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Life of Milton By Samuel Johnson (Chapter 1, 2, 3)
Critical Comments
The Life of Milton has been already written in so many forms and with such minute enquiry
that I might perhaps more properly have contented myself with the addition of a few notes to
Mr
...

JOHN MILTON was by birth a gentleman, descended from the proprietors of Milton near
Thame in Oxfordshire, one of whom forfeited his estate in the times of York and Lancaster
...

[3] His grandfather John was keeper of the forest of Shotover, a zealous papist who
disinherited his son, because he had forsaken the religion of his ancestors
...
He was a man eminent for his skill in musick, many of his compositions being
still to be found; and his reputation in his profession was such that he grew rich, and retired to
an estate
...
He married a gentlewoman of the name of Caston, a Welsh
family, by whom he had two sons, John the poet, and Christopher who studied the law, and
adhered, as the law taught him, to the King's party, for which he was awhile persecuted; but
having, by his brother's interest, obtained permission to live in quiet, he supported himself so
honourably by chamber-practice, that soon after the accession of King James, he was
knighted and made a Judge; but his constitution being too weak for business, he retired before
any disreputable compliances became necessary
...

John, the poet, was born in his father's house, at the Spread-Eagle in Bread-street Dec
...
His father appears to have been very solicitous
about his education; for he was instructed at first by private tuition under the care of Thomas
Young, who was afterwards chaplain to the English merchants at Hamburgh, and of whom
we have reason to think well, since his scholar considered him as worthy of an epistolary
Elegy
...
Paul's School, under the care of Mr
...
12, 1624
...
Of the powers of the mind it is difficult to form an
estimate; many have excelled Milton in their first essays who never rose to works like
Paradise Lost
...


Many of his elegies appear to have been written in his eighteenth year, by which it appears
that he had then read the Roman authors with very nice discernment
...

Hampton, the translator of Polybius, remark, what I think is true, that Milton was the first
Englishman who, after the revival of letters, wrote Latin verses with classick elegance
...
If we produced anything worthy of notice before the elegies of Milton it
was perhaps Alabaster's Roxana
...
They had been undoubtedly
applauded, for they were such as few can perform: yet there is reason to suspect that he was
regarded in his college with no great fondness
...
It was, in the violence of controversial hostility,
objected to him that he was expelled; this he steadily denies, and it was apparently not true;
but it seems plain from his own verses to Diodati that he had incurred Rustication, a
temporary dismission into the country
...
The cause cannot now be known,
but the effect appears in his writings
...
" And in his Discourse On the likeliest Way to remove Hirelings out of
the Church, he ingeniously proposes that "the profits of the lands forfeited by the act for
superstitious uses should be applied to such academies all over the land, where languages and
arts may be taught together; so that youth may be at once brought up to a competency of
learning and an honest trade, by which means such of them as had the gift, being enabled to
support themselves (without tithes) by the latter, may, by the help of the former, become
worthy preachers
...
This is sufficiently
peevish in a man who, when he mentions his exile from the college, relates with great
luxuriance the compensation which the pleasures of the theatre afford him
...

He went to the university with a design of entering into the church, but in time altered his
mind; for he declared that whoever became a clergyman must "subscribe slave and take an
oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that could retch, he must straight perjure
himself
...
"
His unwillingness to engage in the ministry, perhaps not yet advanced to a settled resolution
of declining it, appears in a letter to one of his friends who had reproved his suspended and
dilatory life, which he seems to have imputed to an insatiable curiosity and fantastick luxury
of various knowledge
...
" When he left the university he returned to his father,
then residing at Horton in Buckinghamshire, with whom he lived five years; in which time he
is said to have read all the Greek and Latin writers
...
The fiction is derived
from Homer's Circe; but we never can refuse to any modern the liberty of borrowing from
Homer:
"— a quo ceu fonte perenni
Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis
...
King, the son
of Sir John King, secretary for Ireland in the time of Elizabeth, James, and Charles
...

