Milton, John.

4to (186 x 135mm.), first edition, woodcut vignette on title-page, early twentieth-century half calf, some marginalis in an early hand, lower margins cropped closely to text, minor hole to title-page, nineteenth-century marginal notes and underlining in pen and pencil



First edition of the fourth of Milton's prose pamphlets, the first to which he signed his name, and with some revealing autobiographical passages.

Thomas Edward Newton, armorial bookplate

Coleridge 61; Grolier Wither to Prior 559; Wing M2175, Coleridge 61 

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"The decision to shed the cloak of anonymity is reflected in the body of the tract by the emergence of a newly radical Milton who is willing to 'divulge unusual things of myself' in an autobiographical digression. Whereas in Of Prelatical Episcopacy and Animadversions Milton had argued as a presbyterian within the national church of England, in The Reason of Church Government he moves away from state presbyterianism towards independent congregationalism, which had taken root in the puritan colonies of America and had been re-exported to England as radical tolerationism: Milton had not become a sectarian, but he now differed from the presbyterians in arguing for a measure of toleration, so adumbrating the explicitly tolerationist position that he was to take up in his later years." (Gordon Campbell, Oxford DNB)