JOHN MILTON.

[Illustration]

Perhaps no man ever inhabited more houses than our great epic poet, yet

scarcely one of these now remains. The greater part of his residences

were in London, and in the hundred and seventy-two years since his

decease, the whole of this great metropolis has been, as it were, in a

ferment of growth and extension. The great fire of London swept away an

immense mass of the old houses; and if we look around us now, we see how

very few of the ancient framed tenements which then prevailed now

remain. Again, Milton generally chose his houses, even in the city, with

a view to quiet and retirement. They were, say his biographers,

generally garden houses, where he enjoyed the advantages of a certain

remoteness from noise, and of some openness of space. These spaces the

progress of population has filled with dense buildings, in the course of

the erection of which, the old solitary houses have been pulled down.

Milton, as is well known, was born in Bread-street, Cheapside, at the

sign of the Spread Eagle. The spread eagle was the armorial bearing of

the family. His father was an eminent scrivener, living and practicing

there at the time of Milton's birth, which took place on the 9th of

December, 1608. This house was destroyed in the fire of London. During

his boyhood, which was passed here, Milton was educated at home, in the

first instance, by a private tutor, Thomas Young. This man Aubrey calls

"a Puritan in Essex, who cut his hair short." Young had suffered

persecution for his religious faith, and it is supposed that from him

Milton imbibed a strong feeling for liberty, and a great predilection

for the doctrines which he held. He was much attached to him, as he has

testified by his fourth elegy, and two Latin epistles. It has been

remarked, that however much Milton might be swayed by the principles of

his tutor, he never was by his cut of hair; for, through all the reign

of the Roundheads, he preserved his flowing locks. After the private

tutor was dismissed, he was sent to St. Paul's School. This appears to

have been in his fifteenth year. Here, too, he was a favorite scholar.

The then master was Alexander Gill, and his son was the usher, and

succeeded his father in the school. With him Milton was on terms of

great friendship, and has left a memorial of his regard in three of his

Latin epistles.

From the relation of his original biographer, Aubrey, we may see the boy

Milton going to and fro between Bread-street and his school, full of

zealous thirst of knowledge, and the most extraordinary industry. He

studied with excessive avidity, regardless of his health, continuing his

reading till midnight, so that the source of his future blindness is

obvious in his early passion for letters. Aubrey says, that "when Milton

went to school, and when he was very younge, he studied very hard, and

sate up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock; and his father

ordered the maid to sett up for him." His early reading was in poetical

books. He confirms this account of himself in his _Defensio Secunda pro

Populo_, &c. He says that his father destined him to liberal studies,

which he so eagerly seized upon, that from his twelfth year he seldom

ever retired from his books to bed before midnight; and that his eyes,

originally weak, thus received the first causes of their future

mischief. That, perceiving the danger of this, it could not arrest his

ardor of study, though his nocturnal vigils, followed by his dayly

exercises under his masters, brought on failing vision and pains in the

head. Humphrey Lownes, a printer, living in Bread-street, supplied him,

among other books, with Spenser and Sylvester's Du Bartas. Spenser was

devoured with the intensest enthusiasm, and he has elsewhere called him

his master.

Todd, the generally judicious biographer of Milton, praises his father

for his discernment in the education of his son. The father, who was a

very superior man, and especially fond of and skilled in music,

certainly appears to have at once seen in his son the evidences of

genius, and to have given to it every opportunity of development; but it

is to be regretted that his fatherly encouragement was not attended with

more prudence, and that he had not, instead of encouraging the habit of

nocturnal study, the most pernicious that a student can fall into,

restrained it. Had he done this, the poet might have retained his sight,

and who shall say with what further advantage to the world!

At seventeen, Milton entered as a pensioner at Christ College,

Cambridge. He was found to be a distinguished classical scholar, and

conversant in several languages. His academical exercises attracted

great attention, as well as his verses, both in English and Latin. His

Latin elegies, in his eighteenth year, have always been regarded with

wonder; and, indeed, in his Latinity, both in verse and prose, perhaps

no modern writer has surpassed him. Hampton, the translator of Polybius,

pronounced him the first Englishman who, since the revival of letters,

wrote Latin verses with classic elegance. His extraordinary merit and

acquisitions found, from the authorities of his college, general

applause, spite of a disposition to severity, induced by his sturdy

opposition to them in opinion, on a plan of academical studies then

under discussion.

