"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.]
CONTINUED PRESBYTERIAN ATTACKS ON MILTON: HIS ANTI-PRESBYTERIAN SONNET OF REPLY.
Altogether it was beginning to be a more placid time with Milton. With his book out, his wife restored to him, the Divorce argument dropped, and his pupils to teach, he might look about him quietly on the state of public affairs, and expect what should be the next call on him. There did not seem to be any immediate call. In the month when his volume of Poems appeared Presbyterianism was at its fullest tide in Parliament; but in the succeeding months, what with the increase of Recruiters in the Commons, what with the tramp of Independency in the field growing louder and nearer as the New Model ended its work, he could see the political power of the Presbyterians gradually waning, until, in April 1646, when Cromwell reappeared in London, Anti-Toleration was abashed and the Westminster Assembly itself under control. The spectacle must have been quite to Milton's mind; but, as he had already expressed himself sufficiently on the main question between the Independents and the Presbyterians, and as nobody doubted on which side he was to be ranked, he was disposed to take his ease on this subject too, and to leave the issue to the Parliament and the Army. He was too marked a man, however, to be quite let alone. The Presbyterian writers, true to their policy of publicly naming all prominent heretics and sectaries, and painting their opinions in the most glaring colours, with a view to disgust people with the idea of a Toleration, could not part with Milton and his Divorce Doctrine. After he and his wife were in the Barbican house together, he was still pursued by the hue and cry. Here are two specimens:—
Mr. Baillie on Milton.—"Mr. Milton permits any man to put away his wife upon his mere pleasure without any fault, and without the cognisance of any judge," writes Baillie in the Table of Contents to the First Part of his Dissuasive, published in November 1645; and in the text of the work (p. 116) the statement is amplified as follows:—"Concerning Divorces, some of them [the Independents] go far beyond any of the Brownists; not to speak of Mr. Milton, who in a large treatise hath pleaded for a full liberty for any man to put away his wife, whenever he pleaseth, without any fault in her at all, but for any dislike or dyssympathy of humour. For I do not certainly know whether this man professeth Independency, albeit all the heretics here whereof ever I heard avow themselves Independents. Whatever therefore may be said of Mr. Milton, yet Mr. Gorting and his company were men of renown among the New English Independents before Mistress Hutchinson's disgrace; and all of them do maintain that it is lawful for every woman to desert her husband when he is not willing to follow her in her church-way." In other words, Baillie is not sure that it is fair to charge Milton's extreme opinion upon Independency as such, inasmuch as it may be the crotchet of a solitary heretic; but he is inclined to think that Milton is an Independent, and he knows at least that Mr. Gorting and other Independents have broached a milder form of the same heresy. In his Notes (pp. 144,145) he quotes sentences to the amount of a page from Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce to prove that he does not misrepresent him.—The "Gorting" here mentioned by Baillie is the "Samuel Gorton" who had been such a sore trouble to the New Englanders, and even to Roger Williams at Providence, by his anarchical opinions and conduct (Vol. II. 601). He had returned or been ejected from America, and was making himself notorious in London. "This I am assured of from various hands," wrote Edwards (Gangr. Part II. p. 144), "that Gorton is here in London, and hath been for the space of some months; and I am told also that he vents his opinions, and exercises in some of the meetings of the sectaries, as that he hath exercised lately at Lamb's Church, and is very great at one Sister Stagg's, exercising there too sometimes." This will explain Baillie's allusion to Gorton in connexion with Milton's Divorce Doctrine. Strange that Gorton should be cited as holding a milder form of the heresy than Milton's!
Mr. Edwards on Milton.—Of course, Milton got into the Gangræna. Everybody that deviated in anything, to the right or left, from the path of Presbyterian orthodoxy, got into that register of scandals; and we have already availed ourselves of information incidentally supplied in the Second and Third Parts of it as to the horror caused by Milton's Divorce Doctrine among the Presbyterians (antè, pp. 189-192). We have still to present, however, Edwards's direct notice of Milton in the First Part of his scandalous medley. It was published in January or February 1645-6; so that, at the very time when Milton's volume of Poems was out, and he was writing his Sonnet to Lawes, he found himself pilloried again in the new book which all London was reading greedily. A leading portion of the book, as we know (antè, pp. 143-5), consisted of a catalogue of 176 "Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies" that had been vented by divers Sectaries and were then distracting and corrupting the soul of England. Well, the 154th Error, Heresy, and Blasphemy in this catalogue is this:— "That 'tis lawful for a man to put away his wife upon indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable; and for disproportion and deadness of spirit, or something distasteful and averse in the immutable bent of nature; and man, in regard of the freedom and eminency of his creation, is a law to himself in this matter, being head of the other sex, which was made for him; neither need he hear any judge therein above himself." To this summary by Edwards of Milton's Doctrine, partly in Milton's own words, the reference is appended in the margin: "Vide Milton's Doctrine of Divorce." (Gangræna, Part I. p. 29.) And so for the moment Edwards dismisses Milton, very much as Baillie had done, to return to him again in the Second and Third Parts of his Gangræna, as Baillie was to do in the Second Part of his Dissuasive.
