Milton’s England

JOHN MILTON
From the miniature painted in 1667 by William Faithorne

Copyright, 1902
By L. C. Page & Company
(INCORPORATED)

All rights reserved

Fifth Impression, April, 1908

COLONIAL PRESS
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U. S. A.

THIS LITTLE STUDY
OF BYGONE DAYS AND ANCIENT PLACES
IS INSCRIBED TO THE
PURITAN SCHOLAR AND DEAR FELLOW PILGRIM
WHO WANDERED WITH ME
ONE HAPPY SUMMER THROUGH
MILTON’S ENGLAND.

[Larger Image]

MAP OF MILTON’S ENGLAND

Milton’s Residences in London

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MAP OF MILTON’S LONDON

Map of Milton’s London

Contents

List of Illustrations

Milton’s England

CHAPTER I.

THE LONDON INTO WHICH MILTON WAS BORN

o every well-read man whose mother tongue is English, whether he be born in America or Australia or within sound of Bow Bells, the little dot upon the map, marked “London,” has an interest which surpasses that of any spot on earth. Though in his school-days he was taught nothing of the city’s topography and little of its local history, while he has laboriously learned outlandish names on every continent, nevertheless, in his mind’s eye, Westminster Abbey looms larger than Chimborazo, and a half-dozen miles of the tidal Thames have more of meaning to him than as many thousand of the Amazon, the Oxus, and the Ganges. To know London—its mighty, historic past and its complex, stupendous present—is to know the religion, the art, the science, the politics,—the development, in short, of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Perhaps there is no better method of coming to know what is most interesting in this centre of all English life than studying one of the supremely important periods of its long history, when it was touched by the spiritual genius of one of England’s most noble sons.

Three periods of a hundred years each stand out above all others since the Christian era in their significance and richness of accomplishment.

The third period began about 1790 with the birth of the American Republic and the outbreak of the French Revolution. The first was that one hundred years which from 1450 to 1550 included the beginning of the general use of gunpowder, which made the pigmy with a pistol more than the match for giant with spear and battleaxe. Then it was that

“Gutenberg made thought cosmopolite
And stretched electric wires from mind to mind.”

In this period Italian art made its most splendid achievements, and Luther, Calvin, and Columbus gave man new freedom and new possibilities.

The middle period—the one in which England made her greatest contribution to human advancement—is the one that we are to consider. Milton’s life covered sixty-six of its one hundred years. It began with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and included the brilliant period of exploration and adventure just before Milton’s birth, in which Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh, and other ambitious and not too scrupulous sea-rovers sought, like Cecil Rhodes, jewels and gold, empire, expansion, and renown.

It covered the chief work of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lord Bacon, Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, Dryden, and fifty other men still read to-day. It included all of Milton’s great Puritan contemporaries, who, fighting for the rights of Englishmen, fought the world’s battle for freedom. It ended in 1688 with the downfall of the house of Stuart and the final triumph of those principles for which Vane and Milton had struggled and died without seeing the fruit of their labours. Since 1688 no monarch has sat upon the English throne by any outworn theory of “divine right of kings,” but only, explicitly and emphatically, by the will of the English people.

For all believers in the people, for all who honour Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, Robert Burns, John Bright and Gladstone, the century that knew Cromwell and Milton, Sir Harry Vane and Sir John Eliot, John Hampden, John Winthrop and William Bradford must, more than most others, have significance.

John Milton was born in London in 1608; and it is chiefly the London of the twenty years that intervened between the Spanish Armada and his birth which we are to consider in this chapter.

As neither man nor anything that he has made can be well understood except as they are related to their origins, so to understand the names, the customs, and the daily sights that the boy Milton knew in this city, where for nearly two millenniums before his day history had been making, one must go back and take a brief survey.

Into the mooted question of the origin of the name of London we need not enter. Suffice to say that when we first hear of London it was a little hamlet on a hill of perhaps one hundred feet in height, lying between two ranges of higher hills. At the north rose what we now call Highgate and Hampstead, about 450 feet high, and to the south, beyond the marshes and the Thames and a broad shallow lagoon, whose little islands once marked the site of Southwark, rose the Surrey hills, from one of which in our day the Crystal Palace gleams. Men with stone weapons slew antlered deer upon the little marshy island of Thorney, now Westminster. What is now St. James’s Park was then an estuary. Streams flowed down the valleys between the wooded hills. Only their names remain to-day to tell us, among the present stony streets, where rivers and brooks once flowed. West Bourn, Ty Bourn, Hole Bourne, the southern part of which was called the “Fleet,” flowed from the hills in the northwest in a southeasterly direction into the Thames. Just east of the last named was the little brook called “Wallbrook,” by whose banks, on the present Cornhill, the first settlement was made. All these names, of course, belong to a time long subsequent to the first rude settlements made in unknown antiquity before the Christian era. The Tyburn at its mouth divided, enclosing the island Thorney, upon which in later times arose Westminster. Hole Bourne was so named because of its running through a deep hollow. The lower part of the river—the Fleet—was tidal, and formed the western bulwark of London for centuries. It emptied into the Thames where now is Blackfriars Bridge.

Far eastward from the Wallbrook, through broad marshes, flowed the river Lea down from the country known to us as Essex and Hertfordshire. It emptied into the Thames east of the Isle of Dogs, which is now covered with huge docks for the shipping of the great modern city. The Lea still flows as in the time of the Romans and Saxons, though its marshes have largely disappeared. But the other smaller streams are now obliterated, though in Milton’s time their course could still partly be discerned, and their degradation into drains was not complete.

Through Bread Street, on which Milton was born, passed Watling Street, the old Roman road, named later by the Saxons, which with the Roman wall around the city alone left traces of the Roman occupation in the poet’s day. The mosaic floors, the coins, bronze weapons and scanty remains of the Roman period, before the fourth century A. D., are better known to us than to the Londoners of his time. The Roman city spread itself along the river from the Fleet on the west to the site of the present Tower of London on the east, and then gradually crept northward. By the time the Roman wall was built in about 360 A. D., the circumference of the city, counting the river front, was two miles and three quarters. Here stood the town, not in an area of fertile fields, but surrounded by forests on the north, and on all other sides by wide-spreading marshes. The enclosed space was originally 380 acres, to which later additions were made upon the north and east. The wall was built of layers of thin red brick and stone about twenty feet high, and was finished by bastions and additional defences at the angles. Though scant traces of any of the original construction now remain, much of the Roman wall, and, at all events, a complete wall of mingled Roman and mediæval work, encircled the site of the ancient city limits in Milton’s day, and its gates were nightly locked until long after his death.

At first, two land gates had sufficed, but in 1600 there were seven; on the east, Aldgate; further north was Bishopsgate; further west, upon the northern wall, were Moorgate and Cripplegate; upon the west, Aldersgate, protected by the Barbican, one of the gateway towers; and south of this, Newgate and Ludgate. Upon the waterside, Dowgate, at the mouth of the ancient Wallbrook, now covered by the narrow street of the same name, and Billingsgate, further east toward the Tower of London, gave access to the city.

In Roman days the whole enclosure was crossed by two great streets,—Watling Street, which came from the northwest and entered near Newgate, and Ermyn Street, which came from the northeast. Where these two met was later the market or chepe, from the Saxon word meaning sale.

Of the Saxon period, which followed the sudden and mysterious abandonment of their city by the Romans after their occupation of it for three centuries, we have to-day a thousand traces in London names. Evidently the early Anglo-Saxon, like his descendants, had a marked love of privacy and seclusion. His sense of the sacred nature of property was as marked in him as it has always been in his posterity. The idea of inclosure or protection is made prominent in the constantly recurring terminations of ton, ham, worth, stoke, stow, fold, garth, park, hay, burgh, bury, brough, borrow. Philologic study of continental terms displays no such marked emphasis upon the idea of property and demarkation lines. Says the learned Taylor: “It may indeed be said, without exaggeration, that the universal prevalence throughout England of names containing this word, Homes [viz., ham, ton, etc.], gives us the clue to the real strength of the national character of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Kensington, Brompton, Paddington, Islington, are but a few of the local names which illustrate in their suffix the origin of the word town—originally a little hedged enclosure. [German zaun or hedge.] The most important remnant of the Saxon influence is to be found in the syllable ing which occurs in thousands of London names. This was the usual Anglo-Saxon patronymic, and occurs most often in the middle syllable, as in Buckingham, the home of Buck’s son; Wellington, the village of Wells’s son, or the Wells clan. Family settlements are traceable by this syllable ing.

Chipping or chepe was the old English term for market-place, and Westcheap and Eastcheap were the old London markets of Saxon days. When the word market takes the place in England of the old Anglo-Saxon chipping, we may assume the place to be of later origin.

The Saxons, unlike the Romans, were not road-makers, and when they applied the English word street, corrupted from the Latin strata, as in the case of Watling Street—the ancient road which they renamed—we shall usually find that it marks a work of Roman origin.

Clerkenwell, Bridewell, Holywell, and names with similar suffixes indicate the site of wells from which it would seem that the ancient Londoners derived their water supply when it was not taken from the Thames, the Holborn, or the Tyburn. Hithe, which means landing-place, has in later times largely disappeared, except at Rotherhithe near Greenwich.

With the conversion of the Saxons in the seventh century appear the names of Saxon saints. Among the notable ones to whom churches were built was holy St. Ethelburga, the wife of Sebert, the first Christian king, whose church to-day stands on the site of its Saxon predecessor beside Bishopsgate, on the very spot where stood the Roman gate. Another was St. Osyth, queen and martyr, whose name also survives in Sise, or St. Osyth’s Lane, and whose black and grimy churchyard was doubtless green in Milton’s day. To these must be added St. Dunstan, St. Swithin, St. Edmund the Martyr, and St. Botolph, to whom no less than four churches were erected.

The devastating fire of 1135 swept London from end to end, and not a Saxon structure remained, though the new ones that replaced them were built in similar fashion. With the coming of the Danes were built churches to their patrons, St. Olaf and St. Magnus; and in the centre of the Strand, St. Clement’s, Danes, is said to mark the spot where tradition assigns a settlement of Danes.

As of the Saxons, so of the Danes, the most permanent record of their influence on London and the Danish district of England was in their suffixes to words which still survive. By, meaning first a farm and later a village, is one which occurs some six hundred times. To this day our common term, a by-law, recalls the Dane.

The names of the street on which Milton was born and of those in the near neighbourhood to the booths that once surrounded Cheap indicate the products formerly sold there, or the trades carried on within them. To the north the streets were called: Wood, Milk, Iron, Honey, Poultry; to the south they were named after Bread, Candles, Soap, Fish, Money-Changing. Friday Street was one on which fish and food for fast days were sold.

Of Saxon and Danish London there remains in the old city proper not one stone. Of Norman London, we have to-day the great White Tower, the crypt of Bow Church, from whose round arches it received its name, the crypt of St. John’s Priory outside the city, part of the church of St. Bartholomew’s the Great, and part of St. Ethelburga’s, Bishopsgate. Much more existed before the Great Fire of 1666. The chief characteristics of the English Norman work are the half-circular Roman arch, seen in all Romanesque work: massive walls unsupported by great buttresses and not pierced by the large windows which appear in the later Gothic style; square towers without spires; barrel vaulting over nave and aisles in the churches; massive piers; the use of colour upon ornaments and wall surfaces instead of in the windows as in Gothic buildings; small interlacing round arches in wall surfaces; zigzag and “dog tooth” decoration; “pleated” capitals; carvings, more or less grotesque, of human or animal forms. English Norman, like English Gothic, never equalled the French work in both these styles.

In Milton’s boyhood the impress of Plantagenet London was everywhere visible. Throughout the centuries, from the earliest to the latest Plantagenet, the influence of the Church reigned supreme. It has been estimated that then at least one-fourth of the area of all London was in some way connected with the Church, or the extensive conventual establishments belonging to it. Their Gothic towers and steeples rose clean and pure to the soft blue of the London sky, unfouled with coal smoke. Their lofty walls, over which English ivy crept and roses bloomed, shut from the narrow streets of the old town stretches of soft greensward and shady walks. Among these rose dormitories, refectories, cloisters, and the more prosaic offices. At every hour bells pealed and constantly reminded the citizens of prayer and service.

Hardly a street but had its monastery or convent garden. Most of these were just within or just without the city wall, as they were founded when the city had already become of a considerable size, and they were therefore located in the more open parts. The enormous size of the equipment of these religious establishments before the Reformation, in the century when Milton’s grandfather was young, can scarcely be conceived to-day when the adjuncts of the Church have shrunk almost to nothingness. In Milton’s boyhood, it must have been an easy task among the recent ruins and traditions of these great establishments to reconstruct them to the imagination in their entirety. Sir Walter Besant in his graphic book on “London” details the numbers supported in this earlier period by St. Paul’s alone. The cathedral body included the bishop, dean, the four archdeacons, the treasurer, the precentor, the chancellor, thirty greater canons, twelve lesser canons, about fifty chaplains or chantry priests, and thirty vicars. Of lower rank were the sacrist and three vergers, the servitors, the surveyor, the twelve scribes, the book transcriber, the bookbinder, the chamberlain, the rent-collector, the baker, the brewer, the singing men and choir boys, of whom priests were made, the bedesmen and the poor folk. In addition to these were the servants and assistants of all these officers; the sextons, gravediggers, gardeners, bell ringers, makers and menders of the ecclesiastical robes, cleaners and sweepers, carpenters, masons, painters, carvers, and gilders.

A similar body, though somewhat smaller, was required in every other religious foundation. No wonder that not only one-fourth of the area but also one-fourth of the whole city population was needed to supply these demands.

From Norman London there remained, besides St. Paul’s vast monastic house, the priory of St. Bartholomew’s, the house of St. Mary Overie’s, the hospital of St. Katharine’s, and the priory of the Holy Trinity. In Plantagenet London, we find the priory of Crutched—that is, Crossed—Friars, who wore a red cross upon their back and carried an iron cross in their hands. Farther north upon the other side of Aldgate stood the great monastery of Holy Trinity, the richest and most magnificent in the city; and the priory of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, whose noble ruins had not disappeared more than a century after Milton’s death. Farther west and north of Broad Street stood the splendid house of Austin Friars; still farther west was St. Martin’s le Grand, and just beyond, the foundation of the Gray Friars or Franciscans. Christ’s Hospital, which lies chiefly on the site of this old monastery, we shall consider in a later chapter. In the southwest corner of the London wall dwelt the Black Friars—the Dominicans—whose name to-day is perpetuated in Blackfriars Bridge.

Outside the walls were other establishments as rich and splendid as these that were within them. Farther west than the house of the Black Friars was the monastery of White Friars or Carmelites, and beyond these the ancient site of the Knights Templar, whose Temple church, in Milton’s day, as well as ours, alone remained. North of the Norman St. Bartholomew’s was the house of the Carthusians, whose long history, ending in the Charterhouse, must be reserved to a later chapter. Northwest from the Norman house of St. Bartholomew’s stood the Norman priory of St. John’s of Jerusalem. Adjacent to it lay the twin foundation—the priory of Black Nuns.

South of the Thames lay two great establishments, Bermondsey and St. Thomas’s Hospital, while of the hospitals situated among the priories and monasteries to the north were the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem and the great hospital of St. Mary Spital, both of which were originally planned for religious houses. This is but a dry, brief catalogue, not of all the great religious houses, but only of those whose walls, more or less transformed or ruined, were within walking distance and most familiar to the boy Milton in his rambles around the city of his birth.

Milton must have seen several “colleges” as well as monasteries; among these were St. Michael’s College on Crooked Lane, and Jesus Commons, and a “college” for poor and aged priests, called the “Papey.” A portion of the “college” of Whittington still remained, and on the site of the present Mercers’ Chapel stood a college for the education of priests, whose splendid church remained until the Great Fire.

Every lover of the beautiful must fondly dwell upon the glorious period of Gothic architecture during which these structures rose. Though London in the Tudor period eclipsed in wealth and magnificence the city of earlier times, the Elizabethan age had no power in its development of pseudo-classic forms to equal the dignity and beauty of the Norman and Gothic work. Then the unknown reverent artist wrought not for fame or earthly glory, but dedicated his labour to the God of Nature, whose laws and principles were his chief guide. These were the days when vine and tendril and the subtle curves of leaf and flower or supple animal form suggested the enrichment of capital and corbel. No cheap and servile imitation of lute and drum, of spear and sword and ribbon, of casque and crown and plume, displayed a paucity of inventive genius and abandonment of nature’s teaching for that of milliner and armourer. Let John Ruskin, in many ways the spiritual son of the beauty-loving Puritan, John Milton, interpret to us the meaning of those poems reared in stone, which Milton’s age was fast displacing:

“You have in the earlier Gothic less wonderful construction, less careful masonry, far less expression of harmony of parts in the balance of the building. Earlier work always has more or less of the character of a good, solid wall with irregular holes in it, well carved wherever there was room. But the last phase of Gothic has no room to spare; it rises as high as it can on narrowest foundations, stands in perfect strength with the least possible substance in its bars; connects niche with niche and line with line in an exquisite harmony from which no stone can be removed, and to which you can add not a pinnacle; and yet introduces in rich, though now more calculated profusion, the living elements of its sculpture, sculpture in quatrefoils, gargoyles, niches, in the ridges and hollows of its mouldings—not a shadow without meaning and not a line without life. But with this very perfection of his work came the unhappy pride of the builder in what he had done. As long as he had been merely raising clumsy walls and carving them, like a child, in waywardness of fancy, his delight was in the things he thought of as he carved; but when he had once reached this pitch of constructive science, he began to think only how cleverly he could put the stones together. The question was not now with him, What can I represent? but, How high can I build—how wonderfully can I hang this arch in air? and the catastrophe was instant—architecture became in France a mere web of woven lines,—in England a mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for invention, and geometry for passion.” (“The Two Paths.”)

It is in this later Gothic, for example the much admired Chapel of Henry VII. at Westminster, that we find this redundancy of motive and poverty of invention, as, for instance, in the repetition of the portcullis—the Tudor heraldic ornament. Ruskin would teach us that heraldic signs, though suited for a few conspicuous places, as proclaiming the name or rank or office of the owner, become impertinent when blazoned everywhere, and are wholly devoid of beauty when they reproduce by the hundred some instrument of prosaic use.

Plantagenet London, and its many remnants of domestic architecture, in Milton’s day, illustrated fully Ruskin’s dictum that “Gothic is not an art for knights and nobles; it is an art for the people; it is not an art [merely] for churches and sanctuaries; it is an art for houses and homes.... When Gothic was invented houses were Gothic as well as churches.... Good Gothic has always been the work of the commonalty, not of the churches.... Gothic was formed in the baron’s castle and the burgher’s street. It was formed by the thoughts and hands and powers of labouring citizens and warrior kings.” (“Crown of Wild Olive.”)

In a memorable passage in his lectures on Architecture in Edinburgh, Ruskin recalls the power with which the Gothic forms appeal to the imagination when embodied in poetry and romance. He asks what would result were the words tower and turret, and the mental pictures that they conjure up, removed. Suppose Walter Scott had written, instead of “the old clock struck two from a turret adjoining my bedchamber,” “the old clock struck two from the landing at the top of the stair.” “What,” he asks, “would have become of the passage?” “That strange and thrilling interest with which such words strike you as are in any wise connected with Gothic architecture, as for instance, vault, arch, spire, pinnacle, battlement, barbican, porch,—words everlastingly poetical and powerful,—is a most true and sure index that the things themselves are delightful to you.” As to stylobates, and pediments, and triglyphs, and all the classic forms, even when pure and unvulgarised by decadent Renaissance work, how utterly they fail to satisfy the poetic instinct of the man of English lineage is well expressed by James Russell Lowell, as he stood within the portals of Chartres Minster:

“The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness
Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained,
The one thing finished in this hasty world.
But ah! this other, this that never ends,
Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb,
As full of morals, half divined, as life,
Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise
Of hazardous caprices, sure to please,
Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern,
Imagination’s very self in stone!”

Of the type of architecture most favoured by Milton’s contemporaries, Ruskin says:

“Renaissance architecture is the school which has conducted men’s inventive and constructive faculties from the Grand Canal [in England, he might have said, old Chester or old Canterbury] to Gower Street, from the marble shaft and the lancet arch and the wreathed leafage ... to the square cavity in the brick wall.” This is a strong expression of a half truth. But the baldness and blankness of Gower Street and a thousand other streets is not so hopeless as the pretentious bastard Renaissance work which modern London shows. The rich modern world can not plead poverty as its excuse for ugliness. Even the village cottage of three centuries ago, as well as the city streets, showed a popular love of beauty and a power to attain it which few architects, or rather few of their patrons, permit the modern world to see.

But let the lover of past beauty take new courage. Hundreds of signs disclose the dawn of a revival of true taste in which England and America bid fair to lead the world.

Though in most of its forms the Renaissance art that accompanied the new age of discovery and expansion of commerce in the century before Milton indicates a decadence of the love of beauty, exception must be made to much delightful domestic architecture that has the Tudor stamp and is distinctly English, and unknown on the Continent.

The introduction into the background of portraits of such classic outlines as domes, arches, and marble pilasters, is a device used by painters when they would flatter the vanity of their patrons and give them a courtly setting. No Byzantine or Norman arch, or Gothic spire or portal, however rich in decoration, can equal the severe but pompous lines of the Renaissance in conveying a sense of pride. Says Ruskin: “There is in them an expression of aristocracy in its worst characters: coldness, perfectness of training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy with the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, haughty insufficiency. All these characters are written in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as if they were graven on it in words. For, observe, all other architectures have something in them that common men can enjoy; some concession to the simplicities of humanity, some daily bread for the hunger of the multitude; quaint fancy, rich ornament, bright colour, something that shows a sympathy with men of ordinary minds and hearts, and this wrought out, at least in the Gothic, with a rudeness showing that the workman did not mind exposing his own ignorance if he could please others. But the Renaissance is exactly the contrary of this. It is rigid, cold, inhuman; incapable of glowing, of stooping, of conceding, for an instant. Whatever excellence it has is refined, high-trained, and deeply erudite, a kind which the architect well knows no common mind can taste. He proclaims it to you aloud.... All the pleasure you can have in anything I do is in its proud breeding, its rigid formalism, its perfect finish, its cold tranquillity.... And the instinct of the world felt this in a moment.... Princes delighted in it, and courtiers. The Gothic was good for God’s worship, but this was good for man’s worship.... The proud princes and lords rejoiced in it. It was full of insult to the poor in its every line. It would not be built of materials at the poor man’s hand.... It would be of hewn stone; it would have its windows and its doors and its stairs and its pillars in lordly order and of stately size.”

To the novice, who is beginning to decipher the inner meaning of sermons in stones in which the ages have recorded, all unconsciously, the life and aspiration of the past, these words may sound harsh and fantastic.

With the memory of such rare geniuses as Michael Angelo and Wren, and their awe-inspiring cathedrals, built in the Renaissance forms, one may hesitate before completely accepting Ruskin’s dictum. Ruskin himself has done homage to their genius and the greatness of their work. “There were of course,” he says, “noble exceptions.” Yet surely the devout Christian must feel under their glorious domes not so much like praying and reverencing his Maker as glorifying the work of men’s hands. Under any dome and architectural reminder of Roman thought and life, whether it be Wren’s mighty St. Paul’s, or his small and exquisitely proportioned St. Stephen’s, Wallbrook, almost in its shadow, the worshipper must feel something akin to Ruskin’s sentiment. A meek and contrite heart feels alien and uncomforted amid its perfection.

But Ruskin’s word chiefly concerns the more perfect Gothic of the Continent, and the manifestations there—worse than any in England—of riotous and insolent excess in its Renaissance work. The most ostentatious and offensive monument in Westminster Abbey, which is adorned with meaningless mouldings, artificial garlands, and cherubs weeping hypocritic tears, is not so odious as those which Venice, Rome, Antwerp, and a hundred other cities reared upon the Continent. Those tasteless, costly structures which modern Englishmen are but now learning to condemn illustrate completely the pride and arrogance of a world drunk with new wealth, in which fashion supplants beauty.

Yet to a large extent the England of the splendid Tudor period and the England of the Stuarts substituted for the beautiful and sincere forms of an earlier period a style of construction and decoration which showed distinct decadence. Witness the carvings in the chapel and dining-hall of the Charterhouse, new in Milton’s boyhood, the carvings in the dining-halls of the different Inns of Court, and mural tablets everywhere with their obese cherubs and ghastly death’s heads. In the quaint beam and plaster front of Staple’s Inn on Holborn still remains the ancient type of domestic architecture which antedated and accompanied Milton’s boyhood. Hundreds of such cosy, homelike residences with their ample windows of many leaded panes lined the city streets. The merchants who lived in them sold their wares in the shops beneath, and, if they were artificers, housed their apprentices within them. They were built solidly to last for centuries. Strong beams upheld the broad, low-studded ceilings. Capacious fireplaces opened into chimneys whose construction was often made a work of art. Around the house-door were carvings of saints or devils, of prophets, hobgoblins or grotesque dragons, of birds and bees, and any wild or lovely fancy that the craftsman loved to perpetuate in wood or stone. The home must be made beautiful as well as the sanctuary. In those days the mania of migration had not yet destroyed the permanence and sacredness of the homestead. Where the young man brought his bride, even in a city home, there he hoped to dwell and dandle his grandchildren upon his knee. It was Milton’s fate to know many homes in London. Discoveries and travel of the Elizabethan period had broken many traditions of the past, and the old order in his day was yielding to the new. But half the architecture of two hundred years before him still remained, and all the traditions of the past were fresh. The dingy and mutilated relics of the time before the Tudors which, outside the Gothic churches, alone remain to us, reveal but little of what he saw.

With Henry VIII. and the widespread and thorough dissolution of religious houses, London became a far more commercial and prosaic place. Green convent gardens were sold for the erection of narrow wooden tenements; ancient dormitories, refectories, and chapels were pulled down or transformed for more secular purposes. Crutched Friars’ Church became a carpenter’s shop and tennis court; Shakespeare and his friends erected a playhouse on the site of the Black Friars’ monastery. A tavern replaced the church of St. Martin’s le Grand, and far and wide traces of the despoiler and rebuilder were manifest.

