John Milton was born in 1608 at a house in Bread Street, London, almost under the shadow of St.Paul's Cathedral. Shakespeare was living in London then and writing his plays - indeed there is a story that Milton. a boy of six or seven, once met Shakespeare, then a man of almost fifty. Milton's father was a kind of lawyer, a Puritan but a man of learning and a lover of music. John weent to school at St.Paul's famous English school, and then when he was seventeen to Christ's College, Cambridge.From his early youth Milton seems to have known, with complete certainty, that God had chosen him for some greate purpose to which his whole life had to be devoted. At first he thought of entering the Church as a preacher, but later he decided this was not his chosen work, and after taking his degree he returned to the little village of Horton in Buckinghamshire, 17 miles from London, where his father had retired, and he settled down to six more years of study, to reading poetry, philosophy, music and languages. There was always in Miltin's mind the idea of a greate poem that he was to write. What its subject was to be he did not know, but in his determination to choose the noblest of subjects and to write in a style worthy of the subject, he read and studied in order to become familar with th ebest that had been written and done by other men. He mastered Greek and Latin literature completely, learned French, Italian and Spanish and studied the latest theories of science. This way followed by travels in France and Italy where he perfected his knowledge of French and Italian. He visited theatres there, listened to music and met great and learned men, including Galileo, now old and blind and in prison. He had intended to go to Greece, but the news of the coming struggle in England brought him home. "I considered it a dishonourable thing," he wrote, "to be travelling for amusement abroad in foreign lands while my countrymen were fighting for liberty at home". So in 1639 he came back, and joined the struggle in the way he thought he could help best, not by fighting but by writing to explain and to defend the Puritan cause. For the next twenty years he wrote practically no poetry. "It is fine and noble," he said, "to sing the ways of God; it is finer and nobler to fulfil them." His prose writings, powerful, fierce, learned, have, generally speaking, lost their interest for us now.

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