That sanctity which settles on the memory of a great man, ought upon a
double motive to be vigilantly sustained by his countrymen; first, out
of gratitude to him, as one column of the national grandeur; secondly,
with a practical purpose of transmitting unimpaired to posterity the
benefit of ennobling models. High standards of excellence are among the
happiest distinctions by which the modern ages of the world have an
advantage over earlier, and we are all interested by duty as well as
policy in preserving them inviolate. To the benefit of this principle,
none amongst the great men of England is better entitled than Milton,
whether as respects his transcendent merit, or the harshness with which
his memory has been treated.
John Milton was born in London on the 9th day of December, 1608. His
father, in early life, had suffered for conscience’ sake, having been
disinherited upon his abjuring the popish faith. He pursued the
laborious profession of a scrivener, and having realised an ample
fortune, retired into the country to enjoy it. Educated at Oxford, he
gave his son the best education that the age afforded. At first, young
Milton had the benefit of a private tutor: from him he was removed to
St. Paul’s School; next he proceeded to Christ’s College, Cambridge, and
finally, after several years’ preparation by extensive reading, he
pursued a course of continental travel. It is to be observed, that his
tutor, Thomas Young, was a Puritan, and there is reason to believe that
Puritan politics prevailed among the fellows of his college. This must
not be forgotten in speculating on Milton’s public life, and his
inexorable hostility to the established government in church and state;
for it will thus appear probable, that he was at no time withdrawn from
the influence of Puritan connections.
In 1632, having taken the degree of M.A., Milton finally quitted the
University, leaving behind him a very brilliant reputation, and a
general good will in his own college. His father had now retired from
London, and lived upon his own estate at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. In
this rural solitude, Milton passed the next five years, resorting to
London only at rare intervals, for the purchase of books or music. His
time was chiefly occupied with the study of Greek and Roman, and, no
doubt, also of Italian literature. But that he was not negligent of
composition, and that he applied himself with great zeal to the culture
of his native literature, we have a splendid record in his ‘Comus,’
which, upon the strongest presumptions, is ascribed to this period of
his life. In the same neighbourhood, and within the same five years, it
is believed that he produced also the Arcades, and the Lycidas, together
with L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso.
In 1637 Milton’s mother died, and in the following year he commenced his
travels. The state of Europe confined his choice of ground to France and
Italy. The former excited in him but little interest. After a short stay
at Paris he pursued the direct route to Nice, where he embarked for
Genoa, and thence proceeded to Pisa, Florence, Rome, and Naples. He
originally meant to extend his tour to Sicily and Greece; but the news
of the first Scotch war, having now reached him, agitated his mind with
too much patriotic sympathy to allow of his embarking on a scheme of
such uncertain duration. Yet his homeward movements were not remarkable
for expedition. He had already spent two months in Florence, and as many
in Rome, yet he devoted the same space of time to each of them on his
return. From Florence he proceeded to Lucca, and thence, by Bologna and
Ferrara, to Venice; where he remained one month, and then pursued his
homeward route through Verona, Milan, and Geneva.
Sir Henry Wotton had recommended, as the rule of his conduct, a
celebrated Italian proverb, inculcating the policy of reserve and
dissimulation. From a practised diplomatist, this advice was
characteristic; but it did not suit the frankness of Milton’s manners,
nor the nobleness of his mind. He has himself stated to us his own rule
of conduct, which was to move no questions of controversy, yet not to
evade them when pressed upon him by others. Upon this principle he
acted, not without some offence to his associates, nor wholly without
danger to himself. But the offence, doubtless, was blended with respect;
the danger was passed; and he returned home with all his purposes
fulfilled. He had conversed with Galileo; he had seen whatever was most
interesting in the monuments of Roman grandeur, or the triumphs of
Italian art; and he could report with truth, that in spite of his
religion, every where undissembled, he had been honoured by the
attentions of the great, and by the compliments of the learned.
After fifteen months of absence, Milton found himself again in London at
a crisis of unusual interest. The king was on the eve of his second
expedition against the Scotch; and we may suppose Milton to have been
watching the course of events with profound anxiety, not without some
anticipation of the patriotic labour which awaited him. Meantime he
occupied himself with the education of his sister’s two sons, and soon
after, by way of obtaining an honourable maintenance, increased the
number of his pupils.
