beginning, are prefixed to the Books to which they severally apply. These changes, we are distinctly informed,* were made by Milton himself. To smooth over the breaks made by the division of the two Books, the three new lines were added which now form the beginning of Book VIII. and the five that begin Book XII.; and there are one or two other slight additions or alterations, also dictated by Milton, in the course of the text, besides a few verbal variations, such as would arise in reprinting. Account will be taken of such variations in our Notes. On the whole, the Second Edition, though very correct, is not so nice-looking a book as the First.

As Milton's death occurred in the year in which the second edition was published, he cannot himself have witnessed any greater "success" for his poem than might be measured by the circulation of some 1,500, or at most some 1,800, copies. But that the poem had by that time made an extraordinary impression, and recalled attention to its author as indubitably one of the greatest poets of England or of all time, is proved not only by the language employed by Barrow and Marvel in their commendatory verses-language which, with all allowance for the custom of eulogy in such cases, is startling yet for its vastness—but also by other testimonies. "Jo: Dreyden, Esq., Poet Laureate, who very "much admired him," says Aubrey, "went to him to have leave "to putt his Paradise Lost into a drama in rhyme. Mr. Milton "received him civilly, and told him he would give him leave to tagge his verses." + Accordingly, some time before Milton's death, his friends were scandalized and the whole town amused, by hearing of that extraordinary production of Dryden which he professed to have founded on Milton's epic, and which he entitled The State of Innocence, or the Fall of Man: an Opera. That the bad taste of this performance of the Laureate did not escape censure at the time might easily be proved; ‡ but that his inten

* Memoir of Milton by his nephew Phillips, 1694. Phillips's words respecting the Second Edition are: "amended enlarg'd and differently dispos'd as to the number of books, by his own hand, that is by his own appointment."

+ Aubrey's Lives, written about 1680, published 1813: Art. "Milton." "Tags" were bits of silver, or other metal, at the ends of ribbons used in dress.

There is a sneering allusion to Dryden, for the liberty he had taken with Milton's Paradise Lost, in Andrew Marvel's commendatory verses prefixed to the second edition of the poem. See particularly lines 11--16 and 45-50.

tion was in the highest degree respectful to Milton appears from the "Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence," which he prefixed to the opera, when he published it in 1674, just after Milton's death. He there tells us that the opera had been "wholly written" in one month's time, and that he had been compelled to publish it in self-defence," many hundred copies of it," and those full of errors, having been already "dispersed abroad" without his consent. He then adds these words: "I cannot, without injury to "the deceased author of Paradise Lost, but acknowledge that this "poem has received its entire foundation, part of the design, and 66 many of the ornaments, from him. What I have borrowed will "be so easily discerned [distinguished] from my mean productions "that I shall not need to point the reader to the places; and "truly I should be sorry, for my own sake, that any one should "take the pains to compare them together-the original being "undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." Such an attestation, by a man in the position of Poet Laureate, may be taken as evidence of what was then a formed opinion in the English literary world. In short, before Milton's death, such was the admiration of his Paradise Lost that the publisher Simmons may have had a reasonable pride in putting his own name only on the title-page of the second edition, and in advertising his own shop, "next door to the Golden Lion in Aldersgate Street,” as the place where copies were to be bought.

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Four years sufficed to exhaust the Second Edition; and in 1678 a Third Edition appeared, with this title :

Paradise Lost. | A | Poem | in | Twelve Books. | The Author | John Milton. | The Third Edition. | Revised and Augmented by the same Author. | London, | Printed by S. Simmons next door to the | Golden Lion in Aldersgate Street, 1678. |

This edition is in small octavo, and in other respects on the model of its predecessor, save that there are a few verbal variations, due to the printer, and that, by the getting of a line or two more into the page in some parts of the third edition, there are two pages fewer in all in that edition than in the second, i. e. 331 pages instead of 333. This Third Edition is of no independent value--the Second Edition being the last that could have been

supervised by Milton himself. From the appearance of a third edition in 1678, however, it is to be inferred that by that time the second of those impressions of 1,300 copies which had to be accounted for to the author was sold off (implying perhaps a total circulation up to that time of 3,000 copies), and that, consequently, had the author been alive, he would have been then entitled to his third sum of Five Pounds, as by the agreement. Milton being dead, the sum was due to his widow. Whether, however, on account of disputes which existed between the widow and Milton's three daughters by his first wife as to the inheritance of his property (disputes which were the subject of a lawsuit in 1674-5), or for other reasons, Simmons was in no hurry to pay the third Five Pounds. It was not till the end of 1680 that he settled with the widow, and then in a manner of which the following receipt given by her is a record :

I do hereby acknowledge to have received of Samuel Symonds, Cittizen and Stationer of London, the Sum of Eight pounds: which is in full payment for all my right, Title, or Interest, which I have, or ever had in the Coppy of a Poem Intitled Paradise Lost in Twelve Bookes in 8vo. By John Milton Gent.: my late husband. Wittness my hand this 21st day of December, 1680.

