Frank Kermode, writing in The New York Review, reminds us, I mean informs us, that we missed the 400th anniversary of Milton's birth last year. His casually learned overview of Milton's career quotes liberally from Dr. Johnson's LIfe of Milton, and I was delighted to learn that Anna Williams, Johnson's friend who has a substantial part in Boswell's LIfe, is Milton's granddaughter. It is she who is recorded as having wondered, prosaically, why a man should make of himself a beast with drink, causing Johnson to reply that "he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
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