Dr. Johnson, himself at one period of his life a schoolmaster, on this
occasion indulges in a sneer which is too injurious to be neglected.
“Let not our veneration for Milton,” says he, “forbid us to look with
some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance: on the
man who hastens home because his countrymen are contending for their
liberty; and when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his
patriotism in a private boarding-school.” It is not true that Milton had
made “great promises,” or any promises at all. But if he had made the
greatest, his exertions for the next sixteen years nobly redeemed them.
In what way did Dr. Johnson expect that his patriotism should be
expressed? As a soldier? Milton has himself urged his bodily weakness
and intellectual strength, as reasons for following a line of duty for
which he was better fitted. Was he influenced in his choice by fear of
military dangers or hardships? Far from it: “for I did not,” he says,
“shun those evils, without engaging to render to my fellow-citizens
services much more useful, and attended with no less of danger.” What
services were those? We shall state them in his own words, anticipated
from an after period. “When I observed that there are in all three modes
of liberty—first, ecclesiastical liberty; secondly, civil liberty;
thirdly, domestic: having myself already treated of the first, and
noticing that the magistrate was taking steps in behalf of the second, I
concluded that the third, that is to say, domestic, or household
liberty, remained to me as my peculiar province. And whereas this again
is capable of a threefold division, accordingly as it regards the
interests of conjugal life in the first place, or those of education in
the second, or finally the freedom of speech, and the right of giving
full publication to sound opinions,—I took it upon myself to defend all
three, the first, by my Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the second,
by my Tractate upon Education, the third, by my Areopagitica.”
In 1641 he conducted his defence of ecclesiastical liberty, in a series
of attacks upon episcopacy. These are written in a bitter spirit of
abusive hostility, for which we seek an insufficient apology in his
exclusive converse with a party which held bishops in abhorrence, and in
the low personal respectability of a large portion of the episcopal
bench.
At Whitsuntide, in the year 1645, having reached his 35th year, he
married Mary Powel, a young lady of good extraction in the county of
Oxford. One month after, he allowed his wife to visit her family. This
permission, in itself somewhat singular, the lady abused; for when
summoned back to her home, she refused to return. Upon this provocation,
Milton set himself seriously to consider the extent of the obligations
imposed by the nuptial vow; and soon came to the conclusion, that in
point of conscience it was not less dissoluble for hopeless
incompatibility of temper than for positive adultery, and that human
laws, in as far as they opposed this principle, called for reformation.
These views he laid before the public in his Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce. In treating this question, he had relied entirely upon the
force of argument, not aware that he had the countenance of any great
authorities; but finding soon afterwards that some of the early
reformers, Bucer and P. Martyr, had taken the same view as himself, he
drew up an account of their comments on this subject. Hence arose the
second of his tracts on Divorce. Meantime, as it was certain that many
would abide by what they supposed to be the positive language of
Scripture, in opposition to all authority whatsoever, he thought it
advisable to write a third tract on the proper interpretation of the
chief passages in Scripture, which refer to this point. A fourth tract,
by way of answer to the different writers who had opposed his opinions,
terminated the series.
Meantime the lady, whose rash conduct had provoked her husband into
these speculations, saw reason to repent of her indiscretion, and
finding that Milton held her desertion to have cancelled all claims upon
his justice, wisely resolved upon making her appeal to his generosity.
This appeal was not made in vain: in a single interview at the house of
a common friend, where she had contrived to surprise him, and suddenly
to throw herself at his feet, he granted her a full forgiveness: and so
little did he allow himself to remember her misconduct, or that of her
family, in having countenanced her desertion, that soon afterwards, when
they were involved in the general ruin of the royal cause, he received
the whole of them into his house, and exerted his political influence
very freely in their behalf. Fully to appreciate this behaviour, we must
recollect that Milton was not rich, and that no part of his wife’s
marriage portion (£1000) was ever paid to him.
His thoughts now settled upon the subject of education, which it must
not be forgotten that he connected systematically with domestic liberty.
