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OLD ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL
The two upper views show the porch by Inigo Jones. The two lower views show the “Lesser Cloisters.†Milton’s school stood at the rear of the church.
From an old engraving.
As Milton was early destined for the Church, his unusually thoughtful disposition and quick perception must have given promise of his fulfillment of his father’s hope. At the age of ten he was writing verses. At this time, a Dutch painter, Jansen, reputed to be “equal to Van Dyck in all except freedom of hand and grace,†was employed to paint the scrivener’s little son, as well as James I. and his children and various noblemen.
This portrait shows us a sweet-faced, sober little Puritan in short-cropped auburn hair, wearing a broad lace frill about his neck, and an elaborately braided jacket. This portrait is now in private hands, from whence it is to be hoped that it will some day find its way to the National Portrait Gallery, and be placed beside the striking and noble likeness of the poet in middle life.
The lines which were written beneath the first engraving of it may have been the poet’s own:
“When I was yet a child, no childish playTo me was pleasing; all my mind was setSerious to learn and know, and thence to doWhat might be public good; myself I thoughtBorn to that end, born to promote all truthAnd righteous things.â€
Milton appears to have been very fond of his preceptor, a Scotch Puritan named Young. He seems to have well grounded the lad in Latin, aroused in him a love of poetry, and set him tomaking English and Latin verses. But the little John must go to school with other boys; and what more natural than that the famous St. Paul’s School, within five minutes’ walk, should have been selected?
When Milton went to school in 1620, St. Paul’s Cathedral was become old and much in need of restoration. It had been built on the site of an older church and was in process of erection and alteration from about 1090 to 1512, when its new wooden steeple, covered with lead, was completed. Its cross was estimated later by Wren to have been at least 460 feet from the ground. This had disappeared in a fire in 1561, and none replaced it. What Milton saw was a huge edifice, chiefly Gothic, with a central tower about 260 feet high. The classical porch by Inigo Jones was not added, neither were certain buildings which abutted the nave torn down until after Milton’s school-days were over. On the east end, next his schoolhouse, was a great window thirty-seven feet high, above which was a circular rose window. The choir stretched westward 224 feet, which, with the nave, made the entire length 580 feet. When Jones’s portico was added, its whole length was 620 feet. The area which it covered was 82,000 feet, and it was by far the largest cathedral in all England. Upon the southwestcorner was a tower once used as a prison, and also as a bell and clock tower. This was the real Lollards’ tower, rather than the one at Lambeth which is so called. The northwest tower was likewise a prison. The nave was of transitional Norman design, of twelve bays in length, and with triforium and clerestory. For many decades a large part of the cathedral was desecrated by a throng of hucksters, idlers, and fops.
Ben Jonson makes constant allusion to “Paul’s.†Here he studied the extravagant costumes of the day. According to Dekker, the tailors frequented its aisles to catch the newest fashions: “If you determine to enter into a new suit, warn your tailor to attend you in Paul’s, who with his hat in his hand, shall like a spy discover the stuff, colour, and fashion of any doublet or hose that dare be seen there; and stepping behind a pillar to fill his table-book with those notes, will presently send you into the world an accomplished man.â€
Bishop Earle, writing when Milton was twenty years of age, describes St. Paul’s as follows: “It is a heap of stones and men with a vast confusion of languages; and were the steeple not sanctified, nothing liker Babel. The noise in it is like that of bees mixed of walking tongues and feet. It is the exchange of all discourse, and no businesswhatsoever but is here stirring and afoot. It is the market of young lecturers, whom you may cheapen here at all rates and sizes. All inventions are emptied here, and not few pockets. The best sign of a temple in it is that it is the thieves’ sanctuary.â€
Well may John Milton senior have cautioned his young son not to tarry in “Duke Humphrey’s Walk,†as this scene of confusion was called, on his way home from school, though he may well have taken him to inspect the lofty tomb of Dean Colet or the monuments to John of Gaunt and Duke Humphrey and the shrine of St. Erkenwald, which was behind the high altar. As a man, in later years, Milton may have walked down from Aldersgate on a December in 1641 and attended the funeral of the great painter, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who for nine years had made his residence in England, and was buried here.
In a corner of the churchyard stood a covered pulpit surmounted by a cross, where in ancient times the folkmote of the citizens was held. For centuries before Milton, this was a famous spot for outdoor sermons and proclamations. Here the captured flags from the Armada had waved above the preacher. But in 1629, when Milton was in Cambridge, Oliver Cromwell, in his maiden speech in Parliament, declared that flat popery was beingpreached at Paul’s Cross. When Cromwell’s day of power was come, and the cathedral during the war was sometimes used to stable horses, Paul’s Cross was swept away, and its leaden roof melted into bullets. Before that, in 1633, preaching had been removed from there into the choir.
Of the architecture of the bishop’s palace, which stood at the northeast of the cathedral, we know nothing, but we know that it existed in Milton’s school-days. Adjoining the palace was a “Haw,†or small enclosure surrounded by a cloister, filled with tombs, and upon the walls was a grisly picture of the Dance of Death. Death was represented by a skeleton, who led the Pope, and emperor, and a procession of men of all conditions. In brief, the little “Haw†was a small edition of the Pisan Campo Santo.
At the east end of the churchyard stood the Bell Tower, surmounted by a spire covered with lead and bearing a statue of St. Paul. The cloister of the Chapter House or Convocation House hid the west wall of the south transept and part of the nave. It was, unlike most structures of that character, two stories in height, and formed a square of some ninety feet, which was called the “Lesser Cloisters,†doubtless to distinguish it from the other cloisters in the “Haw.†During his most impressionableyears, the city boy John Milton could not have stirred from home without being confronted by majestic symbols of the Christian faith, and mighty structures already venerable with age, and rich in treasures of a great historic past. Religion and beauty played as large a part in the influences that moulded the life of his young contemporaries as science and athletics do in the life of every American boy to-day. Whatever faults the methods of education in Milton’s age may be accused of, it can not be denied that they developed industry, reverence, and moral courage—three qualities which with all our child study and pedagogical improvements are perhaps less common to-day than they were then.
