It was no great remove. The street called Barbican derived its name, according to Stow, from the fact that at one time there had stood there "a burgh-kenning, or watch-tower of the city, called in some language a barbican;" and modern etymologists perfect Stow's observation by tracing the name, through the mediæval Latin barbacana, to the Persian bála khaneh, meaning "upper chamber," whence our less corrupt form balcony, actually identical with barbican. [Footnote: Stow, as quoted in Cunningham's London, Art. "Barbican;" and Wedgwood's Dict. of English Etymology, Art. "Balcony.">[ There had, in short, been a barbican, or outer defence of the city, at this spot, a little beyond the particular gate called Aldersgate, just as there were such things beyond others of the city-gates; but the name had lingered only here as applied to the street or site where a barbican had been. The street, retaining its warlike name, still exists—a short street going off from Aldersgate Street at right angles on one side, and within a walk of not more than two or three minutes from the site of Milton's Aldersgate Street house. The house in Barbican was larger, and so much farther off from the city- gate; but that was all. There was no real change of neighbourhood or of street-associations. A dingy street now, dingier even than the main thoroughfare of Aldersgate Street, Barbican was then a fair enough bit of suburban London towards the north; and it boasted, as we already know, of at least one aristocratic mansion in which Milton had some interest—the town-house of the Earl of Bridgewater, ex-President of Wales, and the peer of Comus. The name "Bridgewater Gardens" still designates, without a shred of garden left there, but only grimy printing-offices and the like instead, the portion of the street which the mansion occupied. Nay more, till within a few years ago; Milton's own house in Barbican, with some modern change of frontage, and some filling-up of interstices right and left, was extant and known. Somehow, while the more important house in Aldersgate Street had perished from the memory of the neighbourhood (probably because the fabric itself had perished), the tradition of Milton still clung around this house in Barbican, I have passed it many a time, stopping to look at it, when it was occupied, if I remember rightly, by a silk-dyer, or other such tradesman, exhibiting on his sign the peculiar name of "Heaven," and using the lower part of it for his shop. Though jammed in with other houses and undistinguished in the line of bustling street, it had the appearance of having once been a commodious enough house in the old fashion; and I have been informed that some of the old windows, consisting of thick bits of dim glass lozenged in lead, still remained in it at the back, and that the occupants knew one of the rooms in it as "the Schoolroom" where Milton had used to teach his pupils. But alas! one of the city railways took it into its head that it required to run through this precise bit of Barbican, and the house, with others near it, was doomed to demolition. When I was last in Barbican part of the shell of the house was still standing, roofless, disfloored, diswindowed, and pickaxed into utter raggedness, as so much rubbish yet waiting to be removed from the new railway gap. The inscription yet remained on the front-door—"This was Milton's House," or to that effect—which had been very properly put there by the contractor or his workmen to lure people to a last look at the interior before the demolition was complete. [Footnote: My information about the interior of the house is from a friend who visited it just when it was doomed. Though I had passed it often when it was yet complete, I had unfortunately, not expecting its doom, deferred going in till it was too late; and my last homage to it had to be a lingering saunter near and in the railway gap behind, when there was only the remnant of it described in the text.]
FIRST EDITION OF MILTON'S COLLECTED POEMS: HUMPHREY MOSELEY THE BOOKSELLER.
Among Milton's first employments in his new and larger house in Barbican, while his wife was resuming her duties and the schoolroom was getting gradually into use, we are able to distinguish one of particular interest. It was nothing else than the revision for the press of the proof-sheets of the first collected edition of his Miscellaneous Poems.
