About 1670, Milton’s three daughters left their father’s home. Knowing that they needed to be fitted for self-support, he paid for their apprenticeship, and had them taught embroidery in gold and silver. Doubtless bright silks and gay patterns were much more to their mind than their father’s folios, and the change was best for all concerned. Their father sat at his door on pleasant days, dressed in his gray camblet coat, wearing a sword with a small silver hilt. He received many visitors—some of them men of rank and note.
He is described as wearing at this time his light brown hair parted from the crown to the middle of the forehead, “somewhat flat, long and waving, a little curled.” His voice was musical and he “pronounced the letter r very hard.” He rose early, began his day by listening to the Hebrew Bible, and spent his morning listening and dictating. Music, as much walking as his gouty feet permitted, and, in the evening, a smoke, were his sole recreations. He belonged to no church, and attended no service at this period.
As his end drew near he told his brother that he left only the residue of his first wife’s property to their three daughters, who had “been very undutiful;” but everything else to his “loving wife, Elizabeth.” Just one month before he had completed his sixty-sixth year, John Milton died on a Sunday night, November 8, 1674. He was buried beside his father in St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, and was followed to the grave by many friends. What hymns were sung we do not know, but certainly none could more fitly have been sung than that noble one by his dear friend, Sir Henry Wotton:
“How blessed is he born or taught
Who serveth not another’s will,
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his highest skill.
·····
“This man is freed from servile bands,
Of hope to rise or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all.”
Milton’s wife was thirty-six years old when the poet died. She lived to be nearly eighty-nine years old, but never remarried. Deborah lived until 1727, when Voltaire writes: “I was in London when it became known that a daughter of blind Milton was still alive, old and in poverty, and in a quarter of an hour she was rich.” The latest descendants of John and Christopher Milton died about the middle of the eighteenth century, but their sister Anne’s posterity may perhaps be traced to-day.
The forgotten Duke of York has his great column in Waterloo Place. The scholarly but uninspired Prince Consort has his gorgeous Memorial, and a hundred nobodies have their lofty monuments scattered all over England, teaching the rising generation their fathers’ estimation of the relative worth of names in England’s history. The only statue of Milton known to me in England, except the one on the London University Building, is the modest figure which stands, together with Shakespeare and Chaucer, upon a fountain in Park Lane opposite Hyde Park.
No student of the period which is treated in this little volume should fail to visit the upper floor of the National Portrait Gallery, and view the portraits of the many noted men who were Milton’s contemporaries. Besides portraits of the royal families, he will note those of William Harvey, Samuel Pepys, Cowley, old Parr, Sir Henry Vane, Andrew Marvell, Cromwell and his daughter, Inigo Jones, Selden, Sir Julius Cæsar, Samuel Butler, Hobbes, Dryden, Ireton, Algernon Sidney, Sir Christopher Wren, and the Chandos Shakespeare portrait. Milton’s own portrait in middle life, which is little known, is most impressive, and very different from the common portraits.