About the year 1620, when William Bradford was writing his famous journal, and John Carver and Edward Winslow were sailing with him in theMayflower, when Doctor Harvey had told London folk that man’s blood circulates, and many new things were being noised abroad, twelve-year-old John Milton first went to school. His school had been founded in 1512 by Dean Colet, whose great tomb, just mentioned, was but a stone’s throw distant. It was a famous school. Ben Jonson and the famous Camden had studied there, and learned Latin and Greek, the catechism, and good manners. There were 153 boys in all; the number prescribedhad reference, curiously, to the number of fishes in Simon Peter’s miraculous draught. Over the windows were inscribed the words in large capital letters: “Schola Catechizationis Puerorum In Christi Opt. Max. Fide Et Bonis Literis.†On entering, the pupils were confronted by the motto painted on each window: “Aut Doce, Aut Disce, Aut Discedeâ€â€”either teach or learn or leave the place. There were two rooms, one called thevestibulum, for the little boys, where also instruction was given in Christian manners. In the main schoolroom the master sat at the further end upon his imposing chair of office called acathedra, and under a bust of Colet said to have been a work of “exquisite art.†Stow tells us that somewhat before Milton’s time the master’s wages were a mark a week and a livery gown of four nobles delivered in cloth; his lodgings were free. The sub-master received weekly six shillings, eight pence, and was given his gown. Children of every nationality were eligible; on admission they passed an examination in reading, writing, and the catechism, and paid four pence, which went to the poor scholar who swept the school. The eight classes included boys from eight to eighteen years of age, though the curriculum of the school extended over only six years. Milton’s master was Doctor Alexander Gill, who from 1608-1635held the mastership of St. Paul’s School. A progressive man was this same reverend gentleman—a great believer in his native English and in spelling reform. Speaking of Latin, this remarkable Latin master said: “We may have the same treasure in our own tongue. I love Rome, but London better. I favour Italy, but England more. I honour the Latin, but worship the English.†He was also an advocate of the retention of good old Saxon words as against the invasion of Latinised ones. “But whither,†he writes, “have you banished those words which our forefathers used for these new-fangled ones? Are our words to be exiled like our citizens? O ye Englishmen, retain what yet remains of our native speech!†Under Mr. Gill’s instruction, and that of his son, who was usher, Milton spent about four years of strenuous study. So great was his ambition for learning during the years when most boys find school hours alone irksome enough that he says: “My father destined me when a little boy for the study of humane letters, which I seized with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight; which indeed was the first cause of injury to my eyes, to whose natural weakness there were also added frequent headaches.†Philips writes:
“He generally sat up half the night as well in voluntary improvements of his own choice as the exact perfecting of his school exercises; so that at the age of fifteen he was full ripe for academical training.†During these years the boy probably learned French and Italian, as well as made a beginning in Hebrew.
It was in his last year at school that he paraphrased the ninety-fourth Psalm, beginning:
“When the blest seed of Terah’s faithful sonAfter long toil their liberty had won,And passed from Pharian fields to Canaan’s landLed by the strength of the Almighty’s hand,Jehovah’s wonders were in Israel shown,His praise and glory were in Israel known.â€
Likewise Psalm one hundred and thirty-six, beginning:
“Let us with a gladsome mindPraise the Lord, for he is kind:For his mercies aye endure,Ever faithful, ever sure.â€
The present St. Paul’s School is now splendidly housed in a great establishment in Hammersmith. But Milton’s school and the one which arose on its ashes after the Great Fire are remembered by the following inscription: “On this site, A. D. 1512 to A. D. 1884, stood St. Paul’s School, founded byDr. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul’s.†From the studio of Mr. Hamo Thornycroft at Kensington, whence came the heroic figures of Cromwell at Westminster and King Alfred at Winchester, St. Paul’s School is to receive a noble statue of the great scholar.
The schoolmate whom Milton most loved was a physician’s son, Charles Diodati, almost exactly his own age, who went to Cambridge a little in advance of him.
After his sister, who was then eighteen years old, had been wooed and won by Mr. Philips, and had made the first break in the home on Spread Eagle Court, Milton, now sixteen years old, followed his friend to Cambridge. Doubtless he rode on the coach, which every week the hale old stage-coach driver—Hobson—drove from the Bull’s Inn on Bishopsgate Street. A well-to-do man was this worthy, who, in spite of eighty winters, still cracked his whip behind his span, and kept forty horses in his livery stable. Milton took a great fancy to him. He soon learned, as did every young gentleman intent on hiring a nag, that “Hobson’s choice†meant taking the horse that stood nearest the stable door. Hobson is said to have been the first man in England to let out hackney-coaches. The modernvisitor to the university town finds the old carrier honoured by a memorial; for he became a public benefactor, and among many generous gifts bequeathed a sum that to this day provides for a fine conduit and for the runnels of sparkling water that flow along the streets and around the town.[1]
Under the mastership of Doctor Thomas Bainbrigge, Milton became a “lesser pensioner†in February, 1624, at Christ’s College. Students were classified according to social rank and ability to pay, and Milton stood above the poorer students, called “sizars,†who had inferior accommodation; he probably paid about £50 a year for hismaintenance. Christ’s College, as regards numbers, then stood nearly at the head of the sixteen colleges and had one master, thirteen fellows, and fifty-five scholars, which, together with students, made the number two hundred and sixty, about the same that it has to-day. It stands between Sidney Sussex College and Emmanuel. In the former, Cromwell studied, from April, 1616, to July, 1617, and the room with its bay window and deep window-seats and little bedroom opening out of it, which is said to have been his, may still be seen in the second story of the building next to the street. The window is modern. His portrait, painted in middle life, hangs in the dining-hall. Doctor William Everett, in what is the best book on life in Cambridge,—his “On the Cam,â€â€”thus sums up his estimate of the Protector: “Bigots may defame him, tyrants may insult him, but when the hosts of God rise for their great review and the champions of liberty bear their scars, there shall stand in the foremost rank, shining as the brightness of the firmament, the majestic son of Cambridge, the avenger and protector, Oliver Cromwell.†A Royalist has written in a note that is appended to Cromwell’s name in the college books: “Hic fuit grandis ille impostor carnifex perditissimus;†and it is as “impostor†and “butcher†that two-thirdsof Englishmen would have described him before Carlyle resurrected the real man.
Emmanuel College is preëminently the Puritan college. It is dear to Americans as the one where William Blackstone, the learned hermit of Shawmut, John Harvard, the founder of Harvard College, and Henry Dunster, its first president, Bradstreet, the colonial governor, and Hugh Peters, the regicide, who lived in Boston, once studied. Here also Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, was a student, and here John Cotton was a fellow. This beloved preacher afterward left his ministry over St. Botolph’s Church in Boston, England, to go to the little settlement of Winthrop’s, which had changed its earlier names of “Shawmut†and “Trimountaine†to “Boston†before his arrival. American tourists, who find their way to the spacious grounds of Jesus College to see the Burne-Jones and Morris windows in the chapel, will be glad to note that in these stately halls John Eliot walked a student. Little he then dreamed of his future life in wigwams, a guest of mugwumps, in the forests of Natick, Massachusetts, and of the laborious years to be spent in turning Hebrew poetry and history and gospel message into their barbarous tongue. Francis Higginson, the minister to Salem, and the ancestor of Colonel Thomas W.Higginson, studied here as well. John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts colony, and President Chauncy of Harvard College studied at Trinity a generation before Wren erected its great library, and Isaac Newton was a student there. John Norton, Cotton’s successor at the First Church, Boston, studied in Peterhouse, the oldest of all the colleges, and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, entered Pembroke College the year before Milton entered Christ’s. Whether the two, whose lives were to touch so closely later, knew each other then or not is doubtful. William Brewster was the only man who came in theMayflowerwho had a college education. He too studied at Cambridge; and so did John Robinson, the dearly loved pastor of the Pilgrims, who remained with the other English refugees at Leyden.
