Notes to Chapter 1laeta ter ora mero” (Poems, 1645; Hughes’s translation). Unless otherwise indicated,
Milton poems quoted in text and notes are taken from the 1645 Poems.
25 The relevant records of St Paul’s were destroyed in the Great Fire (1666), but registra-
tion records at Christ’s College, Cambridge (April 9, 1625) state that Milton was pre-
pared at Paul’s.
26 Donald L. Clark, John Milton at St Paul’s School (New York, 1948), 27–32 thinks he
entered in 1615 at age 7, the usual time of entry to grammar school, but most biogra-
phers think he entered in 1620. Edward Phillips’s statement that he “was enter’d into
the first Rudiments of Learning” at Paul’s might seem to support Clark, but against that
is Phillips’s comment that he was sent to school “together with his brother Christopher,”
who was born in 1615 (EL 53). The evidence is not conclusive.
27 EL 10. Edward Phillips also reports Milton’s “insuperable Industry” in these nocturnal
studies, which included both voluntary studies and “the exact perfecting of his School-
Exercises” (EL 54).
28 John Stow, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster... Corrected, improved, and
very much Enlarged... By John Strype, 2 vols (London, 1720), I, Bk 1, 163–4.
29 The statutes and rules are set out in Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 38–44, 49–52.
30 John Aubrey, Lives of Eminent Men, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols (Oxford, 1898), I, 263.
31 Alexander Gil, Jr., PARERGA, Sive Poetici Conatus (London, 1632). See Wood, Athenae
Oxonienses, 4 vols (London, 1813–20), III, 42–3; Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 83–
99; and Barker, “Milton’s Schoolmasters,” 526–36. Among Gil’s early poems are fu-
neral tributes to members of the royal family and several panegyrics.
32 That poem, In ruinam camerae Papisticae Londini Octob. 26, was published in PARERGA.
The poem finds providential the fact that the date was November 5 (Guy Fawkes Day)
by the Gregorian Calendar. There is an English version in Bodleian Ms Ashmole 36,
37.
33 See Parker II, 712–14.
34 “Thyrsis & Damon, eiusdem viciniae Pastores, eadem studia sequuti a pueritia amici
erant, ut qui plurimum” (Poems, 1673).
35 Donald C. Dorian, The English Diodatis (New Brunswick, NJ, 1950), 3–96.
36 Charles Diodati, “Sic furua conjux tartarei Jovis,” Camdeni Insignia (Oxford, 1624), sig.
E 4.
37 The curriculum has been reconstructed from contemporary records by Clark, Milton at
St Paul’s School, 100–249.
38 This famous grammar was composed by Lily and Colet between 1510 and 1515; the
revision of 1540, with additions by Thomas Robertson, was made mandatory in the
schools by Henry VIII. Milton used a text with further revisions that was issued first in
1574 and often thereafter, A Shorte Introduction of Grammar generallye to be used, bound
with Brevissima Institutio seu Ratio Grammatices cognoscendae ad omnium puerorum utilitatem
perscripta. See Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 132–3.
39 Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols (Urbana, Ill.,
1956–61), I, surveys the texts Milton most likely used for Greek and Hebrew grammar,
mathematics, and astronomy.
40 Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 48–50.
41 A loose sheet containing these texts, found in Milton’s Commonplace Book in 1874, is
the only conjectural example we have of Milton’s very neat, schoolboy hand. It is now