Essay on Milton Author:Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES. The best cheap edition of Milton's poetical works, both for continuous reading and for occasional reference, as well as for use in school as a text-boo... more »k, is the Globe, with introductions by Professor David Masson. The Globe contains no n5tes, but abounds in interesting, critical, biographical, and expository matter. The best annotated edition is Masson's Poetical Works of John Milton, edited with memoir, introductions, notes, and an essay on Milton's English and versification; 3 vols., octavo; second edition, 1890. This is known as the Library Edition. Every school should, if possible, possess a copy of this beautiful and altogether satisfactory book. It will long remain the standard edition of Milton's poetical works. Printed in much smaller type than the foregoing, and not containing so much explanatory matter, but very much cheaper, is another edition by the same editor, in three volumes of more convenient size. This book is within the means of every school. Masson's great Life of John Milton is too large to read, and is very expensive; but, by means of the index volume, it can easily be referred to for special information concerning either the life and writings of the poet or the history of his times. Access to it can usually be had in the larger public libraries. A life of Milton quite within reach even of the limited opportunity of high-school pupils, is that by the Rev. Mark Pattison in the English Men of Letters Series. Another small book suitable for young students is the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke's Milton in the Series of Classical Writers. A valuable help to Milton study is a concordance, or verbal index, to the poems. The presence of this feature in Cleveland's Milton's Poetical Works makes it desirable to have this book in the class-room accessible to pu...« less