John Selden: Scholar, Statesman, Advocate for Milton's Muse

The life of John Selden (1584-1654) was both contemplative and active. Seventeenth-century England's most learned person, he was also one of the few survivors who continued in the Long Parliament of the 1640s his vigorous opposition, begun in the 1620s, to abuses of power, whether by Charles I or, later, by the Presbyterian-controlled Westminster Assembly. His gift for finding analogies among different cultures--Greco-Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic--helped to transform both the poetr...