It was these men, with Shepard, Saltonstall, and a score more of Oxford and Cambridge men, who were the spiritual fathers of Samuel Adams, Warren, Otis, Hancock; of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Channing, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks; of Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, and Hawthorne; of Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner; of Motley, Bancroft, Prescott, and John Fiske. The Cambridge that Milton knew was the mother and the grandmother of the founders of statesand of the architects of national constitutions and ideals.
Though most of the New England Puritan leaders came from Cambridge, Oxford furnished several of the great Puritans who remained at home—Pym, Vane, John Eliot, and Hampden.
It is estimated that nearly one hundred university men, between 1630 and 1647, left their comfortable homes and the allurements that Oxford, Cambridge, and the picturesque England of their time presented, to undergo the hardships of pioneers in the raw colony upon Massachusetts Bay. Of these, two-thirds came from Cambridge, a particularly large proportion from Emmanuel College. Of the forty or fifty Cambridge or Oxford men who were in Massachusetts in 1639, one-half were within five miles of Boston or Cambridge. It was this element of culture and character that determined the history of New England, and forced its stony soil to bring forth such a crop of men in the ages that were to come as made New England, in the words of Maurice, “the realisation in plain prose of the dreams which haunted Milton his whole life long.â€
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CHRIST’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
A, Chapel; B, Library; C, Dining-Hall; D, Head Master’s Rooms; E, Kitchen; F, Master’s Garden; H, Tennis Court.
From an old engraving.
Sidney Sussex, Christ’s, and Emmanuel Colleges were erected during the Tudor period, Christ’s College, founded in 1505, being the earliest of the three. The buildings of the latter now present a morecommonplace appearance than when the “Lady of Christ’s,†as the students called young Milton, walked among them in his cap and gown. One still may climb the narrow, shabby stairway to the room, with a tiny, irregular bedroom and cupboard, where Milton lived, and which probably he shared with a roommate. It has no inscription or special mark, and probably few strangers seek it out. The visitor will note its two windows opposite each other, whose heavy window-frames, with the wainscoting and cornice, bear mark of age.
No one, however, fails to seek within the secluded inner garden the decrepit mulberry-tree, which is said to have been planted by Milton. Its trunk is muffled high in a mound of sod, and its aged limbs, which still bear foliage and black berries, rest on supports. High, sheltering walls shut in the exquisite green lawns around it, and birds, blossoms, and trees make the spot seem a paradise regained.
Among the students of Christ’s College, none in later years brought it such renown as two men of widely differing types—the authors of “Evidences of Christianity†and “The Origin of Species.†William Paley in 1766, when he was but twenty-three years old, was elected a fellow, and remained in Cambridge ten years. His famous work to-day forms part of the subjects required for the “LittleGo.†Charles Robert Darwin, the Copernicus of the nineteenth century, entered Christ’s with the intention of studying for the ministry. He left it to journey on theBeaglethrough the southern seas, and to bring back results which, with his later study, led to such a revolution in human thought as made it only second to that wrought in the minds of men who lived a generation before Milton was born.
Masson tells us that in Milton’s college days the daily routine was chapel service at five o’clock in the morning, followed sometimes by a discourse by one of the fellows, then breakfasts, probably served in the students’ own rooms, as they are to-day. This was followed by the daily college lectures or university debates, which lasted until noon, when dinner was served in the college dining-halls; there the young men, then as now, sat upon the hard, backless benches, and drank their beer beneath painted windows and portraits, perchance by Holbein, of the eminent men who had been their predecessors.
After dinner, if they supped at seven, and attended evening service, they could do much as they pleased otherwise. In Milton’s day, the rule of an earlier time, which prescribed that out of their chambers students should converse in some dead language, had been much relaxed. Probably the barbarousLatin and worse Greek and Hebrew, which this prescription must have caused, finally rendered it a dead letter. Smoking was a universal practice, and boxing matches, dancing, bear fights, and other forbidden games were not unknown. Bathing in the sedgy little Cam was prohibited, but was nevertheless a daily practice.
In many colleges the undergraduates wore “new fashioned gowns of any colour whatsoever, blue or green, or red or mixt, without any uniformity but in hanging sleeves; and their other garments light and gay, some with boots and spurs, others with stockings of divers colours reversed one upon another.†Some had “fair roses upon the shoe, long frizzled hair upon the head, broad spread bands upon their shoulders, and long, large merchants’ ruffs about their necks, with fair feminine cuffs at the wrist.â€
The portrait of Milton, which hangs in a spacious apartment used by the dons at Christ’s College, shows him a youth of rare beauty, in a rich and tasteful costume with broad lace collar. He holds a gilt-edged volume in his hand, and has the mien of a refined and elegant scholar, but not effeminate withal, for he was used to daily sword practice.
Corporal punishment was then still in vogue, and delinquents under eighteen years old were not infrequently chastised in public. In fact, at TrinityCollege, “there was a regular service of corporal punishment in the hall every Thursday evening at seven in the presence of all the undergraduates.†Masson discredits the story that Milton was once subjected to corporal punishment.
In Milton’s day the old order was changing, and we note that on Fridays men ate meat, and that the clergy indulged in impromptu prayers, to the scandal of the good churchmen. It was complained that “they lean or sit or kneel at prayers, every man in a several posture as he pleases; at the name of Jesus, few will bow, and when the Creed is repeated, many of the boys, by men’s directions, turn to the west door.â€
Milton seems to have attended plays at the university, and to have been a critical observer. Toland quotes him as saying: “So many of the young divines and those in next aptitude to Divinity have been seen so often on the stage writhing and unboning their Clergy Lims to all the antic and dishonest Gestures of Trinculos, Buffoons, and bands; prostituting the shame of that ministry which either they had or were nigh having, to the eyes of Courtiers and Court Ladies, with their grooms and Mademoiselles. There where they acted and overacted among other young Scholars, I was a Spectator; they thought themselves gallant Menand I thought them Fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticisms, they were out and I hist.â€
It is the boast of Cambridge that she educated Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, the three martyrs whom Oxford burned. It must likewise be noted that Erasmus, Spenser, Coke, Walsingham, and Burleigh were Cambridge men.
