ABSTRACT
Miltonists tend to live long, I am glad to note. Is there something sustaining in their author? By way of anecdote: since A Milton Encyclopedia has entries only for the deceased, the editors had to find out whether D.H. Stevens, the bibliographer, was still alive. He had been born so long ago that it was hard to believe that he was. But he was, thus failing to qualify for the “Sm-Z” volume that was published in 1980. The Milton scholars who reached eighty and more include David Masson and Alfred Stern in the 19th century, and in our century James Holly Hanford, William Haller, Harris Fletcher, Marjorie Nicolson, Charles G. Osgood, Walter Clyde Curry, and Sir Herbert Grierson. Maurice Kelley is eighty-eight. Allan H. Gilbert became a centenarian. Kelley was the editor of the last volume of the Yale Prose, 1982. Gilbert, last time I saw him – which was admittedly quite a few years ago – had just come back from jogging. Gilbert wrote an essay on how not to be old that I passed on to Douglas Bush.
