the usual exultation and affluence of conscious genius.  Professing to recognize his life’s work in poetry, he nevertheless suffers himself to be diverted for many a long year into political and theological controversy, to the scandal and compassion of one of his most competent and attached biographers.  Whether this biographer is right or wrong, is a most interesting subject for discussion.  We deem him wrong, and shall not cease to reiterate that Milton would not have been Milton if he could have forgotten the citizen in the man of letters.  Happy, at all events, it is that this and similar problems occupy in Milton’s life the space which too frequently has to be spent upon the removal of misconception, or the refutation of calumny.  Little of a sordid sort disturbs the sentiment of solemn reverence with which, more even than Shakespeare’s, his life is approached by his countrymen; a feeling doubtless mainly due to the sacred nature of his principal theme, but equally merited by the religious consecration of his whole existence.  It is the easier for the biographer to maintain this reverential attitude, inasmuch as the prayer of Agur has been fulfilled in him, he has been given neither poverty nor riches.  He is not called upon to deal with an enormous mass of material, too extensive to arrange, yet too important to neglect.  Nor is he, like Shakespeare’s biographer, reduced to choose between the starvation of nescience and the windy diet of conjecture.  If a humbling thought intrudes, it is how largely he is indebted to a devoted diligence he never could have emulated; how painfully Professor Masson’s successors must resemble the Turk who builds his cabin out of Grecian or Roman ruins.

Milton’s genealogy has taxed the zeal and acumen of many investigators.  He himself merely claims a respectable ancestry (ex genere honesto).  His nephew Phillips professed to have come upon the root of the family tree at Great Milton, in Oxfordshire, where tombs attested the residence of the clan, and tradition its proscription and impoverishment in the Wars of the Roses.  Monuments, station, and confiscation have vanished before the scrutiny of the Rev. Joseph Hunter; it can only be safely concluded that Milton’s ancestors dwelt in or near the village of Holton, by Shotover Forest, in Oxfordshire, and that their rank in life was probably that of yeomen.  Notwithstanding Aubrey’s statement that Milton’s grandfather’s name was John, Mr. Hyde Clarke’s researches in the registers of the Scriveners’ Company have proved that Mr. Hunter and Professor Masson were right in identifying him with Richard Milton, of Stanton St. John, near Holton; and Professor Masson has traced the family a generation further back to Henry Milton, whose will, dated November 21, 1558, attests a condition of plain comfort, nearer poverty than riches.  Henry Milton’s goods at his death were inventoried at L6 19s.; when his widow’s will is proved, two years afterwards, the estimate is L7 4s. 4d.