Milton's acquaintance with the Italian writers may be discovered by a mixture of longer and
shorter verses, according to the rules of Tuscan poetry, and his malignity to the Church by
some lines which are interpreted as threatening its extermination
...
He began now to grow weary of the country, and had some purpose of taking
chambers in the Inns of Court, when the death of his mother set him at liberty to travel, for
which he obtained his father's consent and Sir Henry Wotton's directions, with the celebrated
precept of prudence, i pensieri stretti, ed il viso sciolto, "thoughts close, and looks loose
...
From Paris he hasted into Italy, of which he had with particular
diligence studied the language and literature; and, though he seems to have intended a very
quick perambulation of the country, staid two months at Florence; where he found his way
into the academies, and produced his compositions with such applause as appears to have
exalted him in his own opinion, and confirmed him in the hope, that "by labour and intense
study, which," says he, "I take to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of
nature," he might "leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let
it die
...
Of his praise he was very frugal, as he set its
value high; and considered his mention of a name as a security against the waste of time and
a certain preservative from oblivion
...
Carlo Dati
presented him with an encomiastick inscription, in the tumid lapidary style; and Francini
wrote him an ode, of which the first stanza is only empty noise, the rest are perhaps too
diffuse on common topicks, but the last is natural and beautiful
...
Holstenius, the keeper of the Vatican Library,

who had resided three years at Oxford, introduced him to Cardinal Barberini; and he at a
musical entertainment waited for him at the door, and led him by the hand into the assembly
...
The Italians were gainers by this literary commerce: for the encomiums with which
Milton repaid Salsilli, though not secure against a stern grammarian, turn the balance
indisputably in Milton's Favour
...
At Rome, as at Florence, he staid only two months; a time indeed
sufficient if he desired only to ramble with an explainer of its antiquities or to view palaces
and count pictures, but certainly too short for the contemplation of learning, policy, or
manners
...
Manso was enough delighted with his accomplishments
to honour him with a sorry distich, in which he commends him for everything but his
religion; and Milton in return addressed him in a Latin poem, which must have raised a high
opinion of English elegance and literature
...
He therefore came back to Rome, though the merchants
informed him of plots laid against him by the Jesuits, for the liberty of his conversations on
religion
...
He had perhaps given
some offence by visiting Galileo, then a prisoner in the Inquisition for philosophical heresy;
and at Naples he was told by Manso that, by his declarations on religious questions, he had
excluded himself from some distinctions which he should otherwise have paid him
...

From Florence he visited Lucca
...
Here he reposed as in a congenial element, and became
acquainted with John Diodati and Frederick Spanheim, two learned professors of Divinity
...
At his return he heard of the death of his friend Charles Diodati; a man whom it is
reasonable to suppose of great merit, since he was thought by Milton worthy of a poem,
intituled Epitaphium Damonis, written with the common but childish imitation of pastoral
life
...
Bride's Churchyard,
and undertook the education of John and Edward Philips, his sister's sons
...
Here he received more boys, to be boarded and instructed
...
This is the period of his life from which all his
biographers seem inclined to shrink
...
His father was alive, his allowance was not ample, and
he supplied its deficiencies by an honest and useful employment
...
Those who tell or receive these stories should consider that nobody can be taught faster
than he can learn
...

Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has
been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to
stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension
...
This was a scheme of improvement
which seems to have busied many literary projectors of that age
...
But the truth is that the knowledge of
external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great
or the frequent business of the human mind
...
Prudence and Justice are virtues and excellences of all times and
of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance
...
Physiological learning is of such rare emergence that one man may know
another half his life without being able to estimate his skill in hydrostatics or astronomy, but
his moral and prudential character immediately appears
...
Let me not be censured for this digression as pedantic or paradoxical, for if I have
Milton against me I have Socrates on my side
...
They seem to think that we are placed here to watch the growth
of plants, or the motions of the stars
...

Hotti toi en megaroisi kakon t' agathon te tetuktai
...
From this wonder-working academy I do not
know that there ever proceeded any man very eminent for knowledge; its only genuine
product, I believe, is a small History of Poetry, written in Latin by his nephew Philips, of
which perhaps none of my readers has ever heard
...
One part
of his method deserves general imitation: he was careful to instruct his scholars in religion
...
He set his pupils an example

of hard study and spare diet; only now and then he allowed himself to pass a day of festivity
and indulgence with some gay gentlemen of Gray's Inn
...
In 1641 he published a treatise of Reformation, in two books, against
the established Church; being willing to help the Puritans, who were, he says, "inferior to the
Prelates in learning
...
Of this answer a Confutation was attempted by the
learned Usher ;and to the Confutation Milton published a Reply, intitule Of Prelatical
Episcopacy, and whether it may be deduced from the Apostolical Times, by virtue of those
testimonies which are alledged to that purpose in some late treatises, one whereof goes under
the name of James, Lord Bishop of Armagh
...
At last Michaelmas
arrived; but the lady had no inclination to return to the sullen gloom of her husband's
habitation, and therefore very willingly forgot her promise
...
It could be alleged that letters miscarry; he
therefore dispatched a messenger, being by this time too angry to go himself
...
The family of the lady were Cavaliers

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