The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 998 pages of information about The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660.

The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 998 pages of information about The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660.
containing the Terms, Etymologies, Definitions, and Perfect Interpretations, of the proper Significations of hard English words throughout the Arts and Sciences:  such is the title of a folio volume published by him in 1657, and for the purposes of which he was afterwards accused of having plagiarized largely from the Glossographia of one Thomas Blount, published in the preceding year.  In this piece of labour, which was doubtless a bookseller’s commission, he must have had, the question of plagiarism apart, his uncle’s thorough good-will; but it cannot have been the same with his Mysteries of Love and Eloquence:  or the Arts of Wooing and Complimenting, as they are managed in the Spring Garden, Hide Park, the New Exchange, and other eminent Places.  That performance, which appeared in August 1658, with a Preface “To the Youthful Gentry,” and which must have been in progress at our present date, was much more in the vein of his brother John, and indeed was done to the order of Nathaniel Brooke, the bookseller who had published John’s Satyr against Hypocrites, and also the more questionable Sportive Wit or the Muses’ Merriment.  “The book,” says Godwin, “is put together with conspicuous ingenuity and profligacy, and is entitled to no insignificant rank among the multifarious productions which were at that time issued from the press to debauch the manners of the nation and bring back the King.  It consists of imaginary conversations and forms of address for conversation, poems, models of letters, questions and answers, an Art of Logic with examples from the poets, and various instructions and helps to the lover for the composition of his verses; and, if we could overlook the gross provocations to libertinism and vice which everywhere occur in the book, it might be mentioned as no unentertaining illustration of the manners of the men of wit and gallantry in the time when it was published.”  To Godwin’s description we may add that the book includes a Rhyming Dictionary, “useful for that pleasing pastime called Crambo,” also a collection of parlour-games, and a number of other clever things.  The poems and songs interspersed with the prose were mostly old ones reprinted, some of them chosen with fine taste; but one or two were Phillips’s own.  Of the model phrases or set expressions which form one of the prose parts of the volume, by way of instruction in the language of gallantry and courtship, specimens are these,—­“With your ambrosiac kisses bathe my lips;” “You are a white enchantress, lady, and can enchain me with a smile;” “Midnight would blush at this;” “You walk in artificial clouds and bathe your silken limbs in wanton dalliance.”  What could Milton do, so far as such a production came within his knowledge, but shake his head and mingle smiles with a frown?  Clearly the elder nephew too had slipped the Miltonic restraints.  He had not lapsed, however, so decidedly as his brother; and we may partly retract in his case the statement that Milton could have little comfort from him.  He still went and came about Milton, very attentively.[1]

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The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.