Stow had then but just written his invaluable chronicles, and little antiquarian interest prevailed. For the first time in human history men sailed around the globe. New worlds were opening to men’s visions. Not only dreams of wealth without labour, but golden actualities had dazzled the imagination of thousands. Drake and Hawkins, Frobisher and Raleigh were adding new lustre to an age hitherto unparalleled in prosperity and enterprise. Emerson’s description of the Englishman as having a “telescopic appreciation of distant gain” was exemplified.

England was rich in poets, great even in Shakespeare’s time. Of two hundred and forty who published verses, forty are remembered to-day. Yet of England’s six million people, half could not read at all. Never was there among people of privilege such a proportion of accomplished men. Every man tried his hand at verses, and learned to sing a madrigal, and tinkle the accompaniment with his own fingers. Gentlemen travelled to Italy and brought back or made themselves translations of Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso. Not only learned ladies like Queen Elizabeth, who had had Roger Ascham for instructor, wrote Latin, but many others were accomplished in those severer studies which ladies in a later age neglected.

Sir Walter Besant tells us that from Henry IV. to Henry VIII. herbs, fruits, and roots were scarcely used. At this period, however, the poor again began to consume melons, radishes, cucumbers, parsley, carrots, turnips, salad herbs, and these things as well graced the tables of the gentry. Potatoes were unknown until a much later time. Much meat was eaten, and in different fashion from our own, e. g., honey was poured over mutton. Tobacco cost eighteen shillings a pound, and King James complained that there were those who “spent £300 a year upon this noxious weed.” No vital statistics existed to show the average of longevity. But certain it is that, with modern sanitation and cleanliness, the great modern London, which to-day houses about as many souls as did all England then, has a much lower death-rate. When one remembers that, spite of stupendous intellectual attainments, of exquisite taste in art and literature, spite of wise statesmanship and all manly virtues, the wise men of that day were children in their knowledge of chemistry and medicine, we cannot wonder at the recurrence of the plague in almost every generation.

In 1605 the bills of mortality included the ninety-seven parishes within the walls, sixteen parishes without the walls, and six contiguous outparishes in Middlesex and Surrey. During Milton’s lifetime, they included the city of Westminster and the parishes of Islington, Lambeth, Stepney, Newington, Hackney, and Redriff. Scarlet fever was formerly confounded with measles, and does not appear to be reported as a separate disease until 1703.

In 1682 Sir William Petty, speaking of the five plagues that had visited London in the preceding hundred years, remarks: “It is to be remembered the plagues of London do commonly kill one-fifth of the inhabitants, and are the chief impediment against the growth of the city.”

In Milton’s boyhood common folk were crowded into such narrow, wooden tenements as one may still see within the enclosure of St. Giles’s Church, Cripplegate,—almost the only ones that still remain within the city. There were no sewers and no adequate pavement until 1616. House refuse was not infrequently thrown into the street, and sometimes upon the heads of passers-by, though ancient laws enjoined each man to keep the front of his house clean and to throw no refuse into the gutter. In short, ideas on sanitation in London were much like those in Havana before the summer of 1898.

It is difficult to obtain accurate statistics of the population of London, but Loftie estimates that in 1636 seven hundred thousand people lived “within its liberties.”

Where now lofty, gray stone buildings of pretentious and nondescript architecture shelter banks and offices, gabled buildings with overlapping stories darkened the streets. The city was not dependent on the suburbs or upon other towns for aught but food and raw material. Wool and silk and linen, leather and all metals were wrought close to the shops where they were sold. The odours of glue and dyestuffs tainted the fresh air. The sound of tools and hammers, and of the simple looms and machinery of the day, worked by foot or hand power, were heard.

New objects of luxury began to be manufactured—fans, ladies’ wigs, fine knives, pins, needles, earthen fire-pots, silk and crystal buttons, shoe-buckles, glassware, nails, and paper. New products from foreign lands were introduced and naturalised—among them, turkeys, hops, and apricots. Forks had not yet appeared as a necessary table furnishing. Kissing was a universal custom, and a guest kissed his hostess and all ladies present.

Though in the time of Milton’s father the amenities of life had much increased, cruelty and severe punishments were more frequent than in an earlier age. Three-fourths of all the heretics burned at the stake in England suffered in those five years of the bloody queen who, with her Spanish husband at her court, ruled from 1553 to 1558 over unhappy England. Many a time must the boy Milton have heard blood-curdling tales from aged men of these ghastly days when Ridley, Cranmer, Hooper, and John Rogers withered in the flames. His own father may have seen the later martyrdoms of Roman Catholics in Elizabeth’s reign, or of that Unitarian in 1585 who suffered at the stake for the denial of the divinity of Christ—a theological view with which Milton himself is shown to have had much sympathy.

The historian tells us of men boiled and women burned for poisoning; of ears nailed to the pillory and sliced off for libellous and incendiary language. We read of frightful floggings through the streets and of an enormous number of men hanged. Many rogues escaped punishment altogether, for, though punishment when it came was terrifically out of proportion to the offence, and in its publicity incited by suggestion to more crime, the law was often laxly administered.

All periods are more or less transitional, but the England into which Milton came in the first years of the seventeenth century was peculiarly in a state of transformation and unsettlement. As in the beginning of the twentieth century, men’s minds were receiving radical, new impressions, and had not yet assimilated or comprehended them. The doctrines of religious and political freedom were the dreams of prophets, and were yet to be conceived a possibility by the masses, who through dumb centuries had toiled and laughed and wept, and then stretched themselves in mother earth and slept among their fathers. The tender, growing shoots which in the days of Wiclif had sprung from the seed, small as a mustard seed, which he had planted, had grown. Birds now lodged among its branches. The time was ripening when, with the axe and hammer of Milton and his mighty compeers, some of its timbers should help rear a new structure for church and state; and others should be driven deep under the foundations of the temple which men of English blood should in the future rear to democracy.

CHAPTER II.

MILTON’S LIFE ON BREAD STREET

irectly under the shadow of St. Mary le Bow Church, and almost within bowshot of old St. Paul’s, in a little court off Bread Street, three doors from Cheapside, John Milton, the son of John Milton, scrivener, was born, December 9th in 1608. The house was marked by the sign of a spread eagle, probably adopted from the armorial bearings of the family, which appear on the original agreement for the publication of “Paradise Lost.” John Milton, scrivener, whose business was much like that of the modern attorney, was the son of a well-to-do Catholic yeoman of Oxfordshire, and is said to have studied for a time at Christ Church, Oxford. Certain it is that he turned Protestant, was cast off by his father, and in Elizabeth’s reign settled in London; by 1600, when he married his wife Sarah, the worldly goods with which he her endowed in the church of All Hallows, Bread Street, included two houses on that street, besides others elsewhere.

We know little of Milton’s mother, except that she was a woman of a warm heart and generous hand, and had weak eyes which compelled her to wear spectacles before she was thirty, while her husband read without them at the age of eighty-four. Three of their six little ones died in babyhood, but the little John’s elder sister, Anne, and younger brother, Christopher, grew with him to middle life.

It was a musical household; an organ and other instruments were part of the possessions most highly prized in the Bread Street home. The little lad must have looked with pride at the gold chain and medal presented to his father by a Polish prince for a composition in forty parts which the former had written for him. Many chimes in country churches played the psalm tunes that he had harmonised. To this day a madrigal and other songs of his are known to music lovers. No wonder that the boy reared in this home was ever a lover of sweet sounds, and learned to evoke them with his own little fingers upon the organ keyboard.

The Bread Street of Milton’s day, though swept over by the Great Fire, was not obliterated, and still covers its old site. Just at the head of it, on Cheapside, stood the “Standard in Cheap”—an ancient monument in hexagonal shape, with sculptures on each side, and on the top the figure of a man blowing a horn. Here Wat Tyler and Jack Cade had beheaded prisoners. A little west was the Gothic Cross in Cheap, one of the nine crosses erected in memory of Queen Eleanor, somewhat similar to the modern one at Charing Cross.

Only a few steps from his father’s house the little John found himself in the thickest traffic and bustle of the city. Here were mercers’ and goldsmiths’ shops, and much coming and going of carts, and occasionally coaches, which, as the antiquarian Stow declared, “were running on wheels with many whose parents had been glad to go on foot,” for coaches were but newly come into fashion. As the little lad stood at the street corner looking east and west along Cheapside,—the ancient market-place,—his eye fell on well-built houses three and four stories high; they were turned gable end to the street, were built of timber, brick, and plaster, and had projecting upper stories of woodwork. Stow describes a row built by Thomas Wood, goldsmith, of “fair large houses, for the most part possessed of mercers,” and westward, beginning at Bread Street, “the most beautiful frame of fair houses and shops that be within the walls of London or elsewhere in England. It containeth in number ten fair dwelling-houses and fourteen shops, all in one frame, uniformly builded, four stories high, beautified toward the street with the goldsmiths’ arms and the likeness of woodmen, in memory of his name, riding on monstrous beasts; all of which is cast in lead, richly painted over and gilt.”

The modern visitor, as he turns from the jostling crowds of Cheapside into Bread Street, which is scarcely wider than a good sidewalk, will find no trace of aught that Milton saw. The present mercantile establishment, at numbers 58-63, that covers the site of his house, covers as well the whole Spread Eagle Court, in which it stood. It bears no inscription, but, if one enters, the courteous proprietor may conduct him to the second story where a bust of Milton is placed over the spot where he was born.

A little farther south, on the corner of Watling Street, is the site of All Hallows Church, where Milton was baptised, and which is marked by a gray stone bust of the poet and the inscription:

“Milton
Born in Bread Street
1608
Baptised in Church of All Hallows
Which Stood here Ante
1878.”

The register of his baptism referred to him as “John, sonne of John Mylton, Scrivener.”

Here the Milton family sat every Sunday and listened to the sermons of Reverend Richard Stocke, a zealous Puritan and most respected man, who is said to have had the gift of influencing young people.

Further south, on the same side as All Hallows, were “six almshouses builded for poor decayed brethren of the Salter’s Company,” and beyond this the church of St. Mildred, the Virgin. Upon crossing Basing Lane, Milton saw the most noted house upon the street, known as “Gerrard Hall.” This was an antique structure “built upon arched vaults and with arched gates of stone brought from Caen in Normandy,” as Stow relates. A giant is said to have lived here, and the large fir pole in the high hall, which reached to the roof, was said to have been his staff. Stow thought it worth while to measure it, and declares it was fifteen inches in circumference. Small boys in Bread Street may well have stood in awe of such a cane.

Whether the famous “Mermaid” Tavern was in Bread or Friday Street or between them seems doubtful, but Ben Jonson’s lines plainly indicate Bread Street:

“At Bread-street’s Mermaid having dined and merry,
Proposed to go to Holborn in a wherry.”

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OLD ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL

The two upper views show the porch by Inigo Jones. The two lower views show the “Lesser Cloisters.” Milton’s school stood at the rear of the church.

From an old engraving.

As Milton was early destined for the Church, his unusually thoughtful disposition and quick perception must have given promise of his fulfillment of his father’s hope. At the age of ten he was writing verses. At this time, a Dutch painter, Jansen, reputed to be “equal to Van Dyck in all except freedom of hand and grace,” was employed to paint the scrivener’s little son, as well as James I. and his children and various noblemen.

This portrait shows us a sweet-faced, sober little Puritan in short-cropped auburn hair, wearing a broad lace frill about his neck, and an elaborately braided jacket. This portrait is now in private hands, from whence it is to be hoped that it will some day find its way to the National Portrait Gallery, and be placed beside the striking and noble likeness of the poet in middle life.

The lines which were written beneath the first engraving of it may have been the poet’s own:

“When I was yet a child, no childish play
To me was pleasing; all my mind was set
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do
What might be public good; myself I thought
Born to that end, born to promote all truth
And righteous things.”

Milton appears to have been very fond of his preceptor, a Scotch Puritan named Young. He seems to have well grounded the lad in Latin, aroused in him a love of poetry, and set him to making English and Latin verses. But the little John must go to school with other boys; and what more natural than that the famous St. Paul’s School, within five minutes’ walk, should have been selected?

When Milton went to school in 1620, St. Paul’s Cathedral was become old and much in need of restoration. It had been built on the site of an older church and was in process of erection and alteration from about 1090 to 1512, when its new wooden steeple, covered with lead, was completed. Its cross was estimated later by Wren to have been at least 460 feet from the ground. This had disappeared in a fire in 1561, and none replaced it. What Milton saw was a huge edifice, chiefly Gothic, with a central tower about 260 feet high. The classical porch by Inigo Jones was not added, neither were certain buildings which abutted the nave torn down until after Milton’s school-days were over. On the east end, next his schoolhouse, was a great window thirty-seven feet high, above which was a circular rose window. The choir stretched westward 224 feet, which, with the nave, made the entire length 580 feet. When Jones’s portico was added, its whole length was 620 feet. The area which it covered was 82,000 feet, and it was by far the largest cathedral in all England. Upon the southwest corner was a tower once used as a prison, and also as a bell and clock tower. This was the real Lollards’ tower, rather than the one at Lambeth which is so called. The northwest tower was likewise a prison. The nave was of transitional Norman design, of twelve bays in length, and with triforium and clerestory. For many decades a large part of the cathedral was desecrated by a throng of hucksters, idlers, and fops.

Ben Jonson makes constant allusion to “Paul’s.” Here he studied the extravagant costumes of the day. According to Dekker, the tailors frequented its aisles to catch the newest fashions: “If you determine to enter into a new suit, warn your tailor to attend you in Paul’s, who with his hat in his hand, shall like a spy discover the stuff, colour, and fashion of any doublet or hose that dare be seen there; and stepping behind a pillar to fill his table-book with those notes, will presently send you into the world an accomplished man.”

Bishop Earle, writing when Milton was twenty years of age, describes St. Paul’s as follows: “It is a heap of stones and men with a vast confusion of languages; and were the steeple not sanctified, nothing liker Babel. The noise in it is like that of bees mixed of walking tongues and feet. It is the exchange of all discourse, and no business whatsoever but is here stirring and afoot. It is the market of young lecturers, whom you may cheapen here at all rates and sizes. All inventions are emptied here, and not few pockets. The best sign of a temple in it is that it is the thieves’ sanctuary.”

Well may John Milton senior have cautioned his young son not to tarry in “Duke Humphrey’s Walk,” as this scene of confusion was called, on his way home from school, though he may well have taken him to inspect the lofty tomb of Dean Colet or the monuments to John of Gaunt and Duke Humphrey and the shrine of St. Erkenwald, which was behind the high altar. As a man, in later years, Milton may have walked down from Aldersgate on a December in 1641 and attended the funeral of the great painter, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who for nine years had made his residence in England, and was buried here.

In a corner of the churchyard stood a covered pulpit surmounted by a cross, where in ancient times the folkmote of the citizens was held. For centuries before Milton, this was a famous spot for outdoor sermons and proclamations. Here the captured flags from the Armada had waved above the preacher. But in 1629, when Milton was in Cambridge, Oliver Cromwell, in his maiden speech in Parliament, declared that flat popery was being preached at Paul’s Cross. When Cromwell’s day of power was come, and the cathedral during the war was sometimes used to stable horses, Paul’s Cross was swept away, and its leaden roof melted into bullets. Before that, in 1633, preaching had been removed from there into the choir.

Of the architecture of the bishop’s palace, which stood at the northeast of the cathedral, we know nothing, but we know that it existed in Milton’s school-days. Adjoining the palace was a “Haw,” or small enclosure surrounded by a cloister, filled with tombs, and upon the walls was a grisly picture of the Dance of Death. Death was represented by a skeleton, who led the Pope, and emperor, and a procession of men of all conditions. In brief, the little “Haw” was a small edition of the Pisan Campo Santo.

At the east end of the churchyard stood the Bell Tower, surmounted by a spire covered with lead and bearing a statue of St. Paul. The cloister of the Chapter House or Convocation House hid the west wall of the south transept and part of the nave. It was, unlike most structures of that character, two stories in height, and formed a square of some ninety feet, which was called the “Lesser Cloisters,” doubtless to distinguish it from the other cloisters in the “Haw.” During his most impressionable years, the city boy John Milton could not have stirred from home without being confronted by majestic symbols of the Christian faith, and mighty structures already venerable with age, and rich in treasures of a great historic past. Religion and beauty played as large a part in the influences that moulded the life of his young contemporaries as science and athletics do in the life of every American boy to-day. Whatever faults the methods of education in Milton’s age may be accused of, it can not be denied that they developed industry, reverence, and moral courage—three qualities which with all our child study and pedagogical improvements are perhaps less common to-day than they were then.

About the year 1620, when William Bradford was writing his famous journal, and John Carver and Edward Winslow were sailing with him in the Mayflower, when Doctor Harvey had told London folk that man’s blood circulates, and many new things were being noised abroad, twelve-year-old John Milton first went to school. His school had been founded in 1512 by Dean Colet, whose great tomb, just mentioned, was but a stone’s throw distant. It was a famous school. Ben Jonson and the famous Camden had studied there, and learned Latin and Greek, the catechism, and good manners. There were 153 boys in all; the number prescribed had reference, curiously, to the number of fishes in Simon Peter’s miraculous draught. Over the windows were inscribed the words in large capital letters: “Schola Catechizationis Puerorum In Christi Opt. Max. Fide Et Bonis Literis.” On entering, the pupils were confronted by the motto painted on each window: “Aut Doce, Aut Disce, Aut Discede”—either teach or learn or leave the place. There were two rooms, one called the vestibulum, for the little boys, where also instruction was given in Christian manners. In the main schoolroom the master sat at the further end upon his imposing chair of office called a cathedra, and under a bust of Colet said to have been a work of “exquisite art.” Stow tells us that somewhat before Milton’s time the master’s wages were a mark a week and a livery gown of four nobles delivered in cloth; his lodgings were free. The sub-master received weekly six shillings, eight pence, and was given his gown. Children of every nationality were eligible; on admission they passed an examination in reading, writing, and the catechism, and paid four pence, which went to the poor scholar who swept the school. The eight classes included boys from eight to eighteen years of age, though the curriculum of the school extended over only six years. Milton’s master was Doctor Alexander Gill, who from 1608-1635 held the mastership of St. Paul’s School. A progressive man was this same reverend gentleman—a great believer in his native English and in spelling reform. Speaking of Latin, this remarkable Latin master said: “We may have the same treasure in our own tongue. I love Rome, but London better. I favour Italy, but England more. I honour the Latin, but worship the English.” He was also an advocate of the retention of good old Saxon words as against the invasion of Latinised ones. “But whither,” he writes, “have you banished those words which our forefathers used for these new-fangled ones? Are our words to be exiled like our citizens? O ye Englishmen, retain what yet remains of our native speech!” Under Mr. Gill’s instruction, and that of his son, who was usher, Milton spent about four years of strenuous study. So great was his ambition for learning during the years when most boys find school hours alone irksome enough that he says: “My father destined me when a little boy for the study of humane letters, which I seized with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight; which indeed was the first cause of injury to my eyes, to whose natural weakness there were also added frequent headaches.” Philips writes:

“He generally sat up half the night as well in voluntary improvements of his own choice as the exact perfecting of his school exercises; so that at the age of fifteen he was full ripe for academical training.” During these years the boy probably learned French and Italian, as well as made a beginning in Hebrew.

It was in his last year at school that he paraphrased the ninety-fourth Psalm, beginning:

“When the blest seed of Terah’s faithful son
After long toil their liberty had won,
And passed from Pharian fields to Canaan’s land
Led by the strength of the Almighty’s hand,
Jehovah’s wonders were in Israel shown,
His praise and glory were in Israel known.”

Likewise Psalm one hundred and thirty-six, beginning:

“Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord, for he is kind:
For his mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.”

The present St. Paul’s School is now splendidly housed in a great establishment in Hammersmith. But Milton’s school and the one which arose on its ashes after the Great Fire are remembered by the following inscription: “On this site, A. D. 1512 to A. D. 1884, stood St. Paul’s School, founded by Dr. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul’s.” From the studio of Mr. Hamo Thornycroft at Kensington, whence came the heroic figures of Cromwell at Westminster and King Alfred at Winchester, St. Paul’s School is to receive a noble statue of the great scholar.

CHAPTER III.

MILTON AT CAMBRIDGE

he schoolmate whom Milton most loved was a physician’s son, Charles Diodati, almost exactly his own age, who went to Cambridge a little in advance of him.

After his sister, who was then eighteen years old, had been wooed and won by Mr. Philips, and had made the first break in the home on Spread Eagle Court, Milton, now sixteen years old, followed his friend to Cambridge. Doubtless he rode on the coach, which every week the hale old stage-coach driver—Hobson—drove from the Bull’s Inn on Bishopsgate Street. A well-to-do man was this worthy, who, in spite of eighty winters, still cracked his whip behind his span, and kept forty horses in his livery stable. Milton took a great fancy to him. He soon learned, as did every young gentleman intent on hiring a nag, that “Hobson’s choice” meant taking the horse that stood nearest the stable door. Hobson is said to have been the first man in England to let out hackney-coaches. The modern visitor to the university town finds the old carrier honoured by a memorial; for he became a public benefactor, and among many generous gifts bequeathed a sum that to this day provides for a fine conduit and for the runnels of sparkling water that flow along the streets and around the town.[1]

Under the mastership of Doctor Thomas Bainbrigge, Milton became a “lesser pensioner” in February, 1624, at Christ’s College. Students were classified according to social rank and ability to pay, and Milton stood above the poorer students, called “sizars,” who had inferior accommodation; he probably paid about £50 a year for his maintenance. Christ’s College, as regards numbers, then stood nearly at the head of the sixteen colleges and had one master, thirteen fellows, and fifty-five scholars, which, together with students, made the number two hundred and sixty, about the same that it has to-day. It stands between Sidney Sussex College and Emmanuel. In the former, Cromwell studied, from April, 1616, to July, 1617, and the room with its bay window and deep window-seats and little bedroom opening out of it, which is said to have been his, may still be seen in the second story of the building next to the street. The window is modern. His portrait, painted in middle life, hangs in the dining-hall. Doctor William Everett, in what is the best book on life in Cambridge,—his “On the Cam,”—thus sums up his estimate of the Protector: “Bigots may defame him, tyrants may insult him, but when the hosts of God rise for their great review and the champions of liberty bear their scars, there shall stand in the foremost rank, shining as the brightness of the firmament, the majestic son of Cambridge, the avenger and protector, Oliver Cromwell.” A Royalist has written in a note that is appended to Cromwell’s name in the college books: “Hic fuit grandis ille impostor carnifex perditissimus;” and it is as “impostor” and “butcher” that two-thirds of Englishmen would have described him before Carlyle resurrected the real man.

Emmanuel College is preëminently the Puritan college. It is dear to Americans as the one where William Blackstone, the learned hermit of Shawmut, John Harvard, the founder of Harvard College, and Henry Dunster, its first president, Bradstreet, the colonial governor, and Hugh Peters, the regicide, who lived in Boston, once studied. Here also Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, was a student, and here John Cotton was a fellow. This beloved preacher afterward left his ministry over St. Botolph’s Church in Boston, England, to go to the little settlement of Winthrop’s, which had changed its earlier names of “Shawmut” and “Trimountaine” to “Boston” before his arrival. American tourists, who find their way to the spacious grounds of Jesus College to see the Burne-Jones and Morris windows in the chapel, will be glad to note that in these stately halls John Eliot walked a student. Little he then dreamed of his future life in wigwams, a guest of mugwumps, in the forests of Natick, Massachusetts, and of the laborious years to be spent in turning Hebrew poetry and history and gospel message into their barbarous tongue. Francis Higginson, the minister to Salem, and the ancestor of Colonel Thomas W. Higginson, studied here as well. John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts colony, and President Chauncy of Harvard College studied at Trinity a generation before Wren erected its great library, and Isaac Newton was a student there. John Norton, Cotton’s successor at the First Church, Boston, studied in Peterhouse, the oldest of all the colleges, and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, entered Pembroke College the year before Milton entered Christ’s. Whether the two, whose lives were to touch so closely later, knew each other then or not is doubtful. William Brewster was the only man who came in the Mayflower who had a college education. He too studied at Cambridge; and so did John Robinson, the dearly loved pastor of the Pilgrims, who remained with the other English refugees at Leyden.

It was these men, with Shepard, Saltonstall, and a score more of Oxford and Cambridge men, who were the spiritual fathers of Samuel Adams, Warren, Otis, Hancock; of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Channing, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks; of Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, and Hawthorne; of Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner; of Motley, Bancroft, Prescott, and John Fiske. The Cambridge that Milton knew was the mother and the grandmother of the founders of states and of the architects of national constitutions and ideals.

Though most of the New England Puritan leaders came from Cambridge, Oxford furnished several of the great Puritans who remained at home—Pym, Vane, John Eliot, and Hampden.

It is estimated that nearly one hundred university men, between 1630 and 1647, left their comfortable homes and the allurements that Oxford, Cambridge, and the picturesque England of their time presented, to undergo the hardships of pioneers in the raw colony upon Massachusetts Bay. Of these, two-thirds came from Cambridge, a particularly large proportion from Emmanuel College. Of the forty or fifty Cambridge or Oxford men who were in Massachusetts in 1639, one-half were within five miles of Boston or Cambridge. It was this element of culture and character that determined the history of New England, and forced its stony soil to bring forth such a crop of men in the ages that were to come as made New England, in the words of Maurice, “the realisation in plain prose of the dreams which haunted Milton his whole life long.”

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CHRIST’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

A, Chapel; B, Library; C, Dining-Hall; D, Head Master’s Rooms; E, Kitchen; F, Master’s Garden; H, Tennis Court.

From an old engraving.

Sidney Sussex, Christ’s, and Emmanuel Colleges were erected during the Tudor period, Christ’s College, founded in 1505, being the earliest of the three. The buildings of the latter now present a more commonplace appearance than when the “Lady of Christ’s,” as the students called young Milton, walked among them in his cap and gown. One still may climb the narrow, shabby stairway to the room, with a tiny, irregular bedroom and cupboard, where Milton lived, and which probably he shared with a roommate. It has no inscription or special mark, and probably few strangers seek it out. The visitor will note its two windows opposite each other, whose heavy window-frames, with the wainscoting and cornice, bear mark of age.

No one, however, fails to seek within the secluded inner garden the decrepit mulberry-tree, which is said to have been planted by Milton. Its trunk is muffled high in a mound of sod, and its aged limbs, which still bear foliage and black berries, rest on supports. High, sheltering walls shut in the exquisite green lawns around it, and birds, blossoms, and trees make the spot seem a paradise regained.

Among the students of Christ’s College, none in later years brought it such renown as two men of widely differing types—the authors of “Evidences of Christianity” and “The Origin of Species.” William Paley in 1766, when he was but twenty-three years old, was elected a fellow, and remained in Cambridge ten years. His famous work to-day forms part of the subjects required for the “Little Go.” Charles Robert Darwin, the Copernicus of the nineteenth century, entered Christ’s with the intention of studying for the ministry. He left it to journey on the Beagle through the southern seas, and to bring back results which, with his later study, led to such a revolution in human thought as made it only second to that wrought in the minds of men who lived a generation before Milton was born.

Masson tells us that in Milton’s college days the daily routine was chapel service at five o’clock in the morning, followed sometimes by a discourse by one of the fellows, then breakfasts, probably served in the students’ own rooms, as they are to-day. This was followed by the daily college lectures or university debates, which lasted until noon, when dinner was served in the college dining-halls; there the young men, then as now, sat upon the hard, backless benches, and drank their beer beneath painted windows and portraits, perchance by Holbein, of the eminent men who had been their predecessors.

After dinner, if they supped at seven, and attended evening service, they could do much as they pleased otherwise. In Milton’s day, the rule of an earlier time, which prescribed that out of their chambers students should converse in some dead language, had been much relaxed. Probably the barbarous Latin and worse Greek and Hebrew, which this prescription must have caused, finally rendered it a dead letter. Smoking was a universal practice, and boxing matches, dancing, bear fights, and other forbidden games were not unknown. Bathing in the sedgy little Cam was prohibited, but was nevertheless a daily practice.

In many colleges the undergraduates wore “new fashioned gowns of any colour whatsoever, blue or green, or red or mixt, without any uniformity but in hanging sleeves; and their other garments light and gay, some with boots and spurs, others with stockings of divers colours reversed one upon another.” Some had “fair roses upon the shoe, long frizzled hair upon the head, broad spread bands upon their shoulders, and long, large merchants’ ruffs about their necks, with fair feminine cuffs at the wrist.”

The portrait of Milton, which hangs in a spacious apartment used by the dons at Christ’s College, shows him a youth of rare beauty, in a rich and tasteful costume with broad lace collar. He holds a gilt-edged volume in his hand, and has the mien of a refined and elegant scholar, but not effeminate withal, for he was used to daily sword practice.

Corporal punishment was then still in vogue, and delinquents under eighteen years old were not infrequently chastised in public. In fact, at Trinity College, “there was a regular service of corporal punishment in the hall every Thursday evening at seven in the presence of all the undergraduates.” Masson discredits the story that Milton was once subjected to corporal punishment.

In Milton’s day the old order was changing, and we note that on Fridays men ate meat, and that the clergy indulged in impromptu prayers, to the scandal of the good churchmen. It was complained that “they lean or sit or kneel at prayers, every man in a several posture as he pleases; at the name of Jesus, few will bow, and when the Creed is repeated, many of the boys, by men’s directions, turn to the west door.”

Milton seems to have attended plays at the university, and to have been a critical observer. Toland quotes him as saying: “So many of the young divines and those in next aptitude to Divinity have been seen so often on the stage writhing and unboning their Clergy Lims to all the antic and dishonest Gestures of Trinculos, Buffoons, and bands; prostituting the shame of that ministry which either they had or were nigh having, to the eyes of Courtiers and Court Ladies, with their grooms and Mademoiselles. There where they acted and overacted among other young Scholars, I was a Spectator; they thought themselves gallant Men and I thought them Fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticisms, they were out and I hist.”

It is the boast of Cambridge that she educated Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, the three martyrs whom Oxford burned. It must likewise be noted that Erasmus, Spenser, Coke, Walsingham, and Burleigh were Cambridge men.

The Cambridge of Milton’s time was but a small town of seven thousand inhabitants, about one-sixth of its present size, but rich with a history of nearly six hundred years. Its most beautiful building then as now was King’s College Chapel—in fact, the most beautiful building in either Oxford or Cambridge, despite Mr Ruskin’s just criticism upon it. No doubt, it would look less like a dining-table bottom-side up, with its four legs in air, were two of its pinnacles omitted; doubtless also the same criticism on its monotonous decoration of the alternate rose and portcullis, which we made in regard to the Chapel of Henry VII., is here applicable. But its great length, its noble proportions, its rare rich windows, its splendid organ-screen—old in Milton’s college days—must appeal to every lover of beauty. One loves to think of the young poet musing here upon those well-known lines in “Il Penseroso” which this stately building may have inspired.

“But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloisters pale,
And love the high, embowered roof,
With antick pillars massy proof,
And storied windows, richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow,
To the full voiced Quire below,
In service high and anthem clear,
As may with sweetness through mine ear
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before mine eyes.”

In King’s Chapel Queen Elizabeth attended service several times, and listened with delight to a Latin sermon from the text “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” On the afternoon of the same Sunday she returned to the antechapel and witnessed a play of Plautus.

Among many buildings which were very old even in Milton’s time must be mentioned the church of St. Benedict on Bene’t Street, which was once the chapel of Corpus Christi College. Its ancient tower is especially noteworthy. Its little double windows are separated by a baluster-shaped column. The tower is similar to one at Lincoln, and, with the whole structure, antedates the Norman conquest.

A generation before Milton’s time Robert Browne, the father of Congregationalism, drew great crowds within this venerable edifice to listen to his radical doctrine. At Cambridge, where he had studied, he became impressed with the perfunctoriness and worldliness of the Church of his time, and he resolved to “satisfy his conscience without any regard to license or authority from a bishop.”

When the Pilgrim Fathers fled from Austerfield and Scrooby in 1608, it was as Brownists or Separatists that they went to Holland. They sought a refuge where they might worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience, without interference of bishop or presbyter. It was Browne’s doctrine, not only of the absolute separation of Church and state, but also of the independence of each individual congregation, that laid the foundation of church government in New England. Presbyterianism has gained little root east of the Hudson. After Browne had suffered for his faith in thirty of the dismal dungeons of that day, and, shattered in mind by his suffering, had recanted and returned to Mother Church, his disciples remained true to the light that he had shown them; the generation of scholars with whom Milton talked at Cambridge were as familiar with Browne’s doctrine as the present generation is with that of Maurice and Martineau, and Milton must have been much influenced by it.

Opposite St. John’s Chapel is the little round church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is the earliest of the four churches in England built by the Templars which still remain. It is similar to the Temple church in London, and was probably begun a little later than St. Benedict’s, which has just been mentioned. It is questionable whether the students of Milton’s college days appreciated the beauty of this beautiful remnant of the Norman period that was in their midst. The taste of that day was decidedly for architecture of the Renaissance type, of which Cambridge boasts many examples.

In Milton’s time the most beautiful quadrangle in Cambridge, and perhaps in the world, that of Trinity, had been but newly finished by the architect, Ralph Symons, who altered and harmonised a group of older buildings. In the centre of the court is Neville’s fountain, built in 1602, which is a fine example of good English Renaissance work. During four years of Milton’s residence, part of St. John’s College was in process of erection in the Italian Gothic style. This was at the expense of the Lord Keeper Williams, whose initials and the date, 1624, are lettered in white stone near the western oriel. It was completed in 1628. Clare Bridge was not finished until 1640, and most of the other beautiful bridges that span the Cam to-day were unknown to Milton when he mused beside its shady banks where

“Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,
His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge
Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.”

Only fifteen miles away, across the level fields, lay Ely Cathedral, built on what was once hardly more than an island in the Fens. Many a time during his seven years in the university town must Milton have walked over there, or ridden on one of Hobson’s horses, perhaps with his dear Charles Diodati, to view the mighty structure, or to study its Norman interior. Its gray towers and octagonal lantern dominate the little town that clusters around it, and may be seen from far across the plain.

During these studious years, while Milton walked among the colleges where Chaucer, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Erasmus had likewise walked as students, he was not only busied with logic, philosophy, and the literature of half a dozen living and dead languages, but his tender emotions seem to have been briefly touched by some unknown fair one; and his interest in public matters, for instance, Sir John Eliot’s imprisonment in the Tower, is evident. In one letter he mentions the execution of a child but nine years old, for setting fire to houses. A scourge of the plague afflicted London on the year that he entered Cambridge, and five years later he was driven from town by its devastation there. The university ceased all exercises, and the few members of it that remained shut themselves in as close prisoners. So great was the poverty and suffering incident to this calamity, that the king appealed to the country for aid to the stricken town.

During these years of quiet growth, Milton’s first noteworthy poems appear, of which the Latin poems, according to good judges, deserve the preference. We here mention only some of his English poems. The longest of these, which was written the month and year when he came to his majority, was begun on Christmas morning, 1629. This serious youth of twenty-one longed to give “a birthday gift for Christ,” and thus appeared his poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Three or four years earlier he had written on the death of his baby niece, Mrs. Philips’s child, his lines “On the Death of a Fair Infant.” The revelation of self in his sonnet “On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-Three,” makes the latter the most interesting of these early flights of song.

The most precious literary treasure which Cambridge possesses, and as Mr. Edmund Gosse asserts, “the most precious manuscript of English literature in the world,” is the packet of thirty loose and ragged folio leaves covered with Milton’s handwriting, which since 1691 has lain in Trinity College Library. For a generation, they attracted no attention, but later they were examined and handled by so many that they suffered seriously; within fifty years, seventeen lines of “Comus” were torn out and stolen by some unknown thief. Mr. Gosse, in a delightful article in the Atlantic Monthly, upon “The Milton Manuscripts at Cambridge,” gives reins to his imagination in picturing the sudden temptation of this man, who, passing down the long ranges of “storied urn and animated bust,” which adorn the interior of Wren’s famous structure, advances beyond the beautiful figure of the youthful Byron to the gorgeous window in which the form of Isaac Newton shines resplendent. The careless attendant places in his hands the richly bound thin folio,—“and now the devil is raging in the visitor’s bosom; the collector awakens in him, the bibliomaniac is unchained. In an instant the unpremeditated crime is committed.... And so he goes back to his own place certain that sooner or later his insane crime will be discovered ... certain of silent infamy and unaccusing outlawry, with no consolation but that sickening fragment of torn verse which he can never show to a single friend, can never sell nor give nor bequeath. Among literary criminals, I know not another who so burdens the imagination as this wretched mutilator of ‘Comus.’” These pages are the laboratory or studio of the poet, and reveal most interestingly the progress of his art during his earlier creative years. Like Beethoven’s note-book, they teach the impatient and inaccurate that genius condescends carefully to note little things and to take infinite pains, whether it be with symphonies or sonnets. Charles Lamb, on looking over the Milton manuscripts, whimsically recorded his astonishment that these lines had not fallen perfect and polished from the poet’s pen. “How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure!” But the average man, who despairs of ever attaining artistic excellence, and finds every kind of literary composition a formidable task, takes consolation in the fact here revealed, that even the creator of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” before he reached the perfect phrase,—“endless morn of light,”—experimented with no less than six others: “ever-endless light,” “ever glorious,” “uneclipsèd,” “where day dwells without night,” and “in cloudless birth of night.” The authorities of Trinity College, having of late realised the invaluable service to men of letters that this glimpse into the poet’s workshop would be, have issued a limited edition, in sumptuous form, of a perfect facsimile of the Milton manuscripts. “Now, for the first time,” as Mr. Gosse remarks, “we can examine in peace, and without a beating heart and blinded eyes, the priceless thing in its minutest features.” When it is remembered that no line of Shakespeare’s remains in his own handwriting, and nothing of any consequence of Chaucer’s or Spenser’s, Mr. Gosse cannot be accused of over-statement when he says that to all lovers of literature this volume is “a relic of inestimable value. To those who are practically interested in the art of verse, it reads a more pregnant lesson than any other similar document in the world.”

Some day the great university may add to its charms not only an adequate memorial to its Puritans, but one to its poets—Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson, who have enriched it by their presence, and have made Cambridge par excellence the university of the poets. It must be remembered that Chaucer and Shakespeare were not university men.

The time for a pilgrimage to Cambridge is term time, when window-boxes, gay with blossoms, brighten gray old walls within the “quads,” and when the streets are enlivened by three thousand favoured youths intent on outdoor sport. Then all points of interest are accessible, and perchance one may be so fortunate as to get entrance up narrow, worn stone stairways into some student’s cosy study; the visitor will find it lined with books, rackets, and boxing-gloves, and decorated with trophies and photographs of some one else’s sister. Bits of college gossip and local slang, hints of college traditions, prejudices, and customs pleasantly vary the tourist’s hours spent over the fine print of Baedeker and in search for the tombs of eminent founders.

Even if one is a tourist and not a “fresher,” he will find it profitable to study contemporary Cambridge through “The Fresher’s Don’t,” written by “A Sympathiser, B. A.,” and addressed to freshers “in all courtesy.” As to dress, the “fresher,” among other pieces of sage advice, is told: “Don’t forget to cut the tassel of your cap just level with the board. Only graduates wear long tassels.”

“Don’t wear knickerbockers with cap and gown, nor carry a stick or umbrella. These are stock eccentricities of Fresherdom.” (The genuine Cambridge student would rather be soaked to his skin and risk pneumonia, than encounter the derisive grin which an umbrella would evoke.)

“Don’t aspire to seniority by smashing your cap or tearing your gown, as you deceive no one.”

“Don’t be a tuft-head. The style is more favoured by errand boys than gentlemen.”

“Don’t by any chance sport a tall hat in Cambridge. It will come to grief.”

Under other headings, the following injunctions may be selected:

“Don’t sport during your first month. You will only earn the undesirable appellation of ‘Smug.’”

“Don’t speak disrespectfully of a man ‘Who only got a third in his Trip., and so can’t be very good.’ Before you go down your opinion will be ‘That a man must be rather good to take the Trip. at all.’”

“Don’t mistake a Don for a Gyp. The Gyp is the smarter individual.”

“Don’t forget that St. Peter’s College is ‘Pot-House,’ Caius is ‘Keys,’ St. Catherine’s is ‘Cats,’ Magdalene is ‘Maudlen,’ St. John’s College Boat Club is ‘Lady Margaret,’ and a science man is taking ‘Stinks.’”

“Don’t forget that Cambridge men ‘keep’ and not ‘live.’”

CHAPTER IV.

MILTON AT HORTON

n leaving Cambridge, when he was nearly twenty-four years old, Milton retired to his father’s new home at Horton, about seventeen miles west of London. Here he tells us that, “with every advantage of leisure, I spent a complete holiday in turning over the Greek and Latin writers; not but that I sometimes exchanged the country for the town, either for the purpose of buying books, or for that of learning something new in mathematics, or in music, in which sciences I then delighted.”

As Milton’s father was in easy circumstances his son never earned money until after he was thirty-two years of age. These free and quiet years at Horton, when he was his own master, and was without a care, were the happiest of his life.

The visitor from London now alights at the little station of Wraysbury, and if it be upon a July 4th, as when the writer made a pilgrimage to Horton, he will find no pleasanter way to celebrate the day than to stroll through level fields by the green country roadside a mile and a half to the little hamlet among the trees. On the way he will espy to the left, on the horizon, the gray towers of Windsor, and may imagine the handsome young poet, whose verse has glorified this quiet rural landscape, pausing some morning in the autumn on his early walk to listen to the far sound of the huntsman’s horn, and presently to see the merry rout of gaily clad dames and cavaliers dash by, leaping fearlessly the hedgerows and barred gates.

Horton is a tiny, tranquil village, with little that remains to-day, outside the ancient parish church, that John Milton saw, except the Horton manor-house of the Bulstrode family, which had had connections with Horton from the time of Edward VI. The modern Milton manor, situated in beautiful grounds, may or may not stand upon the site of Milton’s former home, which remained until 1798, when it was pulled down. The old tavern of uncertain date upon the one broad street may perhaps have gathered around its antique hob, within the little taproom, gray-haired peasants who guided clumsy ploughs through the rich loam of the fields of Horton, while the white-handed poet sat on a velvet lawn under leafy boughs, and penned his blithe tribute to the nightingale, or in imagination sported with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the shepherds, sprites, and nymphs who peopled his youthful dreams.

As in Cambridge, runnels of clear water, which come from the little river Colne not far distant, flow beside the road. Even to-day one has not far to seek to find the suggestion for those exquisite lines in “Comus” which Milton wrote in Horton:

“By the rushy-fringèd bank,
Where grows the willow and the osier dank,
My sliding chariot stays,
Thick set with agate and the azurn sheen
Of turkis blue and emerald green
That in the channel strays:
Whilst from off the waters fleet
Thus I set my printless feet
O’er the cowslip’s velvet head
That bends not as I tread.”

The student of Milton finds the centre of interest in Horton to-day to be the beautiful old church where the Milton family attended service for five years, and where the mother lies buried.

It stands in the green churchyard, back from the village street. Yew-trees and rose-bushes lend it shade and fragrance. The tombs for the most part are not moss-grown with age, but are rather new, though the slab at the entrance over which Milton passed is marked “1612.” The battlemented stone tower is draped with ivy and topped with reddish brick. Like scores of churches of the twelfth or thirteenth century, in which it was built, the gabled portico is on the side. The interior is well-preserved; it has a nave with two aisles and a chancel, and in the porch is an old Norman arch. Upon the wall at the rear are wooden tablets which record curious bequests of small annuities for monthly doles of bread to needy people.

Never since those five joyous years at Horton has any English poet blessed the world with verse of such rare loveliness and perfection as fell from the pen of Milton during this time, when spirit, heart, and mind were in attune. The world’s clamour had not broken in upon his peace.

Probably at the request of his friend, the composer Lawes, he wrote his “Arcades” in honour of the Countess Dowager of Derby, who had been Spenser’s friend. The venerable lady lived about ten miles north of Horton on her fine old estate of Harefield, where Queen Elizabeth had visited her and her husband. On that occasion a masque of welcome had been performed for her in an avenue of elms, which thus received the name of the “Queen’s Walk.” It was in this verdant theatre that Milton’s “Arcades” was performed by the young relatives of the countess. Among these were Lady Alice and her boy-brothers, who on the following year took part in Milton’s “Comus,” which he wrote anonymously to be played at Ludlow Castle upon the Welsh border, when the children’s father was installed as lord president of Wales. Besides these longer poems, Milton wrote his “Il Penseroso” and “L’Allegro” at Horton, as well as the noble elegy “Lycidas,” which was written in memory of his gifted friend, Edward King, who was drowned in the summer of 1637, just before Milton left his father’s home.

In this peaceful valley of the Thames, his clear eye searched out every sight, his musical ear sought out every sound that revealed beauty or that suggested the antique, classic world in which his whole nature revelled. He walked in “twilight groves” of “pine or monumental oak;” he listened to “soft Lydian airs” and curfew bells, to the lark’s song, and Philomel’s. He watched “the nibbling flocks,” the “labouring clouds,” and saw, “bosomed high in tufted trees,” towers and battlements arise, and beheld in vision his—

“Sabrina fair,...
Under the glassy, cool translucent wave
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of her amber dropping hair.”

He lived in a world enchanted by the magic of his genius. Yet in his little world of loveliness he was not deaf to the distant hoarse cry of the coming storm, and at the last the Puritan within him awoke and cried out at those—

“who little reckoning make
Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feast ...
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheephook—or have learnt aught else the least
That to the faithful herds-man’s art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs,
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;
The hungry sheep look up and are not fed
But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw
Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread.”

In the spring of 1637, the last year that the poet spent at Horton, just before another outbreak of the plague, his mother died. We may think of brother Christopher, a young student of laws of the Inner Temple, and the widowed sister Anne and her two boys coming post-haste from London, and standing beside the desolate father and the poet-brother in the chancel, when the tabernacle of clay was lowered to its resting-place. A plain blue stone now bears the record: “Heare lyeth the Body of Sarah Milton, the wife of John Milton, who died the 3rd of April, 1637.”

The American visitor to Horton on the day that commemorates his country’s declaration of independence will remember Runnymede and Magna Charta Island. And he will find nothing more consonant with his feeling, after visiting the home of the republican Milton, than to wend his way across the fields, golden with waving grain and gay with scarlet poppies, to the spot where his ancestors and Milton’s in 1215 brought tyrant John to sullen submission to their just demands.

On the margin of the river he may embark, and as the sun casts grateful shadows eastward, he may drift gently down beside the long, narrow island in the rushy margin of the stream, where white swans build their nests. A notice warns him not to trespass, for the gray stone house upon it, whose gables are half hid by dense shrubbery, is private property. Some day perhaps this English nation that so loves its own great history will reclaim this historic spot, and mark Magna Charta Island with a memorial of the brave men who made it world-famous. Or perhaps,—who knows?—some American, who has spent three years at Oxford, and learned to love the history of the race from which he sprang, may be impelled to honour that which is best in her, and after placing in Cambridge and in Horton fit memorials of Milton, may be moved to erect here a worthy monument to the bold barons.

CHAPTER V.

MILTON ON THE CONTINENT.—IN ST. BRIDE’S CHURCHYARD.—AT ALDERSGATE STREET.—THE BARBICAN.—HOLBORN.—SPRING GARDENS

ne year after his mother’s death, and probably just after Christopher’s wedding, the poet, now a man of thirty, arrived in Paris, accompanied by his servant, and bearing valuable letters of introduction, among others, some from Sir Henry Wotton. As we are dealing with Milton’s England, scant space must be allowed to this year or more spent among the savants and the unwonted sights of France and Italy. In Paris the young scholar was introduced by Lord Scudamore to the man whom he most desired to see,—the great Hugo Grotius, a man of stupendous erudition and lofty character. Milton declared that he venerated him more than any modern man, and well he might, for the Dutch hero and exile had not his equal upon the Continent, even in that age of great men.

Passing through Provence, Milton entered Italy from Nice, and found himself in the land whose melodious language he had made his own, and whose history and literature few Italians of his age knew better than he. He went to Genoa, “La Superba,” which then boasted of two hundred palaces; thence to Leghorn, and fourteen miles farther to Pisa on the Arno, and, farther up the Arno, to beautiful Florence. Here he paused two months, lionised by the best society, and hobnobbing with painters, poets, prelates, and noblemen as he walked in Santa Croce, or on the heights of Fiesole, or in the leafy shade of Vallombrosa. Here it was that he was presented to the blind Galileo, “grown old,” he writes, “a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.” Doubtless, in later years, when blindness and royal disfavour had embittered but failed to crush his spirit, the gray-haired poet often recalled this visit made in his radiant youth.

Going by way of Siena, on its rocky height, Milton passed on to Rome in the autumn, and here spent two months in the splendid city of the Popes, in which great St. Peter’s was but newly finished. The city swarmed with priests and prelates, but the poet spoke freely of his own faith. One of his great joys was to listen to the incomparable singing of Leonora Baroni, the Jenny Lind of his time, to whom he wrote exuberant panegyrics in Latin.

In November, Milton drove to Naples, a hundred miles away, where he was favoured with the hospitality of the aged Manso, the friend of Tasso, and the wealthy patron of letters; he showed the young Englishman his beloved city, presented him with valuable gifts, and welcomed him in his villa at Pozzuoli, overlooking the bay of Naples.

Milton had planned to visit Sicily and Greece, but he writes: “The sad news of civil war coming from England called me back; for I considered it disgraceful that, while my fellow countrymen were fighting at home for liberty, I should be travelling abroad at ease for intellectual purposes.”

War, however, had not yet broken out, and Milton lingered another two months in Rome, little aware of the relics of the Cæsars that lay buried in the Forum under the cow-pasture of his time.

Another visit to Florence, where he was again the centre of attraction, was followed by trips to the quaint mediæval cities of Lucca, Ferrara, Bologna, and to Venice by the sea. Guido Reni, Guercino, Domenichino, and Salvator Rosa were then living, and he may have chanced upon them in his wanderings. From Venice he turned back through Verona and Milan, and paused a little in Geneva, which was still under the strong influence of its great reformer, Calvin; then he journeyed on to Paris, where a royal infant, Louis XIV., had been born during his travels. On reaching home, after this journey into the great splendid world full of temptations to every man who was dowered with keen susceptibilities and a passionate, vehement disposition, Milton writes: “I again take God to witness that in all those places where so many things are considered lawful, I lived sound and untouched from all profligacy and vice, having this thought perpetually with me, that though I could escape the eyes of men, I certainly could not the eyes of God.”

It was a chaste and modest love that inspired the six amatory sonnets in Italian, which were probably written during his stay abroad. It was a refined and high-bred man, who knew the world and took it at its just measure, who was now to lend his hand to fight the people’s battle.

On his return to England Milton did not take up his residence again in his father’s home at Horton, which was then kept by his younger brother and his wife. He went to London, and for a brief time made his home with a tailor named Russel in St. Bride’s Churchyard, near Fleet Street, within view of Ludgate Hill and St. Paul’s. Here in the winter of 1639-40 he began teaching the little Philips boys, his nephews, and took entire charge of his small namesake John, but eight years old. His sister Anne by this time had remarried, and was now Mrs. Agar. During his stay in St. Bride’s Churchyard, Milton jotted down on seven pages of the manuscript that is now in Trinity College Library suggestions for future work with which his brain was teeming. Of the ninety-nine subjects that he considered, sixty-one, including “Paradise Lost” and “Samson,” are Scriptural, and thirty-eight, including “Alfred and the Danes” and “Harold and the Normans,” are on British subjects. Like the young Goethe who projected “Faust,” which was not finished until his hair had whitened, Milton conceived his epic when it was to wait a quarter of a century for completion.