Milton here, it appears, on the testimony of Aubrey, suffered an

indignity from his tutor, which it was not in his high and independent

nature to endure with impunity. He refers to the fact in his first

elegy. He mentions threats and other things, which his disposition could

not tolerate; that he was absent in a state of rustication, and felt no

desire to revisit the reedy banks of the Cam. Aubrey says, from the

information of our author's brother Christopher, that Milton's first

tutor at Cambridge was Mr. Chappell, from whom receiving some unkindness

(_he whipped him_), he was afterward, though it seemed against the rules

of the college, transferred to the tuition of one Mr. Tovell. This

information stands in the MS. _Mus. Ashmol. Oxon._, No. 10, p. iii.

Warton, remarking on the fact, adds, that Milton "hated the place. He

was not only offended at the college discipline, but had even conceived

a dislike to the face of the country--the fields about Cambridge. He

peevishly complains that the fields have no soft shades to attract the

Muses, and there is something pointed in his exclamation, that Cambridge

was a place quite incompatible with the votaries of Phoebus."

It was not very likely that a youth of perhaps eighteen, who was writing

the elegies and epistles in Latin which drew upon him so much notice,

would submit quietly to so degrading a treatment. This treatment, it

appears from Warton, was common enough, nevertheless, at both Cambridge

and Oxford, among the tutors at that time. But Milton spurned it, as

became his great spirit and noble nature, and was in consequence,

probably, rusticated for a time. But this could not have been long, nor

could it have been accordant to the wishes of the fellows of his

college. The offense was against the tutor, not against the heads of the

college, in the poet's mind. In his Apology for Smeotymnus, he thanks an

enemy for the opportunity of expressing his grateful sense of the

kindness of the fellows, in these words: "I thank him; for it hath given

me an apt occasion to acknowledge publicly, with all grateful mind, that

more than ordinary favor and respect which I found above any of my

equals, at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the fellows of

the college wherein I spent some years; who at my parting, after I had

taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways how much better

it would content them if I would stay; as by many letters full of

kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, I was

assured of their good affection to me."

Leaving Cambridge, Milton went to reside some time at Horton, near

Colnbrook, in Buckinghamshire. His father had retired from his practice,

on a competent fortune, to this village. This portion of his life was,

probably, one of the most delightful periods of it. He had acquired

great reputation for talent and learning at college; he had taken his

degree of M.A., and in this agreeable retirement he not only indulged

himself, as he tells us, in a deep and thorough reading of the Greek and

Latin authors, but probably then contemplating his visit to Italy, made

himself master of its language and well acquainted with its literature.

To such perfection did he carry this accomplishment, that in Italy he

not only spoke the language with perfect fluency, but wrote in it so as

to astonish the most learned natives. Five years he devoted to these

classical and modern studies, but not to these alone. He was here

actively at work in laying the foundation of that great poetical fame

which he afterward achieved. Born in the city, he now made himself

thoroughly familiar with nature. In the woods and parks, and on the

pleasant hills of this pleasant country, he enjoyed the purest delights

of contemplation and of poetry. Here he is supposed to have imbued

himself with the allegoric romance of his favorite Spenser, and also to

have written his own delightful Arcades, Comus, L'Allegro, Il

Penseroso, and Lycidas. It is a fact which his biographers have not

seemed to perceive, but which is really significant, that the very

Italian titles, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, of themselves almost

identify the productions of this period and place, where he was busy

with the preparation for his visit to Italy. The county of Buckingham

appeared always to be from this time a particular favorite with him; and

no wonder, for it is full of poetical beauty, abounds with those solemn

and woodland charms which are so welcome to a mind brooding over

poetical subjects, and shunning all things and places that disturb. It

abounds, being so near the metropolis, also with historic associations

of deep interest.

"This pleasant retreat," says Todd, "excited his most poetical feelings;

and he has proved himself, in his pictures of rural life, to rival the

works of nature, which he contemplated with delight. In the neighborhood

of Horton, the Countess Dowager of Derby resided; and the _Arcades_ was

performed by her grandchildren at this seat, called Harefield Place. It

seems to me that Milton intended a compliment to his fair neighbor, for

fair she was, in his L'Allegro:

'Towers and battlements it sees

Bosom'd high in tufted trees,

Where, perhaps, some beauty lies,

The cynosure of neighboring eyes.'

The woody scenery of Harefield, and the personal accomplishments of the

countess, are not unfavorable to this supposition; which, if admitted,

tends to confirm the opinion that L'Allegro and Il Penseroso were

composed at Horton. The Masque of Comus, and Lycidas, were certainly

produced under the roof of his father."

