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John Milton
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John Milton :
'Read in Milton: his account of his blindness is very pathetic & I am always affected to tears'. Makes reference to 'Paradise Lost and 'regaind' "'Comus' & 'Allegro' & 'Penserose' are those which I take up most often"Quotes from 'Comus' ll.291-3.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Clare Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'If Clynes needed a second lesson in the subversive power of print, it came when his foreman nearly sacked him for sneaking a look at "Paradise Lost" during a work break at the mill.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: J.R. Clynes Print: Book
John Milton : Sonnet XIX When I consider how my light is spent
'Milton's Sonnet on his Blindness / 'When I consider how my light is spent...'[transcript of text]
UnknownCentury: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Bowly
John Milton : Paradise Lost: a poem in twelve books
[Marginalia]
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
John Milton :
'Christopher Thomson was a "zealous" Methodist until he discovered Shakespeare, Miilton, Sterne and Dr Johnson at a circulating library. When his absence from Sunday chapel was noticed, "I was called to account for it; by way of defence I pleaded my desire for, and indulgence in, reading. This appeared rather to aggravate than serve my cause. It was evidently their opinion, that all books, except such as they deemed religious ones, ought not be read by young men. I ventured somewhat timidly to hint, that it was possible for a young man to read novels, and other works of fiction, and still keep his mind free from irreligion and vice...".'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Christopher Thomson Print: Book
John Milton :
'Byron had intoxicated him "with the freedom of his style of writing, with the fervour or passionateness of his feelings and with the dark and terrible pictures which he seemed to take pleasure in painting". The general effect of reading Milton, Hobbes, Locke and Newton had been "to make me resolve to be free. I saw that it was impossible for the soul of man to answer the end for which it was created, while tramelled by human authority, or fettered with human creeds. I saw that if I was to do justice to truth, to God, or to my own soul, I must break loose from all creeds and laws of men's devising, and live in full and unrestricted liberty..."'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Barker Print: Book
John Milton : L'Allegro
'As a Manchester warehouse porter, Samuel Bamford found the same richness in Milton: "His 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' were but expressions of thoughts and feelings which my romantic imagination had not unfrequently led me to indulge, but which, until now, I had deemed beyond all human utterance".'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford Print: Book
John Milton : Il Penseroso
'As a Manchester warehouse porter, Samuel Bamford found the same richness in Milton: "His 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' were but expressions of thoughts and feelings which my romantic imagination had not unfrequently led me to indulge, but which, until now, I had deemed beyond all human utterance".'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'I often think of the happy evening when, by your fireside, my Brother read to us the first book of the Paradise lost ... '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
Henry Mayhew interviews a penny mouse-trap maker (cripple): "I found books often lull my pain... I can't afford them no, for I have no wish to incur any extraneous expense, while the weight of the labour lies on my family more than it does on myself. Over and over again, when I have been in acute pain with my thigh, a scientific book, or a work on history, or a volume of travels, would carry my thoughts far away ...I always had love of solid works. For an hour's light reading, I have often turned to a work of imagination, such as Milton's Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare's plays; but I prefer science to poetry... I think it is solely due to my taste for mechanics and my love of reading scientific books that I am able to live so comfortably as I do in my affliction."
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
Dorothy Wordsworth writes to Catherine Clarkson (12 November 1810) with description of three nights' stay during October (c.26-29) 1810 at Hackett (overlooking Langdale and other Lakeland locations) with William and Mary Wordsworth, their four children and a maid: 'The weather was heavenly, when we were there, and the first morning we sate in hot sunshine on a crag, twenty yards from the door, while William read part of the 5th Book of the Paradise Lost to us. He read the Morning Hymn, while a stream of white vapour, which covered the Valley of Brathay, ascended slowly and by degrees melted away. It seemed as if we had never before felt deeply the power of the Poet ... '
UnknownCentury: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
John Milton : [sonnets]
Wordsworth in the Fenwick Note to Miscellaneous Sonnets: 'In the cottage of Town-End, one afternoon, in 1801, my Sister read to me the Sonnets of Milton. I had long been well acquainted with them, but I was particularly struck on that occasion with the dignified simplicity and majestic harmony that runs through most of them ... '
UnknownCentury: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'During his stay with the Beaumonts at Coleorton, 30 Oct. to 2 Nov. 1806, W[ordsworth] gave several readings from Paradise Lost - including Book I and Book VI, lines 767-84. Beaumont wrote to W[ordsworth] on 6 Nov., recalling "that sublime passage in Milton you read the other night ... where he describes ... the Messiah's ... coming as shining afar off ..."'
UnknownCentury: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Soldier's son Joseph Barker... first read the Bible "chiefly as a work of history and was very greatly delighted with many of its stories... One effect was to lead me to regard miracles as nothing improbable". Consequently his response to Pilgrim's Progress was exactly the same: "My impression was, that the whole was literal and true"...Ghost stories, highwayman stories, fairy tales, Paradise Lost and Daniel Defoe were all equally credible. "I was naturally a firm believer in all that was gravely spoken or printed", he recalled. "I doubted nothing that was found in books... I had no idea at the time I read Robinson Crusoe, that there were such things as novels, works of fiction, in existence".'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Barker Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'[Janet Hamilton] had a heavy literary diet as a child - history by Rollin and Plutarch, Ancient Universal History, Pitscottie's Chronicles of Scotland, as well as the Spectator and Rambler. She could borrow books by Burns, Robert Fergusson and other poets from neighbours, and at age eight she found "to my great joy, on the loom of an intellectual weaver", Paradise Lost and Allan Ramsay's poems'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Janet Hamilton Print: Book
John Milton : Sabrina Fair
Byron's Ravenna Journal (4 January-27 February 1821), 12 January 1821: 'How strange are my thoughts! -- The reading of the song of Milton, "Sabrina fair" has brought back upon me ... the happiest, perhaps, days of my life ... when living at Cambridge with Edward Noel Long ...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon Lord Byron Print: Book
John Milton :
'[J.M. Dent's] reading was marked by the autodidact's characteristic enthusiasm and spottiness. He knew Pilgrim's Progress, Milton, Cowper, Thomson's Seasons and Young's Night Thoughts; but...did not read Shakespeare seriously until he was nearly thirty'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Malaby Dent Print: Book
John Milton : Lycidas
'Lancashire weaver Elizabeth Blackburn... proceeded to an evening institute course in English literature and by the rhythm of the looms she memorised all of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind", Milton's Lycidas, and Gray's Elegy. She discovered the ancient Greeks at the home of a neighbour, a self-educated classicist with six children, and a Sunday school teacher introduced her to the plays of Bernard Shaw. While attending her looms she silently analysed the character of Jane Eyre's Mr Rochester, "sometimes to the detriment of my weaving".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Blackburn Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost (Book I)
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Friday 29 January, 1802: 'William was very unwell. Worn out with his bad night's rest. He went to bed -- I read to him, to endeavour to make him sleep. Then I came into the other room and read the first book of Paradise Lost.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost (Book XI)
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Tuesday 2 February, 1802: 'After tea I read aloud the eleventh book of Paradise Lost. We were much impressed, and also melted into tears.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Print: Book
John Milton : sonnets
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Friday 21 May 1802, 'Wm. wrote two sonnets on Buonaparte, after I had read Milton's sonnets to him.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Print: Book
John Milton : Il Penseroso
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, in entry for Thursday 3 June 1802, 'A very affecting letter came from M[ary]. H[utchinson]., while I was sitting in the window reading Milton's Penseroso to William.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Print: Book
John Milton : sonnets
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, 24 December 1802: 'William is now sitting by me, at 1/2 past 10 o'clock. I have been beside him ever since tea running the heel of a stocking, repeating some of his own sonnets to him, listening to his own repeating, reading some of Milton's, and the Allegro and Penseroso.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy and William Wordsworth Print: Book
John Milton : L'Allegro
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, 24 December 1802: 'William is now sitting by me, at 1/2 past 10 o'clock. I have been beside him ever since tea running the heel of a stocking, repeating some of his own sonnets to him, listening to his own repeating, reading some of Milton's, and the Allegro and Penseroso.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy and William Wordsworth Print: Book
John Milton : Il Penseroso
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, 24 December 1802: 'William is now sitting by me, at 1/2 past 10 o'clock. I have been beside him ever since tea running the heel of a stocking, repeating some of his own sonnets to him, listening to his own repeating, reading some of Milton's, and the Allegro and Penseroso.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy and William Wordsworth Print: Book
John Milton : unknown
Philip Gibbs in The Pageant of the Years (1946), on work as writer of series of articles under name "Self-Help" in early 1900s: "'All the reading I had done as a boy, all my youthful enthusiasm for Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy ... was a great source of supply now when I sat down to write aout great books ..."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Gibbs Print: Book
John Milton : unknown
'Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer ... liked to get away from political anxieties by devouring what he called "shilling shockers": adventure stories, American westerns, and thrillers, though he would occasionally leaven the mixture by rereading Dickens and what he considered the erotic passages of Byron, Milton and Burns. He did latch on to some best-sellers, such as Jeffrey Farnol's The Amateur Gentleman (1913), which he read "over and over again" ...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lloyd George Print: Book
John Milton :
?I always have a profound impression that human beings have been much more like each other than we fancy since they got rid of their tails & that the great outbursts of speculation or art imply some special excitement more than a radical difference in people themselves. I have even a belief that if Browning had lived 200 years ago he would have been a small Shakespeare & perhaps Tennyson a second rate Milton ? though I agree that poor old Alfred has not quite the stuff in him.?
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Stephen Print: Book
John Milton : Sonnets
' ... [13-to-14-year-old Constance Maynard's] most intimate contact with reading .. took place ... in a secluded corner of the garden, where she haphazardly consumed Milton's sonnets, Cowper, Irving's "Orations", and Tennyson ...'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Constance Maynard Print: Book
John Milton : Complete poetry
" ... it was whilst at a frivolous, rote-learning girls' school that ... [Frances Power Cobbe] developed her determined, methodical aproach [to reading] ... She read all the Faerie Queene, all of Milton's poetry, the Divina Commedia and Gerusalemme Liberata in the originals, and in translation the Iliad, Odyssey, Aenied, Pharsalia, and ... [nearly all] of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Ovid, Tacitus, Xenophon, Herodotus and Thucydides."
