In 1674 the second edition of Paradise Lost, in 12 books in stead of To, appeared, and his Epistolae Familiares, together with his Cambridge Prolusiones. On Nov. 8, , 1674, Milton died, in his house in Bunhill, of "gout struck in," at the age of 65 years and 1 i months. He was buried, the next Thursday, in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, beside his father; a considerable con course attending the funeral.
Posthumous Publications.—Of masses of manuscript that had been left by Milton, some portions saw the light posthum ously. Prevented in the last year of his life from publishing his Latin State Letters in the same volume with his Latin Familiar Epistles, he had committed the charge of the State Letters, pre pared for the press, together with the completed manuscript of his Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrine, to a young Cambridge scholar, Daniel Skinner, who had been among the last of his amanuenses, and had, in fact, been employed by him especially in copying out and arranging those two important mss. Negotiations were on foot, after Milton's death, between this Daniel Skinner and the Amsterdam printer, Daniel Elzevir, for the publication of both mss., when the English government interfered, and the mss. were sent back by Elzevir, and thrown aside, as dangerous rubbish, in a cupboard in the State Paper Office. Meanwhile, in 1676, a London bookseller, named Pitt, who had somehow got into his possession a less perfect, but still tolerably complete, copy of the State Letters, had brought out a surreptitious edition of under the title Literae pseudo-senatus anglicani, . . . nomine et jussu conscriptae a Joanne Miltono. No other posthumous publications of Milton's appeared till 1681, when another bookseller put forth a slight tract entitled Mr. John Mil ton's Character of the Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines, in 1641, consisting of a page or two, of rather dubious authen ticity, said to have been withheld from his History of Britain in the edition of 167o. In 1682 appeared A Brief History of Mos covia, and of other less-known Countries lying Eastward of Rus sia as far as Cathay . . . undoubtedly Milton's, and a specimen of those prose compilations with which he sometimes occupied his leisure. Of the fate of his collections for a new Latin Dic tionary, which had swelled to three folio volumes of ms., all that is known is that, after having been used by Edward Phillips for his Enchiridion and Speculum, they came into the hands of a com mittee of Cambridge scholars, and were used for that Latin dic tionary of 1693, called The Cambridge Dictionary, on which Ainsworth's Dictionary was based. In 1698 there was published in three folio volumes, under the editorship of John Toland, the first collective edition of Milton's prose works, professing to have been printed at Amsterdam, though really printed in London. A very interesting folio volume, published in 1743 by "John Nickolls, junior," under the title of Original Letters and Papers of State addressed to Oliver Cromwell, consists of a number of intimate Cromwellian documents that had somehow come into Milton's possession immediately after Cromwell's death, and were left by him confidentially to the Quaker Ellwood. Finally, a chance search in the London State Paper Office in 1823 having discovered the long-lost parcel containing the mss. of Milton's
Latin State Letters and his Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrine, as these had been sent back from Amsterdam a hundred and fifty years before, the Treatise of Christian Doctrine was, by the com mand of George IV., edited and published in 1825 by the Rev.
C. R. Sumner, under the title of Joannis Miltoni Angli de doc trina Christiana libri duo posthumi. An English translation, by the editor, was published in the same year. Those state papers of Milton which had not been already printed were edited by W.
D. Hamilton for the Camden Society, in 1859.
Milton as Writer.—Milton's literary life divides into three almost mechanically distinct periods: (I) the time of his youth and minor poems, (2) his middle twenty years of prose polemics, and (3) the time of his later Muse and greater poems.
Had Milton died in 1640, when he was in his thirty-second year, and had his literary remains been then collected, he would have been remembered as one of the best Latinists of his genera tion and one of the most exquisite of minor English poets. In the latter character, more particularly, he would have taken his place as one of that interesting group or series of English poets, corn ing in the next forty years after Spenser, who, because they all acknowledged a filial relationship to Spenser, may be called collec tively the Spenserians. In this group Milton would have been entitled, by the small collection of pieces he had left, and which would have included his Ode on the Nativity, his L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, his Comus and his Lycidas, to recognition as in dubitably the very highest and finest. There was in him that peculiar Spenserian something which might be regarded as the poetic faculty in its essence, with a closeness and perfection of verbal finish not to be found in the other Spenserians, or even in the master himself. But owning discipleship to Spenser as the author did, he was a Spenserian with a difference belonging to his own constitution—which prophesied the passage of Eng lish poetry out of the Spenserian into a kind that might be called the Miltonic. This Miltonic something, distinguishing the new poet from other Spenserians, was more than mere perfection of literary finish. It consisted in an avowed consciousness already of the os magna soniturum, "the mouth formed for great utter ances," that consciousness resting on a peculiar substratum of personal character that had occasioned a new theory of literature. "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well here after on laudable things ought himself to be a true poem" was Milton's own memorable expression afterwards of the principle that had taken possession of him from his earliest days; and this principle of moral manliness as the true foundation of high literary effort, of the inextricable identity of all literary produc tions in kind, and their coequality in worth, with the personality in which they have their origin, might have been detected, in more or less definite shape, in all or most of the minor poems. It is a specific form of that general Platonic doctrine of the in vincibility of virtue which runs through his Comus.