The whole of these poems breathe the spirit of youth, and of scenes like

those in which he now dayly rambled. Whether L'Allegro and Il Penseroso

were written, as Sir William Jones contends, at Forest Hill, in

Oxfordshire, or here, need not be much contested. If they were written

there, it must have been many years afterward, after his return from

abroad, and after his first marriage; for it was at Forest Hill that he

found his wife. But for the reason assigned, and for that of their

general spirit, I incline to the belief that they were written at

Horton, as there is plenty of evidence that Comus and the Arcades were.

These latter poems overflow with the imagery and the feeling of the old

wooded scenery of Buckinghamshire.

"_Comus._ I know each lane, and every alley green,

Dingle, or bushy dell of this wild wood,

And every bosky bourne from side to side,

My dayly walks and ancient neighborhood."

How full of the old pastoral country are these lines:

"_Sec. Bro._ Might we but hear

The folded flocks penned in their wattled cotes,

Or sound of pastoral reed with oaten stops,

Or whistle from the lodge, or village cock

Count the night watches to his feathery dames,

'Twould be some solace yet, some little cheering,

In this close dungeon of innumerous boughs."

There is no other poet who has been able to transfuse the very spirit of

nature into words, as it is done in the following passages, except

Shakspeare, on whose soul images of rural beauty and repose fell with

equal felicity of effect.

"This evening late, by then the chewing flocks

Had ta'en their supper on the savory herb

Of knot-grass dew-besprent, and were in fold,

I sat me down to watch upon a bank

With ivy canopied, and interwove

With flaunting honey-suckle, and began,

Wrapped in a pleasing fit of melancholy,

To meditate my rural minstrelsy,

Till Fancy had her fill; but ere a close,

The wonted roar was up amid the woods," &c.

How exquisite is every image of this passage:

"Return, Sicilian Muse,

And call the vales, and bid them hither cast

Their bells, and flowerets of a thousand hues.

Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use

Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,

On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks;

Throw hither all your quaint enamel'd eyes,

That on the green turf suck the honey'd showers,

And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,

The tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine,

The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet,

The glowing violet,

The musk rose, and the well-attired woodbine,

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,

And every flower that sad embroidery wears;

Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,

And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,

To strow the laureate hearse where Lycid lies."

A power of poetic landscape-painting like this is only the result of

genius deeply instructed in the school of nature. But the time was now

come for the survey of other and more striking scenes than those of the

woodlands and pastoral uplands of Buckingham. The tour of Milton in

Italy is a marked portion of his life, and no doubt opened wide fields

of poetic imagination and of artistic experience in his mind. He visited

Nice, Leghorn, Pisa, Florence; in the vicinity of which last city, at

the village of Belloguardo, or at Arcetri, it is supposed that he paid

his visit to Galileo. Thence he went on to Sienna and Rome; he afterward

proceeded to Naples, and was intending to visit Sicily and Athens, when

the news of the revolutionary troubles in England reached him, and

caused him to retrace his steps through Rome and Florence; whence he

visited Lucca, and crossing the Apennines to Bologna, Ferrara, and

Venice, he then hastened homeward by Verona, Milan, and along the Lake

Leman to Geneva, and so on through France.

In every city of Italy he was cordially and honorably received by the

most distinguished persons of the age, and studied the works of the

great masters, in both painting and sculpture, with an effect which is

believed to be apparent in his great work, Paradise Lost. The sacrifice

which he made to the spirit of patriotism by this return is eloquently

adverted to by Warton. "He gave up," he remarks, "these countries,

connected with his finer feelings, interwoven with his poetical ideas,

and impressed upon his imagination by his habits of reading, and by long

and intimate converse with the Grecian literature. But so prevalent were

his patriotic attachments, that hearing in Italy of the commencement of

the national quarrel, instead of proceeding forward, to feast his fancy

with the contemplation of scenes familiar to Theocritus and Homer, the

fires of Etna, and the porticoes of Pericles, he abruptly changed his

course, and hastily returned home to plead the cause of ideal liberty.

Yet in this chaos of controversy, amid endless disputes concerning

religious and political reformation, independency, prelacy, tithes,

toleration, and tyranny, he sometimes seems to have heaved a sigh for

the peaceable enjoyments of lettered solitude, for his congenial

pursuits, and the more mild and ingenious exercises of the Muse."