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Frances Power Cobbe Print: Book
John Milton : A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle
"Henry Wotton recalled coming across Milton's A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle 'in the very close of the late R's Poems, Printed at Oxford' ..."
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Wotton Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regain'd/Samson Agonistes
"One of the copies [of Paradise Regain'd ... Samson Agonistes] I examined at the British Library, London (shelfmark C14a12) ... contains handwritten corrections of both the errata and Omissa."
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
John Milton :
'George Howell, bricklayer and trade unionist..."read promiscuously. How could it be otherwise? I had no real guide, was obliged to feel my way into light. Yet perhaps there was a guidance, although indefinite and without distinctive aim". Howell groped his way through literature "on the principle that one poet's works suggested another, or the criticisms on one led to comparisons with another. Thus: Milton - Shakespeare; Pope-Dryden; Byron-Shelley; Burns-Scott; Coleridge-Wordsworth and Southey, and later on Spenser-Chaucer, Bryant-Longfellow, and so on". By following these intertextual links, autodidacts could reconstruct the literary canon on their own'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: George Howell Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Entry from Commonplace Book]: 'Mammon (figurative) description of, Paradise Lost, Book 1, line 680'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Davy Harrop Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
H. J. Jackson discusses copy of Paradise Lost annotated by John Keats for Mrs Dilke, in which passages highlighted and critical commentary added.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : [unknown]
'Lancashire journalist Allen Clarke (b.1863), the son of a Bolton textile worker, avidly read his father's paperback editions of Shakespeare and ploughed through the literature section (Chaucer, Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton, Pope, Chatterton, Goldsmith, Byron, Shelley, Burns, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt) of the public library. With that preparation, he was winning prizes for poems in London papers by age thirteen...[he] went on to found and edit several Lancashire journals'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Allen Clarke Print: Book
John Milton : [unknown]
'Masefield habitually purchased a book each Friday evening and read it over the weekend. Among the first purchases was a seventy-five cent copy of Chaucer; and that evening, as he recalled, "I stretched myself on my bed, and began to read 'The Parliament of Fowls'; and with the first lines entered into a world of poetry until then unknown to me". As a result, Masefield's study of poetry deepened, and Chaucer, John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats became his mentors. Shelley converted the impressionable youth to vegetarianism....Unfortunately [he] overdid vegetarianism by abjuring milk; and, weak from lack of protein, he finally gave up the regimen'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Masefield Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
'Soon Pritchett was reading Penny Poets editions of "Paradise Regained", Wordsworth's "Prelude", Cowper, and Coleridge. He formulated plans to become Poet Laureate by age twenty-one'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Victor Sawdon Pritchett Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'There is a pleasant story of how [Aunt Cara] once set a Jebb niece to read "Paradise Lost" aloud to herself and her sister Aunt Polly, in order to improve Aunt Polly's mind. The poor old lady was terribly bored and was nearly asleep, when Aunt Cara woke her up, by saying sternly: "Listen now, Polly; it's Satan speaking".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: [unknown] Jebb Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'At home all day. In the even read the 9th book of "Paradise Lost".'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Turner Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Read the 10th book of "Paradise Lost" in the even.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Turner Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
'At home all day. In the even read the 11th and 12th books of "Paradise Regained", which I think is much inferior for the sublimity of style to "Paradise Lost".'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Turner Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'in the Even Tho. Davy at our House to whom I read the 4th Book of Milton's "Paradise Lost".'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Turner Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'In the even read the 6th book of Milton's "Paradise Lost".'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Turner Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'In the even read the 12th and last book of Milton's "Paradise Lost", which I have now read twice through and in my opinion it exceeds anything I ever read for sublimity of language and beauty of similes; and I think the depravity of human nature entailed upon us by our first parent is finely drawn.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Turner Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'I wish you would cannonade this N[ewto]n. I cannot bear, that another of Apollo's genuine Offspring should pass down to future Times with such crude and unworthy Notes.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Richardson Print: BookManuscript: Unknown
John Milton : Paradise Lost
''When I was seven years old [...] I was kept from chapel one Sunday afternoon by some ailment or other. When the door closed behind the other chapel-goers, I looked at the books on the table. The ugliest-looking of them was turned down open; and my turning it up was one of the leading incidents of my life. That plain, clumsy, calf-bound volume was "Paradise Lost";...there was something about Satan cleaving Chaos, which made me turn to the poetry; and my mental destiny was fixed for the next seven years.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
John Milton : Aeropagitica
'With my scanty pocket-money, high-priced books were beyond my reach; but I was lucky enough, when hunting, as was my want, among the second-hand bookstalls in Newcastle market-place, to light upon some off volumes of Milton?s prose works, which I bought for a few shillings. I read them all ? politics, theology, travels, with touches of autobiography- nothing came amiss to my voracious appetite. Over and over again did I read the Areopagitica, ?that sublime treatise? which, Macaulay tells us, ?every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes?.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burt Print: Book
John Milton : [poems]
?The gentle Cowper was my earliest favourite, a small second-hand copy of his poems, which I bought for eighteen pence, being the first book I bought for myself. It emptied my pocket, but I walked home, as I had walked to Newcastle (a distance some eighteen miles to and fro) with a light head, now and then reading as I fared along. Longfellow, Pope, Milton, Wordsworth and other poets were soon afterwards added to my little collection. I read them all. Many passages have clung to my memory, a life-long possession, giving, with their music, sometimes inspiration, sometimes solace in the conflicts and sorrows of life.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burt Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Whenever I read Milton's description of paradise - the happiness, which he so poetically describes fills me with benevolent satisfaction - yet, I cannot help viewing them, I mean the first pair - as if they were my inferiors - inferiors because they could find happiness in a world like this.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Wollstonecraft Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'We read "Paradise Lost" in Gen. English & I tried to look enthusiastic, but I really can't appreciate Milton. He's so unreal and unalive. I must try to read a lot of him and get over this.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding Print: Book
John Milton : unknown
'Had a really wizard lecture from [Prof.] Renwick on Milton, in which he read a good lot of Milton and Shakespeare to us, and he certainly can read.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding Print: Book
John Milton : [miscellaneous poems]
?About this time I was delighted by the acquisition of two books, the existence of which, until then, had been unknown to me. One was the second volume of Homer?s "Iliad", translated by Alexander Pope, with notes by Madame Dacier; and the other was a small volume of Miscellaneous Poems, by John Milton. Homer I read with an absorbed attention which soon enabled me to commit nearly every line to memory.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford Print: Book
John Milton : [miscellaneous works]
?Milton?s miscellaneous works were still my favourites. I copied many of his poems into a writing book, and this I did, not only an account of the pleasure which I felt in their repetition, and in the appropriation ? so to speak ? of the ideas, but also as a means for improvement of my handwriting, which had continued to be very indifferent. The "Odyssey" and "Aeniad", which I also procured and read about this time, seemed tame and languid, whilst the stirring call of the old Iliadic battle trumpet was ringing in my ears, and vibrating within my heart. In short, I read or attentively conned [sic] over, every book I could buy or borrow, and as I retained a pretty clear idea of what I read, I became rather more than commonly proficient in book knowledge considering that I was only a better sort of porter in a warehouse.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'It was about this time that I first met with Milton's "Paradise Lost", in a thick volume with engravings and copious notes, probably a copy of Bishop Newton's edition of that noble poem. I found it, however, little better than "a sealed book". Its versification puzzled me, while the loftiness of its subjects confused my understanding.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carter Print: Book
John Milton : [poems]
'It was at this time that I read the remaining seven volumes of the "Spectator"; to which I added the "Rambler", the "Tatler", and some others of the "British Essayists". I also read the poetical works of Milton, Addison, Goldsmith, Gray, Collins, Falconer, Pomfret, Akenside, Mrs. Rowe, with others which I cannot now clearly call to mind. I remember, however, to have read Gay's poems. These gave me more than usual satisfaction. I was much amused with his "Trivia, or the Art of Walking London Streets" but I was especially pleased with his admirably burlesque "pastorals". These just squared with my humour, for I had then, as I have ever had, an utter dislike to the sickening stuff that is called the pastoral poetry...I must not omit to mention the pleasure I derived from reading a poem called "The Village Curate", which, I think, has fallen into unmerited oblivion.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carter Print: Book
John Milton : [various]
'With my scanty pocket-money, high-priced books were beyond my reach; but I was lucky enough, when hunting, as was my want, among the second-hand bookstalls in Newcastle market-place, to light upon some off volumes of Milton?s prose works, which I bought for a few shillings. I read them all ? politics, theology, travels, with touches of autobiography- nothing came amiss to my voracious appetite. Over and over again did I read the Areopagitica, ?that sublime treatise? which, Macaulay tells us, ?every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes?.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burt Print: Book
John Milton : [various titles]
'For three years I continued a regular subscriber to the circulating library, during which time I read various works, including Milton's, Shakespeare's, Sterne's, Dr Johnson's, and many others. It was a usual practice for me to sit up to read after the family had retired for the night. I remember it was on one of these occasions that I read Lewis's "Monk". On rising from my seat to go to bed, I was so impressed with dongeon horror, that I took the candle and ? up stairs, not daring to look either right or left, lest some Lady Angela should plunge a dagger into me!'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Christopher Thomson Print: Book
John Milton :
'the diverse collection of literature that Christopher Thomson, a sometime shipwright, actor and housepainter, worked his way through [...] included adventure stories such as "Robinson Crusoe" and the imitative "Philip Quarll", books of travel, such as Boyle's "Travels", some un-named religious tracts, a number of "classics" including Milton and Shakespeare, some radical newspapers, particularly Cobbett's "Register" and Wooller's "Black Dwarf", mechanics' magazines, and some occasional items of contemporary literature, including the novels of Scott and the poetry of Byron.'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Christopher Thomson Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Charles Shaw's dependance upon a small Sunday school library in Tunstall [...] imparted a magnificent if involuntary scope to his education: '"I read "Robinson Crusoe" and a few other favourite boys' books [...] After these the most readable I could find was Rollin's "Ancient History". His narratives opened a new world [...] [which] I regarded as remote from Tunstall and England as those other worlds I read of in Dick's "Christian Philosopher," which book I found in the library too ... Then I read Milton's "Paradise Lost", Klopstock's "Messiah", and later on, Pollock's "Course of Time", and Gilfillan's "Bards of the Bible".These books may look a strange assortment for a boy of fourteen or fifteen to read, but [...] they just happened to fall into my hands"'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Shaw Print: Book
John Milton : Samson Agonistes
'The first scene is the Lamentation of Sampson [sic] which possesses much pathos of sublimity ... I think this is beautiful... '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
John Milton : unknown
'[B]e not thrown into wild delight because his genius has shone forth--misfortune & rage have occasioned this & whenever he may speak himself [underlined] Lord Byron will succeed--self is the sole inspirer of his genius he cannot like Homer Dante Virgil Milton Dryden Spencer Gray--Goldsmith [underlined] Tasso write on other subjects well[--]but what he feels he can describe extravagantly well--& therefore I never did doubt that he would one day or other write again as at first--but for God sake do not let this circumstance make you forget what a Rogue he is'.
