urs of wine; ... nor to be obtained by the
invocation of dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer
to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge,
and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch
and purify the lips of whom he pleases; to this must be added industrious
and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and
generous arts and affairs; till which in some measure be compassed, at
mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as
many as are not loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges
that I can give them." And when he came to redeem his pledge, in the very
opening lines of his epic, trusting to the same inspiration, he
challenges the supremacy of the ancients by his

adventrous song
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

"This man cuts us all out, and the Ancients too," Dryden is reported to
have said. But this man intended to do no less, and formally announced
his intention. It is impossible to outface Milton, or to abash him with
praise. His most enthusiastic eulogists are compelled merely to echo the
remarks of his earliest and greatest critic, himself. Yet with all this,
none of the later critics, not the most cavalier nor the dullest, has
dared to call him vain. His estimate of himself, offered as simple fact,
has been accepted in the same spirit, and one abyss of ineptitude still
yawns for the heroic folly, or the clownish courage, of the New
Criticism.

CHAPTER I
JOHN MILTON

John Milton, the son of a middle-aged scrivener, was born on Friday,
December the 9th, 1608, at his father's house in Bread Street, Cheapside;
and died on Sunday, November the 8th, 1674, in a small house, with but
one room on a floor, in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, London. Of his
father the records that remain show him to have been a convinced member
of the Puritan party in the Church, a man of liberal culture and
intelligence, a lover of music (which taste Milton inherited), a wise and
generous friend to the son who became a poet. We owe it to his wisdom
rather than to his prosperity that Milton was allowed to live at home
without any ostensible profession until he was thirty years of age and
more.

For the first sixteen years of his life Milton was educated partly at
home, by a Pre