for glory won (shall be held) to be styl'd great conquerors, etc." This I find since I came to the conclusion myself is Verity's interpretation. I have no doubt that it is right. I must leave "done" or "won" to the reader.

My treatment of Milton's spelling has been described in the preface to the first volume and I need not add much to what is said there. Briefly, of words whose pronunciation is not altered by modernisation and which Milton spells in more ways than one I have adopted the form which has now established itself. Of some of these to-day's pronunciation is not quite that of Milton's day but the old spelling does not to our eyes suggest what was the older pronunciation. To render this we should need to adopt a phonetic spelling, which no one is likely meantime to do. The spellings which I have retained are those that do clearly indicate how Milton pronounced certain words which we have changed and both spell and pronounce differently, e.g. "hunderd" for "hundred"-" childern" is so spelt in the First Edition but in the Second is, with one exception, doubtless an oversight, changed to "children," and I accept the Second Edition as "the only Authentic Edition of Paradise Lost' as thus Perfected; and 'tis very scarce" (Richardson)—"furder" and "fardest" for "further" and "farthest" when Milton so chooses to spell them; "wardrope" or "wardrop" for "wardrobe"; "alablaster" for "alabaster"; "perfet" and "imperfet" for "perfect," etc.; "verdit" for "verdict"; "rowl" or "roul" for "roll," etc. In difficult cases like "range," and "raunge," "fold" and "fould" I have compared all the different passages in which

Milton uses the word and followed his clear preference if there was one, or generally, if there were no clear preference, adopted the form we use. For example, Milton spells "blood" in our way some twelve times in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," as "bloud" some twice or thrice. The pronunciation was such, I gather from Viëtor and others, as to rhyme with "stood." The spelling "bloud" may mean that it was changing in the direction of our sound; "flood" is in like manner occasionally spelt "floud." It is not clear, however, that Milton meant to indicate different sounds by the two spellings.

I have, of course, preserved Milton's distinction between "their" and "thir," "hee" and "he," "she and "shee," "me" and "mee," "ye" and "yee." The corrections made in 1674 carry out the distinction more consistently than editors have suggested. When Beeching says that "thir' is not found at all till the 349th line of the First Book" he is ignoring the Second Edition where the correcting of "their" to "thir" begins at the 31st line. The forms of the pronoun are also corrected to some extent throughout. I have accepted Milton's spelling of "wrauth" although our "wrath" is generally so pronounced, because there may be another pronunciation. I have generally been more conservative in dealing with "Paradise Lost" because Milton took special care with its printing, and have, for example, followed Milton in forms like "femal," "feminin," "Apostat" because the final "e" has undoubtedly led and is leading to a change of sound. The kind of care which Milton took about the printing of the poem, when a blind man, is clearly suggested by the changes made in

the Second Edition, by what Phillips says above, and by a statement in a letter written in 1666 to Heimbach. I quote in English. "I will conclude after first begging you, if there be any errors in the diction or punctuation, to impute it to the boy ('puero,' probably 'servant') who took this down, who is quite ignorant of Latin and to whom I was obliged (with no little vexation) to count out every the least letter in dictating (singulas plane litterulas annumerare non sine miseria dictans cogebar).” If Milton took so much care, it may be asked why I have changed at all. My answer is, first that I wished so to print his poems as would do no injury to their beauty, and to my eyes seventeenth-century spelling is positively ugly, both anarchic and stupid. "So I right," writes one of Baxter's correspondents. The spelling has neither the beauty of the older spelling, say of the "Mort Darthur," phonetic in a simple way, nor the beauty of settled if conventional forms. My second reason is my own experience in reading Beeching. Coming amid so many irregular forms Milton's individual spellings failed to arrest my attention. It is since I began to prepare this edition that I have awakened fully to the interest of some of them for metrical and rhetorical effects. Let me close by citing two examples. Milton sometimes uses two different forms to indicate different shades of meaning. For example, "rhyme" or "Rhime "is"verse"; "Rime" is what we call "rhyme," "the jingling sound of like endings." More interesting is Milton's distinction between "blanc" and "blank." He uses the first in the original French sense of "white":

To the blanc Moon
Her office they prescrib'd, x. 656-7.

He uses "blank" when he wishes to indicate or emphasise mere negation:

Astonied stood and Blank, ix. 890.

Solicitous and blank he thus began,

"Par. Reg." ii. 120.

Skeat and the O.E.D. have both noted the first quotation above. They and Milton's editors have overlooked a much more interesting one. In speaking of his blindness Milton says:

Thus with the Year

Seasons return, but not to me returns

Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the Book of knowledge fair
Presented with a Universal blanc

Of Nature's works, to me expung'd and ras'd,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.

The editors have changed "blanc" here to "blank" without noticing the injury they were doing; even that excellent editor Aldis Wright, who retains "blanc" at x. 656. What Milton tells us is that for him Nature's works have become a white page from which all significant writing has been expunged and rased. Now compare what Milton says in his well-known letter to Philara, the Athenian, in 1654, when giving a minute description of his blindness. I will give it in English. "But at present every species of illumination being, as it were, extinguished, there is diffused around me nothing but darkness mingled and streaked with an ashy brown.

Yet the darkness in which I am perpetually immersed seems always, both by night and day, to approach nearer to white than black (albenti semper quam nigricantì propior videtur), and, when the eye is rolling in its socket, it admits a little particle of light as through a chink." This is the physical condition which Milton is describing in the poem, a darkness more near to white than black, and the significance depends on his spelling "blanc" not "blank." If Masson, who in the larger edition (1890 issue) just notices the possible significance of the "c" and its relation to the letter cited (he omits the reference in the smaller edition, 1910), had given more weight to the careful spelling, he would not have argued, using this very passage, that "by the time he had begun his Paradise Lost' even that little chink of which he speaks had been barred, so that the medium in which he found himself, night and day, had then less of the whitish or ash-grey in it, and more of the hue of absolute black." So much may depend upon one letter.

I have not kept Milton's italics in proper nouns, only when he used them to indicate quotation. In v. 385 and xii. 152 I have substituted capitals for Milton's italics. I have, however, retained the original capital letters throughout, checking the First by the Second Edition. A small instance will show how one may injure an effect by mechanical modernisation. In xii. 248 Milton prints:

The holy One with mortal men to dwell.

Modern editors change to Holy One, distributing the emphasis. But Milton, a reader of the "De Doctrinâ" will quickly learn, is as fanatical a monotheist as