Milton was provoked. It was not in his nature to let any attack upon him, from whatever quarter, pass without notice; and attacks by persons of such popular celebrity as Baillie and Edwards could hardly be ignored. But, as he had given up the public prosecution of the Divorce argument, his punishment for Edwards and Baillie came in a different form from that which he had administered in the Tetrachordon and Colasterion to Herbert Palmer, Dr. Featley, Mr. Caryl, Mr. Prynne, and the anonymous attorney. It came in verse, thus—
"ON THE FORCERS OF CONSCIENCE.
"Because you have thrown off your Prelate lord,
And with stiff vows renounced his Liturgy,
To seize the widowed whore Plurality
From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorred,
Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword
To force our consciences that Christ set free,
And ride us with a Classic Hierarchy,
Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford?
Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul,
Must now be named and printed heretics
By shallow Edwards and Scotch What d'ye call.
But we do hope to find out all your tricks,
Your plots and packing, worse than those of Trent,
That so the Parliament
May, with their wholesome and preventive shears,
Clip your phylacteries, though baulk your ears,
And succour our just fears,
When they shall read this clearly in your charge—
New PRESBYTER is but old PRIEST writ large."
Milton, we are to suppose, having already written two Divorce Sonnets, did not care to write a third, but preferred to punish Edwards and Baillie in a general Anti-Presbyterian Sonnet. It turned out, however, not a Sonnet proper, but a Sonetto con coda, as the Italians call it, or "Sonnet with a tail"—the Anti-Presbyterian rhythm prolonging itself beyond the fourteen lines that would have completed the normal Sonnet, and demanding the scorpion addition of six lines more. Into this peculiar "tailed Sonnet" Milton condenses metrically all the rage against Presbytery, the Westminster Assembly, and the Anti-Tolerationists, which had already broken forth at large in his later prose pamphlets. The piece is unusually full of historical allusions. It breathes throughout his acquired hatred of the Presbyterians for their opposition to Liberty of Conscience, and their determination that the "Classic Hierarchy," or system of Presbyterian classes which they were establishing in England, should be as compulsory on all as the Prelacy they had thrown off; and there is a palpable side-hit at the recent acquisition by some of the leading Presbyterian Divines in the Assembly of University posts and the like in addition to their previous livings, notwithstanding their outcries against Pluralities in the time of Episcopacy. In this side-hit not a few known Divines are slashed; and among them, I fear, Milton's old tutor Thomas Young, now Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, as well as Vicar of Stowmarket. But the open personal references are four. The "A. S." selected as one prominent expounder of Presbytery is the Scotchman, Dr. Adam Steuart, who, under his initials "A. S.," had been one of the first to rush into print in behalf of strict Presbytery and Anti- Toleration against the Apologetical Narrative of the Independents of the Assembly, and who had been replied to by John Good win, but had since gone into Holland (antè, p. 25). The "Rutherford" coupled with him is the celebrated Scottish divine, and Commissioner to the Assembly, Samuel Rutherford, who had set forth several expositions of strict Scottish Presbytery for the enlightenment of the English. "Shallow Edwards" is obvious enough: he is Mr. Edwards of the Gangræna, once far from a nobody in London, but who will now, through Milton's mention of him, be "Shallow Edwards" to the world's end. In Milton's draft of the Sonnet he was "hair-brained Edwards;" but "hair-brained" was erased, and "shallow" substituted. The "Scotch What d'ye call" has cost the commentators more trouble. Most of them have identified him with George Gillespie, whom they also, though erroneously, suppose to be the "Galasp" of one of the Divorce Sonnets. There can be little doubt now, I think, that I have detected the real "What d'ye call" in Gillespie's fellow- Commissioner from Scotland, our good friend Baillie, whose Dissuasive, with its reference to Milton as one of the heretics of the time, had just preceded Edwards's Gangræna. I am sorry for this, but it cannot be helped. There was, I ought to add, in the original draft of the Sonnet, a fifth personal allusion, which Milton saw fit, on second thoughts, to omit. Line 17, which now stands "Clip your phylacteries, though baulk your ears" (i.e." though pass over your ears and leave them undipped"), was originally "Crop ye as close as marginal P—'s ears." As Milton had already, in his Colasterion, said enough about Prynne and the heavy margins of his many pamphlets, and as the circumstances in which Prynne had lost his ears made the subject hardly a proper one for a public joke, it was but good taste in Milton to make the change.