The American visitor to Horton on the day that commemorates his country’s declaration of independence will remember Runnymede and Magna Charta Island. And he will find nothing more consonant with his feeling, after visiting the home of the republican Milton, than to wend his way across the fields, golden with waving grain and gay with scarlet poppies, to the spot where his ancestors and Milton’s in 1215 brought tyrant John to sullen submission to their just demands.
On the margin of the river he may embark, and as the sun casts grateful shadows eastward, he may drift gently down beside the long, narrow island in the rushy margin of the stream, where white swans build their nests. A notice warns him not to trespass, for the gray stone house upon it, whose gables are half hid by dense shrubbery, is private property. Some day perhaps this English nation that so loves its own great history will reclaim this historic spot, and mark Magna Charta Island with a memorial of the brave men who made it world-famous. Or perhaps,—who knows?—some American, who has spent three years at Oxford, and learned to love the history of the race from which he sprang, may be impelled to honour that which is best in her, and after placing in Cambridge and in Horton fit memorials of Milton, may be moved to erect here a worthy monument to the bold barons.
CHAPTER V.
MILTON ON THE CONTINENT.—IN ST. BRIDE’S CHURCHYARD.—AT ALDERSGATE STREET.—THE BARBICAN.—HOLBORN.—SPRING GARDENS
ne year after his mother’s death, and probably just after Christopher’s wedding, the poet, now a man of thirty, arrived in Paris, accompanied by his servant, and bearing valuable letters of introduction, among others, some from Sir Henry Wotton. As we are dealing with Milton’s England, scant space must be allowed to this year or more spent among the savants and the unwonted sights of France and Italy. In Paris the young scholar was introduced by Lord Scudamore to the man whom he most desired to see,—the great Hugo Grotius, a man of stupendous erudition and lofty character. Milton declared that he venerated him more than any modern man, and well he might, for the Dutch hero and exile had not his equal upon the Continent, even in that age of great men.
Passing through Provence, Milton entered Italy from Nice, and found himself in the land whose melodious language he had made his own, and whose history and literature few Italians of his age knew better than he. He went to Genoa, “La Superba,” which then boasted of two hundred palaces; thence to Leghorn, and fourteen miles farther to Pisa on the Arno, and, farther up the Arno, to beautiful Florence. Here he paused two months, lionised by the best society, and hobnobbing with painters, poets, prelates, and noblemen as he walked in Santa Croce, or on the heights of Fiesole, or in the leafy shade of Vallombrosa. Here it was that he was presented to the blind Galileo, “grown old,” he writes, “a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.” Doubtless, in later years, when blindness and royal disfavour had embittered but failed to crush his spirit, the gray-haired poet often recalled this visit made in his radiant youth.
Going by way of Siena, on its rocky height, Milton passed on to Rome in the autumn, and here spent two months in the splendid city of the Popes, in which great St. Peter’s was but newly finished. The city swarmed with priests and prelates, but the poet spoke freely of his own faith. One of his great joys was to listen to the incomparable singing of Leonora Baroni, the Jenny Lind of his time, to whom he wrote exuberant panegyrics in Latin.