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valuable aid of my friend Mr. J. E. Taylor, and of a most excellent Reader in his office; their close attention also detected errors in the text which had escaped my less vigilant

eye.

Brevity and terseness are the very soul of annotation; a note should not contain a superfluous word. Nature not having bestowed on me copiousness of language, my style is brief and condensed, hence I rarely copy the notes of others, as I can express their matter in fewer words. In reality however the greater part of these notes was written from the resources of my own mind, and it was, in general, only in dubious cases that I referred to the commentators. But whenever I have been indebted to any of them, I have given his name; so also in the parallel passages, though I had myself noticed the greater number of them, I give the initials of the critics who first observed them. With respect to these passages, nothing surely can be further from my mind than the idea of making Milton a centoist; but I think it a most agreeable employment for a philosophic mind to trace how far a great poet may have been indebted for ideas or language to the authors he had read, and I quote no others. For a similar reason I have given the various readings to Comus and other poems from Milton's own manuscript.

I write not merely for scholars; my object is to make Milton perfectly intelligible to readers of every degree of culture. As therefore the writers of that time, and Milton more than any, frequently used words derived from the Latin in their original physical sense, I take care to indicate that sense. Thus, 'reluctant flames' must surely be very obscure to one ignorant of Latin. Further, as our ancestors used the preterite subjunctive much more than we do, I have pointed that out also, which removes some apparent incongruities. Finally it will be seen that I complete ellipses; a thing which readers in general are little skilled in doing, and many anomalies thus disappear. In fact a very curious essay might be

written on the employment of this figure in various languages. It may be objected that I indulge needlessly in etymology, and it may be the truth; but the meaning of a word is all the surer when its origin is known.

The reader will find frequent references in the following pages to a Life of Milton. This is a work of mine, of which the full title is, "An Account of the Life, Opinions, and Writings of John Milton:" it contains what may be termed their history and the æsthetic part of their criticism, as also many essays-that on the Ptolemaic astronomy for instance -of the utmost importance for the perfect understanding of Paradise Lost. Unfortunately, while I was writing it an event occurred which affected my mind very much, whence it contains some errors, most of which however have been corrected in the following pages.

Mortlake, June 4, 1859.

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T. K.

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B., Bowle.

INITIALS.

C., Calton. D., Dunster. G., Gillies. H., Hume. N., Newton. R., Richardson. St., Stillingfleet. T., Todd. Th., Thyer. W., Warton.

CORRECTIONS.

Page 7, v. 54, read Or that crowned matron sage, white-robed Truth.

318, v. 420, read The luminous inferior orbs enclosed.

328, in note on v. 616, for At the Equator read Between the Tropics, and

after vertical add somewhere.

150, line 8 from bottom, for trassa read trasse.

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