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Caroline Lamb Print: Book
John Milton : Samson Agonistes
'Reading; First book of Lucretius, 6th book of the Iliad; Samson Agonistes, Warton's History of English Poetry; Grote 2nd vol; Marcus Aurelius; Vita Nuova; vol IV, Chapter 1 of the Politique positive; Guest on English Rhythms, Maurice's Lectures on Casuistry'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud.] Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
Mary Berry, in reflections on reading (1798): 'When I read "Paradise Lost," I am no more able to conceive the powers of imagination and genius exerted by Milton in the composition of that poem, than I am able to conceive the intellect of Sir Isaac Newton in the demonstration of the phenomena of the universe. Both seem to me beings more exalted above myself in the scale of intellectual perfection, than I am above the brute creation.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Berry Print: Book
John Milton : Comus (A mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634)
'Shelley reads a part of Comus aloud.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : 'Invocation to Light'
Mary Berry, Journal, 8 June 1811: 'Went to Lady Cork's. A curious party, where, by way of something to do, she had [John] Thelwall reading Milton's "Invocation to Light," so abominably as to amuse or shock all the company.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Thelwall Print: Book
John Milton : [unknown]
'[Anna Seward's] training was not necessarily less rigorous for being informal and solitary. Seward scoffed at a male contemporary who claimed never to have read or studied poetry. "If Shakespeare's talents were miracles of uncultured intuition, we feel, that neither Milton's, Pope's, Akenside's, Gray's or Darwin's were such, but that poetic investigation, and long familiarity with the best writers in that line, cooperated to produce their excellence".'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Anna Seward Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'there was always poetry. Campbell, just then at the top of his short-lived vogue; Ossian, the unreadable of to-day; Milton - and with the New Year of 1812 a Captain Boothby (met during the London season) as a visitor with whom to read the last, but not the other two. For he did not admire Campbell or Ossian; and indeed seems to have been a person of delicate discriminations, though not advanced in thought. They were reading "Paradise Lost"...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke and Captain Boothby Print: Book
John Milton : Comus
'A Reverend Mr Darnell followed in this January of 1812. He too read Milton. This time it was Comus, and the whole party joined in, Annabella and her guests taking the various parts. They did the Trial-Scene from the Merchant of Venice too, and she "never heard anyone read with more discriminating judgment than Mr Darnell".'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, Rev. Darnell and other house guests Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
Mary Berry, Journal, 19 December 1818: 'Sir James Mackintosh in my room this morning; hearing me read over and commenting on my "Memoir of Lady Russell," spoke frankly, seemed pleased, and satisfied me very tolerably with his opinion [...] In the evening he read some of Milton's "Paradise Regained" to us.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sir James Mackintosh Print: Book
John Milton : Il Penseroso
'Mr. Perry tried upon us [at school in Norwich] the reading of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; and it failed utterly [...] Not long after he was gone, I read both pieces in the nursery, one day; and straightway went into a transport, as if I had discovered myself in possession of a new sense.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mr Perry Print: Book
John Milton : L'Allegro
'Mr. Perry tried upon us [at school in Norwich] the reading of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; and it failed utterly [...] Not long after he was gone, I read both pieces in the nursery, one day; and straightway went into a transport, as if I had discovered myself in possession of a new sense.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mr Perry Print: Book
John Milton : L'Allegro
'Mr. Perry tried upon us [at school in Norwich] the reading of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; and it failed utterly [...] Not long after he was gone, I read both pieces in the nursery, one day; and straightway went into a transport, as if I had discovered myself in possession of a new sense.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
John Milton : Il Penseroso
'Mr. Perry tried upon us [at school in Norwich] the reading of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; and it failed utterly [...] Not long after he was gone, I read both pieces in the nursery, one day; and straightway went into a transport, as if I had discovered myself in possession of a new sense.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
John Milton : Of Education. To Master Samuel Hartlib
'in the evening
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin Print: Book
John Milton : [poems]
To Miss Hunt, July 7, 1792 'At present I am engaged in an argument with my dear Miss Bowdlen concerning Ossian. I support him against all other poets. You may easily guess who will say all I can for Ossian, for I really love [italics] his poems beyond all others. Milton must stand alone; but surely Ossian is in some respects [italics] superior to Homer.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Smith Print: Book
John Milton : [poems]
'At other times we studied Shakespeare, Milton and some other English poets as well as some of the Italians. We took long walks and often drew from nature. We read with great attention the whole of the New Testament, Secker's lectures on the Catechism and several other books on the same important subjects.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Smith Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Twould make a Paradise of Hell-- & fill even Heaven itself with woe[...]'
UnknownCentury: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Caroline Lamb
John Milton : Poems upon Several Occasions, English, Italian, and Latin
[Marginalia]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
John Milton : A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton
[Marginalia]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
John Milton : [poetry]
'Read papers, and last number but one of Cob. a little in the Milton. Licence for universal printing: and in Thucydides'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Windham Print: Unknown
John Milton : Paradise Lost, Book VIII
'To Love thou blam'st me not; for love thou say'st/Leads up to Heaven/ is both the way and guide/...' 'Milton'
UnknownCentury: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Molineux group, including Mrs Molineux
John Milton : Sonnet OR When I consider how my light is spent
'Milton's sonnet on his Blindness "When I consider howmy light is spent"'
UnknownCentury: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Bowly group
John Milton : [poetry]
'Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons? Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.[...] you cannot avoid reading [him] aloud-to your-self or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one-and it degenerates into an audience.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Lamb Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'[Part of a description of his wife] very impatient of contradiction, Reproof She cannot Brook- Milton' [This is a misquotation of 'restraint she will not brook', Book IX, l.1184].
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Benjamin Shaw Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Lookd into Miltons "Paradise Lost" I once read it thro when I was a boy at the time I liked the "Death of Abel" better [...] I cannot help smiling at my young fancys in those days of happy ignorance'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Clare Print: Book
John Milton : [unknown works]
'Our syllabus was large, covering at least twelve set books: two plays of Shakespeare's, two volumes of Milton and two of Keats; Chaucer, Sheridan, Lamb, Scott's "Old Mortality" and the first book of "The Golden Treasury", with its marvellous pickings of Coleridge, Shelly, Byron and, especially, Wordsworth, which excited me, at that age, more than any other poetry written.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
John Milton : [poems complete works]
'I devoured poetry and nothing but poetry until I became insensible to poetry. Take an example; I happened upon some fat volumes of Campbell's "British Poets", the complete works of from four to eight poets in each volume which cost me 6d. apiece. They had shabby worn leather bindings, and the type was on the small side and closely set. But I ploughed through them, doggedly, as if reading for a bet, or an imposed task. One volume I remember contained the poetical works of Samuel Daniel, Browne, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Drummond (of Ha[w]thornden), John Donne, and some more minor ones. Another contained along with "also rans" Cowley, Milton and "Hudibras" Butler. And, I repeat, I ploughed through them with a stout heart, but little sense, and a dwindling understanding.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas A. Jackson Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Read a little of "Paradise lost"'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Albert Battiscombe Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost [?]
'. H. Ewing's diary entry: 'In the evening Boy read Milton to me and I worked'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alexander (Rex) Ewing Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Spent most of the day reading the "Paradise Lost"; I was quite delighted with it'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Wynne Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
'Finished the "Paradise Regained". Milton has been most unhappy in the choice of his subject;--an inexplicable and suspicious legend...'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Green Print: Book
John Milton : Samson Agonistes
'Read Milton's "Samson Agonistes";--a noble Poem, but a miserable Drama...'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Green Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Finished the perusal of the first Six Books of Milton's "Paradise Lost". The scene betwixt Satan, Sin, and Death, in the 2d. Book, is transcendantly sublime...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Green Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost, vii, 29-30
"And tho' I call them Mine, I know that they are not Mine, being of the Same opinion with Milton when he says 'That the Muse visits his Slumbers & awakes & governs his Song when Morn purples the East', & being also in the predicament of that Prophet who says: I cannot go beyond the command of the Lord, to speak good or bad."
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: William Blake Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
'S. reads Livy - talk - in the evening S. read[s] Paradise Regained alloud and then goes to sleep'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : [Works]
Quotes Milton throughout work:V.1 pp 25,75,90,101,169,190; V.2 pp118,206; V.3 p.87. Ex. Letter XI To Miss Reid, Glasgow, Fort William, May 17 1773 V.1 p.90 'If Fort Augustus be such a place, I will certainly become a votary of the ?Pensive nun, devout and pure,/ Sober, stedfast [sic], and demure? whom we used to admire so much. Expect to see me when we meet ?With sable stole of cypress lawn/ O?er my decent shoulders drawn."'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Anne Grant [nee MacVicar] Print: Book
John Milton : unknown
"Now my lot in the Heavens is this, Milton lov'd me in/childhood & shew'd me his face./Ezra came with Isaiah the Prophet, but Shakespeare in riper/ years gave me his hand;/ Paracelsus & Behmen appear'd to me," Poem in letter to John Flaxman Letter 19 12th Sept 1800 explaining Blake's most influential reading.
