If his father accompanied the lad he may have recalled to him the horror of the pestilence which three hundred years before had swept from Asia across Europe. In foul, crowded London, it so filled the churchyards to overflowing, that in 1348, when thousands of bodies were flung into pits without a Christian prayer said over them, the Bishop of London purchased three acres for a burial-ground upon this spot. Near here fifty thousand bodies were buried, one above another in deep graves. But three hundred years is a long time to one who has lived something less than ten, and perhaps these grisly tales of a shadowy and forgotten past appealed less to Milton’s boyish heart than those of a nearer time, which his father’s life had almost touched.

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THE CHARTERHOUSE

From an old engraving.

Above the monastery doors which rose here after the Great Plague, might have been seen, only a half century before, the limb from the dismembered body of the martyred prior, who fell beneath the wrath of Henry VIII. He, with divers of his brethren, perished for their faith as nobly as John Rogers, a few years later, died for a different one. Heroism belongs to no one creed. Thus ended the monastic institution, the House of the Salutation of the Mother of God, which since 1371 had housed twenty-four Carthusian friars. Their quiet lives and austere fasts had been in sharp contrast to those of the Knights of St. John, their ancient neighbours, whose habitations perished at about the time when theirs arose.

Some remains of the old monastery may be seen within the gates to-day, and doubtless there were many more reminders of it when Milton was shown about by his boy-friends. Perhaps the tall youth, Roger Williams, nine years his senior, whose later life was to touch his, may have noticed the handsome lad who read the Latin inscriptions as easily as boys of his age now read English, and who showed a marvellous comprehension of the antiquities of the place.

The visitor to-day on entering the chapel, as Milton did, may notice at the left of the door a white marble tablet framed in yellow marble, on which an American citizen, in memory of the founder of Rhode Island, almost the only tolerator of all religious faiths in an intolerant age, has recently inscribed the fact that Roger Williams studied here.

Since Milton’s day the character of Charterhouse has not much changed, though many buildings have been added. The present foundation marks the benevolence of one of the richest merchants of Elizabeth’s day, whose prayer was: “Lord, thou hast given me a large and liberal estate; give me also a heart to make use thereof.” In 1611, Thomas Sutton purchased the Charterhouse for £13,000, from the Earl of Suffolk and his relatives, and made over twenty manors and lordships and other rich estates, including the Charterhouse, in trust for the hospital.

The pensioners were originally eighty in number, and the boys, forty-four. Hubert Herkomer’s well-known, beautiful painting in the Tate Gallery of the Charterhouse chapel and the venerable figures of the aged gentlemen who daily worship here in their quaint gowns, depicts a scene that Milton saw, and that the modern visitor may see to-day. Beyond the huge, pretentious monument of Sutton, that fills one corner of the chapel, is the side room, where, until quite recent years, the boys sat at morning service. Now their numbers are increased, and they are more happily housed out in the country, where outdoor sports and rural life can do more for them than this region, which is now hemmed in by the encroachments of commercial London. Stow tells us that the master was required to be twenty-seven years old, and that the highest form must every Sunday set up in the Great Hall four Greek and four Latin verses, “each to be made on any part of the second Lesson for that day.”