Publisher's Synopsis
In the seventeenth century it was not the custom to publish two volumes upon every man or woman whose name had appeared on a title-page. Nor, where lives of authors were written, were they written with the redundancy of particulars which is now allowed. Especially are the lives of the poets and dramatists ob-scure and meagrely recorded. Of Milton, however, we know more personal details than of any man of letters of that age. Edward Phillips, the poet's nephew, who was brought up by his uncle, and lived in habits of in-tercourse with him to the last, wrote a life, brief, inex-act, superficial, but valuable from the nearness of the writer to the subject of his memoir.
