MILTON ON THE CONTINENT.--IN ST. BRIDE'S CHURCHYARD.--AT ALDERSGATE
STREET.--THE BARBICAN.--HOLBORN.--SPRING GARDENS
One 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 Caesars 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 mediaeval 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
L288--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.
[Illustration: PART OF WHITEHALL
The Banquet-Hall by Inigo Jones is in the centre at the rear.
_From an old engraving._]