The Cambridge of Milton’s time was but a small town of seven thousand inhabitants, about one-sixth of its present size, but rich with a history of nearly six hundred years. Its most beautiful building then as now was King’s College Chapel—in fact, the most beautiful building in either Oxford or Cambridge, despite Mr Ruskin’s just criticism upon it. No doubt, it would look less like a dining-table bottom-side up, with its four legs in air, were two of its pinnacles omitted; doubtless also the same criticism on its monotonous decoration of the alternate rose and portcullis, which we made in regard to the Chapel of Henry VII., is here applicable. But its great length, its noble proportions, its rare rich windows, its splendid organ-screen—old in Milton’s college days—must appeal to every lover of beauty. One loves to think of the young poet musing here upon those well-known lines in “IlPenseroso†which this stately building may have inspired.
“But let my due feet never failTo walk the studious cloisters pale,And love the high, embowered roof,With antick pillars massy proof,And storied windows, richly dight,Casting a dim religious light.There let the pealing organ blow,To the full voiced Quire below,In service high and anthem clear,As may with sweetness through mine earDissolve me into ecstasies,And bring all heaven before mine eyes.â€
In King’s Chapel Queen Elizabeth attended service several times, and listened with delight to a Latin sermon from the text “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.†On the afternoon of the same Sunday she returned to the antechapel and witnessed a play of Plautus.
Among many buildings which were very old even in Milton’s time must be mentioned the church of St. Benedict on Bene’t Street, which was once the chapel of Corpus Christi College. Its ancient tower is especially noteworthy. Its little double windows are separated by a baluster-shaped column. The tower is similar to one at Lincoln, and, with the whole structure, antedates the Norman conquest.
A generation before Milton’s time Robert Browne,the father of Congregationalism, drew great crowds within this venerable edifice to listen to his radical doctrine. At Cambridge, where he had studied, he became impressed with the perfunctoriness and worldliness of the Church of his time, and he resolved to “satisfy his conscience without any regard to license or authority from a bishop.â€
When the Pilgrim Fathers fled from Austerfield and Scrooby in 1608, it was as Brownists or Separatists that they went to Holland. They sought a refuge where they might worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience, without interference of bishop or presbyter. It was Browne’s doctrine, not only of the absolute separation of Church and state, but also of the independence of each individual congregation, that laid the foundation of church government in New England. Presbyterianism has gained little root east of the Hudson. After Browne had suffered for his faith in thirty of the dismal dungeons of that day, and, shattered in mind by his suffering, had recanted and returned to Mother Church, his disciples remained true to the light that he had shown them; the generation of scholars with whom Milton talked at Cambridge were as familiar with Browne’s doctrine as the present generation is with that of Maurice and Martineau, and Milton must have been much influenced by it.
Opposite St. John’s Chapel is the little round church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is the earliest of the four churches in England built by the Templars which still remain. It is similar to the Temple church in London, and was probably begun a little later than St. Benedict’s, which has just been mentioned. It is questionable whether the students of Milton’s college days appreciated the beauty of this beautiful remnant of the Norman period that was in their midst. The taste of that day was decidedly for architecture of the Renaissance type, of which Cambridge boasts many examples.
In Milton’s time the most beautiful quadrangle in Cambridge, and perhaps in the world, that of Trinity, had been but newly finished by the architect, Ralph Symons, who altered and harmonised a group of older buildings. In the centre of the court is Neville’s fountain, built in 1602, which is a fine example of good English Renaissance work. During four years of Milton’s residence, part of St. John’s College was in process of erection in the Italian Gothic style. This was at the expense of the Lord Keeper Williams, whose initials and the date, 1624, are lettered in white stone near the western oriel. It was completed in 1628. Clare Bridge was not finished until 1640, and most of the other beautiful bridges that span the Cam to-day were unknownto Milton when he mused beside its shady banks where
“Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedgeInwrought with figures dim, and on the edgeLike to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.â€
Only fifteen miles away, across the level fields, lay Ely Cathedral, built on what was once hardly more than an island in the Fens. Many a time during his seven years in the university town must Milton have walked over there, or ridden on one of Hobson’s horses, perhaps with his dear Charles Diodati, to view the mighty structure, or to study its Norman interior. Its gray towers and octagonal lantern dominate the little town that clusters around it, and may be seen from far across the plain.
During these studious years, while Milton walked among the colleges where Chaucer, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Erasmus had likewise walked as students, he was not only busied with logic, philosophy, and the literature of half a dozen living and dead languages, but his tender emotions seem to have been briefly touched by some unknown fair one; and his interest in public matters, for instance, Sir John Eliot’s imprisonment in the Tower, is evident. In one letter he mentions the execution of a child but nine years old, for setting fire to houses. A scourgeof the plague afflicted London on the year that he entered Cambridge, and five years later he was driven from town by its devastation there. The university ceased all exercises, and the few members of it that remained shut themselves in as close prisoners. So great was the poverty and suffering incident to this calamity, that the king appealed to the country for aid to the stricken town.
During these years of quiet growth, Milton’s first noteworthy poems appear, of which the Latin poems, according to good judges, deserve the preference. We here mention only some of his English poems. The longest of these, which was written the month and year when he came to his majority, was begun on Christmas morning, 1629. This serious youth of twenty-one longed to give “a birthday gift for Christ,†and thus appeared his poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.†Three or four years earlier he had written on the death of his baby niece, Mrs. Philips’s child, his lines “On the Death of a Fair Infant.†The revelation of self in his sonnet “On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-Three,†makes the latter the most interesting of these early flights of song.
