John Milton

(1608 - 1674)

Born in 1608, three years before the publication of the King James Bible, John Milton grew up in a house on the same London street as the Mermaid Tavern, where Ben Jonson liked to drink. Milton wrote his tracts “The Reason of Church Government” in 1642 and “Areopagitica” in 1644, and he became secretary for foreign tongues for the Commonwealth in 1649. When he published Paradise Lost in 1667, it was reportedly hailed in the House of Commons as “the noblest poem that ever was wrote in any language or any age.”