English author and Church of England priest, Mark Pattison (1813-1884) was the son of a rector in Yorkshire and was privately educated by his father. In 1832, Pattison matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he took his B.A. degree in 1836. After other attempts to obtain a fellowship, he was elected in 1839 to a Yorkshire fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford, an anti-Puseyite College. He was ordained priest in 1843, and in the same year became tutor of Lincoln College, where he promptly made a reputation as a concise and stimulating teacher and as a sympathetic friend of youth. The management of the college was practically in his hands, and his reputation as a scholar became high in the university.
Pattison is chiefly remembered for his collected sermons and essays and his critical work on Alexander Pope. In 1879, he published this biography on Milton in Macmillan’s English Men of Letters series.