UnknownCentury: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Blake
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Mary Shelley's Reading List for 1815. Only those titles not mentioned in journal entries are given separate database entries. xs denote books also read by Percy Shelley] 'Posthumous Works. 3. Sorrows of Werter Don Roderick - by Southey Gibbons Decline & fall. x Paradise Regained x Gibbons Life and Letters - 1st edition 2 x Lara New Arabian Nights 3 Corinna Fall of the Jesuits Rinaldo Rinaldini Fo[n]tenelle's Plurality of the Worlds Hermsprong Le diable boiteux Man as he is. Rokeby. Ovid's Meamo[r]phoses in Latin x Wordsworth's Poems x Spenser's Fairy Queen x Life of the Philipps x Fox's History of James II The Reflector Wieland. Fleetwood Don Carlos x Peter Wilkins Rousseau's Confessions. x Espriella's Letters from England Lenora - a poem Emile x Milton's Paradise Lost X Life of Lady Hamilton De l'Alemagne - by Made de Stael 3 vols. of Barruel x Caliph Vathek Nouvelle Heloise x Kotzebue's account of his banishment to Siberia. Waverly Clarissa Harlowe Robertson's Hist. of america x Virgil xTale of Tub. x Milton's speech on Unlicensed printing x Curse of Kehama x Madoc La Bible Expliquee Lives of Abelard and Heloise The New Testament Coleridge's Poems. 1st vol. Syteme de la Nature x Castle of Indolence Chattertons Poems. x Paradise Regained Don Carlos. x Lycidas. x St Leon Shakespeare's Play. Part of which Shelley reads aloud Burkes account of civil society x Excursion Pope's Homer's Illiad x Sallust Micromegas x Life of Chauser Canterbury Tales Peruvian letters. Voyages round the World Pluarch's lives. x 2 vols of Gibbon Ormond Hugh Trevor x Labaume's Hist. of the Russian War Lewis's tales Castle of Udolpho Guy Mannering Charles XII by Voltaire Tales of the East'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin
John Milton : Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing
[Mary Shelley's Reading List for 1815. Only those titles not mentioned in journal entries are given separate database entries. xs denote books also read by Percy Shelley] 'Posthumous Works. 3. Sorrows of Werter Don Roderick - by Southey Gibbons Decline & fall. x Paradise Regained x Gibbons Life and Letters - 1st edition 2 x Lara New Arabian Nights 3 Corinna Fall of the Jesuits Rinaldo Rinaldini Fo[n]tenelle's Plurality of the Worlds Hermsprong Le diable boiteux Man as he is. Rokeby. Ovid's Meamo[r]phoses in Latin x Wordsworth's Poems x Spenser's Fairy Queen x Life of the Philipps x Fox's History of James II The Reflector Wieland. Fleetwood Don Carlos x Peter Wilkins Rousseau's Confessions. x Espriella's Letters from England Lenora - a poem Emile x Milton's Paradise Lost X Life of Lady Hamilton De l'Alemagne - by Made de Stael 3 vols. of Barruel x Caliph Vathek Nouvelle Heloise x Kotzebue's account of his banishment to Siberia. Waverly Clarissa Harlowe Robertson's Hist. of america x Virgil xTale of Tub. x Milton's speech on Unlicensed printing x Curse of Kehama x Madoc La Bible Expliquee Lives of Abelard and Heloise The New Testament Coleridge's Poems. 1st vol. Syteme de la Nature x Castle of Indolence Chattertons Poems. x Paradise Regained Don Carlos. x Lycidas. x St Leon Shakespeare's Play. Part of which Shelley reads aloud Burkes account of civil society x Excursion Pope's Homer's Illiad x Sallust Micromegas x Life of Chauser Canterbury Tales Peruvian letters. Voyages round the World Pluarch's lives. x 2 vols of Gibbon Ormond Hugh Trevor x Labaume's Hist. of the Russian War Lewis's tales Castle of Udolpho Guy Mannering Charles XII by Voltaire Tales of the East'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin Print: Book
John Milton : Lycidas
[Mary Shelley's Reading List for 1815. Only those titles not mentioned in journal entries are given separate database entries. xs denote books also read by Percy Shelley] 'Posthumous Works. 3. Sorrows of Werter Don Roderick - by Southey Gibbons Decline & fall. x Paradise Regained x Gibbons Life and Letters - 1st edition 2 x Lara New Arabian Nights 3 Corinna Fall of the Jesuits Rinaldo Rinaldini Fo[n]tenelle's Plurality of the Worlds Hermsprong Le diable boiteux Man as he is. Rokeby. Ovid's Meamo[r]phoses in Latin x Wordsworth's Poems x Spenser's Fairy Queen x Life of the Philipps x Fox's History of James II The Reflector Wieland. Fleetwood Don Carlos x Peter Wilkins Rousseau's Confessions. x Espriella's Letters from England Lenora - a poem Emile x Milton's Paradise Lost X Life of Lady Hamilton De l'Alemagne - by Made de Stael 3 vols. of Barruel x Caliph Vathek Nouvelle Heloise x Kotzebue's account of his banishment to Siberia. Waverly Clarissa Harlowe Robertson's Hist. of america x Virgil xTale of Tub. x Milton's speech on Unlicensed printing x Curse of Kehama x Madoc La Bible Expliquee Lives of Abelard and Heloise The New Testament Coleridge's Poems. 1st vol. Syteme de la Nature x Castle of Indolence Chattertons Poems. x Paradise Regained Don Carlos. x Lycidas. x St Leon Shakespeare's Play. Part of which Shelley reads aloud Burkes account of civil society x Excursion Pope's Homer's Illiad x Sallust Micromegas x Life of Chauser Canterbury Tales Peruvian letters. Voyages round the World Pluarch's lives. x 2 vols of Gibbon Ormond Hugh Trevor x Labaume's Hist. of the Russian War Lewis's tales Castle of Udolpho Guy Mannering Charles XII by Voltaire Tales of the East'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Mary Shelley's Reading List for 1815. Only those titles not mentioned in journal entries are given separate database entries. xs denote books also read by Percy Shelley - again, only those not mentioned in journal entries are indicated separately in the database] 'Posthumous Works. 3. Sorrows of Werter Don Roderick - by Southey Gibbons Decline & fall. x Paradise Regained x Gibbons Life and Letters - 1st edition 2 x Lara New Arabian Nights 3 Corinna Fall of the Jesuits Rinaldo Rinaldini Fo[n]tenelle's Plurality of the Worlds Hermsprong Le diable boiteux Man as he is. Rokeby. Ovid's Metamo[r]phoses in Latin x Wordsworth's Poems x Spenser's Fairy Queen x Life of the Philipps x Fox's History of James II The Reflector Wieland. Fleetwood Don Carlos x Peter Wilkins Rousseau's Confessions. x Espriella's Letters from England Lenora - a poem Emile x Milton's Paradise Lost X Life of Lady Hamilton De l'Alemagne - by Made de Stael 3 vols. of Barruel x Caliph Vathek Nouvelle Heloise x Kotzebue's account of his banishment to Siberia. Waverly Clarissa Harlowe Robertson's Hist. of america x Virgil xTale of Tub. x Milton's speech on Unlicensed printing x Curse of Kehama x Madoc La Bible Expliquee Lives of Abelard and Heloise The New Testament Coleridge's Poems. 1st vol. Syteme de la Nature x Castle of Indolence Chattertons Poems. x Paradise Regained Don Carlos. x Lycidas. x St Leon Shakespeare's Play. Part of which Shelley reads aloud Burkes account of civil society x Excursion Pope's Homer's Illiad x Sallust Micromegas x Life of Chauser Canterbury Tales Peruvian letters. Voyages round the World Pluarch's lives. x 2 vols of Gibbon Ormond Hugh Trevor x Labaume's Hist. of the Russian War Lewis's tales Castle of Udolpho Guy Mannering Charles XII by Voltaire Tales of the East'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Areopagitica: a Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parliament of England
[Mary Shelley's Reading List for 1815. Only those titles not mentioned in journal entries are given separate database entries. xs denote books also read by Percy Shelley - again, only those not mentioned in journal entries are indicated separately in the database] 'Posthumous Works. 3. Sorrows of Werter Don Roderick - by Southey Gibbons Decline & fall. x Paradise Regained x Gibbons Life and Letters - 1st edition 2 x Lara New Arabian Nights 3 Corinna Fall of the Jesuits Rinaldo Rinaldini Fo[n]tenelle's Plurality of the Worlds Hermsprong Le diable boiteux Man as he is. Rokeby. Ovid's Metamo[r]phoses in Latin x Wordsworth's Poems x Spenser's Fairy Queen x Life of the Philipps x Fox's History of James II The Reflector Wieland. Fleetwood Don Carlos x Peter Wilkins Rousseau's Confessions. x Espriella's Letters from England Lenora - a poem Emile x Milton's Paradise Lost X Life of Lady Hamilton De l'Alemagne - by Made de Stael 3 vols. of Barruel x Caliph Vathek Nouvelle Heloise x Kotzebue's account of his banishment to Siberia. Waverly Clarissa Harlowe Robertson's Hist. of america x Virgil xTale of Tub. x Milton's speech on Unlicensed printing x Curse of Kehama x Madoc La Bible Expliquee Lives of Abelard and Heloise The New Testament Coleridge's Poems. 1st vol. Syteme de la Nature x Castle of Indolence Chattertons Poems. x Paradise Regained Don Carlos. x Lycidas. x St Leon Shakespeare's Play. Part of which Shelley reads aloud Burkes account of civil society x Excursion Pope's Homer's Illiad x Sallust Micromegas x Life of Chauser Canterbury Tales Peruvian letters. Voyages round the World Pluarch's lives. x 2 vols of Gibbon Ormond Hugh Trevor x Labaume's Hist. of the Russian War Lewis's tales Castle of Udolpho Guy Mannering Charles XII by Voltaire Tales of the East'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
[Mary Shelley's Reading List for 1815. Only those titles not mentioned in journal entries are given separate database entries. xs denote books also read by Percy Shelley - again, only those not mentioned in journal entries are indicated separately in the database] 'Posthumous Works. 3. Sorrows of Werter Don Roderick - by Southey Gibbons Decline & fall. x Paradise Regained x Gibbons Life and Letters - 1st edition 2 x Lara New Arabian Nights 3 Corinna Fall of the Jesuits Rinaldo Rinaldini Fo[n]tenelle's Plurality of the Worlds Hermsprong Le diable boiteux Man as he is. Rokeby. Ovid's Metamo[r]phoses in Latin x Wordsworth's Poems x Spenser's Fairy Queen x Life of the Philipps x Fox's History of James II The Reflector Wieland. Fleetwood Don Carlos x Peter Wilkins Rousseau's Confessions. x Espriella's Letters from England Lenora - a poem Emile x Milton's Paradise Lost X Life of Lady Hamilton De l'Alemagne - by Made de Stael 3 vols. of Barruel x Caliph Vathek Nouvelle Heloise x Kotzebue's account of his banishment to Siberia. Waverly Clarissa Harlowe Robertson's Hist. of america x Virgil xTale of Tub. x Milton's speech on Unlicensed printing x Curse of Kehama x Madoc La Bible Expliquee Lives of Abelard and Heloise The New Testament Coleridge's Poems. 1st vol. Syteme de la Nature x Castle of Indolence Chattertons Poems. x Paradise Regained Don Carlos. x Lycidas. x St Leon Shakespeare's Play. Part of which Shelley reads aloud Burkes account of civil society x Excursion Pope's Homer's Illiad x Sallust Micromegas x Life of Chauser Canterbury Tales Peruvian letters. Voyages round the World Pluarch's lives. x 2 vols of Gibbon Ormond Hugh Trevor x Labaume's Hist. of the Russian War Lewis's tales Castle of Udolpho Guy Mannering Charles XII by Voltaire Tales of the East'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Lycidas
