MILTON. PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE AND ACADEMIC EXERCISES Translated by Phyllis B.
Tillyard Since the eighteenth century, when all serious scholars knew- at least one of the " dead " languages, the study of Milton's work and character has been handicapped by the decay of that classical accomplishment. For the decisive egotism of Milton's genius, that satanic and poetic pride which Blake was able to recognize by intuition, showed itself early in the poet's life. His academic exercises at Cambridge, written and declaimed in Latin, show the rebel groping his way towards his full strength. They show him too in the forefront of the modernist movement of his day, an advocate of the new inductive system of thought inaugurated by Bacon. Milton applied the new teaching to the world around him, and particularly to the pseudo-Aristotelean system into which the University was cemented. These audacities of the young poet, together with thirty-one of his Latin letters, have now been translated and discussed so ably—(Millon. Private Correspondence and Academic Exercises. Translated from the Latin by Phyllis B. Tillyard, with an Introduction and Commentary by E. M. W. Tillyard : Cambridge University Press, 10s. fid.)—that our latter-day disabilities for studying the early development of Milton's mind are removed. We are able now to see still more
clearly-the tremendous consistency of this self-absorbed and introspective genius, whose personality was so large, however, that his self-study gave him an adequate practical knowledge of contemporary European politics, religion and culture.
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