"With how great and what new pleasure I was filled, my Charles, on the unexpected arrival of your letter, since it is impossible for me to describe it adequately, I wish you may in some degree understand from the very pain with which it was dashed, such pain as is almost the invariable accompaniment of any great delight yielded to men. For, on running over that first portion of your letter, in which elegance contends so finely with friendship, I should have called my feeling one of unmixed joy, and the rather because I see your labour to make friendship the winner. Immediately, however, when I came upon that passage where you write that you had sent me three letters before, which I now know to have been lost, then, in the first place, that sincere gladness of mine at the receipt of this one began to be infected and troubled with a sad regret, and presently a something heavier creeps in upon me, to which I am accustomed in very frequent grievings over my own lot: the sense, namely, that those whom the mere necessity of neighbourhood, or something else of a useless kind, has closely conjoined with me, whether by accident or by the tie of law (sive casu, sive lege, conglutinavit), they are the persons, though in no other respect commendable, who sit daily in my company, weary me, nay, by heaven, all but plague me to death whenever they are jointly in the humour for it, whereas those whom habits, disposition, studies, had so handsomely made my friends, are now almost all denied me, either by death or by most unjust separation of place, and are so for the most part snatched from my sight that I have to live well nigh in a perpetual solitude. As to what you say, that from the time of my departure from Florence you have been anxious about my health and always mindful of me. I truly congratulate myself that a feeling has been equal and mutual in both of us, the existence of which on my side only I was perhaps claiming to my credit. Very sad to me also, I will not conceal from you, was that departure, and it planted stings in my heart which now rankle there deeper, as often as I think with myself of my reluctant parting, my separation as by a wrench, from so many companions at once, such good friends as they were, and living so pleasantly with each other in one city, far off indeed, but to me most dear. I call to witness that tomb of Damon, ever to be sacred and solemn to me, whose adornment with every tribute of grief was my weary task, till I betook myself at length to what comforts I could, and desired again to breathe a little—I call that sacred grave to witness that I have had no greater delight all this while than in recalling to my mind the most pleasant memory of all of you, and of yourself especially. This you must have read for yourself long ere now, if that poem reached you, as now first I hear from you it did. I had carefully caused it to be sent, in order that, however small a proof of talent, it might, even in those few lines introduced into it emblem-wise, [Footnote: See the lines themselves in the translation of the Epitaphium Damonis, Vol. II. p. 90.] be no obscure proof of my love towards you. My idea was that by this means I should lure either yourself or some of the others to write to me; for, if I wrote first, either I had to write to all, or I feared that, if I gave the preference to any one, I should incur the reproach of such others as came to know it, hoping as I do that very many are yet there alive who might certainly have a claim to this attention from me. Now, however, you first of all, both by this most friendly call of your letter, and by your thrice-repeated attention of writing before, have freed the reply for which I have been some while since in your debt from any expostulation from the others. [Footnote: Although I have supposed that the copies of the Epitaphium Damonis sent by Milton to Italy were from the sheets of the Moseley volume of 1645 as it was passing through the press, the reader ought to note, with me, the possibility (already hinted, and now implied in this passage of the letter to Dati) that Milton had sent copies in some form at an earlier date—say immediately after the poem was written, and when his parting from his Italian friends was quite recent.] There was, I confess, an additional cause for my silence in that most turbulent state of our Britain, subsequent to my return home, which obliged me to divert my mind shortly afterwards from the prosecution of my studies to the defence anyhow of life and fortune. What safe retirement for literary leisure could you suppose given one among so many battles of a civil war, slaughters, flights, seizures of goods? Yet, even in the midst of these evils, since you desire to be informed about my studies, know that we have published not a few things in our native tongue; which, were they not written in English, I would willingly send to you, my friends in Florence, to whose opinions I attach very much value. The part of the Poems which is in Latin I will send shortly, since you wish it; and I would have done so spontaneously long ago, but that, on account of the rather harsh sayings against the Pope of Rome in some of the pages, I had