with the widow was not retrospective only, but prospective and for ever. He owed her £5 for the Second Edition; but the Third Edition had been already out for some time, and for that edition, when 1300 copies of it had been sold, he would owe her, by the original agreement, another £5. As she was then about to remove from London to Nantwich, and anxious therefore to wind up all her concerns in London, it was convenient for her to compound for the second £5, not yet due, by accepting £3 instead; and hence her complete acquittance to Simmons for £8 in one sum. There is indeed a subsequent document, dated April 29, 1681, probably just before her actual departure for Nantwich, in which, in the most formal manner, and with extraordinary surplus of legal phraseology, she grants Simmons a renewed release from all obligations to her in the matter of Paradise Lost, and from all actions or demands in her interest, or that of her heirs, executors, and administrators, on that account, "from the beginning of the world unto the date of these presents." Perhaps she regretted having let Simmons have the £2 off, and he feared having farther trouble from her. In any case, by the original agreement with Milton, Simmons was to be absolute proprietor of the copyright after the sale of the then current or third edition. The stipulation of Milton, for himself, his heirs, and assigns, had been for £20 only in all, the first 5 paid down, and the rest to come in instalments of £5 for each of the first three editions when sold out, at the rate of 1300 copies for each edition; after which the book was to be Simmons's own. Milton had received £10 of the total price in his life-time; and the payment of the £8 to the widow in 1680 discharged the rest. The composition with the widow, reducing the stipulated £20 for the entire copyright of Paradise Lost to an actual payment of £18, was as if nowadays £70 had been the sum agreed for and it had been reduced to £63 by composition. The balance of £8 which the widow took with her to Nantwich was worth what £28 would be worth now1. 1 Gentleman's Magazine for July 1822; and Introduction to Paradise Lost in Cambridge Edition of Milton's Poems (1874), I. 15-17. For ten years from 1678 there was no new edition of Paradise Lost. There are various traces, however, of the growth of the interest in Milton's poetry through those ten years. In 1680 there was a second edition of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes together, published by the same John Starkey who had published the first. Whether the widow derived any benefit from this re-issue does not appear; nor is it known what copyright Milton had retained in these poems, or whether any. In the same year 1680, or in 1681, the printer Simmons, having just acquired the entire copyright of Paradise Lost, and either thinking he had made as much by his three editions of the book as he was likely to make, or else having reasons for converting his property in it into cash, sold the future copyright for £25 to Brabazon Aylmer of the Three Pigeons in Cornhill, the bookseller who had published the little volume of Milton's Epistolæ Familiares and Prolusiones Oratoria in 1674 and his translation of the Declaration of the Election of John III of Poland in the same year. His acquisition of Paradise Lost may have been agreeable to him on personal grounds; and the book might have fared well in his hands had it remained there. But there was a young fellow then in London whose enterprise in bookselling and publishing was to beat all slower tradesmen out of the field, and who was already on the alert for all promising speculations. This was Jacob Tonson, the third man after Humphrey Moseley and Henry Herringman in the true apostolical succession of London publishers. He had begun business in 1677, when hardly one-and-twenty years of age, at the sign of the Judge's Head near the Fleet Street end of Chancery Lane. He was an ungainly enough figure, if we may trust Dryden's wicked description of him twenty years afterwards, "With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair, But he had an able head on his shoulders, and a faculty of money-making, for authors and himself, of which Dryden, thralled to Herringman hitherto, had already taken good advantage. On the 17th of August 1683, it appears, this Jacob Tonson bought from Brabazon Aylmer one half of the copyright in Paradise Lost, at a higher price than Aylmer had given to Simmons for the whole three years before. Dryden may have advised him in the transaction; but there was no immediate result. The other half of the copyright remained with Aylmer, or went elsewhither; and there was silence deep as death for a time1. Not among readers and critics. With the remaining copies of the third edition of Paradise Lost, the copies of the second edition of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, and the copies of the collected Minor Poems in the edition of 1673, the interest in Milton was going about like a gad-fly. Mentions of Milton and his poetry are frequent in books between 1678 and 1688, and some of them have been collected. Todd refers to an examination