Notes to Chapter 1doctors of the Gospels and was preserved uncorrupted, or else restored to its pristine
wholeness long before it was among other nations, we swear that we are prepared to
seize upon some common plan, along with yourselves and other reformed brethren and
allies, which will make it more completely possible for us to look properly to the
welfare and relief of so many afflicted men” (692–3).
41 The sonnet is not in the Trinity manuscript (TM ). It was first published in 1673 with
the title, “On the late Massacher in Piemont,” and I quote from that edition.
42 Pages 706–7. Responding to an inquiry from the Prince of Transylvania about joining
a Protestant League if one existed, Cromwell (May 31) welcomed his cooperation on
matters of common concern to Protestants and recycled a passage on the Waldensian
matter (702–4).
43 Only Mercurius Politicus and The Public Intelligencer were to continue after October 3,
appearing respectively on Thursdays and Mondays.
44 Cyriack Skinner’s Life is confusing about dates and sequence, but he seems to suggest
that the Latin Thesaurus came first: “It was now [i.e. when Milton had a substitute at the
office of secretary and had work sent home to him] that hee began that laborious work
of amassing out of all the Classic Authors, both in Prose and Verse, a Latin Thesaurus to
the emendation of that done by Stephanus; Also the composing Paradise Lost And the
framing a Body of Divinity out of the Bible: All which, notwithstanding the several
Calamities befalling him in his fortunes, hee finish’d after the Restoration: As also the
Brittish history down to the Conquest... & had begun a Greek Thesaurus (EL 29). John
Aubrey on the strength of Edward Phillips’s information says Milton began Paradise Lost
two years before the king came in, i.e. 1658 (EL 13).
45 Two octavo volumes “all or mostly taken from the Latin Thesaurus writ by Joh. Milton
Uncle to Edw. Phillips” were said by Anthony à Wood (Athenae Oxoniensis IV, 763) to
have been published by Edward Phillips in 1684 as Enchiridion Linguae Latinae and Speculum
Linguae Latinae, but no copies have been found. Toland reports that “Milton’s Thesaurus
Linguae Latinae... has bin of great use to Dr. [Adam] Littleton in compiling his Dic-
tionary” (EL 192). See chapter 14, p. 507 and n. 93.
46 EL 74; see chapter 9, pp. 293–4. The interconnections are interesting: Marvell obvi-
ously knew Skinner, as he wrote of his pleasure that Skinner was now “got near”
Milton; also, Skinner is the brother of that Anne Sandleir who was a correspondent and
friend of Roger Williams; see chapter 9, p. 285 and n. 38.
47 See J. M. Smart, The Sonnets of Milton (Glasgow, 1921), 111–14; for Oldenburg’s con-
tinual friendly greetings to Lawrence, see pp. 342, 345.
48 This “Invisible College” interested in experimental science and Baconian reformations
of knowledge formed the nucleus of the Royal Society after the Restoration; Oldenburg
was to become its first secretary.
49 These sonnets were first published in 1673; Skinner copied ll. 5–14 of the first sonnet to
him into TM. The Lawrence sonnet is not in TM. My quotations are from Poems, 1673.
50 This sonnet, like those to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane, was withheld from publica-
tion in 1673 because of Milton’s reference to losing his vision in the service of liberty;
it was published with those poems in 1694, in Phillips’s “Life of Milton” prefixed to
the Letters of State. In that publication, though not in TM, it bears the title, “To Mr.
CYRIAC SKINNER Upon his Blindness.” The phrase, “three years day” almost
certainly bears the very usual meaning “space of time”; cf. Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI
Notes to Chapter 10