Notes to Chapter 1marriing [marrying] or in Ramath Lechi Jud. 15. Dagonalia. Jud. 16.”
15 The subjects given brief elaboration are “Dinah,” “Thamar pregnant,” “The Moabites”
(on a later page), “The Eliade,” “Abias Thersaeus,” “Ahab,” “Achabaei Cunoborumani”
(Ahab devoured by dogs), “Hesekiah Besieged,” and “The Taking of Jerusalem.” Milton
may have thought them promising, or wanted to clarify his ideas about them.
16 The sources cited are Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, William of Malmesbury, John
Speed, and Raphael Holinshed.
17 Some of these topics were included earlier on the Old Testament list, but not there
developed.
18 The fourth version does not supersede the third, but contains the directive, “compare
this with the former draught.”
19 Phillips states that he saw these ten lines “several Years before the Poem was begun”
along with some others designed for the beginning of that tragedy (EL 72). This points
to a further stage in Milton’s plan for such a tragedy, with Satan acting as prologue
rather than Moses or Gabriel as in the TM sketches. Some elements from the sketches
reappear in Milton’s epic: a masque of the evils of the world is one generic element in
Books 11 and 12 and a debate of Justice and Mercy lies behind the dialogue of the
Father and the Son in Book 3. See Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary
Forms (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 118–22, 259–62.
20 Milton’s note on Christus patiens projects a classical structure like that he would later use
for Samson Agonistes: “The Scene in the garden beginning from the comming thither till
Judas betraies & the officers lead him away the rest by message & chorus. his agony may
receav noble expressions” (TM, 41).
21 TM 40. These lines are crowded in, as an afterthought. Also, Milton’s note on Egfride,
king of the Northumbrians, states, with allusion to the contemporary Scots war, that
Egfride “made warre for no reason on men [the Scots] that ever lov’d the English” (TM
37).
22 EL 62. Milton probably made the move, and acquired the household furnishings men-
tioned, when his father gave up his house at Horton. Christopher Milton and his wife
were still at Horton with Milton senior on August 11, 1640, when Christopher’s daughter
Sara was baptized there, but soon after they all moved to Reading. Edward Phillips
places Milton’s anti-episcopal tracts (May, 1641–April, 1642) “in the one or two first”
years of Milton’s residence in Aldersgate. Milton paid taxes in his new house on April
29, 1641.
23 Phillips identifies them as “Mr. Alphry and Mr. Miller,” i.e. Thomas Alfray of Catsfield,
Sussex, and John Miller of Litton, Middlesex, admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1633 and 1628
respectively (Masson, II, 209). Nothing more is known of them or of Milton’s associa-
tion with them. Gaudy Days were regular festival times at the Inns of Court; Milton
either participated in those festivities with his friends, or enjoyed feasts and entertain-
ments with them in the City.
24 See chapter 2, pp. 31, 45. Phillips’s statement gives some support to Christopher Hill’s
portrait of Milton as “more sociable and clubbable than is often thought” (Milton and
the English Revolution, London, 1977, 9), though Hill stretches the point to portray
him as a jovial frequenter of taverns, consorting there with the radical fringe (ibid.,
97–9).
25 See chapter 6, pp. 173–5.
Notes to Chapter 5