In 1644 he published his essay on this great theme, in the form of a
letter to his friend Hartlib, himself a person of no slight
consideration. In the same year he wrote his ‘Areopagitica, a speech for
the liberty of unlicensed printing.’ This we are to consider in the
light of an oral pleading, or regular oration, for he tells us expressly
[Def. 2.] that he wrote it “ad justæ orationis modum.” It is the finest
specimen extant of generous scorn. And very remarkable it is, that
Milton, who broke the ground on this great theme, has exhausted the
arguments which bear upon it. He opened the subject: he closed it. And
were there no other monument of his patriotism and his genius, for this
alone he would deserve to be held in perpetual veneration. In the
following year, 1645, was published the first collection of his early
poems: with his sanction, undoubtedly, but probably not upon his
suggestion. The times were too full of anxiety to allow of much
encouragement to polite literature: at no period were there fewer
readers of poetry. And for himself in particular, with the exception of
a few sonnets, it is probable that he composed as little as others read,
for the next ten years: so great were his political exertions.
Early in 1649 the king was put to death. For a full view of the state of
parties which led to this memorable event, we must refer the reader to
the history of the times. That act was done by the Independent party, to
which Milton belonged, and was precipitated by the intrigues of the
Presbyterians, who were making common cause with the king, to ensure the
overthrow of the Independents. The lamentations and outcries of the
Presbyterians were long and loud. Under colour of a generous sympathy
with the unhappy prince, they mourned for their own political
extinction, and the triumph of their enemies. This Milton well knew, and
to expose the selfishness of their clamours, as well as to disarm their
appeals to the popular feeling, he now published his ‘Tenure of Kings
and Magistrates.’ In the first part of this, he addresses himself to the
general question of tyrannicide, justifying it, first, by arguments of
general reason, and secondly, by the authority of the reformers. But in
the latter part he argues the case personally, contending that the
Presbyterians at least were not entitled to condemn the king’s death,
who, in levying war, and doing battle against the king’s person, had
done so much that tended to no other result. “If then,” is his argument,
“in these proceedings against their king, they may not finish, by the
usual course of justice, what they have begun, they could not lawfully
begin at all.” The argument seems inconclusive, even as addressed _ad
hominem_: the struggle bore the character of a war between independent
parties, rather than a judicial inquiry, and in war the life of a
prisoner becomes sacred.
At this time the Council of State had resolved no longer to employ the
language of a rival people in their international concerns, but to use
the Latin tongue as a neutral and indifferent instrument. The office of
Latin Secretary, therefore, was created, and bestowed upon Milton. His
hours from henceforth must have been pretty well occupied by official
labours. Yet at this time he undertook a service to the state, more
invidious, and perhaps more perilous, than any in which his politics
ever involved him. On the very day of the king’s execution, and even
below the scaffold, had been sold the earliest copies of a work,
admirably fitted to shake the new government, and for the sensation
which it produced at the time, and the lasting controversy which it has
engendered, one of the most remarkable known in literary history. This
was the ‘Eikon Basilike, or Royal Image,’ professing to be a series of
meditations drawn up by the late king, on the leading events from the
very beginning of the national troubles. Appearing at this critical
moment, and co-operating with the strong reaction of the public mind,
already effected in the king’s favour by his violent death, this book
produced an impression absolutely unparalleled in any age. Fifty
thousand copies, it is asserted, were sold within one year; and a
posthumous power was thus given to the king’s name by one little book,
which exceeded, in alarm to his enemies, all that his armies could
accomplish in his lifetime. No remedy could meet the evil in degree. As
the only one that seemed fitted to it in kind, Milton drew up a running
commentary upon each separate head of the original: and as that had been
entitled the king’s image, he gave to his own the title of
‘Eikonoclastes, or Image-breaker,’ “the famous surname of many Greek
emperors, who broke all superstitious images in pieces.”
