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where the parallel passage is in a book easily accessible, I have contented myself (as in most citations of passages of the Bible) with a simple reference to the place. In not a few instances, I have added parallel or illustrative passages, more particularly from English authors, to those cited by previous editors. (3.) In some editions, intended for scholastic use, there has been a multiplication of minute philological, and especially minute etymological, notes. Even in such editions I doubt the necessity or propriety of incessant and miscellaneous annotation of the merely etymological kind. In reading Milton, or any other English author, the student ought surely to have an English dictionary beside him; and why should he be saved the wholesome trouble of looking up any ordinary word about the derivation of which he may be uncertain? Enough, at all events, in an edition like the present, if unusual words are duly noted, and also all peculiarly Miltonic grammatical forms and constructions. Care has been taken of this in the individual Notes; and an effort has been made to systematize the results in the General Essay on Milton's English and Versification. (4.) On the whole, more duty has remained for me in the way of new annotation, both hermeneutical and exegetical, than I should have anticipated. Even in the particular of the detection of wrong readings that had crept into the text, something has been gleaned by comparison of the later texts with those of Milton's own editions; while, in the larger matters of the interpretation of difficult passages and the full exposition of others in connexion with Milton's life and with his general philosophy, I found a great deal that had been missed or had been but imperfectly treated. Again and again, for example, I have had to illustrate afresh the significance of particular phrases and passages in connexion with that Miltonic cosmology, or deliberate scheme and meaning of the Poem as a whole, which has been expounded so far, and in part put into diagram, in the Introduction.

107.

NOTES TO PRELIMINARY MATTER.

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I. COMMENDATORY VERSES PREFIXED TO THE SECOND EDITION. Latin Verses by S. B., M.D.-The author, according to Toland, was Dr. Samuel Barrow, a physician. He has been identified with a Dr. Samuel Barrow who was principal physician to the army of General Monk in December 1659, when Monk was negotiating for the Restoration, and who was afterwards Judge Advocate-General of the Army, and Physician in Ordinary to Charles II. The most exact account of him I have found is in Lysons's Environs of London, Vol. II., p. 371; where, after describing a handsome monument in Fulham Church ("the work of the celebrated Grinling Gibbons, and said to have cost £300") to the memory of "Dorothy, Lady Clarke, daughter of Thomas Hylliard, Esq., and wife, first, of Sir George Clarke, Knt., Secretary at War to "Charles II., and, secondly, of Samuel Barrow, M.D., Physician to "Charles II. and Judge Advocate," Lysons continues :-" On a slab at "the foot, enclosed within iron rails, is the following inscription to the memory of Dr. Barrow, who wrote the Latin verses prefixed to Milton's "Paradise Lost: 'P. M. S. Samuelis Barrow, M.D., ex vetustâ in agro "Norfolk. prosapià, Caroli II. Medici Ordinarii, Advocati Generalis et "Judicis Martialis per annos, plus minus, viginti; quæ munera jussu regio suscepit quod Albemarlium secutus optatum Caroli reditum suis "maturavit consiliis. Uxorem duxit unicam, relictam Gul. Clarke Eq. aurat.; cujus felicissimi paris (cum sexdecim annos rarum amoris conjugialis exemplum præbuisset), quæ sola potuit, mors fregit consortium, 12 Kal. Aprilis, A.D. 1682, infracto adhuc manente superstitis amore. Ob. æt. 57.'" ("Sacred to the pious memory of "Samuel Barrow, M.D., of an ancient family in the county of Norfolk, "Physician in Ordinary to Charles II., and Advocate-General and Judge"Martial for 20 years, more or less; which offices were conferred on "him by the King's order because, as a follower of Albemarle, he helped by his counsels to bring about the desired return of Charles. "He married, for his sole wife, the widow of Sir William [George?] "Clarke, Knt., from the society of which most happy mate, after he had "for sixteen years exhibited a rare example of conjugal love, Death,

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"which alone had the power, tore him away March 21, 1681-2, the "love of the survivor remaining yet unbroken. He died aged 57.") From this it would appear that Barrow had been born about 1625, and was Milton's junior by about seventeen years. From 1671 onwards to his death in 1682 I find him mentioned in Chamberlayne's Anglia Notitia as one of the "Principal Physicians who now practise in London" and one of the Licentiates of the Royal College of Physicians. All in all, in 1674, when Barrow's verses were prefixed to the Second Edition of Paradise Lost, he must have been a man of considerable note in London and of intimate Court connexions; and it is interesting to find among Milton's greatest admirers at that date so eminent a Restorationist. Several of Milton's best-known friends, it may be noted, were physicians; and Barrow had probably the liberality of mind natural to his profession, and had moreover been an army-physician and associate of Cromwellians in the Commonwealth time. He survived Milton more than seven years; and his widow, who appears to have erected the slab to his memory in Fulham Church, survived him till 1695, when the fine monument to her described by Lysons was put up in the same church. The verses prove that Barrow must have been a diligent and intelligent reader of Paradise Lost, and are altogether creditable. As Todd has pointed out, he has taken the liberty, in the title to his verses, and in the first line, of making Paradisus feminine, whereas the Greek and Latin writers make the word masculine. In this he has been followed, however, by some of the translators of parts of the Poem into Latin. In the last four lines Barrow may have had in recollection the eulogies by Salzilli and Selvaggi prefixed to Milton's Latin Poems in the editions of 1645 and 1673.