of the blank verse of Paradise Lost and a tribute to the language of the same in a Paraphrase upon Canticles, by Samuel Woodford, D.D., published in 1679, and to a curious commendation of Milton in religious poems by a Samuel Slater, published in the same year. He also quotes from the preface to an anonymous translation in 1680 of a poem of the Dutch Jacob Cats, in which the translator hopes his readers will not reject the counsel of the book, "though not sung by a Cowley or a Milton"; and he adds a quotation from a poetical tribute to Milton in the same year by an F. C., whom he supposes to have been Francis Cradock, formerly one of the Rota Club. It begins "O thou, the wonder of the present age, In 1682 appeared the first edition of the Essay on Poetry by Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards Duke of Bucking 1 Introduction to Paradise Lost in Cambridge Milton, I. 17-18, with references there to Newton and Nichols; Christie's Globe edition of Dryden, p. 653, and prefixed Memoir, p. xli. hamshire, ending with the delineation of that impossible poet who "Must above Cowley, nay, and Milton too, prevail,— Succeed where great Torquato and our greater Spenser fail." In an anonymous book of 1683, The Situation of Paradise, Milton, Todd says, is "the admired theme," and is quoted "with taste and judgment"; and in the second edition of the metrical Essay on Translated Verse by the Earl of Roscommon, who died in 1684, there is the strange compliment to Milton of the insertion amid the rhyming couplets of twenty seven lines of blank verse, ostentatiously adapted from the 6th book of Paradise Lost and offered as a specimen of the true sublime. By this time not only had Milton's doctrine of blank verse gained adherents and his example in that respect been followed, but, possibly on account of the drift of affairs to the Revolution of 1688, the recollection of his political offences had become weaker. It is still rank indeed in the article on him in the Lives of the most famous English Poets published in 1687 by a William Winstanley. He had been a barber, had pillaged Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum for the purposes of his book, and dismisses Milton thus, in words stolen from Phillips, with an addition of his own:- "JOHN MILTON was "one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place "amongst the principal of our English poets, having written "two heroic poems and a tragedy, namely Paradice Lost, "Paradice Regain'd, and Sampson Agonista; but his fame is "gone out like a candle in a snuff, and his memory will "always stink, which might have ever lived in honourable repute, had he not been a notorious traytor and most "impiously and villanously bely'd that blessed martyr King "Charles the First." Winstanley was but a straw against the stream. There had already been a German translation of Paradise Lost, by an Ernst Gottlieb vom Berge, published at Zerbst in 1682 at the translator's own expense; even before that year Milton's old friend Theodore Haak, the original founder of that London club of which the Royal Society was a development, and now an aged Fellow of that Society, had translated half the poem on his own account into German blank verse, with much approbation from the continental friends to whom he had sent specimens of it in manuscript; and a Latin translation of the first book of the poem, done by several hands, had been published in London in 1686 by Thomas Dring, the proprietor of the current edition of Milton's Minor Poems. Then, as we near the Revolution of 1688, the supremacy of Milton seems an article of universal belief. From a poem in a collection by various hands published that year in honour of Waller, who had died the year before, Todd quotes the lines: "Speak of adventurous deeds in such a strain and he quotes also from a tribute to Milton entitled “ A propitiatory sacrifice to the ghost of J. M. by way of Pastoral, in a dialogue between Thyrsis and Corydon," which appeared in 1689 in a volume of pieces "by a late scholar of Eton," but bears marks of having been written soon after Milton's death. Milton in his blindness is compared to Homer and Tiresias, and is apostrophised thus: "Daphnis, the great reformer of our isle! Taught us how to believe and how to write 1." Into this state of sentiment about Milton, fully formed fourteen years after his death, came the sumptuous folio volume entitled Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books. The Authour John Milton. The Fourth Edition, Adorn'd with sculptures. London, Printed by Miles Flesher, for Jacob Tonson, at the Judge's Head in Chancery Lane near Fleet-street. MDCLXXXVIII.” Tonson must have been engaged in the preparation of this volume for some time, and must have bestowed much pains upon it. Not only is the size folio and the type large and open; but 1 Todd's Milton (edit. 1852), T. 124— 127, with his bibliographical list at the end of Vol. IV.; Bohn's Lowndes, Art. Milton; Aubrey's Milton Notes; Win stanley's Lives: Wood's Ath IV. 950 and 763; Godwin's Phillipses, 144; Johnson's Lives of Roscommon and Sheffield, with Cunningham's Notes. |