the plan of which must have been entirely unformed, within the incredibly short space of eight or nine months.

But though these grand and immortal poems were completed in 1666, Milton suffered a twelvemonth to elapse before he committed either of them to the press. It was not until the 27th of April, 1667, as the contract for the copy-right of "PARADISE LOST," with a publisher named Samuel Simmons, conclusively shows, that that chef-d'œuvre of John Milton's laborious and brilliant literary career was first published to the admiration of the ages.

Dr. Symmons remarks, "Much surprise and concern have been discovered at the small pecuniary benefit which the author was permitted to derive from this proud display of his genius, and on the slow and laborious progress with which the work won its way to public estimation. To us in the utmost cultivation of taste, and accustomed to admire the 'PARADISE LOST' without any reference to its author or to the age in which it appeared, it must certainly seem deplorable that the copy-right of such a composition should be sold for the

actual payment of five pounds, and the contingent payment, on the sale of two thousand six hundred copies, of two other equal sums. But if we would regard ourselves as placed in the middle of the seventeenth century, and immersed in all the party violence of that miserable period, we should rather be inclined to wonder at the venturous liberality of the bookseller who would give even this small sum for the poem of a man living under the heaviest frown of the times, in whom the poet had long been forgotten in the polemic, and who now tendered an experiment in verse, of which it was impossible that the purchaser should be able to appreciate the value, or should not be suspicious of the danger.

'Our shame and regret for the slow apprehension of our forefathers with respect to the merits of this illustrious production, are still more unwarranted than those which have been expressed for the parsimony of the bookseller. Before the entire revolution of two years, at a time when learning and the love of reading were far from being in their present wide diffusion through the community, thirteen hundred

copies of the 'PARADISE LOST' were absorbed into circulation. In five years after this period, a second edition of the poem was issued ; and after another interval of four years, a third was conceded to the honorable demands of the public. As we may fairly conclude that, according to the original stipulation of the bookseller, each of these impressions consisted of fifteen hundred copies, we shall find that in the space of little more than eleven years four thousand five hundred individuals of the British community were possessed of sufficient discrimination to become the purchasers of the 'PARADISE LOST.'

'Before the expiration of twenty years, the poem passed through six editions, a circumstance which abundantly proves that it was not destitute of popularity before it attained its full and final dominion over the public taste from the patronage of Somers, and still more from the criticism of Addison."*

The office of licenser of printing, which had been abolished under the wise and liberal government of Cromwell, was restored under the

* Symmons' Life, pp. 457-459.

monarchy for a limited time by an act of Parliament passed in 1662. Milton's great epic barely escaped being strangled at its birth by the malignity or the perverse sagacity of a Mr. Tomkyns, then acting as licenser. The quick nostril of this suspicious and alert official scented treason in the well-known simile of the sun, in the first book:

"As when the sun, new risen,

Looks through the horizontal misty air,

Shorn of his beams; or, from behind the moon,

In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds

On half the nation, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs."

It has been well remarked that "the press was certainly in safe hands when it was in

could dive so deeply and could discern so finely was not likely to be baffled by the most profound, or to be eluded by the most subtle and aerial mischief." Or perhaps Lord Lyttleton's acute explanation is the most correct, that "the politics of Milton at this time brought his poetry into disgrace; for it is a rule with the English, they see no good in a man whose politics they dislike."

It is not within the scope of this Life to enter into any examination of the beauties or the defects of "PARADISE LOST," or of its brother poem, "PARADISE REGAINED," which singularly enough Milton always preferred, and which several competent critics, among others Jortin and Warburton, have united to place above "PARADISE LOST," though they have ever failed to get the mass of readers to agree with them. That harvest has been so frequently and so efficiently gleaned, that but few sheaves would reward the reaper of this late day. All readers therefore who are curious in this matter, are referred directly to the poems themselves, and to the learned and acute comments of the multitudinous accomplished critics who have edited them.*

* See the Lives by Symmons, Todd, Mitford, Newton, Warton, Richardson, Cleveland, Turner, and others; also Addison's essays in the " Spectator."