[Mary Shelley's Reading List for 1815. Only those titles not mentioned in journal entries are given separate database entries. xs denote books also read by Percy Shelley - again, only those not mentioned in journal entries are indicated separately in the database] 'Posthumous Works. 3. Sorrows of Werter Don Roderick - by Southey Gibbons Decline & fall. x Paradise Regained x Gibbons Life and Letters - 1st edition 2 x Lara New Arabian Nights 3 Corinna Fall of the Jesuits Rinaldo Rinaldini Fo[n]tenelle's Plurality of the Worlds Hermsprong Le diable boiteux Man as he is. Rokeby. Ovid's Metamo[r]phoses in Latin x Wordsworth's Poems x Spenser's Fairy Queen x Life of the Philipps x Fox's History of James II The Reflector Wieland. Fleetwood Don Carlos x Peter Wilkins Rousseau's Confessions. x Espriella's Letters from England Lenora - a poem Emile x Milton's Paradise Lost X Life of Lady Hamilton De l'Alemagne - by Made de Stael 3 vols. of Barruel x Caliph Vathek Nouvelle Heloise x Kotzebue's account of his banishment to Siberia. Waverly Clarissa Harlowe Robertson's Hist. of america x Virgil xTale of Tub. x Milton's speech on Unlicensed printing x Curse of Kehama x Madoc La Bible Expliquee Lives of Abelard and Heloise The New Testament Coleridge's Poems. 1st vol. Syteme de la Nature x Castle of Indolence Chattertons Poems. x Paradise Regained Don Carlos. x Lycidas. x St Leon Shakespeare's Play. Part of which Shelley reads aloud Burkes account of civil society x Excursion Pope's Homer's Illiad x Sallust Micromegas x Life of Chauser Canterbury Tales Peruvian letters. Voyages round the World Pluarch's lives. x 2 vols of Gibbon Ormond Hugh Trevor x Labaume's Hist. of the Russian War Lewis's tales Castle of Udolpho Guy Mannering Charles XII by Voltaire Tales of the East'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
[John] Milton : [unknown]
'finish Hermann d'Unna and write - Shelley reads Milton - After dinner Lord Byron comes down and Clare and Shelley go up to Diodati - Read Rienzi'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
[John] Milton : [unknown]
'After dinner read some of Madme Genlis novels - Shelley reads Milton'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise lost
Letter to Collector MacVicar June 30 1773 'I will not tire you with the detail of all the little circumstances that gradually acquired me the place in her favour which I ever continued to possess. She [ie Aunt Schuyler] saw me reading Paradise Lost with delighted attention; she was astonished to see a child take pleasure in such a book.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Anne Grant [nee MacVicar] Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'S. finishes Gulliver and begins P.[aradise] L.[ost]'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'in the evening Shelley read[s] 2nd book of Paradise Lost. S. reads Locke'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'write - read Locke and Curt. S. reads Plutarch and Locke. He reads Paradise Lost - aloud in the evening'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'begin Pamela. Shelley reads Locke and in the evening Paradise Lost aloud to me'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Comus
'read Comus. Knight of the swan - 1st Vol of Goldth citizen of the world'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'I have read since last October a good deal of the history relating to the East...: not much of books not connected with India [but included] ... In poetry, "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" ...
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mountstuart Elphinstone Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
'I have read since last October a good deal of the history relating to the East...: not much of books not connected with India [but included] ... In poetry, "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" ...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mountstuart Elphinstone Print: Book
John Milton : [Latin poems]
'I have read since last October a good deal of the history relating to the East...: not much of books not connected with India [but included] ... In poetry, ... ; many of Milton's Latin poems ...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mountstuart Elphinstone Print: Book
John Milton : Prose works
'I am in Milton's prose works, Cromwell's life, George Fox's Wanderings &c day & night, when I have any leisure'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle Print: Book
John Milton : Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The
'Read Waverly - Pliny's letters - Political Justice & Miltons Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Shelley reads Waverly - Tales of my Landlord & several of the works of Plato'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'S walks - & reads I book of Paradise Lost in the evening.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'S reads Gibbon a[nd] 2 book of Paradise Lost.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Comus
'Friday Oct. 28th. [...] I walk out by myself about Kentish Town -- Read Comus.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
John Milton : Comus
'Saturday -- 29th. [...] Read Comus. & Prince Alexy Haimatoff'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
John Milton : Comus
'Sunday Oct 30th. [...] Dine at four. Read Comus. S[helley] & M[ary Wollstonecraft Godwin] go away in a coach at 1/2 past 8 [...] Sit up till ten reading Queen Mab'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
John Milton : 'L'Allegro'
'Read Livy - & the Virginia of Alfieri - walk out in the evening - after tea S. reads L'Allegro and il penseroso to me'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : 'Il Penseroso'
'Read Livy - & the Virginia of Alfieri - walk out in the evening - after tea S. reads L'Allegro and il penseroso to me'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'After dinner S. reads the first Book of Paradise Lost to me'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Read Metastasio - S. reads Paradise Lost aloud'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost (Book I)
'[Tuesday] Nov. [...] 22nd. [...] After dinner read with [...] Midge [i.e. Chretien-Hermann Gambs] a little of 1st Canto of Paradise lost by the side of the fire which is lighted in the great drawing room.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Wednesday Dec. [...] 14th. [...] Read [...] Milton's Paradise Lost.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Write - read Lucan & the Bible S. writes the Cenci & reads Plutarch's lives - the Gisbornes call in the evening - S. reads Paradise Lost to me - Read 2 Cantos of the Purgatorio'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Read Beaumont & Fletcher - Dante and Lucan - S. reads the Greek tragedians and Boccacio [sic] [...] He reads Paradise Lost aloud'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost (extracts)
'At 7 [...] I read the History of England and Rome -- at 8 I perused the History of Greece and it was at this age that I first found real delight in poetry -- "The Minstrel" Popes "Iliad"[,] some parts of the "Odyssey" passages from "Paradise lost" selected by my dearest Mama and some of Shakespeares plays among which were "The Tempest," "Othello," and a few historical dramatic pieces constituted my studies!'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Mary Shelley's Reading List of texts read by both herself and Shelley in 1819. All texts are mentioned in journal entries so are not given separate entries here] 'M&S Histoires des Republics Italiennes par Sismondi Forsyth's tour Boccacio Dante's Paradiso and Purgatorio Several plays of Shakespeare - Beaumont and Fletcher &c. Ben Jonson Voyages d'Antenor Massinger 4 vols of Clarendon Paradise Lost Remorse - Undine - Novels &c &c'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary and Percy Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : unknown
'This year [when aged twelve] I read Milton for the first time [italics]thro[end italics] together with Shakespeare & Pope's Homer [...] I now read to gain idea's [sic] not to indulge my fancy and I studied the works of those critics whose attention was directed to my favorite authors.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
'S. reads Paradise Regain[e]d aloud'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
'S. reads Paradise regained aloud.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, The
'Read Milton on divorce'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Samson Agonistes
'Read Homer - 3rd Georgic - Geografica Fisica & Samson Agonistes'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Samson Agonistes
'Read Geografica Fisica & Samson Agonistes'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats' annotated copy of "Paradise Lost"]: 'The Genius of Milton, more particularly in respect to its span in immensity, calculated him, by a sort of birthright, for such an "argument" as the paradise lost: he had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of ease and pleasure, poetical Luxury; and with that it appears to me he would fain have been content, if he could, so doing, have preserved his self-respect and feel of duty performed; but there was working in him as it were that same sort of thing as operates in the great world to the end of a Prophecy's being accomplished: therefore he devoted himself rather to the Ardours thean the pleasures of Song, solacing himself at intervals with cups of old wine; and those are with some exceptions the finest parts of the Poem. With some exceptions - for the spirit of mounting and adventure can never be unfruitful or unrewarded: had he not broken through the clouds which envellope [sic] so deliciously the Elysian fields of Verse, and committed himself to the Extreme, we should never have seen Satan as described - But his face/ Deep Scars of thunder had entrench'd etc.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost" on "The Argument"]: There is a greatness which the "Paradise Lost" possesses over every other poem - the Magnitude of Contrast, and that is softened by the contrast being ungrotesque to a degree. Heaven moves on like music throughout. Hell is also peopled with angels; it also move[s] on like music, not grating and harsh, but like a grand accompaniment in the Base to Heaven.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost" on the opening]: 'There is always a great charm in the openings of great Poems, more particularly where the action begins - that of Dante's Hell. Of Hamlet, the first step must be heroic and full of power; and nothing can be more impressive and shaded then the commencement of the action here - "Round he throws his baleful eyes -" '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost" in Book 1, lines 53-75]. Keats underlines the following phrases and lines: 'round he throws his baleful eyes'; 'At once, as far as Angel's ken, he views/ The dismal situation waste and wild'; 'sights of woe,/ Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace/ And rest can never dwell; hope never comes/ That comes to all'. He writes after line 75: 'One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind's imagining into another. Things may be described by a Man's self in parts so as to make a grand whole which that Man himself would scarcely inform to its excess. A Poet can seldom have justice done to his imagination - for men are as distinct in their conceptions of material shadowings as they are in matters of spiritual understanding: it can scarcely be conceived how Milton's Blindness might here ade [for aid] the magnitude of his conceptions as a bat in a large gothic vault'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost" in Book 1, lines 318-21]: Keats underlines the line 'To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?' and writes: 'There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The english word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of delphic Abstraction - a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist. The next mention of Vale is one of the most pathetic in the whole range of Poetry. "Others, more mild, / Retreated in a silent Valley etc". How much of the charm is in the Valley!'