That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have, uncommended, died.”
But neither this, nor a hundred others, brought the Lady Dorothy to terms: she married—like a wise woman—somebody else. And he? He went on singing as chirpingly as ever—sang till he was over eighty.
John Milton.
And now we come to a poet of a larger build—a weightier music—and of a more indomitable spirit; a poet who wooed the world with his songs; and the world has never said him “Nay.” I mean John Milton.[57]
He is the first great poet we have encountered, in respect to whom we can find in contemporary records full details of family, lodgement, and birth. A great many of these details have been swooped together in Dr. Masson’s recently completed Life and Times of Milton, which I would more earnestly commend to your reading were it not so utterly long—six fat volumes of big octavo—in the which the pith and kernel about Milton, the man, floats around like force meat-balls in a great sea of historic soup. Our poet was born in Bread Street, just out of Cheapside, in London, in the year 1608.
In Cheapside—it may be well to recall—stood the Mermaid Tavern; and it stood not more than half a block away from the corner where Milton’s father lived. And on that corner—who knows?—the boy, eight years old, or thereby, when Shakespeare died, may have lingered to see the stalwart Ben Jonson go tavern-ward for his cups, or may be, John Marston, or Dekker, or Philip Massinger—all these being comfortably inclined to taverns.
The father of this Bread Street lad was a scrivener by profession; that is, one who drafted legal papers; a well-to-do man as times went; able to give his boy some private schooling; proud of him, too; proud of his clear white and red face, and his curly auburn hair carefully parted—almost a girl’s face; so well-looking, indeed, that the father employed a good Dutch painter of those days to take his portrait; the portrait is still in existence—dating from 1618, when the poet was ten, showing him in a banded velvet doublet and a stiff vandyke collar, trimmed about with lace. In those times, or presently after, he used to go to St. Paul’s Grammar School; of which Lily, of Lily’s Latin Grammar, was the first master years before. It was only a little walk for him, through Cheapside, and then, perhaps, Paternoster Row—the school being under the shadow of that great cathedral, which was burned fifty years after. He studied hard there; studied at home, too; often, he says himself, when only fourteen, studying till twelve at night. He loved books, and he loved better to be foremost.