Notes to Chapter 1Sidney’s Arcadia, Quarles, and Purchas his Pilgrimage. Also, a few books of (chiefly an-
cient) cosmography, science, and travel and a very few mathematical texts. Mede’s
account books are reprinted in Fletcher, II, 553–622.
17 Milton’s copy of Aratus, Phaenomena & Diosemia (Paris, 1559), is now in the British
Library. Milton’s autograph notes are on the title page (his name, 1631, the price, 2s.
6d., and the motto “cum sole et luna semper Aratus erit”) and several other pages. The
annotations are chiefly corrections of grammar and metrical irregularities (he has checked
his edition against others and the scholia) so as to obtain a correct text. See Maurice
Kelley and Samuel Atkins, “Milton’s Annotations of Aratus,” PMLA 70 (1955), 1,090–
- An annotated copy of Pindar (now at Harvard) was long thought to be Milton’s
but probably is not: see Kelley and Atkins, “Milton and the Harvard Pindar,” Studies in
Bibliography 17 (1964), 77–82.
18 They had also to pass an oral examination before the proctors, to propose and answer
some question out of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, and to have their degrees voted by the
graduates and fellows.
19 Purchas died five months later, in September, 1626. See chapter 7, p. 212.
20 Records indicate that the family resided at Hammersmith in Middlesex from 1631 (see
note 77), but Milton’s father may have obtained a country place there or in the Horton/
Colnbrook area (where relatives held property) at about this time, for occasional use in
summer and in plague seasons.
21 Most scholars accept this period for the incident with Chappell and for Milton’s Elegy
I. For another speculative reconstruction of these events see Leo Miller, “Milton’s
Clash with Chappell,” MQ 14 (1980), 77–86. Miller dates the rustication and Elegy I,
the poem he wrote about that event, to 1627, speculating that Chappell was responding
to Milton’s public denigration of scholastic disputation in Prolusion IV.
22 The right of whipping belonged to the Praelector and Dean, offices not then held by
Chappell (Peile, Christ’s College, 147–8).
23 LR III, 374–5. The letter is from Bramhall to his son (May 9/19, 1654); see chapter 9,
n. 103. The evidence would seem to counter the view of some scholars, among them
A. N. Wilson, The Life of Milton (Oxford, 1983), 18–19, who deny both the whipping
and the rustication, suggesting that Milton’s “exile” may simply refer to the spring
vacation, given his tone of playful exaggeration in describing that event in Elegy I.
24 Translation, Carey. “Nec dudum vetiti me laris angit amor. / Nuda nec arva placent,
umbrasque negantia molles, / Quam male Phoebicolis convenit ille locus! / Nec duri
libet usque minas perferre magistri / Caeteraque ingenio non subeunda meo.” Unless
otherwise indicated, all of Milton’s poems in this chapter are quoted from Poems, 1645.
Latin translations are credited when they are not my own.
25 See R. W. Condee, “Ovid’s Exile and Milton’s Rustication,” Philological Quarterly 37
(1958), 498–502.
26 One reference might point to a contemporary production of Romeo and Juliet or a work
with similar plot: “some poor lad [who] leaves joys untasted and dies, his love snuffed
out, a fit subject for tears.”
27 See Revard, Tangles of Neaera’s Hair, 8–13, for Milton’s use of elegiac topoi stemming
from Propertius, Ovid, and the neo-Latin poet Joannes Secundus.
28 Tovey was raised in the household of the Haringtons of Exton and sent to the univer-
sity by Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford, which links him with a reformist
Notes to Chapter 2