this world. On the contrary, rising from the midst of his ruined fortunes, he set himself, late with him as the hour was, and deep beyond that of night as was the darkness that had fallen upon him, to rear as it were a new life, with as high a spirit as if he had been still in the bright morning of his days. He returned, not perhaps, for all that he had lost, without some sense of release and restoration, to the beloved studies of his youth. So early as in 1661 we have him bringing out a little treatise on the elements of Latin grammar. But the work of which his mind was full was already his great epic, by which in all future time he was to be chiefly known. Aubrey states that "Paradise Lost" had been begun about two years before the Restoration, and according to the same authority it was finished about three years after that event. It was certainly completed in 1665, when it was shown by Milton to his young friend Ellwood the quaker, at Chalfont St. Giles, in Buckinghamshire, whither he had retired with his family from the great plague of that year to a house which Ellwood had taken for him. It was not published, however, till 1667, when it appeared in a small quarto, divided into ten books. There are copies of the same original edition dated 1668 and 1669. The poem first appeared as we now have it, in twelve books, in the second edition published in octavo in 1674; the alteration having been effected by the division of the original seventh and tenth books. Milton made over to his publishers the right of bringing out three successive editions of fifteen hundred copies each for £5 in hand, and further payments of the same amount on the sale of thirteen hundred copies of each edition. He himself, under this agreement, received only £10 in all; his widow would receive £5 more on the second edition after his death; and she made over the entire remainder of her right over the work for another sum of £8 after the publication of the third edition in 1678.
Shortly before leaving town for Chalfont, Milton had made the last of his many changes of residence in London by removing to a house in Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields. But he certainly began his "Paradise Regained," the subject of which was suggested to him by a remark of Ellwood's, while he was still in the country, if he did not even finish it there. It was published along with his "Samson Agonistes" in 1671. In the preceding year he had given to the world, in a quarto volume, a "History of Britain," coming down to the Norman conquest, in six books, some of them, however, written before his appointment as secretary; and also a treatise on logic in Latin, "Artis Logicæ Plenior Institutio, ad P. Rami methodum concinnata." In 1673 he brought out a quarto volume entitled "Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what best means may be used against the growth of Popery;" and in 1674, in duodecimo, a Collection of his letters to his friends in Latin and of some of his academical exercises, "Epistolarum Familiarium Liber Unus," &c. He had besides prepared for the press—bringing together, as he states, "with no cursory pains what was scattered in many volumes"—a "Brief History of Moscovia, and of other less known countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay:" it appeared in duodecimo in 1682. His Latin State-letters, written in the name of the parliament and of Oliver and Richard Cromwell, were very incorrectly published in 1676; but a new edition of them was brought out for the Camden Society by Mr. W. Douglas Hamilton in 1859, from a transcript prepared under Hilton's own direction, which had been found some years before in the State-paper Office. This collection is to be distinguished from another of "Original Letters and Papers of State addressed to Oliver Cromwell from 1649 to 1658, found among the political collections of Mr. John Milton," which was edited by Mr. John Nickolls in a thin folio in 1743. Much of his time also had for many years been employed upon two works of great labour—the one a Latin' dictionary on an extensive scale, of which "three large folios, digested into an alphabetical order," though, it would appear, without having been brought to a state in which they could be sent to the press, were left by him at his death, and afforded important assistance to the editors of the Cambridge dictionary of 1693; the other a complete system of Christian theology in Latin, the manuscript of which, extending to between seven and eight hundred quarto pages, was in 1823 discovered in the State-paper Office by the late Mr. Lemon, and which two years after was by direction of his majesty, George IV., brought out in a magnificent quarto edited by the Rev. Charles Sumner, now bishop of Winchester, under the title of "J. Miltoni Angli de Doctrina Christiana libri duo posthumi," and accompanied in another quarto volume by an English translation with notes, of which a second edition in two volumes octavo appeared in 1852-53.
Thus did the unconquerable spirit of the man keep the resolution and the promise which he had announced to the world many years before, when, in his "Reason of Church Government," 1641, he spoke of labour and study as being what he took to be his portion in this life, and, while piously acknowledging that the accomplishment of his intentions lay with a power above his own, added—"But that none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit that none shall, that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and free leisure will extend." He had by his poetry alone, if there had been nothing more, and especially by his great epic, conferred upon his country and his native language that which might be compared with what a richer and warmer sunshine would be in the natural world. Our English poetry, without his poetry, would be without half of what makes its highest glory and renown.
Milton's death took place at his house in Bunhill Fields on Sunday the 8th of November, 1674, and consequently within about a month of the completion of his sixty-sixth year. He was buried, beside his father, in his parish church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. Though poor, or at all events not rich, he had had enough for his simple wants to the last. He had for some years been a sufferer from gout. Richardson, one of his biographers, was told by an ancient Dorsetshire clergyman, a Dr. Wright, that in a small house, with, he thought, but one room on a floor, he had, "up one pair of stairs, which was hung with a rusty green, found John Milton sitting in an elbow chair, black clothes and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk stones. Among other discourse, he expressed himself to this purpose, that, was he free from the pain this gave him, his blindness would be tolerable." Richardson, whose book was published in 1734, adds from other information that he used "to sit in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house, near Bunhill Fields, without Moorgate, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air, and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts as well as quality." His three daughters seem to have taken somewhat after their mother. When near his end, he complained to his brother that they had been very undutiful to him. Their fortunes in life were not brilliant. Anne, the eldest, who was deformed, but had a handsome face, married a master-builder, and died of her first childbirth, with the infant. Mary, the second, was never married. Deborah, the youngest, who was her father's favourite, and the one that used to read to him after he became blind, married a weaver in Spitalfields, named Clarke, and had seven sons and three daughters; but all that is known of any of them is, that Caleb, one of the sons, went out to India, where he married and became parish-clerk of Madras, and that Elizabeth, the youngest of the daughters, married, like her mother, a Spitalfields weaver (his name was Foster), and had seven children, who all died early, so that in her old age, about the middle of the last century, she was found keeping a small grocer's or chandler's shop in one of the obscurest parts of London.
The original sources for Milton's biography, besides his own works, are the account given by Wood in the Athenæ Oxonienses; Aubrey's Minutes, or notes, in the Bodleian Letters (1813); and the Memoir by Edward Philips, one of his nephews, first published along with an English translation of his Letters of State (1694). Among his subsequent biographers are Toland; the two Richardsons, father and son (whose singular work is of the highest interest); Birch; Bishop Newton; Samuel Johnson (in his Lives of the Poets, 1779); Dr. Symmons, in his edition of Milton's Prose Works (1806); and the late Dr. Todd in his variorum collection of the Poetical Works, first published in 1801, again in 1809, again in 1826, and, for the fourth time, in 1842. But the great work upon this subject will undoubtedly be that of Professor Masson, entitled "The Life of John Milton, narrated in connection with the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of his time," to be completed in 3 vols.; of which, however, only the first, carrying down the narrative to his return from Italy, has yet appeared; 8vo, Cambridge, 1859.—G. L. C.
MIMNERMUS, a Greek of Ionia, flourished about 620 b.c. He was highly celebrated in antiquity as an elegiac and amatory poet, but his works are now lost. They are said to have been burnt by the Byzantine monks on account of their erotic character. Mimnermus was the first great poet who gave an amatory
