It appears to belong partly to the end of the Horton
period. It is not by any means an account of all that he is reading,
but only an arrangement, under certain heads, or places of memoranda
for future use. These notes are extracted from about eighty different
authors, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. Of Greek authors
no less than sixteen are quoted. The notes are mostly notes of
historical facts, seldom of thoughts, never of mere verbal expression.
There is no trace in it of any intention to store up either the
imagery or the language of poetry. It may be that such notes were
made and entered in another volume; for the book thus accidentally
preserved to us seems to refer to other similar volumes of
collections. But it is more likely that no such poetical memoranda
were ever made, and that Milton trusted entirely to memory for the
wealth of classical allusion with which his verse is surcharged. He
did not extract from the poets and the great writers whom he was
daily turning over, but only from the inferior authors and secondary
historians, which he read only once. Most of the material collected
in the commonplace book is used in his prose pamphlets.
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