's work is the final library one in three
volumes, 1890; there is also a convenient smaller issue, based on this,
but omitting some of its editorial matter. It was last printed in
three volumes 1893. It contains a Memoir, rather elaborate
Introductions to all the poems, an Essay on Milton's English and
Versification, and reduced Notes.

A text with Critical Notes by W. Aldis Wright was issued by the
Cambridge University Press in one volume, 1903. The text of the
earliest printed editions of the several poems was reprinted in 1900 in
an edition prepared for the Clarendon Press by the Rev. H. C. Beeching.

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 a
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 th