None of Milton's family, and least of all Edward Phillips, were of a
capacity to apprehend moral or mental qualities, and they could only
tell Aubrey of his goings out and his comings in, of the clothes
he wore, the dates of events, the names of his acquaintance. In
compensation for the want of observation on the part of his own kith
and kin, Milton himself, with a superb and ingenuous egotism,
has revealed the secret of his thoughts and feelings in numerous
autobiographical passages of his prose writings. From what he directly
communicates, and from what he unconsciously betrays, we obtain an
internal life of the mind, more ample than that external life of the
bodily machine, which we owe to Aubrey and Phillips.

In our own generation all that printed books or written documents
have preserved about Milton has been laboriously brought together by
Professor David Masson, in whose _Life of Milton_ we have the most
exhaustive biography that ever was compiled of any Englishman. It is a
noble and final monument erected to the poet's memory, two centuries
after his death. My excuse for attempting to write of Milton alter Mr.
Masson is that his life is in six volumes octavo, with a total of some
four to five thousand pages. The present outline is written for a
different class of readers, those, namely, who cannot afford to know
more of Milton than can be told in some two hundred and fifty pages.

A family of Miltons, deriving the name in all probability from the
parish of Great Milton near Thame, is found in various branches spread
over Oxfordshire and the adjoining counties in the reign of Elisabeth.
The poet's grandfather was a substantial yeoman, living at Stanton St.
John, about five miles from Oxford, within the forest of Shotover, of
which he was also an under-ranger. The ranger's son John was at school
in Oxford, possibly as a chorister, conformed to the Established