Little of a sordid sort disturbs the sentiment of solemn reverence with which, more even than Shakespeare's, his life is approached by his countrymen; a feeling doubtless mainly due to the sacred nature of his principal theme, but equally merited by the religious consecration of his whole existence.

It is the easier for the biographer to maintain this reverential attitude, inasmuch as the prayer of Agur has been fulfilled in him, he has been given neither poverty nor riches.

He is not called upon to deal with an enormous mass of material, too extensive to arrange, yet too important to neglect.

Nor is he, like Shakespeare's biographer, reduced to choose between the starvation of nescience and the windy diet of conjecture.

If a humbling thought intrudes, it is how largely he is indebted to a devoted diligence he never could have emulated; how painfully Professor Masson's successors must resemble the Turk who builds his cabin out of Grecian or Roman ruins.
Milton's genealogy has taxed the zeal and acumen of many investigators.
He himself merely claims a respectable ancestry (_ex genere honesto_).
His nephew Phillips professed to have come upon the root of the family tree at Great Milton, in Oxfordshire, where tombs attested the residence of the clan, and tradition its proscription and impoverishment in the Wars of the Roses.