Physical description

Hard cover book: The Prose Works of John Milton Vol 3
Author: John Milton
Editor: James Augustus St. John
Publisher: Henry G Bohn
Date: 1848
Further Information: Blue leather hardcover with brown spine covers and spine embossed lettering to spine in gilt, portrait frontispiece. The spine has a Library label with an inscription.

Publication type

non-fiction

Inscriptions & markings

The label on the spine with typed text PAT 828 MIL
The end paper facing the flyleaf has a stamp from the Warrnambool Mechanics Institute
Front loose end paper has a sticker from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Front loose end paper has a stamp from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Front loose end paper has a stamp from Warrnambool Mechanics Institute

Summary

The Prose Works of John Milton, Volume 3 is part of a five-volume set issued by London publisher Henry G. Bohn beginning in 1848, as part of his well-known "Bohn's Standard Library" series of affordable classics. Volume 3 is the volume centred on Milton's ecclesiastical, educational, and domestic-life tracts, quite distinct from Volume 1 and its regicide/republic defences and Volume 2's church-government and press-freedom writings.
The contents include The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church; Animadversions upon the Remonstrants' Defence against Smectymnuus; and Apology for Smectymnuus, Milton's final anti-prelatical tract (1642), defending the Puritan pamphleteers writing under the collective pen-name "Smectymnuus" against Bishop Joseph Hall, and defending his own personal integrity as a polemicist.

Also included is The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton's controversial 1643 tract arguing, on scriptural grounds, for the lawfulness of divorce on grounds of incompatibility, written not long after his own troubled first marriage. There are further divorce tracts within this volume, as it continues the argument of the Doctrine and Discipline.
The volume also includes a Tractate on Education, Milton's short treatise on his ideas for educational reform, and A Declaration for the Election of John III, King of Poland.
Therefore, Volume 3 collects Milton's writings on church reform, personal and religious controversy, divorce law, and education — the more personal and doctrinal side of his prose output, as opposed to the state-political defences in Volume