The most precious literary treasure which Cambridge possesses, and as Mr. Edmund Gosse asserts, “the most precious manuscript of Englishliterature in the world,†is the packet of thirty loose and ragged folio leaves covered with Milton’s handwriting, which since 1691 has lain in Trinity College Library. For a generation, they attracted no attention, but later they were examined and handled by so many that they suffered seriously; within fifty years, seventeen lines of “Comus†were torn out and stolen by some unknown thief. Mr. Gosse, in a delightful article in theAtlantic Monthly, upon “The Milton Manuscripts at Cambridge,†gives reins to his imagination in picturing the sudden temptation of this man, who, passing down the long ranges of “storied urn and animated bust,†which adorn the interior of Wren’s famous structure, advances beyond the beautiful figure of the youthful Byron to the gorgeous window in which the form of Isaac Newton shines resplendent. The careless attendant places in his hands the richly bound thin folio,—“and now the devil is raging in the visitor’s bosom; the collector awakens in him, the bibliomaniac is unchained. In an instant the unpremeditated crime is committed.... And so he goes back to his own place certain that sooner or later his insane crime will be discovered ... certain of silent infamy and unaccusing outlawry, with no consolation but that sickening fragment of torn verse which he can never show to a single friend, can never sell nor give norbequeath. Among literary criminals, I know not another who so burdens the imagination as this wretched mutilator of ‘Comus.’†These pages are the laboratory or studio of the poet, and reveal most interestingly the progress of his art during his earlier creative years. Like Beethoven’s note-book, they teach the impatient and inaccurate that genius condescends carefully to note little things and to take infinite pains, whether it be with symphonies or sonnets. Charles Lamb, on looking over the Milton manuscripts, whimsically recorded his astonishment that these lines had not fallen perfect and polished from the poet’s pen. “How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure!†But the average man, who despairs of ever attaining artistic excellence, and finds every kind of literary composition a formidable task, takes consolation in the fact here revealed, that even the creator of “L’Allegro†and “Il Penseroso,†before he reached the perfect phrase,—“endless morn of light,â€â€”experimented with no less than six others: “ever-endless light,†“ever glorious,†“uneclipsèd,†“where day dwells without night,†and “in cloudless birth of night.†The authorities of Trinity College, having of late realised the invaluable service to men of letters that this glimpse into the poet’sworkshop would be, have issued a limited edition, in sumptuous form, of a perfect facsimile of the Milton manuscripts. “Now, for the first time,†as Mr. Gosse remarks, “we can examine in peace, and without a beating heart and blinded eyes, the priceless thing in its minutest features.†When it is remembered that no line of Shakespeare’s remains in his own handwriting, and nothing of any consequence of Chaucer’s or Spenser’s, Mr. Gosse cannot be accused of over-statement when he says that to all lovers of literature this volume is “a relic of inestimable value. To those who are practically interested in the art of verse, it reads a more pregnant lesson than any other similar document in the world.â€
Some day the great university may add to its charms not only an adequate memorial to its Puritans, but one to its poets—Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson, who have enriched it by their presence, and have made Cambridgepar excellencethe university of the poets. It must be remembered that Chaucer and Shakespeare were not university men.
The time for a pilgrimage to Cambridge is term time, when window-boxes, gay with blossoms, brighten gray old walls within the “quads,†and when the streets are enlivened by three thousandfavoured youths intent on outdoor sport. Then all points of interest are accessible, and perchance one may be so fortunate as to get entrance up narrow, worn stone stairways into some student’s cosy study; the visitor will find it lined with books, rackets, and boxing-gloves, and decorated with trophies and photographs of some one else’s sister. Bits of college gossip and local slang, hints of college traditions, prejudices, and customs pleasantly vary the tourist’s hours spent over the fine print of Baedeker and in search for the tombs of eminent founders.
Even if one is a tourist and not a “fresher,†he will find it profitable to study contemporary Cambridge through “The Fresher’s Don’t,†written by “A Sympathiser, B. A.,†and addressed to freshers “in all courtesy.†As to dress, the “fresher,†among other pieces of sage advice, is told: “Don’t forget to cut the tassel of your cap just level with the board. Only graduates wear long tassels.â€
“Don’t wear knickerbockers with cap and gown, nor carry a stick or umbrella. These are stock eccentricities of Fresherdom.†(The genuine Cambridge student would rather be soaked to his skin and risk pneumonia, than encounter the derisive grin which an umbrella would evoke.)
“Don’t aspire to seniority by smashing your cap or tearing your gown, as you deceive no one.â€
“Don’t be a tuft-head. The style is more favoured by errand boys than gentlemen.â€
“Don’t by any chance sport a tall hat in Cambridge. It will come to grief.â€
Under other headings, the following injunctions may be selected:
“Don’t sport during your first month. You will only earn the undesirable appellation of ‘Smug.’â€
“Don’t speak disrespectfully of a man ‘Who only got a third in his Trip., and so can’t be very good.’ Before you go down your opinion will be ‘That a man must be rather good to take the Trip. at all.’â€
“Don’t mistake a Don for a Gyp. The Gyp is the smarter individual.â€
“Don’t forget that St. Peter’s College is ‘Pot-House,’ Caius is ‘Keys,’ St. Catherine’s is ‘Cats,’ Magdalene is ‘Maudlen,’ St. John’s College Boat Club is ‘Lady Margaret,’ and a science man is taking ‘Stinks.’â€
“Don’t forget that Cambridge men ‘keep’ and not ‘live.’â€
On leaving Cambridge, when he was nearly twenty-four years old, Milton retired to his father’s new home at Horton, about seventeen miles west of London. Here he tells us that, “with every advantage of leisure, I spent a complete holiday in turning over the Greek and Latin writers; not but that I sometimes exchanged the country for the town, either for the purpose of buying books, or for that of learning something new in mathematics, or in music, in which sciences I then delighted.â€
As Milton’s father was in easy circumstances his son never earned money until after he was thirty-two years of age. These free and quiet years at Horton, when he was his own master, and was without a care, were the happiest of his life.
The visitor from London now alights at the little station of Wraysbury, and if it be upon a July 4th, as when the writer made a pilgrimage to Horton, he will find no pleasanter way to celebrate the day than to stroll through level fields by thegreen country roadside a mile and a half to the little hamlet among the trees. On the way he will espy to the left, on the horizon, the gray towers of Windsor, and may imagine the handsome young poet, whose verse has glorified this quiet rural landscape, pausing some morning in the autumn on his early walk to listen to the far sound of the huntsman’s horn, and presently to see the merry rout of gaily clad dames and cavaliers dash by, leaping fearlessly the hedgerows and barred gates.
Horton is a tiny, tranquil village, with little that remains to-day, outside the ancient parish church, that John Milton saw, except the Horton manor-house of the Bulstrode family, which had had connections with Horton from the time of Edward VI. The modern Milton manor, situated in beautiful grounds, may or may not stand upon the site of Milton’s former home, which remained until 1798, when it was pulled down. The old tavern of uncertain date upon the one broad street may perhaps have gathered around its antique hob, within the little taproom, gray-haired peasants who guided clumsy ploughs through the rich loam of the fields of Horton, while the white-handed poet sat on a velvet lawn under leafy boughs, and penned his blithe tribute to the nightingale, or in imagination sported with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the shepherds,sprites, and nymphs who peopled his youthful dreams.
As in Cambridge, runnels of clear water, which come from the little river Colne not far distant, flow beside the road. Even to-day one has not far to seek to find the suggestion for those exquisite lines in “Comus†which Milton wrote in Horton:
“By the rushy-fringèd bank,Where grows the willow and the osier dank,My sliding chariot stays,Thick set with agate and the azurn sheenOf turkis blue and emerald greenThat in the channel strays:Whilst from off the waters fleetThus I set my printless feetO’er the cowslip’s velvet headThat bends not as I tread.â€
The student of Milton finds the centre of interest in Horton to-day to be the beautiful old church where the Milton family attended service for five years, and where the mother lies buried.
It stands in the green churchyard, back from the village street. Yew-trees and rose-bushes lend it shade and fragrance. The tombs for the most part are not moss-grown with age, but are rather new, though the slab at the entrance over which Milton passed is marked “1612.†The battlemented stone tower is draped with ivy and topped with reddishbrick. Like scores of churches of the twelfth or thirteenth century, in which it was built, the gabled portico is on the side. The interior is well-preserved; it has a nave with two aisles and a chancel, and in the porch is an old Norman arch. Upon the wall at the rear are wooden tablets which record curious bequests of small annuities for monthly doles of bread to needy people.
