L'ALLEGRO, IL PENSEROSO, ARCADES, LYCIDAS, SONNETS ETC. WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY W. BELL, M.A. PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AND LOGIC, GOVERNMENT COLLEGE, LAHORE London MACMILLAN AND CO AND NEW YORK 1889 [All rights reserved] GENERAL INTRODUCTION. On THIS selection comprises, with only one notable exception (Comus *), all the English poetry that Milton wrote between 1630 and 1660-a period of thirty years. the former date he had already been five years at the University of Cambridge, and on the latter he finally escaped from the political troubles that had beset him for nearly twenty years and set to work in earnest upon his great epic, Paradise Lost. If we divide his life into four periods, as detailed below, we find that the poems in this volume belong to the second and third of these, and, if we exclude the Sonnets, entirely to the second. We have to deal, therefore, with the products of Milton's earlier muse; his later or epic muse belongs exclusively to the fourth and last period of his life. I. Pre-literary period, 1608-25. II. Period of College and Country life and Travel, 1625-40. III. Controversial period, 1640-60. IV. Period of Great Poems, 1660-74. I. John Milton was born on December 9th, 1608, about eight years before the death of Shakespeare. His father, a prosperous London scrivener, was a pious and cultured man, and chose as his son's first tutor Thomas Young, a Puritan divine. In his twelfth year * A separate volume of this series. vii |