Not, indeed, all the
sonnets which we now have. Four, in which Fairfax, Vane, Cromwell, and
the Commonwealth are spoken of as Milton would speak of them, were
necessarily kept back, and not put into print till 1694, by Phillips,
at the end of his life of his uncle.
In proportion to the trouble which Milton's words cost him, was his
care in preserving them. His few Latin letters to his foreign friends
are remarkably barren either of fact or sentiment. But Milton liked
them well enough to have kept copies of them, and now allowed a
publisher, Brabazon Aylmer, to issue them in print, adding to them,
with a view to make out a volume, his college exercises, which he had
also preserved.
Among the papers which he left at his death, were the beginnings of
two undertakings, either of them of overwhelming magnitude, which
he did not live to complete. We have seen that he taught his pupils
geography out of _Davity, Description de l'Univers_. He was not
satisfied with this, or with any existing compendium. They were all
dry; exact enough with their latitudes and longitudes, but omitted
such uninteresting stuff as manners, government, religion, &c.
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