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost" in Book 1, lines 527-67]: Keats underlines the lines from 'the glittering staff unfurl'd' to 'Of warriors old with order'd spear and shield'. He then writes: 'The light and shade - the sort of black brightness - the ebon diamonding - the ethiop Immortality - the sorrow, the pain, the sad-sweet Melody - the Phalanges of Spirits so depressed as to be "uplifted beyond hope" - the short mitigation of Misery - the thousand Melancholies and Magnificences of this Page - leaves no room for anything to be said thereon but "so it is".'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost" in Book 1, lines 591-9]: Keats underlines the lines from 'his form had not yet lost/ All her original brightness, nor appear'd' to 'Perplexes monarchs', and writes: 'How noble and collected an indignation against Kings, "and for fear of change perplexes Monarchs" etc. His very wishing should have had power to pull that feeble animal Charles from his bloody throne. "The evil days" had come to him; he hit the new System of things a mighty mental blow; the exertion must have had or is yet to have some sequences.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost" in Book 1, lines 710-30]: Keats underlines the lines from 'Anon out of the earth a fabric huge/ Rose like an exhalation' to 'yielded light/ As from a sky' and writes: 'What creates the intense pleasure of not knowing? A sense of independence, of power, from the fancy's creating a world of its own by the sense of probabilities. We have read the Arabian Nights and hear there are thousands of those sorts of Romances lost - we imagine after them - but not their realities if we had them nor our fancies in their strength can go further than this Pandemonium - "Straight after the doors opening" etc. "rose like an exhalation" - '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost" in Book 2, lines 546-61]: Keats underlines the following: the lines from 'Others, more mild, /Retreated in a silent valley' to 'By doom of battle'; 'Their song was partial, but the harmony'; 'Suspended Hell'; 'in discourse more sweet/ (For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense)/ Others apart sat on a hill retired'. He writes: 'Milton is godlike in the sublime pathetic. In Demons, fallen Angels, and Monsters the delicacies of passion, living in and from their immortality, is of the most softening and dissolving nature. It is carried to the utmost here - "Others more mild" - nothing can express the sensation one feels at "Their song was partial" etc. Examples of this nature are divine to the utmost in other poets - in Caliban "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments" etc. In Theocritus, Polyphemus, and Homer's Hymn to Pan where Mercury is represented as taking his "homely fac'd" to heaven. There are numerous other instances in Milton - where Satan's progeny is called his "daughter dear", and where this same Sin, a female, and with a feminine instinct for the showy and martial is in pain lest death should sully his bright arms, "nor vainly hope to be invulnerable in those bright arms." Another instance is "pensive I sat alone". We need not mention "Tears such as Angels weep."'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'[underlined] My [end underlining] favorite passage in [underlined] Il Paradiso Perduto [end underlining] is this - When our good old grand pa', Adam, and the Angel Gabriel are discoursing over the repast Eve had set before them, Milton, to put our minds at ease as to the ill consequences of such dawdling, kindly tells us - the meal consisting wholly of fruits "No fear lest dinner cool!" - In "Paradise Regained", however, there is an address from the Devil to our Saviour worth its weight in gold - meeting him in the Wilderness, & affecting not to know him, he begins a conversation thus - "Sir, by what ill chance &c - Now that [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] appears to me the very acme of burlesque - and sets me a shouting every time it comes into my head. - My two dear grown-ups, Miss Wilbraham, & Miss Eliza, who as well as me read [underlined] both [end underlining] Paradises last winter doat upon [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] as much as I do: - and whenever we prate over fruit luncheons, apologise for it by saying - "No fear lest luncheon cool".'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Harriet Burney Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
'[underlined] My [end underlining] favorite passage in [underlined] Il Paradiso Perduto [end underlining] is this - When our good old grand pa', Adam, and the Angel Gabriel are discoursing over the repast Eve had set before them, Milton, to put our minds at ease as to the ill consequences of such dawdling, kindly tells us - the meal consisting wholly of fruits "No fear lest dinner cool!" - In "Paradise Regained", however, there is an address from the Devil to our Saviour worth its weight in gold - meeting him in the Wilderness, & affecting not to know him, he begins a conversation thus - "Sir, by what ill chance &c - Now that [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] appears to me the very acme of burlesque - and sets me a shouting every time it comes into my head. - My two dear grown-ups, Miss Wilbraham, & Miss Eliza, who as well as me read [underlined] both [end underlining] Paradises last winter doat upon [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] as much as I do: - and whenever we prate over fruit luncheons, apologise for it by saying - "No fear lest luncheon cool".'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Harriet Burney Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
'[underlined] My [end underlining] favorite passage in [underlined] Il Paradiso Perduto [end underlining] is this - When our good old grand pa', Adam, and the Angel Gabriel are discoursing over the repast Eve had set before them, Milton, to put our minds at ease as to the ill consequences of such dawdling, kindly tells us - the meal consisting wholly of fruits "No fear lest dinner cool!" - In "Paradise Regained", however, there is an address from the Devil to our Saviour worth its weight in gold - meeting him in the Wilderness, & affecting not to know him, he begins a conversation thus - "Sir, by what ill chance &c - Now that [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] appears to me the very acme of burlesque - and sets me a shouting every time it comes into my head. - My two dear grown-ups, Miss Wilbraham, & Miss Eliza, who as well as me read [underlined] both [end underlining] Paradises last winter doat upon [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] as much as I do: - and whenever we prate over fruit luncheons, apologise for it by saying - "No fear lest luncheon cool".'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: [Miss] Wilbraham Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'[underlined] My [end underlining] favorite passage in [underlined] Il Paradiso Perduto [end underlining] is this - When our good old grand pa', Adam, and the Angel Gabriel are discoursing over the repast Eve had set before them, Milton, to put our minds at ease as to the ill consequences of such dawdling, kindly tells us - the meal consisting wholly of fruits "No fear lest dinner cool!" - In "Paradise Regained", however, there is an address from the Devil to our Saviour worth its weight in gold - meeting him in the Wilderness, & affecting not to know him, he begins a conversation thus - "Sir, by what ill chance &c - Now that [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] appears to me the very acme of burlesque - and sets me a shouting every time it comes into my head. - My two dear grown-ups, Miss Wilbraham, & Miss Eliza, who as well as me read [underlined] both [end underlining] Paradises last winter doat upon [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] as much as I do: - and whenever we prate over fruit luncheons, apologise for it by saying - "No fear lest luncheon cool".'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: [Miss] Wilbraham Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'[underlined] My [end underlining] favorite passage in [underlined] Il Paradiso Perduto [end underlining] is this - When our good old grand pa', Adam, and the Angel Gabriel are discoursing over the repast Eve had set before them, Milton, to put our minds at ease as to the ill consequences of such dawdling, kindly tells us - the meal consisting wholly of fruits "No fear lest dinner cool!" - In "Paradise Regained", however, there is an address from the Devil to our Saviour worth its weight in gold - meeting him in the Wilderness, & affecting not to know him, he begins a conversation thus - "Sir, by what ill chance &c - Now that [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] appears to me the very acme of burlesque - and sets me a shouting every time it comes into my head. - My two dear grown-ups, Miss Wilbraham, & Miss Eliza, who as well as me read [underlined] both [end underlining] Paradises last winter doat upon [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] as much as I do: - and whenever we prate over fruit luncheons, apologise for it by saying - "No fear lest luncheon cool".'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Wilbraham Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Regained
'[underlined] My [end underlining] favorite passage in [underlined] Il Paradiso Perduto [end underlining] is this - When our good old grand pa', Adam, and the Angel Gabriel are discoursing over the repast Eve had set before them, Milton, to put our minds at ease as to the ill consequences of such dawdling, kindly tells us - the meal consisting wholly of fruits "No fear lest dinner cool!" - In "Paradise Regained", however, there is an address from the Devil to our Saviour worth its weight in gold - meeting him in the Wilderness, & affecting not to know him, he begins a conversation thus - "Sir, by what ill chance &c - Now that [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] appears to me the very acme of burlesque - and sets me a shouting every time it comes into my head. - My two dear grown-ups, Miss Wilbraham, & Miss Eliza, who as well as me read [underlined] both [end underlining] Paradises last winter doat upon [twice underlined] Sir [end underlining] as much as I do: - and whenever we prate over fruit luncheons, apologise for it by saying - "No fear lest luncheon cool".'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Wilbraham Print: Book
John Milton : complete works
Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 12 October 1918: 'I read the Greeks, but I am extremely doubtful whether I understand anything they say; also I have read the whole of Milton, without throwing any light upon my own soul, but that I rather like. Don't you think it very queer though that he entirely neglects the human heart? Is that the result of writing one's masterpiece at the age of 50?'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
John Milton : [poems]
