i nc i s i ve personality The Life of John Milton by A. N. Wilson (Oxford University Press £9.95).

CHARLES Lamb thought that one should say grace before reading Milton, indeed he has inspired more admiration and ambition in writers than any other poet.
Studiously eccentric almost from infancy, Milton was intensively educated, and destined for ordination in the Church of England. But from the dawn of Christmas Day 1629, when he wrote down almost without hesitation his Ode on The Morning of Christ's Nativity, he knew that he was a great poet, and to the dismay of his father, declared that no other career should interfere with this divine vocation. L'Allegro, It Pensoroso, Comus followed, Latin verses, Italian sonnets, political pamphlets in sheaves, and when his talent was fully developed and ripened, he wrote what will be a perpetual monument to his excellence, Paradise Lost.
Some people are a bit shy of believing in angels — perhaps they are out of fashion. Milton's Epic is the most convincing explanation of what they are about, and, after all, Milton himself always maintained that it was dictated to him "night after night by the Holy Ghost".
Mr Wilson glosses the poems to contemporary events, both personal and historical, and the mid-seventeenth century was certainly not lacking in dramatic happenings. Milton saw Civil War, Regicide, the Restoration, Fire and Plague. On a personal level he experienced three marriages, with their accompanying bereavements, the trials (in his case) of fatherhood, public life, and the slow painful onset of total blindness.
He had always a high opinion of himself, and with good reason. His lifelong literary success began at University, he had Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Hebrew. He was lionised during his tour of Italy, and "was never in any doubt about his own genius". I am afraid that in his youth he was even "arrogant, lofty, snobbish and cruel", and that it was snobbery, just as much as poetic vocation, that cut short his career in the church.
He was therefore quite thrown
by the problems of his first marriage, when, having fallen in love with a pretty seventeen year old, he rushed into hasty wedlock. Almost immediately the Civil War broke out and her anxious family took her back. If Milton was proud, he was also an "inward, spiritual man".
Mr Wilson's spare, narrative style recreates with scholarly ease the atmosphere of seventeenth century England. A penal system which ordained both ears to be cut off for the most trivial offence (no wonder hair was worn long and drawn forward). The confusion of Christians in mid-reform, sadly prefiguring the state of the Christian churches today.
He has a healthy doubt of contemporary sources, finding them worthy of no more credence than the views of later historians. As "history is a synthesis of innumerable points of view" his interpretation makes an important addition to the period.
Pictures remain in the mind's eye after the book is closed, particularly perhaps as there are no illustrations. Cromwell embarking on his Second Protectorate, exchanging his
plain black suit for purple robe -and sceptre — shades of Animal Farm. The "almost Nazi excitement' of a great Roundhead parade. The Fire of London "like a hideous storm". The "redfaced, diminutive, badtempered little figure of Laud". The succession of cramped little houses, crammed with relations and pupils, in which the family lived. Milton walking on the arm of a friend in Bunhill Fields, toward the end of his life. Putting his literary remains in order, destroying or dispersing his manuscripts, revising and sending for publication what remained.
Best of all, though Andrew Wilson finds it "too perfect to be credible" is the account of the Duke of York's
magnanimous visit to him after the Reformation. "In the course of their conversation, the Duke asked Milton, whether he did not think the loss of his sight was a judgment upon him for what he had written against the late King his father?
Milton's reply was to this effect. "If your Highness thinks that the calamities which befall us here are indications of the wrath of Heaven, in what manner are we to account for the fate of the King your father? The displeasure of Heaven must, upon this supposition, have been much greater against him, than against me, for I have lost only my eyes, but he lost his head".
Margaret Lucy