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[Illustration: Colour plate of book cover]

[Illustration: Byron portrait plate]


    PARADISE LOST. BK. XII. _Painting by S. Meteyard._

    "They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
    Through Eden took their solitary way."

                           (_Paradise Lost. Bk. XII._)


[Illustration: Paradise lost plate]




    A DAY WITH
    JOHN MILTON

    BY MAY BYRON


[Illustration: "Angel" plate]


    HODDER & STOUGHTON




    _In the same Series._

    _Tennyson._
    _Browning._
    _E. B. Browning._
    _Burns._
    _Byron._
    _Longfellow._
    _Whittier._
    _Rossetti._
    _Shelley._
    _Scott._
    _Coleridge._
    _Morris._
    _Wordsworth._
    _Whitman._
    _Keats._
    _Shakespeare._




A DAY WITH JOHN MILTON


About four o'clock on a September morning of 1665,--when the sun was
not yet shining upon his windows facing the Artillery Fields, and the
autumnal dew lay wet upon his garden leaves,--John Milton awoke with
his customary punctuality, and, true to his austere and abstemious mode
of life, wasted no time over comfortable indolence. He rose and
proceeded to dress, with the help of his manservant Greene. For,
although he was but fifty-four years in age, his hands were partly
crippled with gout and chalkstones, and his eyes, clear, bright and blue
as they had