By his dealings with the Press hitherto, it is to be remembered, Milton had made himself known to most people chiefly as a prose pamphleteer. Except his lines On Shakespeare, written in 1630, and prefixed anonymously to the Second Folio Shakespeare in 1632; his Comus, written and acted in 1634, and sent to the press, also without the author's name, by his friend Henry Lawes in 1637; and his Lycidas, written in 1637, and printed in 1638, in the Cambridge University volume of Verses on Edward King's death, but only with the initials "J.M.":— except these, and perhaps another scrap or two of Latin or English verse that had been printed in a semi-private manner, all Milton's poems, written at intervals over a period of more than twenty years, had remained in his own keeping in manuscript, and had been communicated to friends only in that form. In consequence of what had been thus printed, or privately circulated, a certain reputation for Milton as a poet had, indeed, been established; but the voice of this reputation was hardly heard amid the much louder uproar caused by his eleven prose-pamphlets between 1641 and 1645. Now, to a man who believed Poesy to be his true calling, who had consented reluctantly to put aside "his garland and singing robes" in order that he might engage in the work of politics, and who had announced while doing so that in that work it was but the strength of his left hand he could lend and not the nobler cunning of his right, this state of public opinion about himself must have begun to be a little disagreeable. It was the most natural thing in the world that, as soon as there should be a lull in the political tumult, the least leisure of the public for a return to purer and blander literature, Milton should make some sign of resuming his garland, so as to remind those about him of his original vocation. But, precisely in the year 1045, when Naseby had assured the victory of Parliament, there did come, for the first time since the war had begun, or indeed since the Long Parliament had met, such a lull of the polemical tumult. The statistics of the English book- trade, as they are presented in the Registers of the Stationers' Company, verify and illustrate this statement.
Even in the year 1640, when there was political agitation enough in England, but the Long Parliament had not yet met, there was still so much leisure for the purer forms of literature in English society that London publishers were bringing out such things as Masques and other remains of Ben Jonson, the Works of Thomas Carew, various Plays by Shirley, Glapthorne, Habington, Heywood, Killigrew, and Brome, an edition of Herrick's Poems, and Thomas May's Supplement to Lucan. As soon, however, as we pass beyond 1640, and the real work of the Long Parliament is begun, such books almost entirely cease to appear. The matter then provided for the reading of the English public consisted of a huge jumble of Pamphlets on the Church-question, Sermons, semi-controversial Treatises of Theology, Political Speeches, fragments of Ecclesiastical History, Prose Invectives and Satires, and latterly, when the Civil War was in progress, an abundance of Diurnals, Intelligencers, Mercuries, and other news-sheets. Between 1640 and 1645 one does indeed discern twinkling in this jumble some gems or would-be gems of the purer ray serene. The "Epigrams Divine and Moral" of Sir Thomas Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, were published in April 1641; Howell's "Instructions for Foreign Travel" came out in September in the same year; Baker's "Chronicle of the Kings of England" in the following December; in April 1642 there was a London edition of Thomas Randolph's Poems, which had appeared originally at Oxford in 1638; and the publication of Denham's "Cooper's Hill" and his "Tragedy called The Sophy" is a rather notable event of August 1642, the very month in which the King raised his standard. In the same month one London publisher, Francis Smethwick, registered for his copies a number of books of the poetical kind which had been the property of his late father, including "Mr. Drayton's Poems," "Euphues's Golden Legacy," Meres's "Witt's Commonwealth," and also "Hamblett, a Play," "The Taming of the Shrew," "Romeo and Juliet," and "Love's Labour's Lost." This transaction, however, hardly implied that these books were in demand, but only that Smethwick wanted to secure his interest in them on succeeding to his father's business. Afterwards, while the war was actually raging, it is not till December 1644 that one comes upon anything of the finer sort worth mentioning. On the 14th of that month there was registered for publication the first edition of "Poems, &c., written by Mr. Edmund Waller, of Beckonsfield, Esq., lately a member of the Honourable House of Commons," but then, as we know, a disgraced plotter, who, having, by great favour, been permitted to carry his dear-bought life, and his remaining wealth, into exile in France, left this parting gift to his countrymen, that they might think of him meanwhile as kindly as they could. Except that I have not taken notice of a publication or two of the voluminous Scotchman Alexander Rosse, Chaplain to his Majesty, [Footnote: This Alexander Rosse, or "Dr. Alexander Ross," made famous in Hudibras, was one of the singular characters of the time, and a memoir of him, with a complete list of his writings, would be a not uninstructive curiosity. He was a native of Aberdeen, born about 1590, but had migrated to England, where he became Master of the Free School at Southampton, and Chaplain in Ordinary to King Charles. By a succession of publications of all kinds, in Latin and in English., he acquired the reputation of being "a divine, a poet, and an historian." He made a good deal of money, and, at his death in 1654, left bequests, for educational purposes, to Aberdeen, Southampton, Oxford, and Cambridge. ] the foregoing enumeration fairly represents, I believe, the amount of book-production of the purer or non-controversial kind that went on in London in the four loud-roaring years between 1640 and 1645.
