“He lived to make his simple oaken chair
More terrible, more grandly beautiful,
Than any throne before or after of a British king.
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One of the few who have a right to rank
With the true Makers; for his spirit wrought
Order from Chaos; proved that right divine
Dwelt only in the excellence of truth;
And far within old Darkness’ hostile lines
Advanced and pitched the shining tents of Light
Nor shall the grateful Muse forget to tell,
That—not the least among his many claims
To deathless honour—he was Milton’s friend,
A man not second among those who lived
To show us that the poet’s lyre demands
An arm of tougher sinew than the sword.”
—“A Glance Behind the Curtain,” Lowell.
One grave within the church may have been dear to Milton besides that of his honoured father. As he lived only one generation removed from the martyrs of Smithfield, he must often have pored over the record of their heroism and cruel deaths, by Fox, the famous martyrologist. Near the west door lies the slab above his grave. The date is 1587. Here, no doubt, Milton, who, as has been said, at different times had dwellings near the church, must often have entered within its doors and paused.
Says the historian Marsden: “Fox placed the Church of England under greater obligations than any writer of his time, and had his recompense in an old age of poverty and shame.... Nor were his writings undervalued even then; they were commanded to be chained up in churches by the side of the homilies and the English Bible;... thus the ‘Book of Martyrs’ stood amongst the high, authentic records of our Church, whilst its venerable author yet lived.”
Frobisher, the great navigator, is also buried within the church.
On the left wall, as one faces the choir, is a curious doggerel inscription to one Busbie. If it be on a Sunday afternoon, and the children have gathered for the Sunday school, it may be interesting to pause a bit, as we have done, before the epitaph, and, while copying it, to lend a half ear to the teaching that goes on within hearing. Three small boys sit on a bench before a solemn youth who holds a book and instructs their infant minds as follows: “Who is God? Where is God? How many persons are there in the Godhead? Keep still there—don’t answer until it is your turn. When God put Adam and Eve out of Eden, what did he promise them?” “That they should be saved,” mumbles one youngster. “Whom did he promise should save them?” “His Son.” “What do we call his Son?” “Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” The next class and all the others scattered through the church are progressing in Christian nurture in much the same way, and one wonders whether the pedagogical skill of the teachers has advanced one whit in all the hundreds of years since the church was built. We hear no “opening exercises,” no joyous singing, no tender, earnest talk about right-doing and the temptations that little boys on Fore Street may encounter on Monday morning. There is nothing but a purely formal catechising of these eager, impressionable little souls as to a theology that they cannot understand, and a history of the world which their first lesson on geology will undermine. This modern Sunday school is the one blot upon the memory of the beautiful old church so dear to every lover of Milton.
On a week day one may stand on Redcross Street, and behold, as did the travellers in “The Hand of Ethelberta,” “the bold shape of the tower they sought, clothed in every neutral shade, standing clear against the sky, dusky and grim in its upper stages, and hoary gray below, where every corner of stone was rounded off by the waves of wind and storm. All people were busy here; our visitors seemed to be the only idle persons that the city contained; and there was no dissonance—there never is—between antiquity and such beehive industry.... This intramural stir was a fly-wheel, transparent by infinite motion, through which Milton and his day could be seen as if nothing intervened.”