It may be worth while adding that Milton's Latin and Italian poems were translated by the poet Cowper and printed in 1808 by his biographer, Hayley, in a beautiful quarto volume with designs by Flaxman. These translations are reprinted in the "Aldine" edition of Milton, 1826. Masson has also given translations of most of them in his Life of Milton and in his 1890 library edition of the Poems.
PROSE
The Prose works were, of course, mostly issued as books or pamphlets in Milton's lifetime. They were collected by Toland in three volumes folio, 1698. There are several more modern editions; as that published in 1806 in seven volumes {252} with a Life by Charles Symmons; that of Pickering, who included them in his fine eight-volume edition. The Works of John Milton in Verse and Prose, Edited by John Mitford, 1851; and that in Bohn's Standard Library, in six volumes, edited, with some notes of a somewhat controversial character, by J. A. St. John, 1848. The first volume of a new edition edited by Sir Sidney Lee appeared in 1905. One of the most curious of the prose works, the De Doctrina Christiana or Treatise of Christian Doctrine, was not known till 1823, when it was discovered in the State Paper Office. It was edited, with an English translation, by the Rev. C. R. Sumner in 1825 and is included in Bohn's edition.
BIOGRAPHY
The earliest sources for the biography of Milton, outside his own works, are the account given in the Fasti Oxonienses of Anthony à Wood, 1691, the Brief Lives of John Aubrey, and the Life prefixed by the poet's nephew, Edward Phillips, to an edition of the Letters of State, printed in 1694. A very large number of Lives of Milton have been written since, based on these materials and those collected from a few other sources. The most famous and in some ways the best, in spite of its unfairness, is that of Johnson, to be found in his Lives of the Poets. The best short modern Life is Mark Pattison's masterly, though occasionally wilful, little book in the English Men of letters Series. For the library and for students all other biographies have been superseded by the great work of David Masson, who spared no labours to investigate every smallest detail of the life of Milton and to place the whole in the setting of an elaborate history of England in Milton's day. The value of the book is somewhat impaired by the very strong Puritan and anti-Cavalier partisanship of the writer; and its style suffers from an imitation of Carlyle. But nothing can seriously detract from the immense debt every student of Milton owes to the author of this monumental biography which appeared in seven volumes, 1859-1894.
An interesting critical discussion of the various portraits representing or alleged to represent Milton is prefixed to the Catalogue of the Exhibition held at Christ's College Cambridge during the Milton Tercentenary in 1908. It is by Dr. G. C. Williamson.
CRITICISM
A poet at once so learned and so great as Milton inevitably invited criticism. The first and most generous of his critics {253} was his great rival Dryden, who, in a few words of the preface to The State of Innocence, published the year after Milton's death, led the note of praise, which has been echoed ever since by speaking of Paradise Lost as "one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." The next great name in the list is that of Addison, who contributed a series of papers on Milton to the Spectator in 1712. Like all criticism except the work of the supreme masters, they are written too exclusively from the point of view of their own day to retain more than a small fraction of their value after two hundred years have passed. But they are of considerable historical interest and may still be read with pleasure, like everything written by Addison. A less sympathetic but finer piece of work is the critical part of Johnson's famous Life. It is full of crudities of every sort, such as the notorious remark that "no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure had he not known the author"; and perhaps nothing Johnson over wrote displayed more nakedly the narrow limits of his appreciation of poetry. But, in spite of all its defects, it exhibits its writer's great gifts; and its absolute and unshrinking sincerity, its half-reluctant utterance of some of the truest praise ever spoken of Milton, its profound knowledge of the way in which the human mind approaches both literature and life, will always preserve it as one of the most interesting criticisms which Milton has provoked. Johnson's friend, Thomas Warton, in his edition of the minor poems issued in 1785, led the way to an understanding of much in Milton to which Johnson and his school were entirely blind. This movement has continued ever since, and is seen in the immense influence Milton had upon the poets of the nineteenth century, especially upon Wordsworth and Keats; an influence of exactly the opposite sort to that which he exercised with such disastrous effect upon many poets of the century immediately succeeding his own. It is also seen in the finer intelligence of the critical studies of his work. These are far too many to mention here. Among the best are Hazlitt's Lecture on Shakspeare and Milton in his Lectures on the English Poets; Matthew Arnold's speech at the unveiling of a Milton memorial, printed in the second series of his Essays in Criticism; Sir Walter Raleigh's volume, Milton, published in 1900, and The Epic, by Lascelles Abercrombie, 1914, which is full of fine and suggestive criticism of Milton. Milton's Prosody by Robert Bridges, 1901, is the best study of the metre and scansion of Milton's later poems, especially of Paradise Lost.
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