When in his walks he met the Hodge of his period, he is more likely to have thought of a line in Virgil than of stopping to have a chat with the poor fellow. He became a student of the Italian language, and writes to a friend: ‘I who certainly have not merely wetted the tip of my lips in the stream of these (the classical) languages, but in proportion to my years have swallowed the most copious draughts, can yet
sometimes retire with avidity and delight to feast on Dante, Petrarch, and many others; nor has Athens itself been able to confine me to the transparent waves of its Ilissus, nor ancient Rome to the banks of its Tiber, so as to prevent my visiting with delight the streams of the Arno and the hills of Fæsolæ.’
Now it was that he, in his often-quoted words written to the young Deodati, doomed to an early death, was meditating ‘an immortality of fame,’ letting his wings grow and preparing to fly. But dreaming though he ever was of things to come, none the less, it was at Horton he composed Comus, Lycidas, L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso, poems which enable us half sadly to realize how much went and how much was sacrificed to make the author of Paradise Lost.
After five years’ retirement Milton began to feel the want of a little society, of the kind that is ‘quiet, wise, and good,’ and he meditated taking chambers in one of the Inns of Court, where he could have a pleasant and shady walk under ‘immemorial elms,’ and also enjoy the advantages of a few choice associates at home and an elegant society abroad. The death of his mother in 1637 gave his thoughts another direction, and he obtained his father’s permission
to travel to Italy, ‘that woman-country, wooed not wed,’ which has been the mistress of so many poetical hearts, and was so of John Milton’s. His friends and relatives saw but one difficulty in the way. John Milton the younger, though not at this time a Nonconformist, was a stern and unbending Protestant, and was as bitter an opponent of His Holiness the Pope as he certainly would have been, had his days been prolonged, of His Majesty the Pretender.
There is something very characteristic in this almost inflamed hostility in the case of a man with such love of beauty and passion for architecture and music as always abided in Milton, and who could write:
‘But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloisters’ pale,
And love the high embowèd roof,
With antique 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 anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before my eyes.’
Here surely is proof of an æsthetic nature beyond most of our modern raptures; but none the less,
and at the very same time, Rome was for Milton the ‘grim wolf’ who, ‘with privy paw, daily devours apace.’ It is with a sigh of sad sincerity that Dr. Newman admits that Milton breathes through his pages a hatred of the Catholic Church, and consequently the Cardinal feels free to call him a proud and rebellious creature of God. That Milton was both proud and rebellious cannot be disputed. Nonconformists need not claim him for their own with much eagerness. What he thought of Presbyterians we know, and he was never a church member, or indeed a church-goer. Dr. Newman has admitted that the poet Pope was an unsatisfactory Catholic; Milton was certainly an unsatisfactory Dissenter. Let us be candid in these matters. Milton was therefore bidden by his friends, and by those with whom he took counsel, to hold his peace whilst in Rome about the ‘grim wolf,’ and he promised to do so, adding, however, the Miltonic proviso that this was on condition that the Papists did not attack his religion first. ‘If anyone,’ he wrote, ‘in the very city of the Pope attacked the orthodox religion, I defended it most freely.’ To call the Protestant religion, which had not yet attained to its second century, the orthodox religion
under the shadow of the Vatican was to have the courage of his opinions. But Milton was not a man to be frightened of schism. That his religious opinions should be peculiar probably seemed to him to be almost inevitable, and not unbecoming. He would have agreed with Emerson, who declares that would man be great he must be a Nonconformist.