Page:Paradise Lost (1667).djvu/18

All in all, the First Edition of Paradise Lost was a very carefully printed book. It may rank, I think, as the best-looking book of Milton's printed in his life-time—superior both in compositor's work and in press-work to any of his pamphlets, and certainly superior to any other volume of his in verse form. He must have taken all the pains possible to a blind man to insure correctness, and he must have had scholarly friends to revise the sheets for him, and to read them aloud to him for his approval. But much must have been due to Simmons and his office readers. The punctuation and the spelling I conceive to have been mainly theirs. In neither of these matters did they adhere to the manuscript copy that had been supplied them, if I may judge by a comparison of two pages of the extant First Book of that manuscript, as they have been facsimiled by Mr. Leigh Sotheby, with the corresponding parts of the printed First Edition. In the matter of the pointing, indeed, they did not deviate very much from that copy; but they did deviate sufficiently to show that they adopted the pointing of the copy only when it suited them. The result was an empirical system of pointing throughout, as good as was then common, perhaps a little better, and not inconvenient to the reader even now, though far astray from that strict principle of logical sentence-analysis which ought now to regulate pointing universally. But in the matter of spelling they took their own way still more evidently. They conformed more to our present orthography on the whole than their copy did, but used capitals and italics according to the habits or rules of their own printing-office; and, for the rest, they exhibited that utter indifference to uniformity, that fluttering among several spellings of the same word, that capricious departure from most of our present spellings only to return to them again, which we see in all books of the period, and from which we learn conclusively that English spelling had by that time wholly lost whatever of attempted stability or of true phonetic significance it may have formerly had. One use of the present facsimile is that it will afford useful means of studying the characteristics of English spelling in the seventeenth century, and especially that phenomenon of instability, of conformity to our