MILTON 



3810 



MILTON 



ducing several excellent poems, among them 

 the Hymn on the Nativity. For some reason, 

 perhaps because of the refinement of his man- 

 ners and the sternness of his morals, Milton 

 was not popular at the university, where his 

 good looks won for him the name of "the Lady 

 of Christ's College." Before his graduation, 

 however, his unusual abilities were fully recog- 

 nized. 



Early Training. From his earliest years Mil- 

 ton showed a fine spiritual nature, and his par- 



ThnAxti 



Greece.Italy. and England did adorn: 



ITie First, inWincp of thought 



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force i/Mature cou'dno further go: 

 To make aThlnl Sit mrid the formtrTw. 



JOHN MILTON 

 From an engraving executed by George Vertue. 



ents had decided that the Church was his proper 

 calling. However, when Milton left Cambridge 

 he found himself not in sympathy with the 

 methods pursued by the clergy, and determined 

 to devote himself to literature. His father, who 

 had always shown himself most willing to pro- 

 vide for the development of the unusual pow- 

 ers which he recognized in his son, did not fail 

 him now, but made it possible for him to have 

 a six-year period of seclusion at Horton, in 

 Buckinghamshire. During this time Milton pur- 

 sued his studies most diligently and produced 

 the lyrics that are regarded as the most nearly 

 perfect of his poems. These were L 'Allegro 

 and // Penseroso, the first describing the aspects 



of life which appeal most to a cheerful man, 

 the second, those aspects in which a serious and 

 meditative man finds most charm; the masque 

 Comus, in which the beauty and irresistible 

 power of virtue are celebrated; and the elegy 

 Lycidas, written in memory of the death of his 

 college associate, Edward King. 



Period of the Commonwealth. His retire- 

 ment came to an end in 1638 when he took a 

 trip to Italy, making the acquaintance of some 

 of the most famous men of his day. He had 

 been abroad not much more than a year, how- 

 ever, when he learned of the civil struggle 

 which was threatening at home and returned 

 at once to England, settling in London. Iden- 

 tifying himself with the Puritan party, he be- 

 came the chief literary defender of the princi- 

 ples for which that party stood and which led 

 in time to the civil war. After the establish- 

 ment of the Commonwealth Milton was made 

 Latin secretary to the council of state, and in 

 this office was called upon to translate into 

 Latin foreign communications and other public 

 documents. In 1643 he married Mary Powell, 

 the seventeen-year-old daughter of a royalist 

 squire; but his severity was so displeasing to 

 the somewhat frivolous girl that she left him 

 a month after the marriage and did not return 

 to his home for two years. Their life from that 

 time on seems to have been fairly pleasant. 

 She died in 1652, leaving three daughters. His 

 domestic unhappiness led to his writing The 

 Doctrine and Discipline oj Divorce and The 

 Tetrachordon, in which he expressed the most 

 extreme and distorted views. The unfavorable 

 reception of these two caused him to write the 

 Areopagitica, a defense of the freedom of the 

 press, the best of his prose productions. Among 

 his tracts written in defense of the Puritan 

 party and the Commonwealth may be men- 

 tioned the Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (De- 

 fense of the English People), The Tenure oj 

 Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes. 



His Blindness. For several years Milton's 

 eyesight had been gradually failing, and in 1652 

 he became entirely blind, but with assistance 

 was able to keep on at his work of Latin sec- 

 retary until the Restoration in 1660. During 

 this period (1656) he married Catharine Wood- 

 cock, who died in 1658, and in whose honor one 

 of his most beautiful sonnets was written. Five 

 years later he again married, practically driven 

 to the step by the condition of affairs in his 

 home. His three daughters, so early left moth- 

 erless, had been sadly neglected, and grew up 

 uneducated, selfish and thriftless. They com- 



