Fields; his daughters live apart from him; Dryden adapts
"Paradise Lost" as an opera; Milton's "History of Britain," 1670;
second editions of his poems, 1673, and of "Paradise Lost," 1674;
his "Treatise on Christian Doctrine"; fate of the manuscript;
Milton's mature religious opinions; his death and burial, 1674;
subsequent history of his widow and descendants; his personal
character.

INDEX 199

LIFE OF MILTON.

CHAPTER I.

John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, when Shakespeare had lately
produced "Antony and Cleopatra," when Bacon was writing his "Wisdom of
the Ancients" and Ralegh his "History of the World," when the English
Bible was hastening into print; when, nevertheless, in the opinion of
most foreigners and many natives, England was intellectually unpolished,
and her literature almost barbarous.

The preposterousness of this judgment as a whole must not blind us to
the fragment of truth which it included. England's literature was, in
many respects, very imperfect and chaotic. Her "singing masons" had
already built her "roofs of gold"; Hooker and one or two other great
prose-writers stood like towers: but the less exalted portions of the
edifice were still half hewn. Some literatures, like the Latin and the
French, rise gradually to the crest of their perfection; others, like
the Greek and the English, place themselves almost from the first on
their loftiest pinnacle, leaving vast gaps to be subsequently filled in.
Homer was not less the supreme poet because history was for him
literally an old song, because he would have lacked understanding for
Plato and relish for Aristophanes. Nor were Shakespeare and the
translators of the Bible less at the head of European literature because
they must have failed as conspicuously as Homer would have failed in all
things save those to which they had a call, which chanced to be the
greatest. Literature, however, cannot remain isolated at such altitudes,
it must expand or perish. As Homer's epic passed through Pindar and the
lyrical poets into drama history and philosophy, continually fitting
itself more and more to become an instrument in the ordinary affairs of
life, so it was needful that English lettered discourse should become
popular and pliant, a power in the State as well as in the study. The
magnitude of the change, from the time when the palm of