Elizabeth milión.

Witness, William Yapp.

Ann Yapp.

That is to say, Simmons, owing the widow Five Pounds, due since 1678, and in prospect of soon owing her other Five Pounds on the current impression of the Poem, preferred, or consented, to compound for the Ten by a payment of Eight in December 1680. The total sum which he could in any case have been called upon to pay for Paradise Lost by his original agreement was 20%.,

*

Copy, with facsimile of signature, in the Gentleman's Magazine for July 1822, and facsimile of the whole in Mr. S. Leigh Sotheby's Ramblings, Plate XVIII. The original is, or lately was, in the possession of Lady Cullum; and it was the late Mr. Dawson Turner's copy of this original that was put up for sale, in June, 1859, along with his similar copy of Milton's receipt for the second Five Pounds, under the false impression that they were the originals (see antè, p. 12, note).

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If he thus got

and the total sum which he did pay was 187. off 27., it was probably to oblige the widow, who may have been anxious to realize all she could of her late husband's property at once before leaving town. There is, indeed, a subsequent document from which it would appear as if Simmons feared having farther trouble from the widow. It is a document, dated April 29, 1681, by which she formally releases Samuel Simmons, his heirs, executors, and administrators for ever, from "all and all manner of action and actions, cause and causes of action, suits, "bills, bonds, writings obligatory, debts, dues, duties, accounts, "sum and sums of money, judgments, executions, extents, quarrels "either in law or equity, controversies and demands, and all and "every other matter, cause, and thing whatsoever, which against "the said Samuel Simmons" she ever had, or which she, her heirs, executors, or administrators should or might have "by reason or means of any matter, cause, or thing whatsoever, from the "beginning of the world unto the day of these presents." About the most comprehensive release possible!

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From 1680, accordingly, neither Milton's widow, nor his daughters, had any share or interest whatever in the sale of Paradise Lost. The property remained solely with the printer Simmons. Nor did he keep it long. Even before his last transactions with the widow, he had arranged to transfer his entire interest in the poem to another bookseller, Brabazon Aylmer, for twenty-five pounds--a sum which shows that, on the whole, he cannot have been consciously unfair in his dealings with the widow. Brabazon Aylmer, whose shop was at the sign of the Three Pigeons in Cornhill, was a well-known bookseller, in a brisker way of business than Simmons had been able to pretend to. He is described by a contemporary as "a very just and religious man," "nicely exact in all his accounts," "well acquainted with the mysteries of his trade,” and as having been "as often engaged in very useful designs as any other that can be named through the whole trade." He was the publisher of Dr. Isaac Barrow's works, and of some of Tillotson's. What is more interesting to us here, he had had dealings with Milton in his life-time; for he had

*

Copy in Gentleman's Mag. for July, 1822, from the original, then in possession of Sir Thomas Gery Cullum, Bart.

VOL. I.

published, in July, 1674, the little volume of Milton's Epistolæ Familiares and Prolusiones Oratoria-to which volume there is prefixed a short preface in Aylmer's own name, explaining certain particulars in his concern with the volume. His purchase of the copyright of Paradise Lost from Simmons in 1680 may be taken as proving his continued interest in the man with whom he had been thus slightly in contact before. But, after all, Aylmer's connexion with Paradise Lost was transitory. Active and accurate man of business as he was, there was in London at least one bookseller of a more active and speculative turn still, and more likely to discern what might be made commercially of a book. like Paradise Lost. This was the famous Jacob Tonson, the first of the three booksellers of that name, and the founder of the eminent firm. He was then a very young man, having commenced business in 1677, when he was scarcely twenty-one years of age, at the sign of the Judge's Head, near the Fleet Street end of Chancery Lane. Young as he was, and roughmannered even to rudeness, he had already some of those notions of business by the carrying out of which he was to make a new era in the book-trade. He had already begun those relations with Dryden which were to grow closer during the rest of Dryden's life, and through which the veteran poet, if he did not get all the money that he needed, or thought himself entitled to, got more than he would probably have got had. his dealings been with any one else. What made Tonson think of Paradise Lost as a book worth looking after, we do not precisely know. Certain it is that, on the 17th of August, 1683, he bought half of the copyright of it from Brabazon Aylmer, at a higher price than Aylmer had paid for it, and that about seven years later, on the 24th of March, 1690 (query 1690-91), he bought the other half.*

* The authorities for the statements in this paragraph are various. The transfer of the book from Simmons to Aylmer, and then from Aylmer to Tonson, is vouched for by Bishop Newton (Life of Milton, 1749), who may have had the information from the then living members of the Tonson firm, his own publishers. For the other facts, see the title-page and preface to Milton's Epistola Familiares, Edit. 1674; Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, i. pp. 292, 293; and Dunton's Anecdotes, quoted in Nichols, iii. 627. The month of the publication of the Epistola Familiares by Aylmer I have from the Stationers' Registers.