English Verses by A. M. (i.e. Andrew Marvell).—When these verses appeared, Marvell was about fifty-four years of age, had been M.P. for Hull for about fourteen years, and was a marked man both for his political honesty and for his literary ability. The last he had recently exhibited, with much popular effect, in his celebrated satire, The Rehearsal Transprosed (1672-3), directed against Dr. Samuel Parker, who, after a youth of peculiarly strict Puritan professions, had turned renegade at the Restoration, was receiving ecclesiastical promotion on his way to the Bishopric of Oxford, and had published several works of a notoriously time-serving character. For Marvell's intimacy with Milton, and official connexion with him before this date, see Introd. to Paradise Lost, pp. 57, 58, and Introd. to the Lines Ad Christinam among the Latin Poems (Vol. II. pp. 343-352). The Rehearsal Transprosed contains proof that the intimacy had not ceased in 1672. Milton is mentioned with great respect in one passage in the second Part, in which Marvell thus addresses Parker, with reference to allusions he had made to Milton: "At his Majesty's happy return J. M. did partake, "even as you yourself did, of his regal clemency and has ever "since expiated himself in a most retired silence. It was after that, I

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"well remember it, that, being one day at his house, I there first met "you and accidentally. But then it was, when you, as I told you, "wandered up and down Moorfields, astrologizing on the duration of "his Majesty's Government, that you frequented J. M. incessantly, and "haunted his house day by day. What discourses you there used "he is too generous to remember." Marvell, we may add, promised Aubrey, after Milton's death, to write his recollections of Milton for the use of Wood in his Athenæ et Fasti Oxonienses; but he himself died in August 1678, four years after Milton, without having performed his promise. The present verses on Paradise Lost and the mention in the Rehearsal Transprosed are, therefore, the chief extant tributes by Marvell to his friendship with Milton.There is a curious and subtle connexion between the verses and the Rehearsal Transprosed. When Marvell adopted this title for his prose attack on Parker, he had in view the famous burlesque called The Rehearsal, by Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671, and published in 1672. As Buckingham had there burlesqued Dryden, under the name of Bayes, so, under the same nickname of Bayes, was Parker ridiculed in Marvell's 'transprosed' adaptation. But in these verses on Paradise Lost Marvell reverts to the original Rehearsal and to the Bayes of that burlesque―i.e. to Dryden. See the story of Dryden's application to Milton for leave to turn his Paradise Lost, or part of it, into a rhymed drama, Introd. pp. 14, 15; and read lines 17-30 and lines 45-54 of Marvell's present piece in connexion with the details of that story. The full significance of Marvell's reference to Dryden and his rhyming will then be felt, and it will be seen that Milton must have talked with Marvell about Dryden's odd proposal, and reported to Marvell his answer of grim civility: "Yes, Mr. Dryden, you may tag my verses if you please."- -Dryden, it is to be remembered, had been, since the Restoration, the champion of Rhyme, and especially of the Rhymed Drama. In his Essay on Dramatic Poetry (1663) he had discussed the question, and given the preference to Rhyme; and his practice had in the main corresponded. But, at the time with which we are now concerned, he was being beaten on the question. The popular taste had revolted from his efforts to establish a Drama of Rhymed Declamation in England, and was calling loudly for a return to the Elizabethan Blank Verse for lofty subjects and Prose for others. Thus in the Epilogue to Buckingham's Rehearsal :—

"Wherefore, for ours, and for the Kingdom's peace,
May this prodigious way of writing cease!
Let's have, at least once in our lives, a time
When we may hear some Reason, not all Rhyme.
We have for ten years felt its influence;

Pray let this prove a year of Prose and Sense."

Now, Milton's Paradise Lost, published in 1667, and introducing Blank Verse for the first time on a large scale into English Poetry for

epic or narrative purposes, must have been an innovation discomposing to Dryden, as helping to turn the scale against his own advocacy of Rhyme. Hence perhaps, with all his admiration of Milton, his proposal to try the effects of a Rhymed Drama founded on Paradise Lost. Hence, on the other hand, Marvell's contemptuous notice of that experiment. For, though all Marvell's own poetical attempts had been in rhyme, he here confesses himself a convert to Milton's Paradise Lost, not only in respect of the author's success with so stupendous a subject (the possibility of which he had at first doubted), but also in respect of the new metrical form adopted. Blank Verse, he now admitted, was the proper kind of verse for so sublime a subject. Let Bayes and the rest of the town-poets write their verses, spelling words all the while in search of rhymes, and, like pack-horses, unable to get on unless they heard the tinkle of the bells attached to their harness! Milton was not to be bound by such mechanism, and might despise such aid! So Marvell would assert; and yet in asserting it, such was the force of custom, he could not help showing his own slavery to Rhyme! Observe the lines

"I too, transported by the mode, offend,

And, while I meant to praise thee, must commend."

They may be explained thus:-" In this kind of verse, which I am now writing, and which is Dryden's favourite kind, you see how the necessity of finding a rhyme to offend forces me to end the next line with commend, though it is a weaker and less natural word than the one that might otherwise have suggested itself. Generalize this one instance sufficiently, and the superiority of Milton's unrhymed verse for all great purposes will be apparent."

II. AUTHOR'S PREFACE CONCERNING THE VERSE.

This Preface, it is to be remembered, had not been originally prefixed to the First Edition, but, with the Prose Argument, was an afterthought in 1668, for insertion into the copies of the First Edition that still remained to be bound. (See Introd. pp. 8, 9.) Many readers had "desired" a Prose Argument as a directory to the Poem; and the publisher Simmons, having applied to Milton for such an Argument, had obtained from him also "a reason of that which stumbled many others, why the Poem rimes not." Had Dryden been among those who were stumbled? Milton's protest for Blank Verse was, at all events, dead against the teachings and practice of Dryden, and is perhaps the most thoroughgoing declaration on that side of the question yet to be found in the language. It calls Rhyme "the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre," and speaks of it as "a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no musical delight," consisting

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