The Life of John Milton Volume 3 1643-1649 / Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time

by David Masson

TWO DIVORCE SONNETS, AND SONNET TO HENRY LAWES.

Moseley's precious little volume, with the engraver Marshall thus grimly immortalized in it, brings Milton to the beginning of 1646, or twelve months beyond his Tetrachordon and Colasterion. His wife having been for some months back with him, for better or worse, in the house at Barbican, he had dropped the Divorce argument, or at least its public prosecution. That he did so with a certain reluctance, and in no spirit of recantation, appears from two of his Sonnets, which must have been written about the time of the publication of his volume of Poems (Oct. 1645—Jan. 1645-6), but which are not included in that volume, either because they were too late to come in their places after the Ten Sonnets contained in it, or because Milton thought it better not then to print them. "On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises" is the title given by Milton himself in MS. to the two Sonnets together; but they may have been written separately.

I.

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs,
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of Owls and Cuckoos, Asses, Apes, and Dogs;
As when those hinds that were transformed to frogs
Railed at Latona's twin-born progeny,
Which after held the sun and moon in fee.
But this is got by casting pearl to hogs,
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when Truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry Liberty;
For who loves that must first be wise and good:
But from that mark how far they rove we see,
For all this waste of wealth and loss of blood.

II.

A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon,
And woven close, both matter, form, and style;
The subject new. It walked the town a while
Numbering good intellects; now seldom pored on.
Cries the stall-reader "Bless us! what a word on
A title-page is this!" and some in file
Stand spelling false while one might walk to Mile-
End Green. Why is it harder, Sirs, than Gordon,
Colkitto, or Macdonnell, or Galasp?
Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek,
That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp.
Thy age, like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheke,
Hated not learning worse than toad or asp,
When thou taught'st Cambridge and King Edward Greek.

The second of these Sonnets is printed first in all the editions of Milton, but there is proof that it was written second. [Footnote: It stands first in the Second or 1673 Edition of Milton's Poems; but in the Cambridge MSS, it comes second in Milton's own hand.] And, while the two together form what may be called Milton's poetical farewell to the Divorce subject, the mood in the second, it may be noted, is more humorous than in the first. In the first Milton, still angry, clenches his fist in the face of his generation, as a generation of mere hogs and dogs, unable to appreciate any real form of the liberty for which they are howling and grunting; in the second the spleen is less, and he is content with a rigmarole of rhyme about the queer effects among the illiterate of the Greek title of his last Divorce Pamphlet. And here what is chiefly interesting in the rigmarole is the evidence that Milton had been recently attending to the news from Scotland. The "Colkitto, or Macdonnell, or Galasp" of the Sonnet is no other than our friend Alexander MacDonnell, alias MacColkitto, alias MacGillespie, Montrose's gigantic Major-general; and the "Gordon" is either Lord Aboyne, the eldest son of the Marquis of Huntly, who adhered to Montrose till Philiphaugh, or it is a general name for the many Gordons who were with him (see antè, pp. 348, 358, 367). The odd Scottish and Gaelic names had amused Milton's delicate ear; Gordon rhymed aptly to Tetrachordon; and hence the notion of the Sonnet. [Footnote: Those annotators on Milton who have tried to identify Galasp at all have supposed him to be the Mr. George Gillespie who was one of the Scottish Divines in the Westminster Assembly. There may be a side-reference to him, for Milton must have heard much of him; but the primary reference is not to the Presbyterian minister, but to the huge Colonsay Highlander, recently heard of everywhere as Montrose's comrade in arms, and who was Colkitto, MacDonnell, and Galasp, all in one.]

A third Sonnet, written about the same time, shows even more distinctly the calming effect on Milton's mind produced by his changed mode of life in the house in Barbican, after his wife's return and the publication of his little Volume of Poems. It is the well-known Sonnet to his friend Henry Lawes, the musician.

So far as the two artists, William and Henry Lawes, concerned themselves in the politics of the time, they were, of course, Royalists. Officially attached to his Majesty's household and service, what else could they be? The elder of the two, indeed, William Lawes, had gone into the Royalist army, taken captain's rank there, and been slain quite recently at the siege of Chester (October 1645), much regretted by the King, who is said to have put on private mourning for him. Henry, the younger, and much the more celebrated as a composer, had remained in London, exercising his art as much as might be at such a time, and kept by it in acquaintance with many who, differing in other things, were at one in their love of music. Everybody liked and admired the gentle Harry Lawes, and he was welcome everywhere. But there was still no family with which he was on more intimate terms than with his old patrons of the accomplished Bridgewater group, and there can have been no house where his visits were more frequent than at their house in Barbican. True, the family was greatly reduced from what it had been in the old days of the Arcades and Comus, when Lawes was teacher of music to its budding girls and boys, and the master and stage-director of their tasteful masques and private concerts. The Countess had been ten years dead; Lord Brackley, the heir of the house, and the elder of the boy-brothers in Comus, had wedded, in July 1642, when only nineteen years of age, the Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of the powerful Royalist Earl, afterwards Marquis and Duke, of Newcastle; and one or two of his sisters, unmarried in the Comus year, had since found husbands. With the widower Earl, however, inhabiting now his town-house in Barbican, and visiting but seldom his country mansion at Ashridge, Herts, there still remained his youngest daughter, the Lady Alice of Comus, verging on her twenty-fifth year, and Mr. Thomas Egerton, the younger of the boy- brothers in Comus, now a youth of about twenty. Probably elder and married members of the family gave the Earl their occasional company; for he was now about sixty-five years of age, in an infirm state of health, sorely impoverished, and in the unfortunate condition of a Peer who would have been with the King if he could, and whom the King had expected to be with him, but who was obliged to plead his infirm health and his poverty for a kind of semi-submission to Parliament. He had reluctantly taken the Covenant (antè, pp. 39,40), and there are entries in the Lords Journals proving that his excuses for non-attendance in the House were barely allowed to pass. Music and books were among the invalid Earl's chief recreations; and some of his happiest moments in his old age may have been in listening to the Lady Alice, or another of his daughters, singing one of Lawes's songs, with Lawes, now the privileged artist- friend rather than the professional tutor, standing by or accompanying. What if it were the Lady Alice, and the song were that well-remembered one of Comus which she had sung, when a young girl, eleven years before, in the Hall of Ludlow Castle, before the assembled guests of her father's Welsh Presidency, her proud mother then among the listeners,—

"Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv'st unseen
Within thy airy shell"?

If so, the sound of her voice might have almost reached Milton in his house close by in the same street. At all events, here, in the street called Barbican, by a strange chance, were assembled, within a few yards of each other, at the very time when Comus was first published by Milton himself, and acknowledged among his other poems, at least five of the persons chiefly concerned in the masque on its first production—the Earl in whose honour it had been composed; the Lady Alice, and Mr. Thomas Egerton, two of the chief actors: the musician Lawes, who had directed all, composed the music, and sustained the parts of Thyrsis and the Attendant Spirit in the, performance; and the poet who had written the words.

When Lawes was in Barbican of an evening, it was but a step for him from the Earl's house to Milton's. And then would there not be more music, mingled with talk perhaps about the Bridgewater family, while Mrs. Milton sat by and listened? And would not the old Scrivener come down from his room to see Mr. Lawes, and bring out his choicest old music-books, and almost set aside his son in managing the visit for musical delight? So one fancies, and therefore keeps to the interrogative form as the safest; but the fancy here is really the most exact possible apprehension of the facts as they are on record. Lawes's friendship with Milton had been uninterrupted since 1634; but it so chances that the third point in Milton's life at which his intimacy with Lawes emerges into positive record is precisely the winter of 1645-6, when Milton was the Earl of Bridgewater's neighbour in Barbican, and his Volume of Poems was going through the press. Not only was there reprinted in this volume Lawes's Dedication of the Comus in 1637, "To the Right Honourable John, Lord Brackley, son and heir-apparent to the Earl of Bridgewater;" but in the very title-page of the volume, as arranged by Moseley, Lawes's name is associated with Milton's. "The Songs were set in musick by Mr. Henry Lawes, &c.," says the title-page; and this may mean that not only the songs in Arcades and Comus, but other lyrical pieces in the volume, had been set to music by Lawes. If so, a good deal more of Lawes's music to Milton's words may have been in existence about 1645 than his settings of the five songs in Comus, which are all that have come down to us in his own hand. Songs of Milton set by Lawes may have been in circulation in MS. copies, and may have been as well known in musical families as the numerous songs by Carew, Herrick, Waller and others, which had been set by the same composer; and it may be to this that Moseley alludes by the prominent mention of Lawes in the title-page of the collected Poems. And, if Lawes had done so much for Milton's verse, it was fitting that Milton should make some return in kind. He had indeed introduced skilful compliments to Lawes personally in his Comus; but something more express might be now appropriate. Accordingly, on the 9th of February, 1645-6, or five weeks after the publication of the Poems, Milton wrote the following:—

"TO MY FRIEND MR. HENRY LAWES.

"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song
First taught our English music how to span
Words with just note and accent, not to scan
With Midas ears, committing short and long,
Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng,
With praise enough for Envy to look wan:
To after-age thou shalt be writ the man
That with smooth air could humour best our tongue.
Thou honour'st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing
To honour thee, the priest of Phoebus' quire,
That tun'st their happiest lines in hymn or story.
Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher
Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing,
Met in the milder shades of Purgatory."

The original draft of this Sonnet, entitled as above, and with the date "Feb. 9, 1645," attached, and a corrected transcript underneath, both in Milton's own hand, are in the Cambridge volume of Milton MSS. The Sonnet was prefixed by Lawes, with the same title, in 1648 to a publication of some of his own and his deceased brother's compositions, entitled Choice Psalmes put into Musick for Three Voices; but in the Second or 1673 Edition of Milton's Poems it reappeared with the title which it has retained in all subsequent editions: viz. "To Mr. Henry Lawes on his Airs." For biographical purposes it is well to remember the first title and the dating. The Sonnet is, in fact, a memorial of a time when Milton and Lawes must have been much together. [Footnote: The details about the state of the Bridge water family in the text are partly from Todd's Note prefixed to Comus (Todd's Milton, ed. 1852, IV 38-44), partly from entries in the Lords Journals already referred to in this volume. Todd has also (ibid. 45-54) an elaborate, though ill-digested, note on Lawes, with particulars of his continued connexion, to 1653 and beyond, with various members of the Bridgewater family. In the Stationers' Registers there is this entry:—"Nov. 16, 1647, Rich. Woodnoth entered for his copy under the hands of Mr. Downham and Mr. Bellamy, warden, a book called 'Compositions of Three Parts,' by Henry and William Lawes, servants to his Majesty." I suppose this was the book published in 1648 with the title "Choice Psalmes," &c.]