“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–16451643; a note by Hartlib within that period states that “Mr. Milton of Aldersgate
Street has written many good books a great traveller and full of projects and inven-
tions.”^72 Also, there is evidence in Hartlib’s papers that Milton contributed three
shillings to the development of an engine of war for use against royalist cavalry, the
invention of one Edmund Felton for which Hartlib was seeking subscriptions.^73 In
Of Education Milton praised Hartlib as “a person sent hither by some good provi-
dence from a farre country to be the occasion and incitement of great good to this
Iland” – an opinion shared, he states, by “men of most approved wisdom and some
of highest authority among us” (CPW II, 363). Hartlib circulated the tract but did
not supply, nor did Milton probably seek, a prefatory commendation such as was
common in works Hartlib formally sponsored: Milton probably did not want that
appearance of patronage.^74 But several members showed interest in this treatise and
in other works of Milton’s: Hartlib took note of the publication of his Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce; John Dury termed Milton’s education tractate “brief and gen-
eral,” but took over some elements of it into his own model; John Hall thought it
excellent and “desired Milton’s acquaintance”; and Sir Cheney Culpepper criti-
cized the lack of “particulars” though he thought it contained “good sprinklings,”
and was sufficiently impressed to inquire about Milton’s charges for taking on a
pupil.^75 Milton may have acquired a pupil or two through these channels.
Milton described his treatise as a response to Hartlib’s “earnest entreaties” to set
forth the ideas he had expressed during their several “incidentall discourses” (363)
about education. Hartlib was much influenced by the Moravian scholar Jan Amos
Comenius and promoted his ideas about education and about preparing a compen-
dium of all knowledge.^76 Milton shared with Hartlib and Comenius the belief that
a reformed commonwealth requires educational reform – “for the want whereof
this nation perishes” (363) – and also a desire to reform the teaching of languages
and the school curriculum. But Milton rather curtly dismisses the seminal Comenian
texts: “To search what many modern Janua’s and Didactics more then ever I shall
read, have projected, my inclination leads me not” (364–6). That statement is prob-
ably disingenuous: as a practicing schoolmaster Milton almost certainly knew
Comenius’s Janua linguarum reserata, a much discussed and widely used manual for
teaching Latin, and he had probably encountered summaries of Comenius’s Didactica
Magna, containing schemes for an articulated school system from the cradle to the
university for both sexes and all ranks and levels of ability.^77 Milton’s dismissive
statement allows him to distance himself from the Hartlib–Comenian educational
project without, in courtesy to Hartlib, spelling out his disagreements. Also, this
statement and this stance is a version of Milton’s thoroughly characteristic claim to
originality. He declines to work out his debts to “old renowned Authors,” and
insists he has not even read the most famous modern educational reformer. Out of
benevolence to others and at the specific behest of Hartlib he simply offers a “few
observations,” the offshoots “of many studious and contemplative yeers altogether
spent in search of religious and civil knowledge” (364–6). Nor does he identify