Little more than two months after the burial of Mr. Powell, and possibly before the removal of his widow and children from the house in Barbican, there was another funeral from that house. It was that of Milton's own father. Father-in-law and father had gone almost together, and the house was in double mourning.
Who can part with this father of one of the greatest of Englishmen without a last look of admiration and regret? Nearly fifty years ago, in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, we saw him, an "ingeniose man" from Oxfordshire, detached from his Roman Catholic kindred there, and setting up in London in the business of scrivenership, with music for his private taste, and a name of some distinction already among the musicians and composers of the time. Then came the happy days of his married life in Bread Street, all through James's reign, his business prospering and music still his delight, but his three surviving children growing up about him, and his heart full of generous resolves for their education, and especially of pride in that one of them on whose high promise teachers and neighbours were always dilating. Then to Cambridge University went this elder son, followed in time by the younger, the father consenting to miss their presence, and instructing them to spare no use of his worldly substance for their help in the paths they might choose. It had been somewhat of a disappointment to him when, after seven years, the elder had returned from the University with his original destination for the Church utterly forsworn, and with such avowed loathings of the whole condition of things in Church and State as seemed to bar the prospect of any other definite profession. There had been the recompense, indeed, of that son's graceful and perfected youth, of the haughty nobleness of soul that blazed through his loathings, and of his acquired reputation for scholarship and poetry. And so, in the country retreat at Horton, as age was beginning to come upon the good father, and he was releasing himself from the cares of business, how pleasant it had been for him, and for the placid and invalid mother, to have their elder son wholly to themselves, their one daughter continuing meanwhile in London after her first husband's decease, and then younger son also mainly residing there for his law-studies. What though the son so domiciled with them was plowing up to manhood, still without a profession, still absorbed in books and poetry, doing exactly as he liked, and in fact more the ruler of them than they were of him? Who could interfere with such a son, and why had God given them abundance but that such a son might have the leisure he desired? All in all, one cannot doubt that those years of retirement at Horton had been the most peaceful on which the old man could look back. But those years had come to an end. The sad spring of 1637 had come; the invalid wife had died; and he had been left in widowhood. Little in the ten years of his life since then but a succession of shiftings and troubles! For a while still at Horton, sauntering about the church and in daily communion with the grave it contained, his younger son and that son's newly-wedded wife coming to keep him company while the elder was on his travels. Then, after the elder son's return, the outbreak of the political tumults, and the sad convulsion of everything. In this convulsion his two sons had taken opposite sides, the elder even treasuring up wrath against himself by his vehement writings for the Parliamentarians. How should an old man judge in such a case? The Horton household now broken up, he had gone for a time with Christopher and his wife to Reading, but only to be tossed back to London and the safer protection of John. We have seen him under that protection in Aldersgate Street, all through the time of Milton's marriage—misfortune and the Divorce pamphlets. There was some comfort, on the old man's account, in the picture given of him by his grandson Phillips, then in the same house, as living through all that distraction "wholly retired to his rest and devotion, without the least trouble imaginable." All the same one fancies him having his own thoughts in his solitary upper room, contrasting the now with the then, and feeling that he had become feeble and superfluous. A cheerful change for him may have been the larger house in Barbican, with his son's forgiven wife in her proper place in it and more numerous pupils going in and out, and at last the birth of the infant-girl that made his grandfatherhood complete in all its three branches. He had been about eighteen months in this house. The Civil War had come to an end, and the King had been surrendered by the Scots at Newcastle and shifted to the second stage of his captivity at Holmby House, and Christopher Milton had returned ruefully to London from Exeter to sue out pardon for his delinquency, and the impoverished Powells also had come to the house from Oxford. Old Mr. Powell and old Mr. Milton had been a good deal together, and at length, when Mr. Powell was dying, old Mr. Milton may have assisted, scrivener-like, in the framing of his will. Only two months afterwards his own turn came. No will of his has been found, and probably he had made a will unnecessary by previous arrangements. His Bible and music-books left in his room may have been the mementoes of his last occupations. He was buried, March 15, 1646-7, in the chancel of the Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, not far from Barbican; and the entry "John Milton, Gentleman, 15" among the "Burialls in March 1646" may be still looked at with interest in the Registers of that parish. [Footnote: To the courtesy of the Rev. P. P. Gilbert, M.A., Vicar of the parish, I owe a certified copy of the burial- entry.]
Nothing came from Milton's pen on the occasion; but one remembers his Latin poem "Ad Patrem," written fifteen years before, and the lines with which that poem closes may stand fitly here as the epitaph for the dead:—
"At tibi, care Pater, postquam non aqua merenti
Posse referre datur, nec dona rependere factis,
Sit memorasse satis, repetitaque munera grato
Percensere animo, fidæque reponere menti.