'Adam Smith, Sir [-] informed me, was no admirer of the Rambler or the Idler, but was pleased with the pamphlet respecting the Falkland Islands, as it displayed in such forcible language, the madness of modern wars. Of Swift, he made frequent and honourable mention, and regarded him, both in style and sentiment, as a pattern of correctness. He often quoted some of the short poetical addresses to Stella, and was particularly pleased with the couplet, Say Stella, - feel you no content, Reflecting on a life well-spent? Smith had an invincible dislike to blank verse, Milton's only excepted. "they do well", said he, "to call it blank, for blank it is". Beattie's Minstrel he would not allow to be called a poem; for he said it had no plan, beginning or end. He did not much admire Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd", but preferred the "Pastor Fido", of which he spoke with rapture'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Adam Smith Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'You seem so much interested with the translation of "Pastor Fido" that I shall take the liberty of sending it to you, that you may judge of its merits: not being skilled in the Italian tongue I cannot possibly give an opinion of it as a [italics] translation [end italics]. As anything else, I do not like it, nor ever liked pastorals or pastoral writing, even of the first order, further than as vehicles for fine poetry; and then the poetry would have pleased me better had it spoken for itself, than from the mouth of a creature to me so inconceivable as a shepherd or shepherdess, whose chief, or rather [italics] only [end italics] characteristics are innocence and simplicity. I am sorry to say they are but too apt to be insipid and uninteresting to those who merely read about them [she continues this critique at length, concluding] It may be owing to some defect in my mind that I really never yet knew an interesting pastoral character, or cared a straw about whether they hanged themselves upon the first willow, or drowned themselves in the neighbouring brook. I can enter into the delights of Homer's gods, and follow to their darkest recesses Milton's devils, and delight in the absurdities and extravagancies of Shakespeare's men and women, but I never could sympathise in the sufferings of even Virgil's shepherd swains'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Miss V[-] Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
Tuesday 10 September 1918: 'My intellectual snobbishness was chastened this morning by hearing from Janet [Case] that she reads Don Quixote & Paradise Lost, & her sister Lucretius in the evenings.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Janet Case Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
Tuesday 10 September 1918: 'Though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton, I mean to write down my impressions of Paradise Lost [...] Impressions fairly well describes the sort of thing left in my mind. I have left many riddles unread. I have slipped on too easily to taste the full flavour [goes on to describe and discuss in detail] [...] But how smooth, strong & elaborate it all is! What poetry!'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
John Milton : Comus: A Masque
'Whoever reads the Part of the Fairies in the [italics] Midsummer Night's Dream [end italics] may easily perceive how many beautiful Images [italics] Milton [end italics] has borrowed thence to adorn his Masque of [italics] Comus [end italics].'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Laetitia Pilkington Print: Book
John Milton : Il Penseroso
'Why sure every Person must acknowledge, that while [italics] he [Pope; end italics] is insulting [italics] his [end italics] Betters, his Ethic Epistles are little more than Lord [italics] Shaftesbury's [end italics] Rhapsody be rhym'd; his [italics] Windsor Forest [end italics] stollen [sic] from [italics] Cooper's [end italics] Hill; and his [italics] Eloisa and Abelard [end italics], the most beautiful Lines in it, taken from [italics] Milton's Il Penseroso [end italics]'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Laetitia Pilkington Print: Unknown
John Milton :
E. M. Forster to Laura Mary Forster (aunt), 1 January 1917: 'For the last hour I have occupied myself with copying extracts into my "War Anthology" [...] I have put in "your" Milton passage and next to it a passage from Pater -- that in which he describes the longings of Marcus Aurelius for the Ideal City [...] (The passage is in Marius the Epicurean -- at the end of the chapter called Urbs Beata) [...] It is somehow very tranquil to copy out passages such as these, and the very labour of writing seems to bring one nearer to those who wrote them in the past.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster
John Milton : Samson Agonistes
Alfred Tennyson, aged twelve, to his aunt Marianne Fytche: 'You used to tell me that you should be obliged to me if I would write to you and give you my remarks on works and authors. I shall now fulfil the promise which I made at that time. Going into the library this morning, I picked up "Samson Agonistes," on which (as I think it is a play you like) I shall send you my remarks [goes on to comment in detail on various transcribed passages from text, with points discussed including Classical allusions, and etymologies of words]'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
John Milton :
'The [Tennyson] boys had one great advantage [as home-educated pupils], the run of their father's excellent library. Amongst the authors most read by them were Shakespeare, Milton, Burke, Goldsmith, Rabelais, Sir William Jones, Addison, Swift, Defoe, Cervantes, Bunyan and Buffon.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Tennyson children (boys) Print: Book
John Milton :
'Many friends of Somersby days have told me of the exceeding consideration and love which my father showed his mother [...] and how he might often be found in her room reading aloud, with his flexible voice, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Spenser, and Campbell's patriotic ballads.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
John Milton : Comus
[Following Hallam Tennyson's description of his mother's attendance of her younger sister as bridesmaid in May 1836] 'My uncle Arthur says: "It was then I first saw your mother, and she read to me Milton's 'Comus,' which I had not known before and which I have loved ever since."'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Emily Sellwood Print: Book
John Milton :
'The "faithful Fitz" [Edward Fitzgerald] writes that as early as 1835, when he met my father in the Lake Country, at the Speddings' (Mirehouse, by Bassenthwaite Lake) he saw what was to be part of this 1842 volume [of Tennyson's poetry], the "Morte d'Arthur," "The Day-Dream," "The Lord of Burleigh," "Dora," and "The Gardener's Daughter." They were read out of an MS. "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night, when all the house was mute [...] My father read them a great deal of Wordsworth, "the dear old fellow," as he called him [...] Fitzgerald notes again: '"I could remember A. T. saying he remembered the time when he could see nothing in 'Michael' which he now read us in admiration [...]" 'My father also read Keats and Milton'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
John Milton :
'On his [Tennyson's] return [to Farringford] the evening books were Milton, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Thackeray's Humourists, some of Hallam's History and of Carlyle's Cromwell.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred and Emily Tennyson Print: Book
John Milton :
'His books, over three hundred of which are preserved as he left them in 1918, show the range - and limitations - of his interests at school and later. Shakespeare, Scott, Keats and Dickens predominate, but he also worked on Milton, several eighteenth-century authors, and some Elizabethan and late Medieval poets. About two thirds of his library can be classified as "English literature", including biographies of at least twenty authors [explanatory sentence about dominance of biography not criticism in those days]. There are also nearly fifty books in or about French, a high proportion for someone of Owen's respectable but ordinary educational background. the rest are mostly botany, history and classics. The imprints are often those of the popular "libraries" of the time - Everyman's Library, the People's Books, the Home University Library, Penny Poets - cheap editions aimed at the growing market of young people like himself who were keen on self-improvement'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfred Owen Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Oct 4th. [1858] "To-day," my mother says [in diary], "A. took a volume of the Morte d'Arthur and read a noble passage about the battle with the Romans. He went to meet Mr and Mrs Roebuck at dinner at Swainston: and the comet was grand, with Arcturus shining brightly over the nucleus. At dinner he said he must leave the table to look at it, and they all followed [...]" When he returned next night he "observed the comet from his platform, and, when he came down for tea, read some Paradise Lost."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
John Milton : Tractate: Of Education
'We had a quiet comfortable meeting at Mr. Dilly's; nobody there but ourselves. Mr. Dilly mentioned somebody having wished that Milton's "Tractate on Education" should be printed along with his Poems in the edition of "The English Poets" then going on. JOHNSON. "It would be breaking in upon the plan; but would be of no great consequence. So far as it would be any thing, it would be wrong. Education in England has been in danger of being hurt by two of its greatest men, Milton and Locke. Milton's plan is impracticable, and I suppose has never been tried. Locke's, I fancy, has been tried often enough, but is very imperfect; it gives too much to one side, and too little to the other; it gives too little to literature.--I shall do what I can for Dr. Watts; but my materials are very scanty. His poems are by no means his best works; I cannot praise his poetry itself highly; but I can praise its design".'
Century: Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Johnson
John Milton :
'Mrs. Kennicot related, in his [Johnson's] presence, a lively saying of Dr. Johnson to Miss Hannah More, who had expressed a wonder that the poet who had written "Paradise Lost" should write such poor Sonnets:--"Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones".'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Johnson Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Mrs. Kennicot related, in his [Johnson's] presence, a lively saying of Dr. Johnson to Miss Hannah More, who had expressed a wonder that the poet who had written "Paradise Lost" should write such poor Sonnets:--"Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones".'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Hannah More Print: Book
John Milton : [Sonnets]
'Mrs. Kennicot related, in his [Johnson's] presence, a lively saying of Dr. Johnson to Miss Hannah More, who had expressed a wonder that the poet who had written "Paradise Lost" should write such poor Sonnets:--"Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones".'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Hannah More Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Doctor Collier used to say that although Milton was so violent a Whig himself, he was obliged to write his poem upon the purest Tory principles - it is very observable and very true'.
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Dr Collier Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'Doctor Collier used to say that although Milton was so violent a Whig himself, he was obliged to write his poem upon the purest Tory principles - it is very observable and very true'.