In 1645, however, and especially after Naseby, there are symptoms of a slightly revived leisure for other kinds of reading than were supplied by Diurnals, Sermons, Pamphlets, and books of Polemical Theology, and of a willingness among the London booksellers to cater for this leisure. In that year, interspersed amid the still continuing tide of Pamphlets, Diurnals, Sermons, and other ephemerides, were such novel appearances in the London book-world as these—two Treatises, one physical, the other metaphysical, by Sir Kenelm Digby, then abroad; an edition of Buxtorf's Hebrew Grammar; an Essay by Lord Herbert of Cherbury; some metrical religious remains of Francis Quarles, then just dead; some attempts to introduce the mystic Jacob Bohme, by specimens of his works; a translation of Æsop's Fables and those of Phædrus; the issue of the second and third parts of the Epistolæ Hoelianæ or James Howell's Letters, with a re-issue of his "Dodona's Grove;" and a re-issue of Randolph's comedy of "The Jealous Lovers." Clearly, as the Civil War was drawing to a close, the Muses of pure History, pure Speculation or Philosophy, Scholarship for its own sake, and even lighter Phantasy, did hover over England again, timidly seeking some spots where they might rest themselves in the all-prevailing controversy between Independency and Presbyterianism.
Almost always, in such cases, a social tendency is represented in the activity of some particular person. Nor is it otherwise here. So far as Poetry and so-called Light Literature are concerned, one has no difficulty in pointing to the particular London publisher who in 1645, and from that year onwards, stood out from all his fellows by his alertness in the trade. This was HUMPHREY MOSELEY, who had his shop at the sign of the Prince's Arms in St Paul's Churchyard. Something in his personal tastes, I am inclined to think, must have determined him to the line of business which he selected; so marked is his avoidance of all dealings in sermons, ephemeral treatises on theology, and pamphlets either way on the present crisis, and his preference for poetry and books of general culture. He had been in the trade, in partnership with a Nicholas Fussel, in St. Paul's Churchyard, as early as 1634, [ Footnote: Wood's Ath. II 503.] and shortly after that is heard of as in business for himself. I have a note of him as registering for his copyright, on March 16, 1639-40, Howell's "Dodona's Grove;" and thenceforward, in worse times, he stuck to Howell. He not only published Howell's "Instructions for Foreign Travel" in September 1641, and again the second and third parts of Howell's "Letters" in 1645, with a re-issue of "Dodona's Grove;" but he acquired, in the same year, the copyright of the first part of the "Letters," which had been originally brought out by another publisher. More significant still is the fact that it was Moseley that was the publisher of Waller's Poems in December 1644. [Footnote: "Poems &c. written by Mr. Ed. Waller of Beckonsfield, Esquire; lately a member of the Honourable House of Commons. All the Lyrick Poems in this Booke were set by Mr. Henry Lawes, Gent. of the King's Chappell, and one of his Majestie's Private Musick. Printed and Published according to Order. London. Printed by T.W. for Humphrey Mosley at the Princes Armes in Paul's Churchyard: 1645:" pp.96 small 8vo. My authority for the date of the publication of the volume—December 1644—is the Stationers' Registers.] After that date his tendency to trade-dealings in Poetry and the like is so manifest in the Stationers' records that I find appended to my MS. notes, from these records, for the London Bibliography of the year 1646, this memorandum:—"Poetry and Pure Literature looking up again this year, and chiefly through the medium of Moseley's shop." By that time Moseley had distinguished himself as the publisher of original editions of books, not only