But though he might sigh for these, he never suffered them to draw him

aside from the path of what he deemed the most sacred duty, both toward

God and man; he sacrificed not only his desire of visiting classical

regions, and of lettered ease, but he was willing to risk the

achievement of what he considered--and which eventually proved to

be--the crowning act of his eternal fame, the writing of his great epic.

He had conceived, as he tells us himself, the scheme of his Paradise

Lost; on that he placed his hope of immortality; but even that he

heroically resolved to postpone till he had seen his country rescued

from her oppressors, and placed on a firm ground of freedom. The

casualties of life might have robbed him and the world forever of the

projected work, but he ventured all for the great cause of his country

and of man, and was rewarded.

A story has been repeatedly told as the occasion of Milton's Italian

journey, and very generally believed, which Todd has shown to be told

also in the preface to "Poésies de Marguerite, Eleanore Clotilde, depuis

Madame de Surville, Poëte Française du xv. Siècle," of another poet, a

Louis de Puytendre, exactly agreeing in all the particulars, except that

the ladies were on foot. That Milton needed no such romantic incentive

to his Italian tour is self-evident, having a sufficient one in his

classical and poetic tastes; but as it appeared in a newspaper, and

obtained general credence, it may be worth transcribing.

"It is well known that in the bloom of youth, and when he pursued his

studies at Cambridge, this poet was extremely beautiful. Wandering one

day, during the summer, far beyond the precincts of the University, into

the country, he became so heated and fatigued that, reclining himself at

the foot of a tree to rest, he fell asleep. Before he woke, two ladies,

who were foreigners, passed in a carriage; agreeably astonished at the

loveliness of his appearance, they alighted, and having admired him, as

they thought, unperceived, for some time, the youngest, who was very

handsome, drew a pencil from her pocket, and having written some lines

upon a piece of paper, put it with her trembling hand into his own;

immediately afterward they proceeded on their journey. Some of his

acquaintances, who were in search of him, had observed this silent

adventure, but at too great a distance to discover that the

highly-favored party in it was our illustrious poet. Approaching nearer,

they saw their friend, to whom, being awakened, they mentioned what had

happened; Milton opened the paper, and with surprise read these verses

from Guarini, Madrigal xii., ed. 1598:

'Occhi, stelle mortali,

Ministre de miei mali--

Se chiusi m'uccidete,

Aperti che farete?'

"'Ye eyes, ye human stars! ye authors of my liveliest pangs! If thus,

when shut, ye wound me, what must have proved the consequence had ye

been open?" Eager from this moment to find the fair _incognita_, Milton

traversed, but in vain, through every part of Italy. His poetic fervor

became incessantly more and more heated by the idea which he had formed

of his unknown admirer; and it is in some degree to _her_ that his own

times, the present times, and the latest posterity, must feel themselves

indebted for several of the most impassioned and charming compositions

of the Paradise Lost."

Now, to say nothing of the incoherence of this story--of the questions

that naturally suggest themselves, of how these young men, too far off

to recognize their companion as the object of this flattering attention,

could know that the ladies were foreigners, and that the one who wrote

the paper was the _youngest_, and was very handsome--it is evident that,

had a young Cantab found himself awaking, nowadays, under a tree, with a

paper of Italian verses in his hand, and his comrades ready with a story

of a couple of beautiful young ladies, foreigners, traveling in a

carriage, and the _youngest_, who was very handsome, putting this paper

into his hand, he would very naturally have deemed himself the subject

of a most palpable quiz. Yet did the world, in a simpler age, not only

gravely receive this narrative as a fact, but Anna Seward did it into

verse.

Returned from Italy, not from the vain quest after an imaginary and

romantic fair one, but with his mind stored with knowledge and poetic

imagery, which he had not pursued in vain, Milton took up his residence

in London, in order to be ready, as occasion presented itself, to serve

his country. He had no longer the inducement to return to Horton. He had

seen his mother laid in the grave before he went; his father had

probably quitted Horton when the civil war broke out, and betaken

himself to the security of Reading, a fortified town; for on the

surrender of that town to the Earl of Essex, in 1643, the old man came

up to London to his son, with whom he continued to reside till his

death, about four years afterward.

During the five years spent by Milton at Horton, between leaving

Cambridge and setting out on his travels, he did not entirely bury

himself there in his classical books and poetic musings in the woods and

fields. He had occasional lodgings in London, in order to cultivate

music, for which he had always a great passion, to prosecute his

mathematics, to procure books, to enjoy the society of his friends,

among whom were many of his old college friends, and, no doubt, to

perfect himself in the speaking of the French and Italian languages,

which it is not to be supposed he could do at Horton. Now, however, duty

as well as inclination fixed him almost wholly in London. Great events

were transpiring, and he felt a persuasion that he must bear his part in

them. There was one circumstance which drew him for a while from the

metropolis, and it was this. He became attached to a young lady in

Oxfordshire, and is supposed to have made some abode in the place of her

residence. "The tradition," says Todd, "that he did reside at this

beautiful village of Forest Hill, near Shotover, is general, though none

of his biographers assert the circumstance. Madame du Bocage, in her

entertaining 'Letters concerning England,' &c., relates that, 'visiting,

in June, 1750, Baron Shutz and lady, at their house near Shotover Hill,

they showed me, from a small eminence, _Milton's House_, to which I

bowed with all the reverence with which that poet's memory inspires

me.'" And the same writer quotes this interesting account of the place

and circumstance from a letter of Sir William Jones: "The necessary

trouble of correcting the first printed sheets of my history prevented

me to-day from paying a proper respect to the memory of Shakspeare, by

attending his jubilee. But I resolved to do all the honor in my power to

as great a poet, and set out in the morning, in company with a friend,

to visit a place where Milton spent some part of his life, and where,

in all probability, he composed several of his earliest compositions. It

is a small village on a pleasant hill, about five miles from Oxford,

called Forest Hill, because it formerly lay contiguous to a forest,

which has since been cut down. The poet chose this place of retirement

after his first marriage, and he describes the beauties of this retreat

in that fine passage of his L'Allegro:

'Sometime walking not unseen,

By hedgerow elms, on hillocks green,--

While the plowman, near at hand,

Whistles o'er the furrowed land,

And the milkmaid singeth blithe,

And the mower whets his scythe

And every shepherd tells his tale

Under the hawthorn in the dale.

Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures,

While the landscape round it measures;

Russet lawns, and fallows gray,

Where the nibbling flocks do stray;

Mountains, on whose barren breast

The laboring clouds do often rest;

Meadows trim with daisies pied,

Shallow brooks and rivers wide;

Towers and battlements it sees

Bosom'd high in tufted trees;

Hard by, a cottage chimney smokes

From betwixt two aged oaks,' &c.

"It was neither the proper season of the year, nor time of the day, to

hear all the rural sounds, and see all the objects mentioned in this

description; but, by a pleasing concurrence of circumstances, we were

saluted on our approach to the village with the music of the mower and

his scythe; we saw the plowman intent upon his labor, and the milkmaid

returning from her country employment.

"As we ascended the hill, the variety of beautiful objects, the

agreeable stillness and natural simplicity of the whole scene, gave us

the highest pleasure. We at length reached the spot whence Milton

undoubtedly took most of his images: it is on the top of a hill, from

which there is a most extensive prospect on all sides. The distant

mountains, that seemed to support the clouds; the village and turrets,

partly shrouded in trees of the finest verdure, and partly raised above

the groves that surrounded them; the dark plains and meadows, of a

grayish color, where the sheep were feeding at large; in short, the view

of the streams and rivers, convinced us that there was not a single

useless or idle word in the above-mentioned description, but that it was

a most exact and lively representation of nature. Thus will this fine

passage, which has always been admired for its elegance, receive an

additional beauty from its exactness. After we had walked, with a kind

of poetical enthusiasm, over this enchanted ground, we returned to the

village.

"The poet's house was close to the church; the greatest part of it has

been pulled down; and what remains belongs to an adjacent farm. I am

informed that several papers, in Milton's own hand, were found by the

gentleman who was last in possession of the estate. The tradition of his

having lived there is current among the villagers: one of them showed me

a ruinous wall that made part of his chamber, and I was much pleased

with another who had forgotten the name of Milton, but recollected him

by the title of The Poet.

"It must not be omitted, that the groves near this village are famous

for nightingales, which are so elegantly described in the Penseroso.

Most of the cottage windows are overgrown with sweet-briers, vines, and

honey-suckles; and that Milton's habitation had the same rustic

ornament, we may conclude from his description of the lark bidding him

good-morrow:

Through the sweet-brier, or the vine,

Or the twisted eglantine;

for it is evident that he meant a sort of honey-suckle by the eglantine;

though that word is commonly used for the sweet-brier, which he could

not mention twice in the same couplet.