a suspicion they would not be quite agreeable to your ears. Now I beg of you that the indulgence you were wont to give, I say not to your own Dante and Petrarch in the same case, but with singular politeness to my own former freedom of speech, as you know, among you, the same you, Dati, will obtain (for of yourself I am sure) from my other friends whenever I may be speaking of your religion in our peculiar way. I am reading with pleasure your description of the funeral ceremony to King Louis, in which I recognise your style (Mercurium tuum)—not that one of street bazaars and mercantile concerns (compitalem ilium et mercimoniis ad dictum) which you say jestingly you have been lately practising, but the right eloquent one which the Muses like, and which befits the president of a club of wits (facundum ilium, Musis acceptum, et Mercurialium virorum præsidem). [Footnote: The production of Dati to which Milton refers, and of which a copy had probably accompanied Dati's letter, was an Italian tract or book, entitled "Esequie del la Maestà Christianiss: di Luigi XIII. il Giusto, Re di Francia e di Navarra, celebrate in Firenze dall altezza serenissima di Ferdinando Granduca di Tose., e discritte da Carlo Dati: 1644." Louis XIII. of France had died May 14, 1643, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany had ordered a celebration in his honour at Florence.—The hint that Dati was now engaged in mercantile business is confirmed by subsequent evidence.] It remains that we agree on some method and plan by which henceforth our letters may go between us by a sure route. This does not seem very difficult, when so many of our merchants have frequent and large transactions with you, and their messengers run backwards and forwards every week, and their vessels sail from port to port not much seldomer. The charge of this I shall commit, rightly I hope, to Bookseller James (Jacobo Bibliopolæ), or to his master, my very familiar acquaintance (vel ejus hero mihi familiarissimo). [Footnote: I have translated this as well as I can, but it is obscure. Did Milton refer to some Florentine "Jacopo," a bookseller (the publisher of Dati's Esequie?), and playfully entrust the arrangement of the future means of correspondence to Dati himself, as master of the services of this person?] Meanwhile farewell, my Charles; and give best salutations in my name to Coltellini, Francini, Frescobaldi, Malatesta, Chimentelli the younger, anyone else you know that remembers me with some affection, and, in fine, to the whole Gaddian Academy. Again farewell!
London: April 21, 1617." [Footnote: This letter to Dati is the tenth of Milton's Epistolæ Familiares, as published by himself in 1674, and reprinted in the collected editions of his works. By a curious chance, however, a MS. copy of it exists in Milton's own hand—either a draft which Milton kept at the time, or perhaps the actual copy sent to Dati. It is one of some valuable Milton documents in the possession of Mr. John Fitchett Marsh of Warrington, who has described it in his Milton Papers, printed for the Chetham Society in 1851, and given there a fac-simile of the beginning and end of it. There is a copy of this fac- simile in Mr. Sotheby's Milton Ramblings (p. 122). Mr. Marsh, who is inclined to think that the MS. is the actual letter as it reached Dati, has favoured me with an exact list of some verbal variations in it from the printed copy. They are slight, but rather confirm the idea that the printed copy is from the draft which Milton kept and that the MS. was the transcript actually dispatched to Italy. Thus, while the printed copy is headed merely "Carolo Dato, Patricio Florentino," the MS. is headed "Carolo Dato, Patricio Florentino, Joannes Miltonius, Londinensis, S.P.D." Again, at the close, instead of the printed dating "Londino, Aprilis 21, 1647," the MS. presents the dating "Londini: Pascatis feria tertia, MDCXLVII," ("London: the third feast day of Easter, 1647.") On this Mr. Marsh, in a note to me, remarks ingeniously, "Dating from the feast-day, according to the Roman Catholic usage, in writing to an Italian friend, indicates a tolerance and politeness worth noticing." Easter in 1647 fell on Sunday, April 18, so that the third day, or Easter-Tuesday, was April 20. The printed copy is dated a day later.]
There are passages in this letter which we can interpret now better than Dati can have done then. The sentences in which Milton speaks of his hard fate in being tied by accident or law to the constant companionship of people with whom he had no sympathy, while those whom he really cared for were distant or dead, may have been read by Dati with only a vague general construction of their meaning, and perhaps would not have been written by Milton to any one capable of a more exact construction from knowledge of the circumstances. We can now discern in them, however, a reference by Milton to his domestic troubles, to the worry brought on him by the whole Powell connexion, and perhaps also to the recent loss of his father. Altogether the letter is a melancholy one. One sees Milton, as he wrote it in Barbican in the spring of 1647, the gloomy master of an uncomfortable household.