Never since those five joyous years at Horton has any English poet blessed the world with verse of such rare loveliness and perfection as fell from the pen of Milton during this time, when spirit, heart, and mind were in attune. The world’s clamour had not broken in upon his peace.
Probably at the request of his friend, the composer Lawes, he wrote his “Arcades†in honour of the Countess Dowager of Derby, who had been Spenser’s friend. The venerable lady lived about ten miles north of Horton on her fine old estate of Harefield, where Queen Elizabeth had visited her and her husband. On that occasion a masque of welcome had been performed for her in an avenue of elms, which thus received the name of the “Queen’s Walk.†It was in this verdant theatre that Milton’s “Arcades†was performed by the young relatives of the countess. Among these were Lady Alice and her boy-brothers, who on thefollowing year took part in Milton’s “Comus,†which he wrote anonymously to be played at Ludlow Castle upon the Welsh border, when the children’s father was installed as lord president of Wales. Besides these longer poems, Milton wrote his “Il Penseroso†and “L’Allegro†at Horton, as well as the noble elegy “Lycidas,†which was written in memory of his gifted friend, Edward King, who was drowned in the summer of 1637, just before Milton left his father’s home.
In this peaceful valley of the Thames, his clear eye searched out every sight, his musical ear sought out every sound that revealed beauty or that suggested the antique, classic world in which his whole nature revelled. He walked in “twilight groves†of “pine or monumental oak;†he listened to “soft Lydian airs†and curfew bells, to the lark’s song, and Philomel’s. He watched “the nibbling flocks,†the “labouring clouds,†and saw, “bosomed high in tufted trees,†towers and battlements arise, and beheld in vision his—
“Sabrina fair,...Under the glassy, cool translucent waveIn twisted braids of lilies knittingThe loose train of her amber dropping hair.â€
He lived in a world enchanted by the magic of his genius. Yet in his little world of lovelinesshe was not deaf to the distant hoarse cry of the coming storm, and at the last the Puritan within him awoke and cried out at those—
“who little reckoning makeThan how to scramble at the shearers’ feast ...Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to holdA sheephook—or have learnt aught else the leastThat to the faithful herds-man’s art belongs!What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;And when they list, their lean and flashy songs,Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;The hungry sheep look up and are not fedBut swoln with wind and the rank mist they drawRot inwardly and foul contagion spread.â€
In the spring of 1637, the last year that the poet spent at Horton, just before another outbreak of the plague, his mother died. We may think of brother Christopher, a young student of laws of the Inner Temple, and the widowed sister Anne and her two boys coming post-haste from London, and standing beside the desolate father and the poet-brother in the chancel, when the tabernacle of clay was lowered to its resting-place. A plain blue stone now bears the record: “Heare lyeth the Body of Sarah Milton, the wife of John Milton, who died the 3rd of April, 1637.â€
The American visitor to Horton on the day that commemorates his country’s declaration ofindependence will remember Runnymede and Magna Charta Island. And he will find nothing more consonant with his feeling, after visiting the home of the republican Milton, than to wend his way across the fields, golden with waving grain and gay with scarlet poppies, to the spot where his ancestors and Milton’s in 1215 brought tyrant John to sullen submission to their just demands.
On the margin of the river he may embark, and as the sun casts grateful shadows eastward, he may drift gently down beside the long, narrow island in the rushy margin of the stream, where white swans build their nests. A notice warns him not to trespass, for the gray stone house upon it, whose gables are half hid by dense shrubbery, is private property. Some day perhaps this English nation that so loves its own great history will reclaim this historic spot, and mark Magna Charta Island with a memorial of the brave men who made it world-famous. Or perhaps,—who knows?—some American, who has spent three years at Oxford, and learned to love the history of the race from which he sprang, may be impelled to honour that which is best in her, and after placing in Cambridge and in Horton fit memorials of Milton, may be moved to erect here a worthy monument to the bold barons.
One year after his mother’s death, and probably just after Christopher’s wedding, the poet, now a man of thirty, arrived in Paris, accompanied by his servant, and bearing valuable letters of introduction, among others, some from Sir Henry Wotton. As we are dealing with Milton’s England, scant space must be allowed to this year or more spent among thesavantsand the unwonted sights of France and Italy. In Paris the young scholar was introduced by Lord Scudamore to the man whom he most desired to see,—the great Hugo Grotius, a man of stupendous erudition and lofty character. Milton declared that he venerated him more than any modern man, and well he might, for the Dutch hero and exile had not his equal upon the Continent, even in that age of great men.
Passing through Provence, Milton entered Italyfrom Nice, and found himself in the land whose melodious language he had made his own, and whose history and literature few Italians of his age knew better than he. He went to Genoa, “La Superba,†which then boasted of two hundred palaces; thence to Leghorn, and fourteen miles farther to Pisa on the Arno, and, farther up the Arno, to beautiful Florence. Here he paused two months, lionised by the best society, and hobnobbing with painters, poets, prelates, and noblemen as he walked in Santa Croce, or on the heights of Fiesole, or in the leafy shade of Vallombrosa. Here it was that he was presented to the blind Galileo, “grown old,†he writes, “a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.†Doubtless, in later years, when blindness and royal disfavour had embittered but failed to crush his spirit, the gray-haired poet often recalled this visit made in his radiant youth.
Going by way of Siena, on its rocky height, Milton passed on to Rome in the autumn, and here spent two months in the splendid city of the Popes, in which great St. Peter’s was but newly finished. The city swarmed with priests and prelates, but the poet spoke freely of his own faith. One of his great joys was to listen to the incomparable singing ofLeonora Baroni, the Jenny Lind of his time, to whom he wrote exuberant panegyrics in Latin.
In November, Milton drove to Naples, a hundred miles away, where he was favoured with the hospitality of the aged Manso, the friend of Tasso, and the wealthy patron of letters; he showed the young Englishman his beloved city, presented him with valuable gifts, and welcomed him in his villa at Pozzuoli, overlooking the bay of Naples.
Milton had planned to visit Sicily and Greece, but he writes: “The sad news of civil war coming from England called me back; for I considered it disgraceful that, while my fellow countrymen were fighting at home for liberty, I should be travelling abroad at ease for intellectual purposes.â€
War, however, had not yet broken out, and Milton lingered another two months in Rome, little aware of the relics of the Cæsars that lay buried in the Forum under the cow-pasture of his time.