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Hester Lynch Thrale Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost", Book 3, Lines 51-9]: The management of this Poem is Apollonian. Satan first "throws round his baleful eyes", then awakes his legions, he consults, he sets forward on his voyage - and just as he is getting to the end of it we see the Great God and our first parent, and that same satan all brought in one's vision - we have the invocation to light before we mount to heaven - we breathe more freely - we feel the great Author's consolations coming thick upon him at a time when he complains most - we are getting ripe for diversity - the immediate topic of the Poem opens with a grand Perspective of all concerned.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost", Book 3, lines 135-7]: 'Hell is finer than this'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost", Book 3, lines 487-9]: 'This part in its sound is unaccountably expressive of the description.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost", Book 3, lines 606-17]: Keats underlines the phrases and lines "Breathe forth Elixir pure"; "when with one virtuous touch/ The arch-chemic Sun" and "as when his beams at noon Culminate from the equator". He writes: 'A Spirit's eye'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost", Book 4, lines 1-5] Keats underlines the lines: "O for that warning voice, which he who saw/ The Apocalypse heard cry in Heaven aloud,/ Then when the Dragon put to second rout,/ Came furious down to be revenged on men,". He writes: 'A friend of mine says this Book has the finest opening of any - the point of time is gigantically critical - the wax is melted, the seal is aobut to be applied - and Milton breaks out, "O for that warning voice," etc. There is moreover an opportunity for a Grandeur of Tenderness - the opportunity is not lost. Nothing can be higher - Nothing so more than delphic.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost", Book 4, lines 268-72] Keats underlines the lines: "Not that fair field/ Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers,/ Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis/ Was gather'd, which cost Ceres all that pain/ To seek her through the world." He writes: 'There are two specimens of a very extraordinary beauty in the "Paradise Lost"; they are of a nature as far as I have read, unexampled elsewhere - they are entirely distinct from the brief pathos of Dante - and they are not to be found even in Shakespeare - these are according to the great prerogative of poetry better described in themselves than by a volume. The one is in the fol[lowing] - "which cost Ceres all that pain" - the other is that ending "Nor could the Muse defend her son" - they appear exclusively Miltonic without the shadow of another mind ancient or modern.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost", Book 6, lines 58-9] Keats underlines "reluctant flames, the sign/ Of wrath awaked", and writes '"Reluctant" with its original and modern meaning combined and woven together, with all its shades of signification has a powerful effect.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost", Book 7, lines 420-34] Keats underlines the phrase "With clang despised the ground, under a cloud/ In prospect." He writes: 'Milton in every instance pursues his imagination to the utmost - he is "sagacious of his Quarry", he sees Beauty on the wing, pounces upon it and gorges it to the producing of his essential verse. "So from the root the springs lighter the green stalk," etc. But in no instance is this sort of perseverance more exemplified than in what may be called his stationing or statuary. He is not content with simple description, he must station, - thus here, we not only see how the Birds "with clang despised the ground" but we see them "under a cloud in prospect." So we see Adam "Fair indeed and tall - under a plantane" - and so we see Satan "disfigured - on the Assyrian Mount." This last with all its accompaniments, and keeping in mind the Theory of Spirits' eyes and the simile of Gallilio [sic], has a dramatic vastness and solemnity fit and worthy to hold one amazed in the midst of this "Paradise Lost" -'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost", Book 9, 41-7]: 'Had not Shakespeare liv'd?'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost", Book 9, 179-91]. Keats underlines the whole passage, excluding "where soonest he might find /the serpent", and writes: 'Satan having entered the Serpent, and inform'd his brutal sense - might seem sufficient - but Milton goes on "but his sleep disturb'd not". Whose spirit does not ache at the smothering and confinement -the unwilling stillness - the "waiting close"? Whose head is not dizzy at the prosaible [sic] speculations of satan in the serpent prison - no poetry ever can give a greater pain of suffocation.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Keats Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'I was told to-day that Joshua and Jesus are the very same Name. I never heard it before, and suppose it not commonly known among Christians - 'tis a Shame however not to have known it always - Milton mentions it in the last Book of Paradise Lost'.
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Hester Lynch Thrale Print: Book
John Milton :
'[when Mrs Thrale was a child] The Duchess of Leeds likewise took an odd Delight in my excellent company, used to send her chair for me & set me to read Milton I remember sometimes to Lord Godolphin sometimes to Mr Garrick who used often to be there & Mr Quin'.
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Hester Lynch Salusbury Print: Book
John Milton : Comus: A Masque
'"Ye Grots & Caverns shagg'd with horrid Thorn!" This Verse from Pope's Eloisa was originally Milton's - 'tis in Comus, but I think very little remember'd'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Hester Lynch Thrale Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost (book IV)
From F. T. Palgrave's 'Personal Recollections' of Tennyson: 'Shakespeare and Milton [...] he read aloud by preference: always coming to Paradise Lost with manifest pleasure and reverent admiration [...] I may name [...] the great vision of Eden (Book IV. 205-311), which he read aloud at Ardtornish in Morvern (August, 1853), and often afterwards; dwelling always upon the peculiar grace of lines 246-263.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
John Milton : 'L'Allegro'
'What a strange Book is Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"! & how it has been plunder'd! Milton took his Allegro and Penseroso from the Verses at the beginning, Savage his Speech of Suicide in the Wanderer from Page 216. Swift his Tale of the Woman that held water in her Mouth to regain her Husband's Love by Silence - 'tis printed in the Tatler; Johnson got his Story of the Magnet that detects unchaste Wives from the same Farrago, & even Shakespear I believe the Trick put on the Tinker Christopher Sly in the taming of the Shrew. See page 277 of Burton.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Hester Lynch Thrale Print: Book
John Milton : 'Il Penseroso'
'What a strange Book is Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"! & how it has been plunder'd! Milton took his Allegro and Penseroso from the Verses at the beginning, Savage his Speech of Suicide in the Wanderer from Page 216. Swift his Tale of the Woman that held water in her Mouth to regain her Husband's Love by Silence - 'tis printed in the Tatler; Johnson got his Story of the Magnet that detects unchaste Wives from the same Farrago, & even Shakespear I believe the Trick put on the Tinker Christopher Sly in the taming of the Shrew. See page 277 of Burton.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Hester Lynch Thrale Print: Book
John Milton :
'While their [her daughters'] Father's Life preserv'd my Authority entire, I used it [italics] all & only [end italics] for their Improvement; & since it expired with him, & my Influence perished by my Connection with Piozzi - I have read to them what I could not force or perswade them to read for themselves. The English & Roman Histories, the Bible; - not Extracts, but the whole from End to End - Milton, Shakespeare, Pope's Iliad, Odyssey & other Works, some Travels through the well-known Parts of Europe; some elegant Novels as Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Voltaire's Zadig &c. Young & Addison's works, Plays out of Number, Rollin's Belles Lettres - and hundreds of Things now forgot, have filled our Time up since we left London for Bath.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Hester Lynch Thrale and her daughters Hester, Susanna and Sophia Print: Book
John Milton : Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio
Robert Southey to Charles Collins, 31 March 1793: 'On Wednesday morning about eight o clock we sallied forth. my travelling equipage consisting of my diary — writing book, pen & ink silk handkerchief & Miltons defence. We reached Woodstock to breakfast where I was delighted with reading the Nottingham address for peace...'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Southey Print: Book
John Milton : ‘The Fifth Ode of Horace. Lib. I’
Robert Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, c 26 December 1793: 'I take Milton to have introduced this kind of alcaics into the English language in his translation of Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa &c. it is since used most elegantly by Collins Mrs Barbauld — in the gent. of Devon & Cornwalls poems — & by my favourite Dr Sayers — so here I have strong authority.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Southey Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
Lady Harriet Cavendish to her grandmother, the Countess Dowager Spencer, 23 July 1807: 'This morning I got up between 8 and 9, read 500 lines of Milton's Paradise Lost, walked in the garden, played upon a Russian Bilboquet Willy brought me last night, and pride myself upon my candour in confessing this last occupation to you.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Harriet Cavendish Print: Book
John Milton :
'We may suspect that the library was dearer to Papa and Annabella than to Mamma [...] She liked visiting the neighbours and tenants, with a friendly finger ready to stick in everybody's pie, and consequent plums to bring back for the Jack Horners at home, writing their verses and reading their Milton and Cowper and Campbell.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sir Ralph and Anne Isabella Milbanke Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'There was always poetry. Campbell, just then at the top of his short-lived vogue; Ossian, the unreadable of to-day; Milton -- and with the New Year of 1812 a Captain Boothby (met during the London season) as a visitor with whom to read the last, but not the other two. For he did not admire either Campbell or Ossian [...] They were reading Paradise Lost; he said that he "believed almost all the events in it." Only almost; and he went on to point out a passage in Book X which proves that, when diction was his theme, he knew what he was talking about [cites lines 'While yet we live, but one short hour perhaps, / Between us two let there be peace,' and notes Boothby's admiration of their simplicity].'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Anne Isabella Milbanke and Captain Boothby Print: Book
John Milton : Paradise Lost
'The subject of the meeting was 'Gardens' & all members were asked to bring contributions [...] The following is a list of the contributions. C.E. Stansfield a reading from 'Paradise Lost' followed by a short essay entitled "The Lost Art of Living - A Gardener's Life" Mary Hayward. Song "Now sleeps the Crimson petals" C.I. Evans. Two Readings. Of an Orchard. Higson. The Apple. John Burrough. Mrs Robson. Song. "Thank God for a Garden" Miss Cole. Recitation. 'The Flower's Name'. Browning. E.E. Unwin. Song. "Come into the Garden Maud" Mrs Evans. Reading from "The Small Garden Useful" dealing with the Cooking of Vegetables. C.I. Evans. Reading. "My Garden" interval for supper Miss Wallis. Reading by Request 'My Garden' - a parody Miss Cole. Recitation. Gardens. by Kipling Miss Hayward. Song. R.H. Robson Violin Solo C.I. Evans. Reading. A ballad of trees & the master Mrs Robson. Song.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Stansfield Print: Book
John Milton : Prose writings
Aaron Hill to Samuel Richardson, 1 June 1730: 'It pleases me, but does not surprise me at all, that your sentiments concerning Milton's prose writings, agree with those I threw out, under influence of that back-handed inspiration, which his malevolent genius had filled me with, as I drew in the bad air of his pages [...] One might venture on a very new use of two writers: I would pick out my friends and my enemies, by setting them to read [italics]Milton[end italics] and [italics]Cowley[end italics]. I might take it for granted, that I ought to be afraid of his [italics]heart[end italics], who, in the fame and popularity of the first, could lose sight of his malice and wickedness.'
