ABSTRACT
John Milton was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, and the son of a well-to-do scrivener and composer. There are stories of the twelve-year-old Milton working into the early hours of the morning. Milton went on to Christ's College, Cambridge. Milton began to write his English verse in 1629, and his last work, Paradise Regained, published. His epic Paradise Lost seems to have been in partial existence by the early 1640s, but was mostly composed after his blindness in 1651, and completed by 1667. Milton was a learned author, composing in Latin and Italian as well as English, and the grand style which he employs in Paradise Lost the subject of criticism for its unidiomatic and artificial language. Milton heavily influenced by his familiarity with Latin, and this is clear both in Latin syntactical constructions such as the ablative absolute and in his use of unfamiliar Latin forms and senses. Very few words in this passage are first recorded in Milton.