"If ever I pass a month or six weeks at Oxford in the summer, I shall be

inclined to hire and repair this venerable mansion, and to make a

festival for a circle of friends in honor of Milton, the most perfect

scholar, as well as the sublimest poet that our country ever produced.

Such an honor will be less splendid, but more sincere and respectful,

than all the pomp and ceremony on the banks of the Avon."

That Sir William might be, and probably was mistaken in supposing that

the Allegro was written at Forest Hill, I think is apparent from the

character of that poem and of the Penseroso, which bear, to me, evident

marks of a more youthful muse than the Comus and the Lycidas. They deal

more in mere description, and, what is more, the poet himself placed

them in his original volume, prior to those poems, as if written prior.

The images quoted by Sir William will apply to a thousand other scenes

in England, and where Milton himself never was. They are such as a

thousand hill-tops in our beautiful pastoral land can show us. They may

be found equally in his earlier haunts in Buckinghamshire. Nevertheless,

Shotover is not the less interesting, nor do the scenes the less apply

to it. There Milton undoubtedly did walk and muse,

"By hedgerow elms on hillocks green,"

and hear the plowman's whistle, the milkmaid's song, and the mower's

ringing scythe, and rest his eye on its landscape, tinted and varied as

he describes it. There he saw the distant mountains of Wales, and the

shepherds under the hawthorns, down in the dales below him, each

"telling his tale;" that is, not telling a story to some one, or making

love, but "telling the tale," or number of his flock, before penning

them for the night, or letting them loose in the morning.

That Milton lived at Forest Hill some time, there is no doubt; but

when, and how long, and how often, are points that now can not be very

well cleared up. Sir William Jones represents him to have chosen this

retirement after his first marriage. Now Milton was not married before

1643, at which time he was in his thirty-fifth year. But Comus and

Lycidas were written long before then, and so, no doubt, were L'Allegro

and Il Penseroso. Mosely, in his Address to the Reader, in the volume of

Milton's poems containing all these pieces, published in 1645, tells us

that these poems were known to be written, and that he solicited them to

accompany Lycidas and Comus; and Milton, in presenting this volume to

his friend Rouse, says plainly that they were the productions of his

early youth:

"Gemelle cultu simplici gaudens liber,

Fronde licit geminâ,

Munditiaque nitens non operosâ;

Quem _manus attulit

Juveniles olim_,

Secula tamen haud nimii poetæ," &c.

This settles the question of the location of the poems; but the question

of when, and how long, and how often Milton resided at Forest Hill,

still remains. That he did not reside there long, _immediately_ after

his marriage, is very clear, from the statement of his nephew and

biographer, Phillips. "About Whitsuntide, or a little after, he took a

journey into the country: nobody about him certainly knowing the reason,

or that it was more than a journey of recreation. After a month's stay,

home he returns a married man, that went out a bachelor; his wife being

Mary, the eldest daughter of Mr. Richard Powell, then a justice of

peace, of _Forestil_, near Shotover, in Oxfordshire." This account is

confirmed by Anthony Wood, who states that Milton courted, married, and

brought his wife to his house in London in one month's time; and that

she was very young. She continued, however, as we shall presently see,

only a few weeks with her husband, and returned to Forest Hill.

Now, as Milton kept this courtship so profound a secret, it is quite

probable that it might be going on much longer than any of his friends

were aware of. When he set out on his journey, of which nobody knew the

cause, he no doubt knew it. Somewhere, and some time before, he had most

likely seen this Mary Powell--where, and how long before, who shall now

say? It is possible, therefore, that, for aught any one of his friends

knew, he might have been at Forest Hill, and sojourning there

occasionally, attracted by this attachment; and that he now set out with

an intention of bringing his courtship to an end, as he did. As it

turned out, his wife was discontented with the dullness of his dwelling,

being accustomed to much gayety at home, and left him. Of this we shall

speak more anon, but here we are inquiring only into the probability of

the extent of his residence or residences at Forest Hill. The marriage

took place in the midst of the Revolutionary wars. Soon after, the house

and property of Mr. Powell, Milton's father-in-law, were seized by the

Parliamentary army, he being a Cavalier; and the wife, who had deserted

her husband in her father's prosperity, now, in his adversity, came

back, and soon brought her father and family, to seek protection under

the roof so coolly abandoned before. The father-in-law and family appear

to have lived with Milton till 1647, or about three years.

