REMOVAL FROM BARBICAN TO HIGH HOLBORN.
It would have been no surprise if Milton, on the skirts of the Invisible College as he was, and in sympathy with many of their aims, had exerted himself about this time in setting up a great Academy for young gentlemen, embodying some of the new utilitarian fancies even to the satisfaction of Petty, but fulfilling also his own higher ideal. He was peculiarly fond of Pedagogy; and his notion of an institution combining the School with the University, and so tending to the abolition of Universities, seems to have been coming more and more into favour.
Not only, however, did Milton abandon the experiment of which Phillips thinks there was then some prospect; but, precisely in 1647, he broke up his actual pedagogic establishment in Barbican, and went into a new house, where he either ceased to teach altogether, or had no pupils remaining but his two nephews. What may have been his reasons for the step we do not know; but it is not unlikely that the change of his circumstances by his father's death had something to do with it. No will of the ex-scrivener having been found, it is not known what property he left; but there is reason to believe that he left something considerable, and that, whatever it was, it came more completely to the two sons, and their sister Mrs. Agar, than while the old man lived. [Footnote: We may remember here Phillips's and Aubrey's hints as to the scrivener's prosperity in business. Phillips's information is that he "gained a competent estate, whereby he was enabled to make a handsome provision both for the education and maintenance of his children;" and he adds such particulars as that his mother, Mrs. Phillips, "had a considerable dowry given her" on her first marriage, and that the lease of the scrivener's house in Bread Street—the Spread Eagle, where he had carried on his business, and where his children had been born (or at least of some house in that street)—became in time part of the poet's estate. Aubrey distinctly reckons the Spread Eagle house as the scrivener's property, besides another house in the same street called The Rose," and other houses in other places." Christopher Milton, as we know, owned a house in London called the Cross Keys, worth 40_l._ a year, while his father was alive.] At all events, the fact of Milton's change of residence within a few months after his father's death is certified by Phillips. "It was not long," says Phillips, "after the march of Fairfax and Cromwell through the City of London, with the whole Army, to quell the insurrections Browne and Massey, now malcontents also, were endeavouring to raise in the City against the Army's proceedings, ere he left his great house in Barbican, and betook himself to a smaller in High Holborn, among those that open backward into Lincoln's-Inn Fields." The date of that famous march of the Army through London, to tame the tumultuous Presbyterianism of the City, rescue Parliament from its domination, and compel a policy more favourable to Independency and Toleration, was August 6 and 7, 1647 (see antè, pp. 553-4). Milton's removal from Barbican may be assigned, therefore, to September or October in the same year.
Change we, then, from those eastern purlieus of Aldersgate Street and Barbican, where we have been observing Milton for seven years, to a scene farther west, more within the cognisance of Londoners generally, and nearer to those two Houses of Parliament which the Army had rescued for the time from Presbyterian leadership within and Presbyterian mob-law without. Holborn was not then the dense continuity of houses it is now; there were more spaces in it of gardens and greenery, and the houses had not crept as far as Oxford Street; but it was, as now, the familiar thoroughfare of relief from the narrower and noisier Fleet Street and Strand, and the part of it which Milton had chosen was the most convenient. The actual house which he took may be still extant, wedged somewhere in the labyrinthine block between Great Turnstile and Little Turnstile; but one could judge but poorly from present appearances how pleasant may have been its old outlook to the rear. The fine open area of Lincoln's-Inn Fields was then only partly built round, and was used as a lounge and bowling-green by the lawyers and citizens. The houses in the neighbourhood were mostly new ones. [Footnote: Cunningham's London: Holborn and Lincoln's-Inn Fields.]