The popularity of a poet can hardly be gauged by the number of visitors to the haunts wherein he passed his day. Rather are they numbered by the proximity of a railroad thereto. Consequently it is not surprising that the pilgrims to the little out-of-the-way Buckinghamshire village where Milton completed his Paradise Lost are an inconsiderable percentage of those who journey to Stratford-on-Avon. For though Chalfont St. Giles lies only a short distance away from the twenty-third milestone on the high-road from London to Aylesbury, it is some three miles from the nearest station—a station, too, where few conveyances are obtainable. Motor cars which will take the would-be pilgrim in an hour from a Northumberland Avenue hotel may increase its popularity, but at present the village of the “pretty box,” as Milton called the house, is as slumberous and as little changed as it was in the year 1665, when Milton fled thither from his house in Artillery Ground, Bunhill Row, before the terror of the plague.[4] Milton was then fifty-seven, and is described as a pale, but not cadaverous man, dressed neatly in black, with his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk-stones. He loved a garden, and would never take a house, not even in London, without one, his habit being to sit in the sun in his garden, or in the colder weather to pace it for three or four hours at a stretch. Many of his verses he composed or pruned as he thus walked, coming in to dictate them to his amanuensis, and it was from the vernal to the autumnal equinox that his intermittent inspiration bore its fruit. His only other recreation besides conversation was music, and he sang, and played either the organ or the bass viol. It was at Chalfont that Milton put into the hands of Ellwood his completed Paradise Lost, with a request that he would return it to him with his judgment thereupon. It was here also that on receiving Ellwood’s famous opinion, “Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?” he commenced his Paradise Regained. He returned to London after the plague abated, in time to see it again devastated by the fresh calamity of the great fire.
An engraving of this house appears in Dunster’s edition of Paradise Regained, and an account in Todd’s Life of Milton, p. 272; also in Jesse’s Favourite Haunts, p. 62.
6. THE WALLER OAK, COLESHILL
From the Water-colour in the possession of the Artist.
Painted 1902.
That several of Mrs. Allingham’s drawings should illustrate scenes connected with Great Britain’s poets is not remarkable, seeing that her life has been so intimately bound up with one of them, but it is at first somewhat startling to find that the two selected for illustration here should treat of Milton and Waller, for was it not the latter who said of Paradise Lost that it was distinguished only by its length. The accident that has brought them together here is perhaps that the two scenes are near neighbours, and, may be, the artist was tempted to paint the old oak through kindly sentiments towards the author of the sweet-smelling lines, “Go, Lovely Rose,” by which his name endures.
Coleshill, where the oak stands, is a “woody hamlet” near Amersham, and a mile or two away from Chalfont St. Giles. The tree which bears his name, and under which he is said to have composed much of his verse, dates from long anterior to the late days of the Monarchy, when he was more engaged in hatching plots than in writing verse. If, as is probable, he viewed and sought its comforting shade, he can hardly have believed that it would survive the fame of him who received such praise from his contemporaries as to be acclaimed “inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps.”
7. APPLE AND PEAR BLOSSOM
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. Theodore Uzielli.
Painted 1901.
A charming little picture made out of the simplest details is this spring scene in an Isle of Wight lane. But if the details are of the simplest character, as much cannot be said for the methods employed by the artist in their treatment. These are so intricate that the drawing was perhaps the most difficult of any to reproduce, owing to the impossibility of accurately translating the subtle gradations which distinguish the tender greenery of trees, hedgerow, and bank.