This work was drawn up with the usual polemic ability of Milton; but by
its very plan and purpose, it threw him upon difficulties which no
ability could meet. It had that inevitable disadvantage which belongs to
all ministerial and secondary works: the order and choice of topics
being all determined by the Eikon, Milton, for the first time, wore an
air of constraint and servility, following a leader and obeying his
motions, as an engraver is controlled by the designer, or a translator
by his original. It is plain, from the pains he took to exonerate
himself from such a reproach, that he felt his task to be an invidious
one. The majesty of grief, expressing itself with Christian meekness,
and appealing, as it were from the grave, to the consciences of men,
could not be violated without a recoil of angry feeling, ruinous to the
effect of any logic, or rhetoric the most persuasive. The affliction of
a great prince, his solitude, his rigorous imprisonment, his constancy
to some purposes which were not selfish, his dignity of demeanour in the
midst of his heavy trials, and his truly Christian fortitude in his
final sufferings—these formed a rhetoric which made its way to all
hearts. Against such influences the eloquence of Greece would have been
vain. The nation was spell-bound; and a majority of its population
neither could or would be disenchanted.
Milton was ere long called to plead the same great cause of liberty upon
an ampler stage, and before a more equitable audience; to plead not on
behalf of his party against the Presbyterians and Royalists, but on
behalf of his country against the insults of a hired Frenchman, and at
the bar of the whole Christian world. Charles II. had resolved to state
his father’s case to all Europe. This was natural, for very few people
on the continent knew what cause had brought his father to the block, or
why he himself was a vagrant exile from his throne. For his advocate he
selected Claudius Salmasius, and that was most injudicious. This man,
eminent among the scholars of the day, had some brilliant
accomplishments, which were useless in such a service, while in those
which were really indispensable, he was singularly deficient. He was
ignorant of the world, wanting in temper and self-command, conspicuously
unfurnished with eloquence, or the accomplishments of a good writer, and
not so much as master of a pure Latin style. Even as a scholar, he was
very unequal; he had committed more important blunders than any man of
his age, and being generally hated, had been more frequently exposed
than others to the harsh chastisements of men inferior to himself in
learning. Yet the most remarkable deficiency of all which Salmasius
betrayed, was in his entire ignorance, whether historical or
constitutional, of every thing which belonged to the case.
Having such an antagonist, inferior to him in all possible
qualifications, whether of nature, of art, of situation, it may be
supposed that Milton’s triumph was absolute. He was now thoroughly
indemnified for the poor success of his ‘Eikonoclastes.’ In that
instance he had the mortification of knowing that all England read and
wept over the king’s book, whilst his own reply was scarcely heard of.
But here the tables were turned: the very friends of Salmasius
complained, that while his defence was rarely inquired after, the answer
to it, ‘Defensio pro Populo Anglicano,’ was the subject of conversation
from one end of Europe to the other. It was burnt publicly at Paris and
Toulouse: and by way of special annoyance to Salmasius, who lived in
Holland, was translated into Dutch.
Salmasius died in 1653, before he could accomplish an answer that
satisfied himself: and the fragment which he left behind him was not
published, until it was no longer safe for Milton to rejoin. Meantime
others pressed forward against Milton in the same controversy, of whom
some were neglected, one was resigned to the pen of his nephew, Philips,
and one answered diffusely by himself. This was Du Moulin, or, as Milton
persisted in believing, Morus, a reformed minister then resident in
Holland, and at one time a friend of Salmasius. For two years after the
publication of this man’s book (Regii Sanguinis Clamor) Milton received
multiplied assurances from Holland that Morus was its true author. This
was not wonderful. Morus had corrected the press, had adopted the
principles and passions of the book, and perhaps at first had not been
displeased to find himself reputed the author. In reply, Milton
published his ‘Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano,’ seasoned in every
page with some stinging allusions to Morus. All the circumstances of his
early life are recalled, and some were such as the grave divine would
willingly have concealed from the public eye. He endeavoured to avert
too late the storm of wit and satire about to burst on him, by denying
the work, and even revealing the author’s real name: but Milton
resolutely refused to make the slightest alteration. The true reason of
this probably was that the work was written so exclusively against
Morus, full of personal scandal, and puns and gibes upon his name, which
in Greek signifies foolish, that it would have been useless as an answer
to any other person. In Milton’s conduct on this occasion, there is a
want both of charity and candour. Personally, however, Morus had little
ground for complaint: he had bearded the lion by submitting to be
reputed the author of a work not his own. Morus replied, and Milton
closed the controversy by a defence of himself, in 1655.
