John Milton.
And now we come to a poet of a larger build—a weightier music—and of a more indomitable spirit; a poet who wooed the world with his songs; and the world has never said him “Nay.” I mean John Milton.[57]
He is the first great poet we have encountered, in respect to whom we can find in contemporary records full details of family, lodgement, and birth. A great many of these details have been swooped together in Dr. Masson’s recently completed Life and Times of Milton, which I would more earnestly commend to your reading were it not so utterly long—six fat volumes of big octavo—in the which the pith and kernel about Milton, the man, floats around like force meat-balls in a great sea of historic soup. Our poet was born in Bread Street, just out of Cheapside, in London, in the year 1608.
In Cheapside—it may be well to recall—stood the Mermaid Tavern; and it stood not more than half a block away from the corner where Milton’s father lived. And on that corner—who knows?—the boy, eight years old, or thereby, when Shakespeare died, may have lingered to see the stalwart Ben Jonson go tavern-ward for his cups, or may be, John Marston, or Dekker, or Philip Massinger—all these being comfortably inclined to taverns.
The father of this Bread Street lad was a scrivener by profession; that is, one who drafted legal papers; a well-to-do man as times went; able to give his boy some private schooling; proud of him, too; proud of his clear white and red face, and his curly auburn hair carefully parted—almost a girl’s face; so well-looking, indeed, that the father employed a good Dutch painter of those days to take his portrait; the portrait is still in existence—dating from 1618, when the poet was ten, showing him in a banded velvet doublet and a stiff vandyke collar, trimmed about with lace. In those times, or presently after, he used to go to St. Paul’s Grammar School; of which Lily, of Lily’s Latin Grammar, was the first master years before. It was only a little walk for him, through Cheapside, and then, perhaps, Paternoster Row—the school being under the shadow of that great cathedral, which was burned fifty years after. He studied hard there; studied at home, too; often, he says himself, when only fourteen, studying till twelve at night. He loved books, and he loved better to be foremost.
He turns his hand to poetry even then. Would you like to see a bit of what he wrote at fifteen? Well, here it is, in a scrap of psalmody:
“Let us blaze his name abroad,
For of gods, he is the God,
…
Who by his wisdom did create
The painted heavens so full of state,
…
And caused the golden tressèd sun
All the day long his course to run,
The hornèd moon to hang by night
Amongst her spangled sisters bright;
For his mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.”
It is not of the best, but I think will compare favorably with most that is written by young people of fifteen. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, whither he went shortly afterward—his father being hopeful that he would take orders in the Church—he was easily among the first; he wrote Latin hexameters, quarrelled with his tutor (notwithstanding his handsome face had given to him the mocking title of “The Lady”), had his season of rustication up in London, sees all that is doing in theatrics thereabout, but goes back to study more closely than ever.
The little Christmas song,
“It was the winter wild,
While the heaven-born Child,” etc.,
belongs to his Cambridge life; though his first public appearance as an author was in the “Ode to Shakespeare,” attaching with other and various commendatory verses to the second folio edition of that author’s dramas, published in the year 1632.
Milton was then twenty-four, had been six or seven at Cambridge; did not accept kindly his father’s notion of taking orders in the Church, but had exaggerated views of a grandiose life of study and literary work; in which views his father—sensible man that he was—did not share; but—kind man that he was—he did not strongly combat them. So we find father and son living together presently, some twenty miles away from London, in a little country hamlet called Horton, where the old gentleman had purchased a cottage for a final home when his London business was closed up.
Here, too, our young poet studies—not books only, borrowed where he can, and bought if he can; but studies also fields and trees and skies and rivers, and all the natural objects that are to take embalmment sooner or later in his finished verse. Here he wrote, almost within sight of Windsor towers, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” You know them; but they are always new and always fresh; freshest when you go out from London on a summer’s day to where the old tower of Horton Church still points the road, and trace there (if you can)
“The russet lawns and fallows gray
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
…
Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide.
…
Sometimes with secure delight
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round
And the jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the chequered shade;
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday.”
In reading such verse we do not know where to stop—at least, I do not. He writes, too, in that country quietude, within sight of Windsor forest, his charming “Lycidas,” one of the loveliest of memorial poems, and the “Comus,” which alone of all the masques of that time, and preceding times, has gone in its entirety into the body of living English literature.
In 1638, then thirty years old, equipped in all needed languages and scholarship, he goes for further study and observation to the Continent; he carries letters from Sir Henry Wotton; he sees the great Hugo Grotius at Paris; sees the sunny country of olives in Provence; sees the superb front of Genoa piling out from the blue waters of the Mediterranean; sees Galileo at Florence—the old philosopher too blind to study the face of the studious young Englishman that has come so far to greet him. He sees, too, what is best and bravest at Rome; among the rest St. Peter’s, just then brought to completion, and in the first freshness of its great tufa masonry. He is fêted by studious young Italians; has the freedom of the Accademia della Crusca; blazes out in love sonnets to some dark-eyed signorina of Bologna; returns by Venice, and by Geneva where he hobnobs with the Diodati friends of his old school-fellow, Charles Diodati; and comes home to England to find changes brewing—the Scotch marching over the border with battle-drums—the Long Parliament portending—Strafford and Laud in way of impeachment—his old father drawing near to his end—and bloody war tainting all the air.
The father’s fortune, never large, is found crippled at his death; and Milton, now thirty-two, must look out for his own earnings. He takes a house; first in Fleet Street, then near Aldersgate, with garden attached, where he has three or four pupils; his nephew Phillips[58] among them.