"John Milton" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed,— epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... not want myself to be held responsible; yes, he should have eight hundred dollars a year, and that is seven hundred and sixty dollars more than Milton got for his 'Paradise Lost,' about which one of his learned contemporaries wrote: 'The old blind schoolmaster, John Milton, hath published a tedious poem on the fall of man; if its length be not considered a merit, it has no other.' Nothing spoils ministers like too big a salary. Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked; if it had not been for the wax and the fat, ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... for their own reputation in the future time. As for us, at the present, we mention not their names, but, like the injured ghost in the poet's picture of the world of spirits, turn from them silently and pass on. We remember there was a grand old republican in the realm of letters, John Milton by name, whose shade must be terrible to their thoughts. Let them beware of making of themselves a public shame. The great revenge of years will turn into a mere trick of literature the prose and verse of all not inspired by devotion to humanity, zeal for the cause of the oppressed, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... contempt for me,—they know something, but this work was not for them. Yet there will arise a man of nature like mine own; for time is endless, and the world is wide." This seems prophetic of John Milton.] ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... surpassing richness in prose and poetry, one author stands by himself. John Milton refuses to be classed with any of the schools. Though Dryden tells us Milton confessed to him that Spenser was his "original," he has no connection—other than a general similarity of purpose, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... John Milton, son and grandson of John Miltons, was born in Breadstreet, London, Dec. 9, 1608, fitted for the University in St. Paul's school, and studied seven years at Cambridge. His parents intended him for the ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... was hard at work in his profession with no other ambition directly before him but to get together a humble home to which he might take his mother; he intended to surprise her as soon as his income would at all warrant it. But as John Milton when he met Mary Powell fastened his eyes earnestly upon her, knowing that he had found "Mistress Milton," so Benjamin, the first Sabbath he took a class in the mission Sabbath-school, and found himself near neighbour ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... president. Cromwell, Fairfax and Skippon were members of the council, as also were two aldermen of the city, viz., Pennington and Wilson.(932) The post of Secretary for Foreign Languages was offered to a kinsman of Bradshaw, and one of whom the city of London is justly proud, to wit, John Milton. ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... every one will agree with Switzer in the concluding part of what he says of Milton, in the History of Gardening, prefixed to his Iconologia:—"But although things were in this terrible combustion, we must not omit the famous Mr. John Milton, one of Cromwell's Secretaries; who, by his excellent and never-to-be-equalled poem of Paradise Lost, has particularly distinguished gardening, by taking that for his theme; and shows, that though his eyes deprived him of the benefit of seeing, yet his mind was wonderfully moved with ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... the apology of the worthy Quaker, for the digression, which has alone saved him from oblivion. He offered to send us the old book, which came a few days after; and I shall add another digression in favour of John Milton, to whom he appears to have been introduced about the year 1661, by a Dr. Paget. It is thus notified apropos to Thomas Elwood feeling a desire for more learning than he possessed, which having expressed to Isaac Pennington, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... took him home, and the punishment he inflicted upon him was sedulous instructions to virtue." Yet this truly comic paper does not probably know that it is comic, any more than the kleptomaniac knows that he steals, or than John Milton knew he was a humorist when he wrote a hymn upon the circumcision, and spent his honeymoon in composing a treatise on divorce. No more again did Goethe know how exquisitely humorous he was when he wrote, in his Wilhelm Meister, that a beautiful tear glistened in Theresa's right eye, and then went ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... administrative action. The prime objective of the ban on previous restraints was to outlaw censorship accomplished by licensing. "The struggle for the freedom of the press was primarily directed against the power of the licensor. It was against that power that John Milton directed his assault by his 'Appeal for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.' And the liberty of the press became initially a right to publish 'without a license what formerly could be published only with one'."[164] ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... immortal, peculiar teachers of our race? Alas! the Paradise Lost is lost again to us beneath an inundation of graceful academic verse, sugary stanzas of ladylike prettiness, and ceaseless explanations in more or less readable prose of what John Milton meant or did not mean, or what he saw or did not see, who married his great-aunt, and why Adam or Satan is like that, or unlike the other. We read a perfect library about the Paradise Lost, but the Paradise Lost ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... sight; in "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue," Atlas figures represented as an old man, his shoulders covered with snow, and Comus, "the god of cheer or the belly," is one of the characters, a circumstance which an imaginative boy of ten, named John Milton, was not to forget. "Pan's Anniversary," late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" displayed the old ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... the ablest prose of the period came from the pen of Cromwell's Latin Secretary of State, John Milton. Milton stands in his own time a peculiarly isolated figure. We never in thought associate him with his contemporaries. Dryden had become the leading literary figure in London before Milton wrote ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... associated with the House of Commons, as when the members began to sit in St. Stephen's Chapel they attended Divine service in St. Margaret's, while the Lords went to the Abbey. Edmund Waller, the poet, was married in St. Margaret's to Anne Banks on July 5, 1631, and John Milton to Katherine Woodcock in November, 1656. A son of Sir Walter Raleigh's is buried in the church, and also Colonel Blood. Children of Judge Jeffreys: Bishop Burnet, Titus Oates and Jeremy Bentham were christened here. Besides Latimer and Sacheverell the list of great preachers in St. Margaret's ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... obtained the ascendency, the Independents were grieved and enraged to discover that religious toleration was stigmatized as the parent of all heresy and schism. While in power, the Presbyterians shackled the press, and their intolerance brought out John Milton's famous tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing—one of the most masterly arguments which the advocates of freedom have ever made. The idea that any dominant religious sect should be incorporated with the political power, was the fatal error of Presbyterianism, and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord |
