The "foreign folk" were no new thing. Milton's fame, indeed, was European: as a prose-writer and pamphleteer, be it understood, not as a poet. Had he not refuted and put to shame the most erudite scholars of the day? Foreign savants of note, therefore, who might be visiting London, were desirous to acquaint themselves with so powerful a personality: and the little house in the Artillery Walk was the rendezvous for many distinguished persons. They found their host no such recluse as town-talk might have led them to imagine, but one ready and willing to converse with them,—an English gentleman to the backbone, a scholar and artist to the finger-tips. His Continental tours and Italian sojourns had made him less insular than most of his compatriots, and his vast range of reading had imparted a certain cosmopolitanism to his exceedingly individual lines of thought. The visitors found him, moreover, employed upon a work so important, and of a theme so lofty, as might well give them pause, considering the circumstances under which it was being accomplished: and whatever their particular religious tenets might be, they could not fail to admire the magnitude of his aim in composing Paradise Lost,—"To justify the ways of God to men."
PARADISE LOST. BK. II Painting by S. Meteyard.
"Satan with less toil, and now with ease, ...
Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold ...
This pendent world in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude."
(Paradise Lost. Bk. II.)
Dinner despatched, the master of the house, led by his devoted friends, went out into the garden. A garden was the desideratum of his existence, and he had never been without one; for in seventeenth-century London every house was fitly furnished in this respect. Here Milton was in the habit of taking that steady exercise which was a sine quâ non to a sedentary and gouty man. He made a point of walking up and down out of doors, in cold weather, for three or four hours at a time,—sometimes composing his majestic lines, sometimes merely meditating. When weary with walking, he would come in and either dictate what he had conceived, or would take further exercise in a swing. In really warm weather, he received his visitors sitting outside his house door, wrapped in a coarse grey overcoat—gazing out upon the fields of the Artillery ground with those "unblemished eyes" that belied their own clear beauty—"the only point," as he said, "in which I am against my will a hypocrite." To-day, being cool and cloudy, allowed but intermittent periods in the open air. Milton, Lawrence and Skinner paced slowly to and fro, deep in enthralling intercourse, until three o'clock: when the rain and Thomas Elwood arrived simultaneously, and the other two men departed to their respective avocations.
Thomas Elwood was a young Quaker of twenty-three, who was acting in some degree as honorary secretary to Milton. Himself of a defective education, and having been expelled from his father's house on account of his religious opinions, he was only too glad to take a lodging in the neighbourhood, and, by reading aloud to Milton every afternoon, acquire an amount of information and a variety of learning, which by no other means could he have obtained. And there was also a tacit sympathy between them, insomuch as Milton was, more and more, as life went on, inclining towards the Quaker tenets,—in those days, bien entendu, viewed with horror and detestation by the majority of men.