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A 11008 5 A 'GOODBoojC 5 THE • IS • PRECIOUS LIFE-BLPOD OF A • • MASTER SPIRIT ?fUX&n Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil http://archive.org/details/miltonsparadiselmilton KINGS TREASURIES The LITERATURE OF GENERAL EDITOR AT COUCH Sir QUILLER. f, *«*. j»«j- jitm-j-^. .->mJA,«^1 ^—sjjaagggsass:<«:n..^ 14 NEW YORK. E-PDUTTON AND COMPANY ^^^^^^VJ>'>w^V^^^.r^ ^-^^ ,l ^^^^^^^ ^^^^vjl ^Vi,^S^>?<^L,^S^^ ^>M DENT & SONS LTD LONDON & TORONTO* , Sole Agent for Scotland THE GRANT EDUCATIONAL CO. LTD. GLASGOW Allrightsreserved — PREFACE This volume represents an attempt to present Paradise Lost in a form in which the poem can be read as a whole by classes of boys or girls of the age of sixteen or so. Books I. and II. are given entire, and the selection from the other ten Books is nearly equal in length to the first two Books combined. The whole, that is to say, consists of a little over 3,500 lines, being about a third of the whole poem as Milton wrote it. Care has been taken, not only to select the passages of greatest poetic merit, but to preserve the general structure of the original work. The task of selection is necessarily a delicate one, and I am very glad to have had the advice in this matter of Dr. A. C. Bradley, not only because the selection made with his help is a better one than I should have made unaided, but also because the reader will naturally feel greater confidence in a selection guided by a critic known to fame, than in one made by an unknown schoolmaster. In my notes I have tried throughout to bear in mind that what Milton wrote was an Epic Poem not a General Knowledge paper. Paradise Lost is full of learned allusions, the explanation of which, in many cases, simply does not matter at all to the 5 PARADISE LOST 6 appreciation of thepoem. The " readerforpleasure " would not dream of searching them out in " notes,'' and unless Paradise Lost is " read for " and " with " pleasure, in schools as elsewhere, it had better not be read at all. If a schoolmaster gets a class through a stiff examination in a Book of Paradise Lost, and leaves the impression that the poem is " awful rot," he has done much more harm than good. I have placed at the bottom of the pages of the text such brief ex- planatory notes as seemed to me really useful, and collected at the end some longer notes discussing, it is hoped, matters of general interest rather than points for examination. I cannot overstate my debt to Sir Walter Raleigh's Milton and to Dr. Verity's annotated edition of the poem. I owe my general idea very largely to the insight of the former and my information on points of detail to the industry of the latter. My excuse for pillaging their works so extensively must be that Sir Walter's book is not likely to rind its way into the class-room, except perhaps to the teacher'sdesk,andDr.Verity'snotes,whileinvaluable to the student, are far too extensive for the school- boy making his first acquaintance with the epic.