Et vos, O nostri, juvenilia carmina, lusus,
Si modo perpetuos sperare audebitis annos,
Nec spisso rapient oblivia nigra sub Orco,
Forsitan has laudes decantatumque parentis
Nomen, ad exmplum, sero servabitis ævo."
[Footnote: It seems to me not improbable that the poem, as originally
written, ended at the word "menti." and that the last six lines,
beginning "Et vos," were an addition when Milton published his Poems in
1645 his father then residing with him.]
SONNET XIV, AND ODE TO JOHN ROUS.
Since the removal from the Aldersgate Street house to that in Barbican, Milton, as we know, had ceased from prose pamphleteering; and all that he had done of a literary kind, besides publishing his volume of collected Poems, had been his two Divorce Sonnets, his Sonnet to Henry Lawes, and his Sonnet with the scorpion tail, entitled On the Forcers of Conscience. To these have now to be added, as written since Aug. 1646, two other scraps—viz.: the Sonnet marked XIV. in most of our modern editions of his Poems, and the Latin Ode to John Rous which generally appears at or near the end of the Latin portion of these editions.
Sonnet XIV., though printed without a heading by Milton himself in the Second or 1673 edition of his Poems, and often so printed still, exists fortunately in two drafts in his own hand (one of them erased) among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge, and bears there this heading, also in his own hand: "On the Religious memory of Mrs. Catherine Thomson, my Christian friend, deceased 16 Decemb. 1646." We have no other information about this Mrs. Catherine Thomson than is conveyed by these words and the Sonnet itself; and the fact that we know of her existence only by chance suggests to us how many friends and acquaintances of Milton there may have been in London whose very names have perished. One may suppose her to have been a neighbour of Milton's, and rather elderly. That he had no ordinary respect for her appears from the fact that he felt moved to write something in her memory. If written exactly at the time of her death, it was while his house was full of the Powells, and Mr. Powell was grieving over the state of his affairs and perhaps known to be dying. There is a suggestion, however, in the wording, that it may have been written later.
"When Faith and Love, which parted from thee never,
Had ripened thy just soul to dwell with God,
Meekly thou didst resign this earthy load
Of death, called life, which us from Life doth sever.
Thy works, and alms, and all thy good endeavour,
Stayed not behind, nor in the grave were trod;
But, as Faith pointed with her golden rod,
Followed thee up to joy and bliss for ever.
Love led them on; and Faith, who knew them best
Thy handmaids, clad them o'er with purple beams
And azure wings, that up they flew so drest,
And speak the truth of thee on glorious themes
Before the Judge, who thenceforth bid thee rest
And drink thy fill of pure immortal streams."
Certainly written in Barbican between the death of Mr. Powell and that of Milton's father, but in a very different strain from the foregoing, is the Latin Ode to Rous, the Oxford Librarian. The circumstances were these:—
Milton, we have had proof already, cared enough both about his opinions and about his literary reputation to adopt the common practice of sending presentation-copies of his books to persons likely to be interested in them. He had sent out, we have seen, such presentation-copies of Lawes's 1637 edition of his "Comus," and of some of his pamphlets individually. We find, however, that in 1645 or 1646, when he had published no fewer than eleven pamphlets in all, and when moreover his English and Latin Poems had been issued by Moseley, he must have taken some pains to secure that copies of the entire set of his writings, as then extant, should be in the hands of eminent book-collectors and scholars. Thus, in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, there is a small quarto volume containing ten of the pamphlets bound together in this order—"Of Reformation," "Of Prelatical Episcopacy," "The Reason of Church- government," "Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence," "An Apology against a modest Confutation," "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," "The Judgment of Martin Bucer," "Colasterion," "Tetrachordon," "Areopagitica;" and the volume exhibits (in a slightly mutilated form, owing to clipping in the re-binding) this inscription in Milton's autograph: "Ad doctissimum virum, Patricium Junium, Joannes Miltonius hæc sua, unum in fasciculum conjecta, mittit, paucis hujusmodi lectoribus contentes" ("To the most learned man, Patrick Young, John Milton sends these things of his, thrown together into one volume, content with few readers were they but of his sort") The volume, therefore, though it has found its way to Dublin, originally belonged to the Scotchman Patrick Young, better known by his Latinized name of Patricius Junius, one of the most celebrated scholars of his time, especially in Greek, and for more than forty years (1605?-1649) keeper of the King's Library in St. James's, London. Milton, it is clear, did not intend the gift for the Royal Library, unless Young chose to put it there. He meant it for Young himself, with whom he had probably some personal acquaintance, and who was of Presbyterian sympathies, and in fact then under the orders of Parliament. [Footnote: There is a facsimile of the inscription to Young in Sotheby's Milton Ramblings, p. 121; but I am indebted for a more particular account of the volume, with a tracing of the inscription, to the Rev. Andrew Campbell of Dublin. There is a memoir of Young in Wood's Fasti, I. 308-9]