
_Prometheus the Fire-Giver_, 246
_Prometheus Unbound_, 102
_Prometheus Vinctus_, 21, 243, 245
Prose Works, 47 _et sqq._, 251-2
Psalms, the, 139-40; paraphrases of, 95
Purcell, Henry, 16
Pym, John, 171

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 198, 253
Ranelagh, Lady, 69
_Ready and Easy Way A, to
Establish a Free Commonwealth_, 65
_Reason, The, of Church Government_, 13, 37
Regicides, the, 55, 63, 71, 74
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 16
Rome, 44, 209
Rossetti, Dante G., 133, 135

St. Brides', Fleet Street, 46
St. Giles' Church, Cripplegate, 79
St. John, J. A., 252
St. Paul, 9, 144, 218
St. Paul's Cathedral, 89, 193
Salmasius, 59-62, 69, 218
_Samson Agonistes_, 13, 20, 24, 78, 83, 99, 199, 219 _et sqq._, 250
Sansovino's Library, Venice, 193
Saumaise, _see_ Salmasius.
Scudamore, Lord, 43
Shakspeare, W., 9, 14, 17, 32, 35, 36, 80, 85, 90, 103, 114, 118,
145, 166, 247; sonnets, 133-5, 253
Shelley, P. B., 20, 29, 50, 79, 90, 99, 102, 111, 125, 228
Shelley, Mrs. P. B., 50
Sidney, Sir Philip, 58, 98, 124, 135
Skinner, Cyriack, 62, 133
Smithfield, 72
_Song on May Morning_, 36, 107
_Sonnets_, 47, 54, 62-3, 68, 69, 91, 106, 131 _et sqq._
Sophocles, 82, 233, 245
_Spectator, The_, 253
Spenser, Edmund, 93, 97, 98, 111, 115, 116, 124, 125, 153
_State, The, of Innocence_, 240, 253
Statius, 157
Strafford, Earl of, 171
Sumner, Rev. C. R., 252
Symmons, Charles, 252

Tasso, Torquato, 45, 82, 153, 164
Tennyson, Alfred, 69, 90, 197
_Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_, 56, 58, 75
Theocritus, 124
Todd, Rev. H. J., 251
Toland, John, 251
Tonson, Jacob, 250
_Treatise of Christian Doctrine_, 252
Trinity College Library, 89, 250
Turner, J. W. M., 16
Tyburn, 71, 90

Verrall, A. W., 240
Virgil, 82, 84, 89, 91, 124, 139, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 163, 175
_Vita Nuova, La_, 120

Waller, Edmund, 104
Warton, Joseph, 118, 126, 214
Warton, Thomas, 253
Whitehall, 58, 70, 74, 219
Williamson, Dr. G. C., 252
Winchester, Marchioness of, 36
Windsor, 37
Windsor Castle, 40
Wood, Anthony à, 31, 35, 252
Wordsworth, W., 26, 34, 79, 90, 131, 133, 135, 137, 140, 141,
206, 227-30; sonnets, 137-41, 253
_Works, The, of John Milton, in Prose and Verse_, 252
Wren, Sir Christopher, 16, 89
Wright, W. Aldis, 251

Young, Thomas, 27