_FIRST PERIOD_. 1608-1639.




CHAPTER I.

FAMILY--SCHOOL--COLLEGE.


In the seventeenth century it was not the custom to publish two
volumes upon every man or woman whose name had appeared on a
title-page. Nor, where lives of authors were written, were they
written with the redundancy of particulars which is now allowed.
Especially are the lives of the poets and dramatists obscure and
meagrely recorded. Of Milton, however, we know more personal details
than of any man of letters of that age. Edward Phillips, the poet's
nephew, who was brought up by his uncle, and lived in habits of
intercourse with him to the last, wrote a life, brief, inexact,
superficial, but valuable from the nearness of the writer to the
subject of his memoir. A cotemporary of Milton, John Aubrey (b.1625),
"a very honest man, and accurate in his accounts of matters of fact,"
as Toland says of him, made it his business to learn all he could
about Milton's habits. Aubrey was himself acquainted with Milton, and
diligently catechised thepoet's widow, his brother, and his nephew,
scrupulously writing down each detail as it came to him, in the
minutee of lives which he supplied to Antony Wood to be worked up in
his _Athenae_ and _Fasti_. Aubrey was only an antiquarian collector,
and was mainly dependent on what could be learned from the family.