Betwixt two ages cast: Milton, Johnson, and the English renaissance

Journal of the History of Ideas

Volumn 61, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 397-413

  Lynch, Jack ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039331183     PISSN: 00225037     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3653920     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. 6).
2. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600-1660 (New York, 1945); James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century (New York, 1969).
3. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600-1660 (New York, 1945); James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century (New York, 1969).
4. See, however, Robert DeMaria, British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), which extends the "long eighteenth century" to before the Civil Wars and includes the complete ten-book Paradise Lost.
5. H. A. Taine, History of English Literature, tr. Henry Van Laun (New York, n.d.).
6. Thomas Vogler, "Romanticism and Literary Periods," New German Critique, 38 (1986), 131-60, 135.
7. Peter Bürger, "On Literary History," Poetics, 14 (1985), 199-207, 202. Compare Walter Benjamin's term Jetztzeit, which makes clear the importance of the now in periodization.
8. See Giorgio Falco, La Polemica sul medio evo, nuova edizione, ed. Fulvio Tessitore (Naples, 1974), 29-41, and Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), 1-77.
9. See Giorgio Falco, La Polemica sul medio evo, nuova edizione, ed. Fulvio Tessitore (Naples, 1974), 29-41, and Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), 1-77.
10. 7).
11. Robert Sanderson, Sermons (London, 1689), 490.
12. John Evelyn, 26 November 1661, cited in Earl R. Wasserman, Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (Urbana, 1947), 12.
13. "Defence of the Epilogue," Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (2 vols.; Oxford, 1900), I, 162.
14. The Man of Mode, I.i.
15. George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, A General Key to the Writings of the Poets of the Last Age (London, 1723), iv.
16. Jonathan Richardson, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost (London, 1734), Ixxxvi.
17. "The Secular Masque," lines 90-91; Prologue to Aureng-Zebe, lines 21-22. Quotations are from The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenborg, Jr. (21 vols.; Berkeley, 1956).
18. r-
19. Elizabeth Cooper, The Muses Library; or, A Series of English Poetry ... Being a General Collection of All the Old Valuable Poetry Extant (London, 1738), xii.
20. The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley (3 vols.; Oxford, 1935), III, 1124; to Thomas Warton, 15 April 1770.
21. Tonson attached the 321-page Annotations on Milton's "Paradise Lost," signed "P. H.," to the folio Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton (London, 1695). For Hume, see David Masson, The Life of John Milton (7 vols.; London, 1859-94), VI, 786; Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson: Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville, 1971), 128; Howard Erskine-Hill, "On Historical Commentary: The Example of Milton and Dryden," Presenting Poetry, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Richard A. McCabe (Cambridge, 1995), 52-74; and Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge, 1997), 57-62. There are only a few earlier examples of commentary on English works, such as E. K.'s notes to The Shepherd's Calender, Speight's Chaucer, and Selden's 1613 commentary on the Poly-Olbion. There was a tradition of scholarly commentary on Renaissance Latin scholarship: the editor of the 1738 edition of Grotius's Rights of War and Peace, I, xxviii, boasts that an edition came out "cum Notis Variorum, by which means our Author, within 50 Years after his Death, obtained an Honour, which was not bestow'd upon the Ancients, till after many Ages."
22. See James Anderson Winn, John Diyden and His World (New Haven, 1987), 262.
23. The State of Innocence: And Fall of Man. Described in Milton's Paradise Lost. Render'd into Prose ... by a Gentleman of Oxford, translated by George Smith Green from the French Paradis perdu by Nicolas François Dupré de Saint-Maur (London, 1745). A second edition appeared ten years later. Other early translations are catalogued in the 1753 edition of the Prose Works, including Thomas Power's Latin translation of Paradise Lost (1691), Michael Bold's Latin version of the first book (1702), Trap's Latin Paradise Lost (1741), William Dobson's Latin translation of the first six books (1750), an anonymous Dutch translation from Haarlem (1728), a French version by Dupré de S. Maur (3 vols.; 1729), an Italian version by Paolo Rolli (1736), and a planned but never completed Greek version by Richard Dawes (1736).
24. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford, 1992), and Jean I. Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington, 1995). There is no comparable study of the adaptations of Paradise Lost.
25. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford, 1992), and Jean I. Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington, 1995). There is no comparable study of the adaptations of Paradise Lost.
26. 2), xxiv.
27. 2), xxiv.
28. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (6 vols.; Oxford 1934-64), 1, 301 (cited hereafter as Life).
29. The Life of Milton, in The Lives of the Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (3 vols.; Oxford, 1905), I, 87.
30. "Proposals," Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, vols. VII and VIII of the Yale Edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1968), VII, 56, 207. See also Arthur Sherbo, Samuel Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare (Urbana, 1956), 24.
31. See Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens, 1994), 4-8.