by Howell and Waller, but also by Milton, Davenant, Crashaw, and Shirley, and moreover as the ready purchaser of whatever copyrights were in the market of poems and plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Ludwick Carlell, Shirley, Davenant, Killigrew, and other celebrities dead or living. To this group of Moseley's authors Cowley and Cartwright were soon added; and it was not long before he snapped out of the hands of duller men Denham's Poems, Carew's Poems, various things of Sir Kenelm Digby, and every obtainable copyright in any of the plays of Shakespeare, Massinger, Ford, Rowley, Middleton, Tourneur, or any other of the Elizabethan and Jacoban dramatists. For at least the ten years from 1644 onwards there was, I should say, no publisher in London comparable to Moseley for tact and enterprise in the finer literature.
Moseley was only on the way to make all this reputation for himself, and indeed Waller's volume of Poems, published in Dec. 1644, was yet the principal advertisement of his shop, when he and Milton came together. Pleased with the success of the Waller, it appears, Moseley thought of a collection of Mr. Milton's Poems as a likely second experiment of the same kind, and applied to Milton for the copy. The application was not disagreeable to Milton; and, accordingly, some time after the middle of 1645, or just while he was preparing to remove from Aldersgate Street to Barbican, and there came upon him the great surprise of his wife's re- appearance, Moseley and he were busy in arrangements for the new volume. Milton's acknowledged London publishers hitherto had been these three— "Thomas Underhill, of the Bible in Wood Street" (Of Reformation, 1641, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, 1641, and Animadversions on Remonstrant's Defence, 1641), "John Rothwell, at the sign of the Sun in Paul's Churchyard" (Reason of Church Government, 1641, and _Apology for Smectymnuus, 1642), and "Matthew Symmons" (the Bucer Tract, 1644); and this last-mentioned Symmons, who does not give the locality of his shop, had been probably the printer also of those pamphlets of Milton which bore no publisher's name (Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1643, 1644, and 1645, Of Education, 1644, Areopagitica, 1644, and Tetrachordon and Colasterion, 1645). Now, however, these were forsaken for the moment, and for bringing out the Volume of Poems the conjunction was Milton and Humphrey Moseley. The revisal of the proof- sheets may have been begun in Aldersgate Street, but it must mainly, as I have said, have been among Milton's first employments at the new house in Barbican. Here, at all events, is Moseley's entry of the new volume in the Stationers' Registers: "Oct. 6 [1645], Mr. Moseley ent. for his copie, under the hand of Sir Nath. Brent and both the Wardens, a booke called Poems in English and Latyn by Mr. John Milton." Usually the entry of a book in the Stationers' Registers was about simultaneous with its publication. In this case, however, there was a delay of nearly three months between the registration and the actual appearance. The precise day of the publication of the new volume was Jan. 2, 1645-6. [Footnote: This is ascertained by a MS. note of the collector Thomason's, or by his direction, on a copy among the King's Pamphlets in the British Museum; Press-mark E. 1126. "Jan. 2" is inserted before the word "London" in the title-page.] Either, therefore, Moseley had registered the volume before the printing had proceeded far, or after the sheets were printed there was some little cause of delay.
The following is the title-page of this interesting and now very rare volume:—
"Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, compos'd at several
times. Printed by his true Copies. The Songs were set in Musick by Mr.
Henry Lawes, Gentleman of the King's Chappel, and one of His Majestie's
Private Musick.