The acquisition of the copyright of Paradise Lost by Jacob Tonson is a fact of some consequence in the history of the book. When Tonson bought his first half of the copyright in 1683, the book was in its third edition. About 4000 or 4500 copies in all had been printed off up to that time; of which, however, a considerable number (probably the bulk of the third edition) remained on hand. The sale of these, from Aylmer's counter or Tonson's, seems to have sufficed all demand for a year or two more. But then there came a sudden stir. In 1688, while Tonson was still only half-proprietor of the book, there appeared a Fourth Edition of it, in folio size, and with this title: "Paradise Lost. A Poem. In Twelve Books. The Author John Milton. The Fourth Edition. Adorn'd with Sculptures. London, Printed by Miles Flesher for Richard Bently, at the Post Office in Russell-Street, and Jacob Tonson, at the Judges-Head in Chancery Lane near Fleet-street." An interesting fact respecting this Fourth Edition of the poem, accounting also for its large size and sumptuous form, is that it was published by subscription: one of the first books so published in England.1 At the end of the volume is a list of "The Nobility and Gentry that encourag'd, by subscription, the printing this Edition." The list consists of more than 500 names, including those of many eminent men of the day, such as Dryden, Waller, Lord Dorset, Sir Robert Howard, Mr. (afterwards Lord) Somers, Dr. Aldrich, Atterbury, and Milton's old political antagonist, Sir Roger L'Estrange. Preceding the title-page is a portrait of Milton by R. White, adapted from Faithorne's engraving of 1670; and there is an engraving before each book of the poem. All this shows an increase of interest in the poem, and a wish to do the best for it, which it is reasonable to attribute to Jacob Tonson. He is said, indeed, to have been "advised and encouraged" in the under is vouched for by Bishop Newton (Life of Milton, 1749), who may have had the information from the then living members of the Tonson firm, his own publishers. For the other facts, see the title-page and preface to Milton's Epistolæ Familiares, edit. 1674, Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, i. pp. 292, 293, and Dunton's Anecdotes, quoted in Nichols, iii. 627. The month of the publication of the Epistolæ Familiares by Aylmer I have from the Stationers' Registers. 1 Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, iv. 8. The first book published by subscription in England, Nichols here says, was Walton's Polyglott Bible (1654-57); the second, he thinks, was Dryden's Virgil; and the third, he thinks, was this edition in 1688 (which he calls Tonson's) of Paradise Lost. But Dryden's Virgil was not published till 1697. taking by Somers, "who not only subscribed himself, but was zealous in promoting the subscription."1 Dryden also, whose loyalty to Milton from the first is remarkable, is likely to have been among Tonson's advisers in the affair; and it was probably as much to oblige Tonson, as to express again his own opinion of Milton, that he wrote those now famous lines which were first given to the world at the foot of White's portrait of Milton in this very edition of 1688: "Three Poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. To make a third she joined the former two. As will be seen from the title-page of this Fourth Edition of Paradise Lost, Tonson was not yet sole proprietor of the copyright : his associate Richard Bently probably representing that half of the right which had been left, in 1683, still in Brabazon Aylmer's hands. Moreover, though some copies of this Fourth Edition of Paradise Lost were sent into the market bound up with similar folio editions of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, also freshly published in 1688, this seems to have been only by arrangement with a third bookseller, Randal Taylor, whose name appears on the title-pages of the two smaller poems, and who was then their proprietor. It was probably the success of the fourth edition of the great Epic,—whether in its separate form, as published by Bently and Tonson jointly, or as bound up with Taylor's editions of the two smaller poems, printed in the same year to match,—that induced Tonson to extend his property in Milton's poetry. At all events, as we have seen, he did, in 169091, buy the remaining half of the copyright of Paradise Lost; and from this date onwards we find him.having almost a monopoly of the publication not only of that, but also of the other poems of Milton. We may pause for a moment at the year 1690-91, for the purpose of noting another bibliographical proof of the extraordinary celebrity which had by that time, only sixteen years after the death of Milton, grown round his name, more especially on account of his Paradise Lost. Not only was that poem then in its fourth and hitherto most 1 Newton's Life of Milton, 1749, p. xl. sumptuous English edition; but there had begun to be translations of it into other tongues. Not to do more than merely mention a German translation by an E. G. von Berge (of which one hears as having been published at Zerbst at the translator's own expense in 1682, but copies of which have become excessively rare), and a Latin translation of the First Book by several scholars, brought out in London in 1686 by Thomas Dring (the publisher of Milton's own. .second edition of his Minor Poems in 1673: see ante, vol. i. p. 100), one may dwell more particularly on the appearance, exactly in 1690, of a substantial octavo volume of 546 pages, printed at London by John Darby, and bearing this title: "Paraphrasis Poetica in Tria Johannis Miltoni, viri clarissimi, Poemata: Paradisum Amissum, Paradisum Recuperatum, et Samsonem Agonisten. Autore Gulielmo Hogao" ("Poetical Paraphrase on three Poems of the illustrious John Milton viz. Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes by William Hog"). As the title bears, this is a Paraphrase or free version in Latin of the whole of Paradise Lost, and of the other two Poems, all done by one hand. The laborious author, William Hog, was a Scot from Perthshire, who had gone to London about the year 1675 or 1676, and had been living there ever since, employed in various efforts for a scholarly livelihood, but in very hard straits. He had managed to publish in 1682 a Paraphrasis in Jobum Poetica, or Poetical Latin Paraphrase of the Book of Job, and subsequently a similar Paraphrasis in Ecclesiasten Poetica, or Latin Paraphrase of the Book of Ecclesiastes; and this Latin Paraphrase of Milton's three great Poems seems to have been his third exercise in that once common, but never very hopeful, species of literary industry. How he came to undertake the labour we learn from himself in his Epistola Nuncupatoria prefixed to the volume, and dedicating it, in terms of boundless gratitude, to his lately-found Mæcenas, Dr. Daniel Cox, Professor of Medicine, Fellow of the Royal Society, etc. "More than fourteen years," he there says in some touching Latin sentences, "I have lived in England, and often "I have walked about as a stranger among strangers: and with how many miseries have I meanwhile struggled! To how many scorns, "how many reproaches, how many injuries, has my unfortunate "poverty exposed me! All that while I never was able anywhere "to find a true friend, till the kind providence of a merciful God led 66 me into your presence." For the last three years, he goes on to 66 inform us, it was this good Dr. Cox that had supported him; it was Dr. Cox, himself a man of literary abilities and tastes, and a great admirer of Milton, that had set him upon translating Milton's English poems into Latin; and it was at Dr. Cox's expense that the present volume was published.- -It was not to be the last of Mr. Hog's exertions in Latinising Milton; for, whether it was Dr. Cox's continued liberality or anything else that sustained the painful thread of the poor man's life some while longer, there was to be a Latin Paraphrase in 1694 of Milton's Lycidas, followed in 1698 by a Latin Paraphrase of the Comus, both by the same Gulielmus Hogæus.To these Latin translations of so much of Milton's Poetry by Hog there will be occasion to refer again in the course of this Introduction: meanwhile what has to be noted is the testimony furnished by the appearance in 1690 of Hog's Latin Translation of the whole of Paradise Lost to the great reputation then of that poem in particular. It was on the Translation of Paradise Lost first of all, Hog tells us in the prefixed Epistle to his volume, that his patron Dr. Cox had set him, the addition of translations of the Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes having come in as an afterthought; and Dr. Cox's reason for the suggestion had been that, at a time when the fame of Paradise Lost was spread throughout all England, it seemed a pity that the accident of its having been written in English should prevent sufficient acquaintance with it abroad, and should any longer confine the appreciation of "such an invention of genius, so worthy of celebrity in all lands," within the narrow limits. of Britain. Great as was the fame of Paradise Lost within Britain already in 1690-91, when Jacob Tonson became proprietor of the whole copyright of the poem, he was not the man to let the book rest in the mere Fourth Edition which was then maintaining that fame. In 1692 he brought out another folio edition of Paradise Lost, counting as the fifth of that poem, bound up with another edition (the fourth) of Paradise Regained. This was followed, in 1695, by a sixth edition. of Paradise Lost, also in large folio, and with illustrations: many of the copies separate, but others bound up with Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the Minor Poems, all separately paged, but of the same folio size, so as to constitute together what is really the first Collective Edition of the whole of Milton's Poetry. But this sixth edition of Paradise Lost was distinguished by another important 66 accompaniment. Besides the text of the poem, but separately paged, so that it might stand apart, and form a folio volume by itself, there was an elaborate commentary, consisting of no fewer than 321 folio pages of Annotations, under this title, "Annotations on Milton's "Paradise Lost: wherein the texts of Sacred Writ relating to the "Poem are quoted; the parallel places and imitations of the most "excellent Homer and Virgil cited and compared; all the obscure "parts rendered in phrases more familiar; the old and obsolete words, with their originals, explain'd and made easy to the Eng"lish reader. By P. H. piλoоTηs." The "P. H." who thus led the way, so largely, carefully, and laboriously, in the work of commentating Milton, and from whom all subsequent commentators have borrowed, and often with too little acknowledgment, is ascertained to have been Patrick Home or Hume, a Scotsman, of whom nothing. more is known than that, at the time of the publication, he was settled as a schoolmaster somewhere near London. Tonson, one supposes, had found him out, and either set him on the work, or accepted the work from him, already done privately as a labour of love.1 After we pass into the Eighteenth Century, editions of the Paradise Lost, either separately or as a part of the "Poetical Works," begin to abound. A common statement, indeed, is that it was Addison's celebrated series of criticisms on Paradise Lost (begun in No. 267 of the Spectator, Jan. 5, 1711-12, and concluded in No. 369, May 3, 1712) that first awoke people to Milton's greatness as a poet, and that till then he had been neglected. The statement will not bear investigation, and is in fact one of those sheepish repetitions of 1 It is really a pity that more is not known of this modest and meritorious “P. H.,” who wrote so elaborate a commentary on Paradise Lost only twentyone years after Milton's death. Richardson, noticing him in 1734 (Explanatory Notes, p. cxvii.), says, "I have been told this was Philip Humes"; Paterson, a subsequent commentator on Milton (1744), calls him "a very learned and judicious gentleman of North Britain, . . . Peter Home"; Bishop Newton, in 1749, first gives him his right name of Patrick Hume. Later writers, confusing persons, have made him Sir Patrick Hume. My authority for his having been a schoolmaster near London is Mr. David Laing of Edinburgh, in a paper in the Archeologia Scotica (vol. iii. pp. 83-91). I may add that among the graduates of the University of Edinburgh about 1680 there are more than one Patricius Home or Patricius Hume. The older Scottish spelling of the name was Home; but the pronunciation, even with this spelling, was, and still is in some families, Hume. |