CONTENTS OF VOLUME II. INTRODUCTION TO PARADISE LOST :— I. Earliest Editions of the Poem II. Origin of the Poem and History of its Com- INTRODUCTION TO PARADISE LOST. I. EARLIEST EDITIONS OF THE POEM. It was possibly just before the Great Fire of London in September 1666, and it certainly cannot have been very long after that event, when Milton, then residing in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, sent the manuscript of his Paradise Lost to receive the official licence necessary for its publication. The duty of licensing such books was then vested by law in the Archbishop of Canterbury, who performed it through his chaplains. The Archbishop of Canterbury at that time (1663-1667) was Dr. Gilbert Sheldon; and the chaplain to whom it fell to examine the manuscript of Paradise Lost was the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, M. A. of Oxford, then incumbent of St. Mary Aldermary, London, and afterwards Rector of Lambeth and D.D. He was the Archbishop's domestic chaplain, and a very great favourite of his, -quite a young man, but already the author of one or two books or pamphlets. The nature of his opinions may be guessed from the fact that his first publication, printed in the year of the Restoration, had been entitled "The Rebel's Plea Examined; or, Mr. Baxter's Judgment concerning the Late War." A subsequent publication of his, penned not long after he had examined Paradise Lost, was entitled "The Inconveniences of Toleration "; and, when he died in 1675, still young, he was described on his tombstone as having been "Ecclesia Anglicana contra Schismaticos assertor eximius." A manuscript by a man of Milton's political and ecclesiastical antecedents could hardly, one would think, have fallen into the hands of a more unpropitious examiner. VOL. II. B It is, accordingly, stated that Tomkyns hesitated about giving the licence, and took exception to some passages in the poem,-particularly to that (Book I. vv. 594-599) where it is said of Satan, in his diminished brightness after his fall, that he still appeared "" 'as when the Sun, new-risen, Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams, or, from behind the moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change At length, however, Mr. Tomkyns was satisfied. There Imprimatur: Tho. Tomkyns, Rmo. in Christo Patri ac Domino, Dno. Gilberto, divinâ Providentiâ Archiepiscopo Cantuariensi, a sacris domesticis. The other books of the manuscript having received a similar certificate, or this certificate on the MS. of the first book sufficing for all, the copy was ready for publication by any printer or bookseller to whom Milton might consign it. Having already had many dealings with London printers and booksellers, Milton may have had several to whom he could go; but the one whom he favoured in this case, or who favoured him, was a certain Samuel Simmons, having his shop "next door to the Golden Lion in Aldersgate Street." The date of the transaction between Simmons and Milton is April 27, 1667. On that day an agreement was signed between them to the following effect :-Milton, 1 The manuscript is described, and a facsimile of a portion of it is given, in Mr. S. Leigh Sotheby's "Ramblings in elucidation of the Autograph of Milton," 1861: pp. 196, 197. It was then in the possession of William Baker, Esq., of Bayfordbury, Hertfordshire, to whom it had descended, with other Milton relics, from the famous publishing family of the Tonsons, connected with him by ancestry. |