He had, indeed, about this time some domestic afflictions, which
reminded him of the frail tenure on which all human blessings were held,
and the necessity that he should now begin to concentrate his mind upon
the great works which he meditated. In 1651 his first wife died, after
she had given him three daughters. In that year he had already lost the
use of one eye, and was warned by the physicians that if he persisted in
his task of replying to Salmasius, he would probably lose the other. The
warning was soon accomplished, according to the common account, in 1654;
but upon collating his letter to Philaras the Athenian, with his own
pathetic statement in the Defensio Secunda, we are disposed to date it
from 1652. In 1655 he resigned his office of secretary, in which he had
latterly been obliged to use an assistant.
Some time before this period, he had married his second wife, Catherine
Woodcock, to whom it is supposed that he was very tenderly attached. In
1657 she died in child-birth, together with her child, an event which he
has recorded in a very beautiful sonnet. This loss, added to his
blindness, must have made his home, for some years, desolate and
comfortless. Distress, indeed, was now gathering rapidly upon him. The
death of Cromwell in the following year, and the imbecile character of
his eldest son, held out an invitation to the aspiring intriguers of the
day, which they were not slow to improve. It soon became too evident to
Milton’s discernment, that all things were hurrying forward to
restoration of the ejected family. Sensible of the risk, therefore, and
without much hope, but obeying the summons of his conscience, he wrote a
short tract on the ready and easy way to establish a free commonwealth,
concluding with these noble words, “Thus much I should perhaps have
said, though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones,
and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet, Oh earth! earth! earth! to
tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to.
Nay, though what I have spoken should happen [which Thou suffer not, who
didst create free, nor Thou next, who didst redeem us from being
servants of men] to be the last words of our expiring liberty.” A
slighter pamphlet on the same subject, ‘Brief Notes’ upon a sermon by
one Dr. Griffiths, must be supposed to be written rather with a
religious purpose of correcting a false application of sacred texts,
than with any great expectation of benefiting his party. Dr. Johnson,
with unseemly violence, says, that he kicked when he could strike no
longer: more justly it might be said that he held up a solitary hand of
protestation on behalf of that cause now in its expiring struggles,
which he had maintained when prosperous; and that he continued to the
last one uniform language, though he now believed resistance to be
hopeless, and knew it to be full of peril.
That peril was soon realised. In the spring of 1660, the Restoration was
accomplished amidst the tumultuous rejoicings of the people. It was
certain that the vengeance of government would lose no time in marking
its victims; for some of them in anticipation had already fled. Milton
wisely withdrew from the first fury of the persecution, which now
descended on his party. He secreted himself in London, and when he
returned into the public eye in the winter, found himself no farther
punished, than by a general disqualification for the public service, and
the disgrace of a public burning inflicted on his Eikonoclastes, and his
Defensio pro Populo Anglicano.
Apparently it was not long after this time that he married his third
wife, Elizabeth Minshul, a lady of good family in Cheshire. In what year
he began the composition of his ‘Paradise Lost,’ is not certainly known:
some have supposed in 1658. There is better ground for fixing the period
of its close. During the plague of 1665 he retired to Chalfont, and at
that time Elwood the quaker read the poem in a finished state. The
general interruption of business in London occasioned by the plague, and
prolonged by the great fire in 1666, explain why the publication was
delayed for nearly two years. The contract with the publisher is dated
April 26, 1667, and in the course of that year the Paradise Lost was
published. Originally it was printed in ten books: in the second, and
subsequent editions, the seventh and tenth books were each divided into
two. Milton received only five pounds in the first instance on the
publication of the book. His farther profits were regulated by the sale
of the three first editions. Each was to consist of fifteen hundred
copies, and on the second and third respectively reaching a sale of
thirteen hundred, he was to receive a farther sum of five pounds for
each; making a total of fifteen pounds. The receipt for the second sum
of five pounds is dated April 26, 1669.