Says Edward Philips, the elder nephew whom he taught: “He made no long stay in his lodgings on St. Bride’s Churchyard: necessity of having a place to dispose his books in, and other goods fit for the furnishing of a good handsome house, hastening him to take one; and accordingly, a pretty garden-house he took in Aldersgate Street, at the end of an entry, and therefore the fitter for his turn, besides that there are few streets in London more free from noise than that.”

At that time the entrance to the street from St. Martin’s-le-Grand was one of the seven gates of the city wall. A new one, on the site of a far older one, had been erected when Milton was nine years old; this had “two square towers of four stories at the sides, pierced with narrow portals for the foot passengers and connected by a curtain of masonry of the same height across the street, having the main archway in the middle.” Besides the figures of Samuel and Jeremiah, the gate was adorned with an equestrian statue of James I. on the Aldersgate side, and the same monarch on his throne on the St. Martin’s-le-Grand side. In 1657 Howell says: “This street resembleth an Italian street more than any other in London, by reason of the spaciousness and uniformity of the buildings and straightness thereof, with the convenient distance of the houses.”

Amid the labyrinth of dingy, crowded alleys with which the garden spaces of the seventeenth century now are covered, one looks in vain to-day for any trace of Milton’s home; in short, of all the houses that he occupied in London, no one remains, or even has its site marked. All we know of the house on Aldersgate Street is, that it stood in the second precinct of St. Botolph’s parish, between the gate and Maidenhead Court on the right, and Little Britain and Westmoreland Alley on the left. Near by dwelt his old teacher, Doctor Gill, and Doctor Diodati, the father of his dearest friend, whose recent death he mourned in a touching elegy written in Latin. Upon his walks into the open fields, which were not then far distant, he must have passed many fine town houses of the gentry, their sites now covered by a dreary waste of shops and factories. During these years we learn that he varied his studies in the classics, and his keen observations on the doings of the newly assembled Long Parliament by an occasional “gaudy-day,” in company with some “young sparks of his acquaintance.”

It was in Aldersgate Street that Milton began writing his vehement pamphlets, and it was Thomas Underhill, at the sign of the “Bible” in Wood Street, Cheapside, who published the first polemics which he and young Sir Harry Vane sent forth upon the burning questions of the day, into which the scope of this volume forbids us to enter. Milton’s future career was a complete refutation of Wordsworth’s conception of him as a lonely star that dwelt apart. The gentle author of “Comus” and the composer of elegant sonnets had changed his quill for that “two-handed engine” which was to smite prelate and prince.

During these days the post brought daily news of the horrors of the insurrection in Ireland; Milton read “of two and twenty Protestants put into a thatched house and burnt alive” in the parish of Kilmore; of naked men and pregnant women drowned; of “eighteen Scotch infants hanged on clothiers’ tenterhooks;” of an Englishman, wife, and five children hanged, and buried when half alive; of eighty forced to go on the ice “till they brake the ice and were drowned.” These, and the hideous tortures upon thousands, which history relates, may explain, if they do not palliate the cruelties a few years later which Cromwell committed, and which have made his name synonymous with “monster” to this day throughout this much tormented and turbulent Irish people.

Americans who sharply condemn the devastation which old Oliver wrought will also do well to cry out no less loudly at the like barbaric slaughter in the island of Samar, which was ordered two hundred and fifty years later by some of their own officers.

War opened. There were doubtless anxious days in the house on Aldersgate Street, for brother Christopher, who stood with the royal party, had moved with his father from Horton to Reading, which was besieged. But war was not the sole cause for anxiety. When old Mr. Milton arrived safely in London late in the summer he found his son John married and already parted from his bride of seventeen, who had lived with him but one short month. Of the brief courting of Mary Powell at her father’s house at Forest Hill, near Oxford, we know little. But one day in May, when King Charles I. had driven her brothers and all other students out of Christ Church, and had taken up temporary residence there himself, the venturesome lover came into the enemy’s country and called on her. The family was well known to him; their comfortable mansion housed ten or eleven children and had fourteen rooms. We read of their “stilling-house,” “cheese-press house,” “wool-house,” of their two coaches, one wain, and four carts. It was a merry household, and one well-to-do in worldly goods.

Whether the girl was deeply enamoured of the grave, handsome man, twice her age, who asked her hand, is doubtful, but they were soon married, and in the Aldersgate house, the nephew relates, there was “feasting held for some days in celebration of the nuptials, and for entertainment of the bride’s friends.” Then the relatives bade the bride goodbye. But the young wife, having been brought up and lived “where there was a great deal of company and merriment, dancing, etc., when she came to live with her husband found it very solitary; no company came to her;” consequently at the end of a month her preoccupied husband gave consent to the girl’s request to pay a visit home, with the promise of returning in September.

Some sons of intimate friends joined the nephews as pupils, and the elder Milton was added to the household. But the bride declined to answer her husband’s letters or to return; during the following months the irate man, thus deserted, wrote his pamphlets on “Divorce,” while all England was astir with the meeting of the famous Westminster Assembly, the spread of Independency, and the king’s defeat at Marston Moor. During these days also Milton wrote his remarkable scheme for the education of gentlemen’s sons, in which he showed himself as radical and original and as ready to make learning a delightful and not an odious process as did Rousseau and Froebel a century or more later. Marvellous was the work accomplished by Milton’s young pupils at Aldersgate Street. We read of these boys of fourteen and sixteen, though even their learned teacher knew not yet of the microscope and the law of gravitation, studying not only Greek and Latin, but Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, and Italian.

Milton’s noble “Areopagitica”—a plea for freedom of the press—was written during these melancholy, wifeless months, while the din of civil war was in the air, and he mused in wrath and bitterness over his country’s miseries and his own.

The fortunes of the Powell family had waned with the king’s cause. One day, when Milton called on a relative who lived near by his home, on the site of the present post-office, “he was surprised,” writes his nephew, “to see one whom he thought to have never seen more, making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him.” A reconciliation was effected, and, with the wife of nineteen now two years older and wiser than since their first attempt at matrimony, they began housekeeping in the Barbican.

This was a larger house than the one in Aldersgate Street, and only a three minutes’ walk from it. It remained until Masson’s lifetime and had, he says, “the appearance of having been a commodious enough house in the old fashion.” “And I have been informed,” he adds, “that some of the old windows, consisting of thick bits of glass lozenged in lead, still remained in it at the back, and that the occupants knew one of the rooms in it as a schoolroom, where Milton had used to teach his pupils.” The visitor to the noisy, bustling Barbican to-day, close to old London wall, will find nothing that Milton saw.

Here he published the first edition of his collected poems. The title-page tells us that the songs were set to music by the same musician, Henry Lawes, “Gentleman of the King’s Chapell,” who had engaged him to write the “Arcades” and “Comus.” It was to be “sold at the signe of the Princes Arms in Paul’s Churchyard, 1645.” The wretched botch of an engraving of the poet which accompanied it displeased him, and he humourously compelled the unsuspecting and unlearned artist to engrave in Greek beneath it the following lines:

“That an unskilful hand had carved this print
You’d say at once, seeing the living face;
But finding here no jot of me, my friends,
Laugh at the botching-artist’s mis-attempt.”

Unfortunately this was the only published portrait of Milton during his life, and gave strangers at home and abroad the impression that his face was as grim as his pamphlets were caustic.

By strange coincidence this house, where Milton lived when “Comus” was first published, was but a few yards distant from the town house of the earl in whose honour the masque had been composed a dozen years or more before this. With him was the “Lady Alice,” now nearly twenty-four years old, who, as a girl of eleven, had sung Milton’s songs in Ludlow Castle. The earl loved music, and his children’s music teacher, Lawes, and others who had acted in the merry masque comforted his invalidism with concourse of sweet sounds, almost within hearing of the old scrivener and organist and his poet-son. Milton loved Lawes, and wrote a sonnet to him; doubtless during these days they were much together.

About the time that Milton’s first baby daughter appeared, the Barbican house was crowded with the disconsolate Powell family, who had nearly lost their all, and fled to Mary’s husband for protection. Mother Powell seems to have been a woman of strong personality, and the new baby was christened “Anne” for her. Within two months, both the Milton and Powell grandfathers were buried from the house in Barbican. In the burials at St. Giles’s Cripplegate appears, in March, 1646, the record: “John Milton, Gentleman, 15.”

While worrying over the settlement of the Powell estates and brother Christopher’s as well, Milton continued his teaching; his pupil writes: “His manner of teaching never savoured in the least anything of pedantry.” Cyriack Skinner, grandson of the great Coke, to whom he wrote two sonnets in later years, was his pupil in the Barbican.

In 1647, just after the march of Fairfax and Cromwell through the city, Milton removed to a smaller house in High Holborn, “among those that open backward into Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” which had been laid out by Inigo Jones. Here he ceased playing the schoolmaster, became definitely a republican at heart, and busied himself with the writing of a history of England, and compiling of a Latin dictionary and a System of Divinity. The new home was among pleasant gardens, and near the bowling green and lounging-place for lawyers and citizens. Its exact site is unknown. In 1648 a second baby girl, called Mary, was born to the Miltons in the new home.

By his bold tractate on the “Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” which was written during the terrible days of the king’s trial and execution, Milton put himself on the side of the regicides. Exactly a month after its appearance he was waited on at High Holborn by a committee from the Council of State, who asked him to accept the position of “Secretary for Foreign Tongues.” His eyesight was already failing; he could no longer read by candle-light; but here was a great opportunity for public service, and he did not long hesitate. On March 20th, when he entered upon office, he learned that all letters to foreign states and princes were to be put into dignified Latin form, so as to be instantly read by government officials in all countries, and not into the “wheedling, lisping jargon of the cringing French,” as his nephew calls it. His salary was a trifle over £288—worth about five times that sum to-day. Sometimes an early breakfast at High Holborn was necessary in order to meet the council at seven A.M. in Whitehall, but usually it met at eight or nine. It seemed, however, best for the Miltons to move nearer Whitehall, and while he waited for his apartments to be ready, Milton took lodging at Charing Cross, opening into Spring Garden, where now is the meeting-place of the London County Council. This was on the royal estate, and was so named from a concealed fountain which spurted forth when touched by the unwary foot. It must have been a pleasant spot, with its bathing pond and bowling green and pheasant yard, which led from what is now Trafalgar Square into St. James’s Park. Opposite, at Charing Cross, was the palace of the Percys, later called “Northumberland House,” and next to it, where now stands the Grand Hotel, was the home of Sir Harry Vane. Queen Eleanor’s Cross had been taken down in 1647 and the statue of Charles I., which on the year of Milton’s death replaced it on its site, was at this time kept in careful concealment.

St. Martin’s Lane was a genuine shady lane, bordered with hedges. The church which Milton saw upon the site of the present one was erected by Henry VIII., and was even then in reality St. Martin’s in the Fields.

Upon the north side of what is now Trafalgar Square, which is occupied by the National Gallery, stood the Royal Stables. Pall Mall, which leads westward, was so named from the Italian outdoor game, resembling croquet, which was played upon a green in the vicinity. It was then a resort for travellers and foreigners, who, like the Londoners Pepys and Defoe, frequented the chocolate and coffee houses in the neighbourhood and for a shilling an hour were carried about in sedan-chairs. The latter tells us that “the chairmen serve you for porters to run on errands, as your gondoliers do at Venice.”

St. James’s Palace, with its picturesque brick gateway, had but just seen the last hours of the monarch whom Milton had helped dethrone. Here Charles II. had been born in 1630, and here the Princess Mary was born in 1662, and was married to William, Prince of Orange, fifteen years later.

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PART OF WHITEHALL

The Banquet-Hall by Inigo Jones is in the centre at the rear.

From an old engraving.

CHAPTER VI.

MILTON AT WHITEHALL.—SCOTLAND YARD.—PETTY FRANCE.—BARTHOLOMEW CLOSE.—HIGH HOLBORN.—JEWIN STREET.—ARTILLERY WALK

ilton remained in Spring Gardens about seven months, when his new apartments in the north end of Whitehall Palace were ready. These opened from Scotland Yard, in which was the Guard House. The yeomen of the guard wore red cloth roses on back and breast, and must have seemed very gay and imposing personages to the little girls of the Milton family. Their rooms were connected with the various courts and suites of apartments that extended down to the Privy Garden. The palace in Cromwell’s time probably retained in residence a large portion of the small army of caterers, butchers, brewers, confectioners, glaziers, etc., who provided for the constant needs of the huge establishment. The Horse Guards, built for gentlemen pensioners, was erected in 1641, and was still quite new. This apparently was not on the site of the present Horse Guards, which was built in 1753.

At Scotland Yard, Milton’s only son, John, was born, and here his protracted labours in his vehement controversy with Salmasius brought on the blackness of great darkness which, at the age of forty-three, for ever shut his world from view. For the next twenty years and more it is the blind poet whose life we follow, during the period when his fiery spirit was chastened not only by his own afflictions, but by the nation’s also.

In 1652 Milton moved to Petty France, now York Street, near the Bird Cage Walk, which was so named from the king’s aviary there. Here the next year his little daughter Deborah was born, and soon after his wife, at the age of twenty-six, after nine years of married life, died. After the first estrangement and reconciliation, so far as we know, all had gone well. Her little John, who had scarcely learned to speak his father’s name, soon followed her to the grave.