PEDAGOGY IN THE BARBICAN: LIST OF MILTON'S KNOWN PUPILS: LADY RANELAGH.
Yet precisely this spring of 1647, if we are to believe his nephew Phillips, was Milton's busiest time with his pupils. "And now," says Phillips, after mentioning the death of Milton's father, and the departure at last of the Powell kindred from the house in Barbican, "the house looked again like a house of the Muses only, though the accession of scholars was not great. Possibly his proceeding thus far in the education of youth may have been the occasion of some of his adversaries calling him Pedagogue and Schoolmaster; whereas it is well known he never set up for a public school to teach all the young fry of a parish, but only was willing to impart his learning and knowledge to relations, and the sons of some gentlemen that were his intimate friends, besides that neither his converse, nor his writings, nor his manner of teaching ever savoured in the least anything of pedantry; and probably he might have some prospect of putting in practice his academical institution, according to the model laid down in his sheet Of Education!" Taking this passage in connexion with prior passages already quoted from the same memoir, we are to conclude that, though Milton's practice in teaching had begun as far back as 1639-40, when he gave lessons to his two nephews in his lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard, and although the practice had been kept up all through the time of his residence in Aldersgate Street, when his nephews boarded with him and other pupils were gradually added (1640-45), yet it was in the Barbican house, and there more especially in 1647, that his employment in pedagogy was most engrossing. The house had been taken expressly that there might be accommodation for additional pupils, and such pupils had come in—not in any considerable number, nor yet miscellaneously from the neighbourhood, but rather by way of favour on Milton's part to select boys whose parents knew him well, and were anxious that they should have the benefit of his instructions.
As to Milton's theories and methods of education we are already sufficiently informed. This may be the place, however, for a list of those who can be ascertained to have had the honour of being his pupils. Perhaps that honour may have been shared by as many as twenty or thirty youths in all, afterwards distributed through English society in the seventeenth century, and some of them living even into the eighteenth; but I have been able to recover only the following:—[Footnote: It is to be understood that Milton may have continued the practice of pedagogy, in individual cases at least, after the Barbican period of its fullest force, and hence that one or two of the pupils in my present list may not have been in the Barbican house, but may be strays afterwards undertaken by him, on special request, in those later days and those other houses into which we have yet to follow him. As it is not worth while, however, to break up such a list, I present all Milton's known pupils, of whatever date, in one cluster.]
EDWARD PHILLIPS (the elder nephew):—Not ten years old when he first received lessons from Milton in the St. Bride's Churchyard lodging, this elder nephew, after five years of board in Aldersgate Street, and about a year and a half in Barbican, had reached his seventeenth year. He had received the full benefit so far of his uncle's method of teaching; and, if he were to go to the University, it was about time that he should be preparing. About two years after our present date, or in March 1648-9, by whatever management of his uncle, or of his mother and step-father, Mrs. and Mr. Agar, he did enrol himself in Magdalen Hall, Oxford. The rest of his life will concern us hereafter. [Footnote: Wood's Ath., IV. 760, and Godwin's Lives of the Phillipses, p. 12.]
JOHN PHILLIPS (the younger nephew):—This nameson of Milton's, first committed to his entire charge in the St. Bride's Churchyard lodging, had been as long under training as his elder brother, and had now reached his sixteenth year. He was to remain a more unmixed example of his uncle's training, for he never went to any University. He also will reappear in the subsequent course of his uncle's life. [Footnote: Wood's Ath., IV. 764, and Godwin.]
RICHARD HEATH, OR HETH:—That a person of this name was among Milton's pupils, rests on the evidence of one of Milton's own Epistolæ Familiares, dated Dec. 1652, and addressed "Richardo Hetho." As he was then a minister of the Gospel somewhere, it is to be inferred that he was one of the earliest pupils of the Aldersgate Street days. I have not been able to identify him farther.
——PACKER:—"Mr. Packer, who was his scholar," is one of Aubrey's Jottings about Milton, written in 1680 or thereabouts. This is a very insufficient clue. A John Packer, who had taken the degree of Doctor of Physic at Padua, was incorporated in the same degree at Oxford, Feb. 19, 1656-7. [Footnote: Aubrey's Notes on Milton's Life (Godwin's reprint, p. 349); Wood's Fasti, II. 196.]