Milton's Schoolmasters: Alexander Gil and His Son Alexander

Abstract

J OHN MILTON as a schoolboy at St. Paul's School in London was peculiarly fortunate in being associated from his tenth to his sixteenth year with such intellectually alert and scholarly men as his schoolmasters the Gils.1 Both father and son were of course expert Latinists and commanded an idiomatic Latin style, clear, vigorous and not seldom witty. They were both competent Grecians and sufficiently good Hebraists to introduce the boys in the eighth form to the language of the Psalms. Alexander Gil the elder wrote two distinguished works in prose: Logonomia Anglica in Latin and The Sacred Philosophy of the Holy Scripture in English. Logonomia Anglica was published in I6I9 and reissued with many corrections in i 62 i, both editions appearing while John Milton was Dr. Gil's pupil. Logonomia shows him as a versatile and independent linguistic scholar, a phonetician, grammarian, logician, and prosodist whose views are still both interesting and instructive-at least to other linguistic scholars. Masson long since pointed out that Milton could not fail to have been influenced by Gil's enthusiasm for the English language and his practice of illustrating figures of speech and metrical patterns with full examples from contemporary English poets, especially from Spenser. As I shall show, Gil also wrote a second part of the