For a young man of simple habits and studious life a little suffices.
The chief want is books, and of these, for Milton's style of reading,
select rather than copious, a large collection is superfluous. There
were in 1640 no public libraries in London, and a scholar had to find
his own store of books or to borrow from his friends. Milton never
can have possessed a large library. At Horton he may have used
Kederminster's bequest to Langley Church. Still, with his Italian
acquisitions, added to the books that he already possessed, he soon
found a lodging too narrow for his accommodation, and removed to a
house of his own, "a pretty garden-house, in Aldersgate, at the end of
an entry." Aldersgate was outside the city walls, on the verge of the
open country of Islington, and was a genteel though not a fashionable
quarter. There were few streets in London, says Phillips, more free
from noise.

He had taken in hand the education of his two nephews, John and Edward
Phillips, sons of his only sister Anne. Anne was a few years older
than her brother John. Her first husband, Edward Phillips, had died in
1631, and the widow had given her two sons a stepfather in one Thomas
Agar, who was in the Clerk of the Crown's office. Milton, on settling
in London in 1639, had at once taken his younger nephew John to live
with him. When, in 1640, he removed to Aldersgate, the elder, Edward,
also came under his roof.

If it was affection for his sister which first moved Milton to
undertake the tuition of her sons, he soon developed a taste for the
occupation. In 1643 he began to receive into his house other pupils,
but only, says Phillips (who is solicitous that his uncle should not
be thought to have kept a school), "the sons of some gentlemen that