32. See George Sensabaugh, That Grand Whig Milton (Stanford, 1952), 3; Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1970), 329; and Joseph Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland 1970) 11-12.
33. See George Sensabaugh, That Grand Whig Milton (Stanford, 1952), 3; Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1970), 329; and Joseph Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland 1970) 11-12.
34. See George Sensabaugh, That Grand Whig Milton (Stanford, 1952), 3; Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1970), 329; and Joseph Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland 1970) 11-12.
35. Lives of the Most Famous English Poets: or, The Honour of Parnassus (London 1687) 195.
36. Cited in Anderson, The Works of the British Poets, VII, 762.
37. John Bell (ed.), The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill (109 vols.; London, 1777-87), XXVIII, 11.
38. Note to "On Time," Poems on Several Occasions, 296n (compare xiii). The first edition reads, "The poet should be distinguished from the puritan."
39. 2), 129.
40. 2), 129.
41. 2), 129.
42. An Essay upon Divorcement; Writ for the Good of Both Sexes (London, 1715).
43. Areopagitica: A speech of Mr John Milton, for the Liberty of Unlicens'd Printing, to the Parliament of England (London, 1738), with other editions in 1772, 1791 ("Dedicated to the Rt. Hon. Charles James Fox, the friend of truth and liberty"), and 1792; A Manifesto of the Lord Protector ... wherein Is Shewn the Reasonableness of the Cause of this Republic against the Depredations of the Spaniards. Written in Latin by John Milton, ... Now Translated into English (London, 1738); A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political, and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton (2 vols.; London, 1738).
44. The Works of John Milton, Historical, Political, and Miscellaneous (2 vols.; London, 1753).
45. Explanatory Notes and Remarks, xiv; cf. Ixxi: "And Now for Some Years Poetry must be Suspended, and all the Delights of the Greek and Roman Ideas Exchang'd for Modern Janglings. ... the Poet is Seen, however Disguis'd by Polemical Accoutrements."
46. Poems upon Several Occasions, xi. He extends the principle beyond Milton to others like him, and writes of early Puritanism, "the first fervours of a new sect are always violent, retarded for some time the progress of ingenious and useful knowledge" (The History of English Poetry [4 vols.; London, 1775-81], II, 457).
47. A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford, 1966), 61.
48. Dedication to Kennedy's Chronology, Samuel Johnson's Prefaces and Dedications, ed. Allen T. Hazen (New Haven, 1937), 76.
49. The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell, vol. II of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1963), 213-14. Note that Boswell applies the same logic to Johnson himself: "It is somewhat curious, that his literary career appears to have been almost totally suspended in the years 1745 and 1746, those years which were marked by a civil war in Great-Britain, when a rash attempt was made to restore the House of Stuart to the throne" (Life, I, 176).
50. On the reception of The Lives of the Poets, including The Life of Milton, see Edward Tomarken, A History of the Commentary on Selected Writings of Samuel Johnson (Columbia, S.C., 1994), 119-45, and Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton, esp. 10-11, but a definitive account of Johnson's opinion of Milton has yet to be written.
51. Francis Blackburne, Remarks on Johnson's Life of Milton, to which are added Milton's Tractate of Education and Areopagitica (London, 1780), vi, 127-28, 148.
52. Prem Nath (in "Johnson Agonistes and Milton's Samson," American Notes & Queries, 20 [1982], 69-70), Nalini Jain (in "Echoes of Milton in Johnson's Irene," American Notes & Queries, 24 [1986], 134-36), and James Ogden (in "A Johnson Borrowing from Milton," Notes & Queries, 39 [1992], 482) have identified Miltonic sources and analogues for Johnson's writings. Bruce Redford, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 20 (1990), 81-91, considers Milton's influence on Johnson in "Defying Our Master: The Appropriation of Milton in Johnson's Political Tracts."
53. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (New York, 1971), 52.
54. Lives of the Poets, I, 140; cf. his admonition, I, 98, "Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look" closely at his work.
55. v See Reddick, The Making of Johnson's Dictionary, 129-30, and Robert DeMaria, "The Politics of Johnson's Dictionary," PMLA, 104 (1989), 64-74, 70.
56. Samuel Johnson's Literary Criticism (Chicago, 1952), 39.
57. Piozzi's Anecdotes, Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill (2 vols.; Oxford, 1987), I, 487.
58. The Rambler, ed. Walter Jackson Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vols. III to V of The Yale Edition (New Haven, 1969), IV, 383 (Rambler 140). By Coleridge's day, the transformation was complete and Johnson's criticism was simply impertinent: "Of Criticism we may perhaps say, that these divine Poets, Homer, Eschylus, and the two Compeers, Dante, Shakespeare, Spencer, Milton, who deserve to have Critics, χριτὶ, are placed above Criticism in the vulgar sense" (Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton, 254).
59. Vereen Bell, "Johnson's Milton Criticism in Context," English Studies, 49 (1968), 127-32, 127, 132; but cf. J. R. Brink, "Johnson and Milton," SEL, 20 (1980), 493-503, 495. 52 Roy Flannagan, "Bate's Samuel Johnson and Johnson's Life of Milton: Puckish or Perverse? A Review Article," Milton Quarterly, 12 (1978), 147-48.
60. The Making of the National Poet, 219. See Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (New York, 1964), and Dobson, esp. 214-27.
61. The Making of the National Poet, 219. See Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (New York, 1964), and Dobson, esp. 214-27.