Another visit to Florence, where he was again the centre of attraction, was followed by trips to the quaint mediæval cities of Lucca, Ferrara, Bologna, and to Venice by the sea. Guido Reni, Guercino, Domenichino, and Salvator Rosa were then living, and he may have chanced upon them in his wanderings. From Venice he turned back through Verona and Milan, and paused a little in Geneva, which wasstill under the strong influence of its great reformer, Calvin; then he journeyed on to Paris, where a royal infant, Louis XIV., had been born during his travels. On reaching home, after this journey into the great splendid world full of temptations to every man who was dowered with keen susceptibilities and a passionate, vehement disposition, Milton writes: “I again take God to witness that in all those places where so many things are considered lawful, I lived sound and untouched from all profligacy and vice, having this thought perpetually with me, that though I could escape the eyes of men, I certainly could not the eyes of God.â€
It was a chaste and modest love that inspired the six amatory sonnets in Italian, which were probably written during his stay abroad. It was a refined and high-bred man, who knew the world and took it at its just measure, who was now to lend his hand to fight the people’s battle.
On his return to England Milton did not take up his residence again in his father’s home at Horton, which was then kept by his younger brother and his wife. He went to London, and for a brief time made his home with a tailor named Russel in St. Bride’s Churchyard, near Fleet Street, within view of Ludgate Hill and St. Paul’s. Here in the winter of 1639-40 he began teaching the little Philipsboys, his nephews, and took entire charge of his small namesake John, but eight years old. His sister Anne by this time had remarried, and was now Mrs. Agar. During his stay in St. Bride’s Churchyard, Milton jotted down on seven pages of the manuscript that is now in Trinity College Library suggestions for future work with which his brain was teeming. Of the ninety-nine subjects that he considered, sixty-one, including “Paradise Lost†and “Samson,†are Scriptural, and thirty-eight, including “Alfred and the Danes†and “Harold and the Normans,†are on British subjects. Like the young Goethe who projected “Faust,†which was not finished until his hair had whitened, Milton conceived his epic when it was to wait a quarter of a century for completion.
Says Edward Philips, the elder nephew whom he taught: “He made no long stay in his lodgings on St. Bride’s Churchyard: necessity of having a place to dispose his books in, and other goods fit for the furnishing of a good handsome house, hastening him to take one; and accordingly, a pretty garden-house he took in Aldersgate Street, at the end of an entry, and therefore the fitter for his turn, besides that there are few streets in London more free from noise than that.â€
At that time the entrance to the street from St.Martin’s-le-Grand was one of the seven gates of the city wall. A new one, on the site of a far older one, had been erected when Milton was nine years old; this had “two square towers of four stories at the sides, pierced with narrow portals for the foot passengers and connected by a curtain of masonry of the same height across the street, having the main archway in the middle.†Besides the figures of Samuel and Jeremiah, the gate was adorned with an equestrian statue of James I. on the Aldersgate side, and the same monarch on his throne on the St. Martin’s-le-Grand side. In 1657 Howell says: “This street resembleth an Italian street more than any other in London, by reason of the spaciousness and uniformity of the buildings and straightness thereof, with the convenient distance of the houses.â€
Amid the labyrinth of dingy, crowded alleys with which the garden spaces of the seventeenth century now are covered, one looks in vain to-day for any trace of Milton’s home; in short, of all the houses that he occupied in London, no one remains, or even has its site marked. All we know of the house on Aldersgate Street is, that it stood in the second precinct of St. Botolph’s parish, between the gate and Maidenhead Court on the right, and Little Britain and Westmoreland Alley on the left. Near by dwelt his old teacher, Doctor Gill, andDoctor Diodati, the father of his dearest friend, whose recent death he mourned in a touching elegy written in Latin. Upon his walks into the open fields, which were not then far distant, he must have passed many fine town houses of the gentry, their sites now covered by a dreary waste of shops and factories. During these years we learn that he varied his studies in the classics, and his keen observations on the doings of the newly assembled Long Parliament by an occasional “gaudy-day,†in company with some “young sparks of his acquaintance.â€
It was in Aldersgate Street that Milton began writing his vehement pamphlets, and it was Thomas Underhill, at the sign of the “Bible†in Wood Street, Cheapside, who published the first polemics which he and young Sir Harry Vane sent forth upon the burning questions of the day, into which the scope of this volume forbids us to enter. Milton’s future career was a complete refutation of Wordsworth’s conception of him as a lonely star that dwelt apart. The gentle author of “Comus†and the composer of elegant sonnets had changed his quill for that “two-handed engine†which was to smite prelate and prince.
During these days the post brought daily news of the horrors of the insurrection in Ireland; Miltonread “of two and twenty Protestants put into a thatched house and burnt alive†in the parish of Kilmore; of naked men and pregnant women drowned; of “eighteen Scotch infants hanged on clothiers’ tenterhooks;†of an Englishman, wife, and five children hanged, and buried when half alive; of eighty forced to go on the ice “till they brake the ice and were drowned.†These, and the hideous tortures upon thousands, which history relates, may explain, if they do not palliate the cruelties a few years later which Cromwell committed, and which have made his name synonymous with “monster†to this day throughout this much tormented and turbulent Irish people.
Americans who sharply condemn the devastation which old Oliver wrought will also do well to cry out no less loudly at the like barbaric slaughter in the island of Samar, which was ordered two hundred and fifty years later by some of their own officers.
War opened. There were doubtless anxious days in the house on Aldersgate Street, for brother Christopher, who stood with the royal party, had moved with his father from Horton to Reading, which was besieged. But war was not the sole cause for anxiety. When old Mr. Milton arrived safely in London late in the summer he found hisson John married and already parted from his bride of seventeen, who had lived with him but one short month. Of the brief courting of Mary Powell at her father’s house at Forest Hill, near Oxford, we know little. But one day in May, when King Charles I. had driven her brothers and all other students out of Christ Church, and had taken up temporary residence there himself, the venturesome lover came into the enemy’s country and called on her. The family was well known to him; their comfortable mansion housed ten or eleven children and had fourteen rooms. We read of their “stilling-house,†“cheese-press house,†“wool-house,†of their two coaches, one wain, and four carts. It was a merry household, and one well-to-do in worldly goods.
Whether the girl was deeply enamoured of the grave, handsome man, twice her age, who asked her hand, is doubtful, but they were soon married, and in the Aldersgate house, the nephew relates, there was “feasting held for some days in celebration of the nuptials, and for entertainment of the bride’s friends.†Then the relatives bade the bride goodbye. But the young wife, having been brought up and lived “where there was a great deal of company and merriment, dancing, etc., when she came to live with her husband found it very solitary; nocompany came to her;†consequently at the end of a month her preoccupied husband gave consent to the girl’s request to pay a visit home, with the promise of returning in September.