Mary Powell, Milton's first wife, died in 1652, or about nine years

after her marriage. Now, these nine years were all years of the

ascendency of the Parliamentary power, and consequently of danger and

uncertainty to the Powell family. It must be to Milton's interest with

Cromwell that they must look for any kind of security; and during these

nine years there would be many occasions when Milton might find it

agreeable to spend a certain time in the country, and at Forest Hill. It

is said that Mr. Powell, Milton's father-in-law, had, indeed, another

mansion in the neighborhood, and allowed Milton and his family

occasional occupation of this. Thus, though Milton, from his post as

Latin secretary to Cromwell, and from his continual engagements in the

cause of the Commonwealth, always had, and must have, his house in

London, it is quite likely that during these nine years he resided, in

the summer months, not unfrequently at Forest Hill.

Warton has said that he composed some of his later productions there. It

would be just the retreat for such purposes, when he required close and

unbroken retirement from the excitements and personal interruptions of

town. Mr. Richards, a sub-commissioner under a recent commission of the

reign of George III., gave Mr. Todd this intelligence: "Milton married a

daughter of Justice Powell, of Sandhurst, in the vicinity of Oxford, and

lived in a house at Forest Hill, about three miles from Sandhurst, where

the late laureate Warton told me Milton wrote a great part of his

Paradise Lost. Warton found a number of papers of Milton's own writing

in that house, and also many of Justice Powell's, which the late Mr.

Crewe, father to the late Viscountess Falmouth, permitted him to take,

and make what use of them he thought proper. The late Mr. Mickle

translated part of Camoens' Luciad in the same house, he being, at the

time I visited him, a lodger in that house. Mr. Mickle married the

daughter of Mr. Tomkins, a farmer, the tenant to Mr. Crewe. The time I

allude to of visiting my worthy friend Mickle was in 1772 and 1773; and

my conversations had with Mr. Warton and Mr. Crewe were from 1781 to

1786."

Having now clearly settled the fact that Forest Hill, near Shotover, was

a residence of Milton, and probably through a course of nine years, at

various times, and the scene of some of those great literary and

political works on which he was arduously engaged during those years;

and that while his birth-place in Bread-street, and his parental home at

Horton, were both destroyed, this has been nearly so, we will now notice

a little more closely the condition of his home during those nine years

of his first marriage. That marriage appears to have been a great

mistake; to have destroyed to a great degree his domestic comfort, and

to have occasioned the world to entertain a very unfavorable idea of

Milton's disposition. The facts, drawn from his various biographers, are

briefly these.

At Whitsuntide, in 1643, and in his thirty-fifth year, as we learn from

his nephew Phillips, in the passage quoted, he married Mary, the

daughter of Richard Powell, living at Forest Hill, near Shotover, and a

justice of peace for Oxfordshire. He brought his wife to London. She was

very young, and had been accustomed to a gay life. According to Aubrey,

"she was brought up and bred where there was a great deal of company and

merriment, as dancing, &c.; and when she came to live with her husband,

she found it solitary, no company coming to her; and she often heard her

nephews cry and be beaten. This life was irksome to her, and so she went

to her parents." Phillips says the same; that she was averse to the

philosophic life of Milton, and sighed for the mirth and jovialness to

which she had been accustomed in Oxfordshire. It was a great mistake

altogether. Milton was now a man of a sober age; he was yet but a

schoolmaster, though he had a large and handsome house in

Aldersgate-street, in a garden. This was necessary for the accommodation

of his pupils, as well as for his quiet study, and prosecution of those

great questions of the age in which he was engaged, writing for the

Republican cause, and against its enemies. All this must have been

immensely dull to a young girl, who, from all the glimpses we can get of

her, was, though perhaps handsome and fascinating, but of an ordinary

nature, and one who had been educated to frivolity and mere enjoyment of

the fashionable gayeties of life. What was more, the very work on which

Milton was zealously engaged, the defense of the Parliamentary cause,

and the defeat of the kingly, and which abstracted him from her

society, was perfect poison to her and her family--all high Royalists.

"Her relations," says Phillips, "being generally addicted to the

Cavalier party, and some of them possibly engaged in the king's service,

who at this time had his headquarters at Oxford, and was in some

prospect of success, they began to repent them of having matched the

eldest daughter of the family to a person so contrary to them in

opinion; and thought it would be a blot in their escutcheon, whenever

that events should come to flourish again."

