Notes to Chapter 1as expected, after the eighth line. See Smart, Sonnets of Milton; F. T. Prince, The Italian
Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford, 1954); and Variorum I, 365–74.
82 “Quanto d’ingegno, e d’alto valor vago, / E di cetra sonora, e delle muse.”
83 See Mede’s letter to Stuteville, October 20, 1630 (BL Harleian Ms 390, f. 518).
84 The title is that used in the 1632 Shakespeare Folio; in Poems, 1645 the title is simply
“On Shakespear. 1630.” I quote from the 1645 version, which incorporates a few
verbal changes.
85 This might also have been the publisher’s decision, as both anonymous poems are new
to the second edition and appear on a single added leaf. The discrepancy between
Milton’s date and the publication date of the Folio is smaller than appears, since he
could have written a poem dated 1630 as late as March 1631, according to the old
calendar.
86 The pseudo-Shakespearean epitaph begins, “Not monumentall stones preserves our
Fame; / Nor sky-aspiring Piramides our name.” The circulating version conflates epi-
taphs for Sir Edward Standly (Stanley) and Sir Thomas Standly (Stanley) that appeared
on the Stanley tomb in Shropshire, without attribution. They are reprinted in Variorum
II.1, 208. Gordon Campbell reported on the tomb and the manuscripts, including a late
attribution to Shakespeare by William Dugdale (1663), at the Sixth International Milton
Symposium, York, England, July 18–23, 1999.
87 Hanford, “Youth of Milton,” 37, cites William Browne’s elegy for the Countess of
Pembroke for the conceit of the reader turned to marble.
88 Some of Hobson’s considerable wealth and property he willed to the town to build a
handsome conduit for sanitation. See J. T. Shawcross, “A Note on Milton’s Hobson
Poems,” Review of English Studies n.s. 18 (1967), 433–7.
89 John T. Shawcross, A Bibliography for the Years 1624–1700 (Binghamton, NY, 1984),
3–5, lists some 25 manuscript versions of one or both of Milton’s Hobson poems,
which were also printed, anonymously, in contemporary anthologies of humorous verse.
A Banquet of Jests (1640) contains Milton’s second poem, entitled, “Upon old Hobson
the Carrier of Cambridge” (pp. 129–31); Wit Restor’d (1658) contains Milton’s first
poem complete, a shorter version of the second comprising lines 1–12, 27–8, and also a
third unidentified Hobson poem (pp. 84–5).
90 John Pory describes her death and rumors about her impending conversion in a letter to
Sir Thomas Puckering (April 21, 1631), Court and Times of Charles the First, II, 106. In
a verse miscellany compiled by Francis Baskerville – chiefly panegyrics to the Stuarts
and assorted nobility, Cavalier love songs and other social and courtly poems – the
Paulet epitaph is ascribed to “John Milton of Chr: Coll Cambr:” (BL Sloane 1446, ff.
37v–38v).
91 An example is Jonson’s epitaph for Vincent Corbet (1619).
92 See Dante, Paradiso, 32, ll 7–9, James Holly Hanford, “Youth of Milton,” 37, noted the
apparent echo in the opening lines of Browne’s Elegy for the Countess of Pembroke:
“Under this marble hearse / Lies the subject of all verse: / Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s
mother.”
93 See note 77. Though Prolusion VII cannot be dated with certainty, most critics place it
in 1631–2.
94 These poems have been dated as late as 1633–4 and as early as 1629, but many scholars
think the long vacation of 1631 most likely.
Notes to Chapter 2