Book Description

Excerpt from Minor Poems The character of John Milton presents an unusual combination of two elements seldom found together in the same person: a Renaissance passion for beauty in both nature and art, and a Puritan zeal for reform in matters of morals and religion. His career, too, is an equally singular alternation of the contemplative with the active life. Until he was well over thirty, circumstances joined to favor him in maintaining that studious ease which, in his case, fostered a native inclination towards scholarship and poetry. Living as a boy almost "within the spacious times of great Elizabeth," he could hardly fail to be stimulated by the men and the atmosphere around him. Shakespeare himself was alive until 1616, when Milton was eight years old; and sturdy Ben Jonson must often have walked with his "sons" past the Milton home on his way to the Mermaid Tavern in the same street. In school and university there was little to disturb the smooth current of Milton's daily routine, and for nearly six years after he left Cambridge he remained quietly in the country, training himself seriously in writing, preparing consciously for the lofty poetic mission to which he had already dedicated himself. During this first period he seems like an untroubled child of the Renaissance, a genuine Elizabethan, belated, it is true, but nevertheless with much of the free and joyous spirit of that splendid age. Then the change came. The breach between Puritan and Cavalier, imminent since the accession of Charles I in 1625, gradually widened, and Milton, idealist in religion and government as he had shown himself to be in art, returned from Italy to cast in his fortunes with the Parliamentarians. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.