Concordance to the Poetical Works of John Milton

Excerpt from A Concordance to the Poetical Works of John Milton

The only Concordance to Milton’s Poetical Works that has yet appeared is that by the late Mr. Guy Lushington Prendergast of the Madras Civil Service, published at Madras in 1857. The edition was small, and it has long been out of print. Unfortunately, too, the editing seems to have been left to the printers, who apparently cut ofi from either end of a Quotation such words as would not fit into a line of the Concordance, thus rendering it necessary for one consulting the work to refer in most cases to the passage in Milton; there are also many errors in it owing to the fact that to copyists as well as to compositors English was a foreign language. In 1867 Mr. C. D. Cleveland, of Philadelphia, published in England a small work entitled A Complete Concordance to the Poetical Works of John Milton (london, Sampson Low), but it was merely a verbal index, a first edition of which had appeared in Cleveland’s edition of Milton’s Poetical Works, published in America in 1854. Previous to this there was Todd’s Verbal Index, appended to his edition of Milton’s Poetical Works in 1809; but in it, according to Cleveland, there are over three thousand mistakes.