Agonistes, which appeared together in a small octavo volume in 1671, was John Starkey, of the Mitre in Fleet Street; and the publisher of the Second Edition of his minor poems, which appeared in 1673, and contained pieces not included in the First Edition of 1645, was Thomas Dring, who varied his address, within the year of the publication, from "The White Lion, next Chancery Lane End" to "The Blew Anchor next Mitre Court over against Fetter Lane." Nor, so far as I remember, had Simmons anything to do with several prose publications of Milton's during the same interval.
At length, however, Simmons did bestir himself. In 1674, the last year of Milton's life, there was published "Paradise Lost.A Poem in Twelve Books.The Author John Milton. The Second Edition Revised and Augmented by the same Author.London, Printed by S. Simmons next door to the Golden Lion in Algersgate-street, 1674." This Second Edition differed from the first in being a small octavo instead of a quarto, and in having a numbered paging in the ordinary way, and without the convenient accompaniment of a marginal numbering of the lines in tens. But the chief difference was the division of the poem in this edition into twelve books, instead of the original ten. This was done by breaking what had been Books VII. and X. in the First Edition into two books each. The prose argument was re-arranged to correspond, and, instead of being printed entire at the beginning, was distributed into pieces at the heads of the several books. Prefixed were two sets of laudatory verses on the poem, which Milton had received since its first publication, one in Latin by Samuel Barrow, a well-known physician and public man of the time, and the other in English by Milton's friend Andrew Marvell, but both signed only with the initials of the writers. The words "Revised and Augmented" on the title-page of the new edition are somewhat of an exaggeration. Having stopped Book VII. at line 640 and converted the rest of that book into Book VIII., Milton does expand what had formerly been line 641 of Book VII. into the four lines that now form the opening of Book VIII.; and, similarly, in breaking the former Book X. into