Some sons of intimate friends joined the nephews as pupils, and the elder Milton was added to the household. But the bride declined to answer her husband’s letters or to return; during the following months the irate man, thus deserted, wrote his pamphlets on “Divorce,†while all England was astir with the meeting of the famous Westminster Assembly, the spread of Independency, and the king’s defeat at Marston Moor. During these days also Milton wrote his remarkable scheme for the education of gentlemen’s sons, in which he showed himself as radical and original and as ready to make learning a delightful and not an odious process as did Rousseau and Froebel a century or more later. Marvellous was the work accomplished by Milton’s young pupils at Aldersgate Street. We read of these boys of fourteen and sixteen, though even their learned teacher knew not yet of the microscope and the law of gravitation, studying not only Greek and Latin, but Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, and Italian.
Milton’s noble “Areopagiticaâ€â€”a plea for freedom of the press—was written during thesemelancholy, wifeless months, while the din of civil war was in the air, and he mused in wrath and bitterness over his country’s miseries and his own.
The fortunes of the Powell family had waned with the king’s cause. One day, when Milton called on a relative who lived near by his home, on the site of the present post-office, “he was surprised,†writes his nephew, “to see one whom he thought to have never seen more, making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him.†A reconciliation was effected, and, with the wife of nineteen now two years older and wiser than since their first attempt at matrimony, they began housekeeping in the Barbican.
This was a larger house than the one in Aldersgate Street, and only a three minutes’ walk from it. It remained until Masson’s lifetime and had, he says, “the appearance of having been a commodious enough house in the old fashion.†“And I have been informed,†he adds, “that some of the old windows, consisting of thick bits of glass lozenged in lead, still remained in it at the back, and that the occupants knew one of the rooms in it as a schoolroom, where Milton had used to teach his pupils.†The visitor to the noisy, bustling Barbican to-day, close to old London wall, will find nothing that Milton saw.
Here he published the first edition of his collected poems. The title-page tells us that the songs were set to music by the same musician, Henry Lawes, “Gentleman of the King’s Chapell,†who had engaged him to write the “Arcades†and “Comus.†It was to be “sold at the signe of the Princes Arms in Paul’s Churchyard, 1645.†The wretched botch of an engraving of the poet which accompanied it displeased him, and he humourously compelled the unsuspecting and unlearned artist to engrave in Greek beneath it the following lines:
“That an unskilful hand had carved this printYou’d say at once, seeing the living face;But finding here no jot of me, my friends,Laugh at the botching-artist’s mis-attempt.â€
Unfortunately this was the only published portrait of Milton during his life, and gave strangers at home and abroad the impression that his face was as grim as his pamphlets were caustic.
By strange coincidence this house, where Milton lived when “Comus†was first published, was but a few yards distant from the town house of the earl in whose honour the masque had been composed a dozen years or more before this. With him was the “Lady Alice,†now nearly twenty-four years old, who, as a girl of eleven, had sungMilton’s songs in Ludlow Castle. The earl loved music, and his children’s music teacher, Lawes, and others who had acted in the merry masque comforted his invalidism with concourse of sweet sounds, almost within hearing of the old scrivener and organist and his poet-son. Milton loved Lawes, and wrote a sonnet to him; doubtless during these days they were much together.
About the time that Milton’s first baby daughter appeared, the Barbican house was crowded with the disconsolate Powell family, who had nearly lost their all, and fled to Mary’s husband for protection. Mother Powell seems to have been a woman of strong personality, and the new baby was christened “Anne†for her. Within two months, both the Milton and Powell grandfathers were buried from the house in Barbican. In the burials at St. Giles’s Cripplegate appears, in March, 1646, the record: “John Milton, Gentleman, 15.â€
While worrying over the settlement of the Powell estates and brother Christopher’s as well, Milton continued his teaching; his pupil writes: “His manner of teaching never savoured in the least anything of pedantry.†Cyriack Skinner, grandson of the great Coke, to whom he wrote two sonnets in later years, was his pupil in the Barbican.
In 1647, just after the march of Fairfax andCromwell through the city, Milton removed to a smaller house in High Holborn, “among those that open backward into Lincoln’s Inn Fields,†which had been laid out by Inigo Jones. Here he ceased playing the schoolmaster, became definitely a republican at heart, and busied himself with the writing of a history of England, and compiling of a Latin dictionary and a System of Divinity. The new home was among pleasant gardens, and near the bowling green and lounging-place for lawyers and citizens. Its exact site is unknown. In 1648 a second baby girl, called Mary, was born to the Miltons in the new home.
By his bold tractate on the “Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,†which was written during the terrible days of the king’s trial and execution, Milton put himself on the side of the regicides. Exactly a month after its appearance he was waited on at High Holborn by a committee from the Council of State, who asked him to accept the position of “Secretary for Foreign Tongues.†His eyesight was already failing; he could no longer read by candle-light; but here was a great opportunity for public service, and he did not long hesitate. On March 20th, when he entered upon office, he learned that all letters to foreign states and princes were to be put into dignified Latin form, so as to be instantlyread by government officials in all countries, and not into the “wheedling, lisping jargon of the cringing French,†as his nephew calls it. His salary was a trifle over £288—worth about five times that sum to-day. Sometimes an early breakfast at High Holborn was necessary in order to meet the council at sevenA.M.in Whitehall, but usually it met at eight or nine. It seemed, however, best for the Miltons to move nearer Whitehall, and while he waited for his apartments to be ready, Milton took lodging at Charing Cross, opening into Spring Garden, where now is the meeting-place of the London County Council. This was on the royal estate, and was so named from a concealed fountain which spurted forth when touched by the unwary foot. It must have been a pleasant spot, with its bathing pond and bowling green and pheasant yard, which led from what is now Trafalgar Square into St. James’s Park. Opposite, at Charing Cross, was the palace of the Percys, later called “Northumberland House,†and next to it, where now stands the Grand Hotel, was the home of Sir Harry Vane. Queen Eleanor’s Cross had been taken down in 1647 and the statue of Charles I., which on the year of Milton’s death replaced it on its site, was at this time kept in careful concealment.
St. Martin’s Lane was a genuine shady lane,bordered with hedges. The church which Milton saw upon the site of the present one was erected by Henry VIII., and was even then in reality St. Martin’s in the Fields.
Upon the north side of what is now Trafalgar Square, which is occupied by the National Gallery, stood the Royal Stables. Pall Mall, which leads westward, was so named from the Italian outdoor game, resembling croquet, which was played upon a green in the vicinity. It was then a resort for travellers and foreigners, who, like the Londoners Pepys and Defoe, frequented the chocolate and coffee houses in the neighbourhood and for a shilling an hour were carried about in sedan-chairs. The latter tells us that “the chairmen serve you for porters to run on errands, as your gondoliers do at Venice.â€
St. James’s Palace, with its picturesque brick gateway, had but just seen the last hours of the monarch whom Milton had helped dethrone. Here Charles II. had been born in 1630, and here the Princess Mary was born in 1662, and was married to William, Prince of Orange, fifteen years later.