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FROM

THE POETICAL WORKS

OF

JOHN MILTON

WITH INTRODUCTION, SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY,
NOTES, AND GLOSSARY

EDITED BY

ALBERT PERRY WALKER, M.A.

MASTER, AND TEACHER OF ENGLISH AND HISTORY IN THE
ENGLISH HIGH SCHOOL, BOSTON

BOSTON, U.S.A.

D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS

1908

HRVARD
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

COPYRIGHT, 1897, 1900,
By D. C. HEATH & Co.

PREFACE.

Up to the present time it has been a somewhat general custom in American secondary schools to limit the study of Milton's works to the first two Books of Paradise Lost. The result of this has been that the pupils, approaching a poem written on a subject and in a style with which they are unfamiliar, and reading a fragment from the middle of a narrative with the beginning and end of which they have no acquaintance, form a wholly erroneous estimate of the character and interest of Milton's work taken as a whole. The tendency above mentioned has unfortunately been strengthened by the selection of those two Books as a part of the requirement in English for admission to colleges, since teachers who prepare pupils for college are always solely tempted to limit their instruction strictly to the matters absolutely required for admission thereto. A wiser and broader educational spirit would lead them rather to welcome in such a requirement the opportunity to undertake as careful and comprehensive a study of the work of the greatest English poet as is possible to pupils of secondary school age. It is such a com

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