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LXV. The Authorship of the Anonymous Life of Milton

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edward S. Parsons
Edward S. Parsons*
Affiliation:
Marietta College
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Extract

The conviction of Miss Helen Darbishire, to which she has given expression in the Appendix to The Manuscript of Paradise Lost, Book I, and later in Early Lives of Milton (xvi-xxvii), that the anonymous Life of Milton was the work of John Phillips, the poet's nephew, is so strong that, after having stated it and given her reasons therefore, she uses the suggested authorship as a certainty in the title she gives to the Life and elsewhere throughout the Early Lives of Milton. Her argument is two-fold:

1. In a manuscript of John Phillips's poem, “A Satyr against Hypocrites,” is “a page and a half of Dedication signed by John Phillips. This dedication “written in a formal Italian hand,” she believes to be his. She also believes that certain marginal notes and textual corrections are in his hand. Comparing these specimens of what she believes to be John Phillips's handwriting with the handwriting of the anonymous Life, she “was struck at once by the similarity of the handwriting” in the two manuscripts.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 1935 , pp. 1057 - 1064
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1935

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References

1 Bodl. MS. Wood D. 4.

2 Bodl. MS. Rawl. Poet. 30.

3 Early Lives of Milton (London: Constable & Co., 1932), xviii.

4 The MS. of Paradise Lost, Book I, 73.

5 The anonymous Life uses the form thir eleven times and their five times.

6 Miss Darbishire seems for the most part to have won over her reviewers to an acceptance of her conclusions. Miss Rose Macaulay, however, in a signed review in the Spectator (London), cxlix, 835, carefully guards her acquiescence: the proof is “pretty convincing”; “it looks very much as if the same hand had written” the three documents cited. B. A. Wright in MLR, xxviii, 518–523, is much more critical and only accepts Miss Darbishire's judgment “for the present.” The present writer's conclusions were arrived at before reading any of the reviews.

7 Miss Darbishire says, there is only one in the Bodleian (E. L. of M., xvi). She must have searched in vain elsewhere.

8 E. L. of M., xviii, xix. B. A. Wright above (op. cit., note 6) expresses an unsettling doubt as to the accuracy of Miss Darbishire's identification of the handwriting. “She admits 'that the handwriting of the sonnets is much more evidently like that of the anonymous Life than either is like the handwriting of the Dedication to the Satyr against Hypocrites!' So far as the two latter manuscripts are concerned this can be explained by a natural change in handwriting during the thirty years between the Satyr (1654) and the Life (1686), but the sonnets were composed about 1655 and the hand here might therefore be expected to resemble that of the Satyr rather than that of the Life. Miss Darbishire seeks to get over this difficulty by arguing in a circle—if her identification of all three hands is correct, then the sonnets were copied out 'clearly, it seems, for the edition of poems to be published in 1673.' But she omits to note that the second of them, with which she is particularly concerned, was withheld by Milton from publication in 1673 … One regrets that she has not set out the facts quite clearly and fairly.”

9 E. L. of M., xvi.

10 Making use of the Columbia University edition of Milton's works in the original spelling.

11 Grierson, The Poems of John Milton, Vol. ii, lvi.

12 See page 76, l. 24 of the Columbia University edition.

13 Grierson, loc. cit.

14 B. A. Wright pertinently asks: “Was this spelling adopted by only one of Milton's associates?”

15 Neither does the writer of the anonymous Life use the device of doubling vowels for emphasis. He spells the pronoun he, for example, nine times as he, one hundred and five times as hee. He is fond of doubling both vowels and consonants—shee, bee, beeing, habitt, modell, farr, fitt, matt, sonn.

16 E. L. of M., xxiii. Godwin (Lives of E. & J. Phillips, p. 112) is of the same opinion: John Philips has “an unconquerable propensity to coarseness.”

17 Ibid., xxi.

18 Miss Darbishire, following Malone, thinks the anonymous Life was written in 1686 or 1687. John Phillips in 1685 wrote his “Ode on the Death of Charles II,” which was full of royalist sycophancy and in 1687 his coarse version of Don Quixote.

19 cf. E. L. of M., ibid., pp. 24, 25.

20 The anonymous Life records the death of Milton (1674) and was used by Wood in his life of the poet, published 1691. Edward Phillips's life of his uncle was printed in 1694.

21 E. L. of M., xx, xix.

22 Ibid., xx.

23 The Earliest Life of Milton, edited by Edward S. Parsons, Eng. Hist. Rev. (1902).

24 Miss Darbishire says the first editor conjectured that the author was “probably a doctor.” What the text actually says is: “Perhaps he was a physician.” E. L. of M., ix, Eng. Hist. Rev. (Jan., 1902), 97.

25 E. L. of M., xxi. Godwin's conjecture as to the funeral of Milton is an amusing contrast to Miss Darbishire's certainty as to the death bed scene: “It is obvious to conjecture that Edward Philips, his nearest male relation, and afterwards the historian of his life, probably filled the place of chief mourner, in this last farewell to the ashes of his adored preceptor and uncle. John Philips, on the contrary, who, we shall have reason to think, as long as he existed, never relaxed in his unnatural animosity to Milton, did not, I trust, pollute the sad solemnity with his unhallowed presence.” (Lives of E. & J. Philips, p. 157.)

26 E. L. of M., xx, xxi.

27 This study was made possible by the Facsimile of the Trinity Manuscript of Milton's writings and the recent publication of the Columbia University Edition of Milton in the original spelling. The page references are to this edition. It has been carefully gone over several times. In the quest valuable assistance was given by Miss Pauline Frederick of the Marietta College Department of English.

28 Miss Darbishire points this out. The Harvard Library copies confirm Miss Darbishire's statement. The edition of 1673 changes thir to their.

29 In the first of the two cases in Sonnet xxii, as indicated above, the word was originally written their and later the e was elided.

30 See also the occurrence of the spellings in Samson A gonistes. See below, p. 9.

31 According to Miss Darbishire's figures in The Manuscript of P. L. Book I, their occurs in the First Edition of Book I, 39 times and thir 30 times. In the MS. their 5 times, thir 64.