Milton

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
The original text was not separated in chapters. For the only purpose of facilitating the navigation on the HTML version and hand-held devices chapters were added to the transcribed text. The addition of those chapters was arbitrary and did not follow any particular logic. Consequently, the Table of Contents was also added by the Transcriber.
The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been added to the public domain.
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.
Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been silently corrected.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
New York, H. M. Caldwell & Co.
1900
Table of Contents

Toward the close of the year 1823, Mr. Lemon, deputy keeper of the state papers, in the course of his researches among the presses of his office, met with a large Latin manuscript. With it were found corrected copies of the foreign despatches written by Milton, while he filled the office of Secretary, and several papers relating to the Popish Trials and the Rye-House Plot. The whole was wrapped up in an envelope, superscribed To Mr. Skinner, Merchant . On examination, the large manuscript proved to be the long lost Essay on the Doctrines of Christianity, which, according to Wood and Toland, Milton finished after the Restoration, and deposited with Cyriac Skinner. Skinner, it is well known, held the same political opinions with his illustrious friend. It is therefore probable, as Mr. Lemon conjectures, that he may have fallen under the suspicions of the government during that persecution of the Whigs which followed the dissolution of the Oxford parliament, and that, in consequence of a general seizure of his papers, this work may have been brought to the office in which it has been found. But whatever the adventures of the manuscript may have been, no doubt can exist that it is a genuine relic of the great poet.