The household then consisted of the poet, his nephew and amanuensis John, and his three motherless little girls. Masson describes the house as he saw it before its destruction in 1875. It was then No. 19 York Street, and had a squalid shop in its lower part, and a recess on one side of it used for stacking wood. On entering by a small door and passage at the side of the shop, one groped up a dark staircase, where several tenants lived, in the rooms that were once all Milton’s. “The larger ones on the first floor are not so bad, and what are now the back rooms of the house may have been even pleasant and elegant when the house had a garden of its own behind it, and that garden opened directly into the park.”

Jeremy Bentham, who over a century later was landlord of the house and lived close by, placed a tablet on the rear wall inscribed “Sacred to Milton, Prince of Poets.” After 1811 Bentham’s tenant was William Hazlitt; before that his friend James Mill occupied the house.

Lord Scudamore, who had given Milton an introduction to Grotius, was his next-door neighbour at York Street. To-day the loftiest apartment house in London stands upon the unmarked site of Milton’s house. The frequent walk which Milton took to Whitehall, with a guide to his dark steps, during his eight years’ residence here, led him half a mile across St. James’s Park from Queen Anne Gate to Spring Gardens or the Horse Guards. The ornamental water was not then there, but there were ponds and trees and pleasant stretches of green turf. Charles II. had it later all laid out by the famous French landscape artist, Le Nôtre.

Occasional sonnets—those to Cromwell, Vane, “On his Blindness,” and “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”—appeared in the increasing leisure of this period, when his duties lessened, and he retired on a diminished salary. But Milton was become a man who was sought out by foreigners of note and persons of quality; among his friends, Andrew Marvell, the poet, and his pupil, Cyriack Skinner, were frequent visitors, with charming Lady Ranelagh, his neighbour, who persuaded him to teach her little son, and who he said had been to him in the place of kith and kin.

After four years of widowerhood, when his little girls were sadly in need of a mother, Milton married Katharine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney, in the church of St. Mary Aldermanbury, on November 12, 1656. Her coming into the home in Petty France brought serenity and happiness to all its inmates. During the brief fifteen months of their married life, a little daughter came, who followed her soon after to her grave in St. Margaret’s Church beside the Abbey, and the sorrowing husband was again left in his blindness to bring up his three motherless little daughters.

After eighteen years, the poem, sketched out in St. Bride’s Churchyard, was resumed, and in the lonely house in Petty France, the first lines of “Paradise Lost” were dictated, just before the closing days of Cromwell’s life. Under Richard Cromwell, Milton retained his secretaryship, but with the return of Charles II., in May, 1660, he fled his home in Petty France, for he well knew the vengeance that might follow. His little girls were sent no one knows whither, and he took refuge in a friend’s house in Bartholomew Close, a passage which led from West Smithfield, through an ancient arch. It was filled with quaint old tenements, where Doctor Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge, had lived, and also Le Sœur, who had modelled the statue of Charles I., which, as has been stated, was concealed during the Commonwealth, and was soon to be erected. Sixty-five years later, young Benjamin Franklin set up type in a printing-office here. To the blind refugee, it mattered little that he had left his garden to be hemmed in by narrow walls. The labyrinth of little courts and tortuous passages was his safeguard. During those days of arrests and executions of his friends, Milton must have known that any day might bring the hangman’s summons for him. Many a time during the nearly four months that he was hidden here must he in imagination have heard the shouts of the fickle populace, and seen himself haled in a cart to Tyburn gallows. Says Masson: “Absolutely no man could less expect to be pardoned at the Restoration than Milton,” and “there is no greater historical puzzle than this complete escape.” But his faithful friend, Andrew Marvell, pleaded for him, and other powerful friends did their utmost in his behalf; the brain that was to give birth to a great epic was spared to England.

Though Milton lay in some prison for a little time, during which his “infamous” books “were solemnly burnt at the Session house in the Old Bailey by the hand of the common hangman,” he was soon a free man, though many of his companions were meanwhile hanged and quartered, or like Goffe and Whalley fled beyond seas and even there scarcely escaped the king’s swift avengers.

In December, Milton emerged from prison and moved temporarily into a little house on the north side of Holborn near Red Lion Square, which was behind it, and nearer Bloomsbury than was his former residence upon the street. Close by was the Red Lion Inn, where in January, on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I., lay on a hurdle, amidst a howling mob, the ghastly bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, which had been disinterred and were on their way to Tyburn to be swung upon the gallows. It was well for Milton to sit behind barred doors in silence in those days, while Sir Harry Vane languished in prison, bold Algernon Sidney was in exile, and the England that he loved seemed in eclipse.

In 1661, Milton, who had good reason to reside as far away from Petty France and the court end of town as possible, returned to the neighbourhood of his early married life, and took a house in Jewin Street, off Aldersgate, at the end of the street nearest St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, where his father lay buried. For the remainder of his life, here and in Artillery Walk, he was a parishioner of this church. During the three years spent here, Vane was beheaded, two thousand clergy were ejected from their livings, and many, as Richard Baxter tells us, starved on an income of only eight or ten pounds a year for a whole family; men of Milton’s way of thinking struggled for daily bread on six days in the week, and preached on the seventh with the police upon their track.

During these fruitful years in Jewin Street, while “Paradise Lost” was growing apace, Milton had about him his motherless and ill-educated girls. The oldest, about seventeen years of age, was handsome, but lame, and had a defect of speech. It fell to Mary and little eleven-year-old Deborah to read, with scanty comprehension of the words, as their father required their services, from his Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian works. To them, and to a group of young men who felt it an honour to serve him, he dictated the sonorous lines of his great epic. No wonder that girls of a dozen or sixteen years of age found life in Jewin Street dull, and Greek dictionaries and the daily records of the doings of the hosts of heaven and hell abominably irksome. They served their father with grudging pen, and pilfered from him, and tricked him in his helpless sightlessness—small blame to them, perhaps, whose rearing had been by servants and governesses, but pitiable for the father of fifty years, who fought his daily battles with fate alone in the dark.

Andrew Marvell and Cyriack Skinner sought him out, and doubtless told him the latest literary news of Henry More, the Platonist; of Howell, but just appointed historiographer royal; of Samuel Butler, who had just gone with the Lady Alice of “Comus” to Ludlow Castle; of Richard Baxter, whose popular book, “The Saints’ Everlasting Rest,” Milton had doubtless read when it appeared five years before; of Pepys, now secretary to the Admiralty; of Izaak Walton, whose “Complete Angler” Milton may have read ten years before; of Evelyn and of the poet Cowley; of Bishop Jeremy Taylor; of George Fox, the valiant Quaker, and the philosophers, Hobbes, and John Locke, who was then at Oxford; and the budding poet, John Dryden.

We learn from Richardson that Milton usually dictated “leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it, though often when lying in bed in a morning.” Sometimes he would lie awake all night without composing a line, when a flow of verse would come with such an impetus that he would call Mary and dictate forty lines at once. During these days a newly converted young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, who was desirous of improving his Latin, and to see John Milton, who, he writes, “was a gentleman of great note for learning throughout the learned world,” betook himself to the modest home on Jewin Street, got lodging hard by, and engaged to read Latin to him six afternoons a week. Milton, noticing that he used the English pronunciation, told him that if he wanted to speak with foreigners in Latin he must learn the foreign pronunciation. This Ellwood by hard labour accomplished, when Milton, seeing his earnestness, helped him greatly in translation. These happy hours were interrupted by Ellwood’s arrest for attending the Quaker meeting in Aldersgate Street. Three months were spent in Bridewell and Newgate, where he saw the bloody quarters and boiled heads of executed men, and wrote out in detail an account of the hideous spectacle. One heavenly day in a quiet library reading of Dido and Æneas with Milton, the next in an English hell of bestiality, filth, and cruelty—a memorable experience for a young man of twenty-two, was it not?

Household affairs were going from bad to worse in Jewin Street, and the unhappy home needed a wife and mother. When the news came to the daughter Mary that her father was to marry again, she exclaimed that it was “no news to hear of his wedding, but if she could hear of his death, that would be something.” The third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, was twenty-four years old when Milton married her, in the church of St. Mary Aldermary, a little south of his boyhood’s home near Cannon Street. She proved an excellent wife, and was of a “peaceful and agreeable humour.” There are traditions that the young stepmother had golden hair and could sing; her good sense and housewifely accomplishments brought peace, comfort, and thrift into the discordant household.

Soon after his marriage, the Milton family removed to a house in Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields. This was on the roadway which is the southern part of Bunhill Row. Not only was there a garden here, but the site of the present Bunhill Fields Cemetery, where Defoe, Bunyan, Richard Cromwell, and Isaac Watts lie buried, was then an open field; while, close at hand, was Artillery Ground, where trained bands occasionally paraded, as they have done from 1537 to the present time. Of the house we know little, except that it had four fireplaces. Near by was “Grub” Street, since changed to “Milton” Street, partly perhaps to commemorate the fact of the poet’s residence in the neighbourhood. In June, 1665, while the Great Plague had begun its desolating course, Milton had completed the last lines of “Paradise Lost.” It was then that young Ellwood came to his assistance, and engaged for him “a pretty box in Giles-Chalfont,” whither he was driven with his wife and daughters.

CHAPTER VII.

CHALFONT ST. GILES.—ARTILLERY WALK

f the pilgrim to the shrines of Puritans and poets has thought worth while to spend an afternoon at Horton, he may well spare two or three days more for a drive from there to Stoke Pogis, Harefield, and the region thirteen miles north of Horton in lovely Buckinghamshire, among the Chiltern hills.

Here stands, about twenty-three miles northwest of London, in the little village of Chalfont St. Giles, the only house that still exists in which Milton ever lived. The village lies in a quiet hollow among the hills, three or four miles removed from the shriek of any locomotive. One may approach it by train from the little stations of Chorley Wood or Chalfont Road. It will well repay one before doing so to make a detour of a mile and a half to Chenies,—one of the loveliest villages in all England,—beside the tiny Chess, where Matthew Arnold loved to angle. A delightful hostelry is the “Bedford Arms,” where he always “put up.” The chief feature of the place is the mortuary chapel of the Russells, where the family have been buried from 1556 until the present day. But the lover of the picturesque will more admire the adjoining Tudor mansion. American multi-millionaires have built no Newport palace that is so attractive to the lover of the beautiful.

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IN MILTON’S HOUSE AT CHALFONT ST. GILES

As one drives toward Chalfont, he enters it at the end farthest from Milton’s cottage, which is one of the last houses upon the left of the main street. It is on the road that leads to Beaconsfield, four miles away. The cottage lies at the foot of a slope close by the roadside; it is built of brick and timber, and has two entrances, four sitting-rooms, and five bedrooms.

On the floor which is level with the garden are two sitting-rooms that look toward the hill slope and Beaconsfield. Their quaint old windows are filled with diamond panes, which are set in lead and open outward. The long carved dining-table, in the room at the left, and the small table, cabinet, and stools in the room at the right, which is seen in the illustration, were Milton’s own. Here at the open casement, during those days of horror in the stricken city, Milton sat and breathed the fragrant air, and in the evening listened to the nightingales which haunt the Chalfont groves. Hither the brave young Ellwood came to greet him, fresh as he was from another imprisonment; he returned with his comments the manuscript of “Paradise Lost,” which Milton had loaned to him, and added: “Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?” To which the poet answered nothing at the time, but, as the result proved, the query brought later a fitting response in “Paradise Regained.” Perhaps the visitor may be allowed to ascend the narrow winding stair with its carved railing to the humble chambers under the gables, whither the poet groped his way to bed, and to glance into narrow cupboards, where he may have piled his books and manuscripts. There is a tender, pathetic charm about the place, which even the greater poet’s house at Stratford lacks. The man Shakespeare—the successful dramatist—we know little of; his inner life we only guess at and infer. His consummate genius wins our worship; it does not touch our hearts. But the blind poet, the passionate lover of liberty and fearless pleader for justice, the man who like blind Samson shook his locks in defiance of fate, and would not be cast down, this man we know. We have followed step by step his brilliant youth, his strenuous manhood, and his brave, declining years. With all his faults of temper we love him as we love Dante and Michael Angelo and Beethoven. We linger reverently in the little house made dear to England by his presence there.

Then we wander back a little on our way, to a row of antique houses and go through a passage to the venerable parish church and churchyard where Milton’s feet doubtless have trod.

En route to Beaconsfield the traveller will not fail to pause at Jordan’s, a plain, square structure in a leafy grove, beside a green God’s Acre. It was the Quaker meeting-house in Milton’s day as it is still. At the rear is a concealed gallery where the worshippers took refuge when their service was broken up by armed pursuers. Close by are many unmarked graves, and among them is Ellwood’s. But the grave of William Penn, the founder of a great American State, and the graves of his wife and children, have low modern headstones, for their position was well known. Here the man of gentle birth, the hero and saint, who is dear to all Americans, sleeps peacefully among his English kindred. During the year when Milton was at Chalfont, Penn was a youth in Paris, seeing the world, but keeping himself unspotted from it.