In 1670 Milton published his History of Britain, from the fabulous
period to the Norman conquest. And in the same year he published in one
volume Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. The Paradise Regained, it
has been currently asserted that Milton preferred to Paradise Lost. This
is not true; but he may have been justly offended by the false
principles on which some of his friends maintained a reasonable opinion.
The Paradise Regained is inferior by the necessity of its subject and
design. In the Paradise Lost Milton had a field properly adapted to a
poet’s purposes: a few hints in Scripture were expanded. Nothing was
altered, nothing absolutely added: but that, which was told in the
Scriptures in sum, or in its last results, was developed into its whole
succession of parts. Thus, for instance, “There was war in Heaven,”
furnished the matter for a whole book. Now for the latter poem, which
part of our Saviour’s life was it best to select as that in which
Paradise was Regained? He might have taken the Crucifixion, and here he
had a much wider field than in the Temptation; but then he was subject
to this dilemma. If he modified, or in any way altered, the full details
of the four Evangelists, he shocked the religious sense of all
Christians; yet, the purposes of a poet would often require that he
should so modify them. With a fine sense of this difficulty, he chose
the narrow basis of the Temptation in the Wilderness, because there the
whole had been wrapt up in Scripture in a few brief abstractions. Thus,
“He showed him all the kingdoms of the earth,” is expanded, without
offence to the nicest religious scruple, into that matchless succession
of pictures, which bring before us the learned glories of Athens, Rome
in her civil grandeur, and the barbaric splendour of Parthia. The actors
being only two, the action of Paradise Regained is unavoidably limited.
But in respect of composition, it is perhaps more elaborately finished
than Paradise Lost.
In 1672 he published in Latin, a new scheme of Logic, on the method of
Ramus, in which Dr. Johnson suspects him to have meditated the very
eccentric crime of rebellion against the universities. Be that as it
may, this little book is in one view not without interest: all
scholastic systems of logic confound logic and metaphysics; and some of
Milton’s metaphysical doctrines, as the present Bishop of Winchester has
noticed, have a reference to the doctrines brought forward in his
posthumous Theology. The history of the last-named work is remarkable.
That such a treatise had existed, was well known, but it had
disappeared, and was supposed to be irrecoverably lost. But in the year
1823, a Latin manuscript was discovered in the State-Paper Office, under
circumstances which left little doubt of its being the identical work
which Milton was known to have composed; and this belief was
corroborated by internal evidence. By the King’s command, it was edited
by Mr. Sumner, the present Bishop of Winchester, and separately
published in a translation. The title is ‘De Doctrina Christiana, libri
duo posthumi’—A Treatise on Christian Doctrine, compiled from the Holy
Scriptures alone. In elegance of style, and sublimity of occasional
passages, it is decidedly inferior to other of his prose works. As a
system of theology, probably no denomination of Christians would be
inclined to bestow other than a very sparing praise upon it. Still it is
well worth the notice of those students, who are qualified to weigh the
opinions, and profit by the errors of such a writer, as being composed
with Milton’s usual originality of thought and inquiry, and as being
remarkable for the boldness with which he follows up his arguments to
their legitimate conclusion, however startling those conclusions may be.
What he published after the scheme of logic, is not important enough to
merit a separate notice. His end was now approaching. In the summer of
1674 he was still cheerful, and in the possession of his intellectual
faculties. But the vigour of his bodily constitution had been silently
giving way, through a long course of years, to the ravages of gout. It
was at length thoroughly undermined: and about the tenth of November,
1674, he died with tranquillity so profound, that his attendants were
unable to determine the exact moment of his decease. He was buried, with
unusual marks of honour, in the chancel of St. Giles’ at Cripplegate.
The published lives of Milton are very numerous. Among the best and most
copious are those prefixed to the editions of Milton’s works by Bishop
Newton, Todd, and Symmons. An article of considerable length, founded
upon the latter, will be found in Rees’s Cyclopædia. But the most
remarkable is that written by Dr. Johnson in his ‘Lives of the British
Poets;’ production grievously disfigured by prejudice, yet well
deserving the student’s attentions for its intrinsic merits, as well as
for the celebrity which it has attained.
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
_Engraved by C. E. Wagstaff._