It was these circumstances, operating together, which induced his young

wife to desert Milton. All that we can learn confirms the idea that her

family was a regularly worldly-minded one; and the only wonder is that

they should ever have agreed to the match at all. Milton was then

comparatively unknown. He was but a schoolmaster, and must have been

pretty well known to all that came in contact with him to hold very

liberal opinions. However, scarcely was the match made, than the family

began to suspect they had made a great blunder. The wife asked leave,

after a week, to go home and see her parents; and the whole affair

reminds us of the matrimonial history of a great poet of our own day.

The wife goes home in good humor, and then sends her husband word that

she does not mean to come back again. It does not appear that the wife

or wife's friends ever set up the plea that Milton was mad, however they

might think so. Luckily, Milton was a sober, moderate man, and not

accustomed to run into debt. Had he, like Lord Byron, been pretty well

dipped in debt, and expecting a large property with his wife, and not

immediately getting it, but, on the contrary, all his creditors on his

back in the expectation of it, he might have been quite as mad as he

was. Like Lord Byron, however, he had not nine executions in his house

in one week--enough to craze the sanest creature; and so Milton went on

for a good while, calmly and manfully laboring at his _Areopagitica_, or

Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, one of the noblest works

in our language. His wife had gone home, at the invitation of her

friends, to spend the remaining part of the summer with them: we have

seen _why_ they invited her. The good, easy man gave her leave to stay

till Michaelmas. Michaelmas came, but no wife; the visit had only been a

pretense for desertion. He sent for her, and she refused to come. He

sent letter after letter; these remained unanswered. He dispatched a

messenger to bring her home; the messenger was dismissed from her

father's house with contempt. This very properly moved his spirit, and

he resolved to repudiate her. To justify this bold step, he published

four treatises on divorce: The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce; The

Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce; his famous _Tetrachordon_,

or Expositions upon the four chief places of Scripture which treat of

Marriage, or Nullities of Marriage; and _Colasterion_. It is probable

that the lady and her friends would have thanked him for the divorce,

had the world gone well with them; and that, like the great poet of our

time, he might have lived and died without further sight of his pretty

runaway; but the political scene was now fast changing. The royal power

was rapidly waning; the Powells were getting into trouble, or foresaw it

fast approaching, from their active participation in the royal cause.

Milton, on the other hand, was fast rising into popular note. He was the

very man that they were likely to need in the coming storm; and, with

true worldly policy, they forgot all their pride and insults--were

willing to forget the offended husband's public exposure of his wife's

conduct, and his active measures for repudiation; and a plan was laid

for retaking him. The plot was thus laid: Milton was accustomed to visit

a relative in St. Martin's-le-Grand; and here, as it had been concerted

on her part, he was astonished to see his wife come from another

apartment, and, falling on her knees before him, beg forgiveness for her

conduct. After some natural astonishment, and some reluctance on his

part to a reconciliation, after what had passed, he at length gave way

to her tears, and forgave and embraced her.

"Soon his heart relented

Toward her, his life so late, and sole delight,

Now at his feet submissive in distress."

It has been supposed that the impression made upon his imagination and

his feelings, on this occasion, contributed no little to his description

of the scene in Paradise Lost, in which Eve addresses herself to Adam

for pardon and peace.

And certainly Milton, on this occasion, displayed no little magnanimity

and nobility of character. His domestic peace and reputation had been

most remorselessly attacked, yet, says Fenton, "after this reunion, so

far was he from retaining an unkind memory of the provocations which he

had received from her ill conduct, that when the king's cause was

entirely oppressed, and her father, who had been active in his loyalty,

was exposed to sequestration, Milton received both him and his family to

protection and free entertainment in his own house, till his affairs

were accommodated by his interest with the victorious faction." The old

father-in-law had to smart for his attachment to the royal cause. He was

publicly announced as a delinquent, and fined £576, 12_s._, 3_d._;

besides that his house was seized by the Parliamentary party.

It would be agreeable if from this time we could find data for believing

that the returned wife and her friends showed a generous sense of the

kindness of the poet. But we can not. It appears from Milton's

nuncupative will, that the old man never paid him a penny of the

promised marriage portion of £1000; and that the three daughters, too

true daughters of such a mother, had behaved to him very undutifully.

The whole of the view that we obtain of the Powell family is of a piece.

After the royal power was restored, and Milton was in danger and

disgrace, we hear of no protection afforded by them to him; no

protecting roof extended, no countenance even to the daughters, their

mother now being dead; but the father being poor, and out of favor, the

daughters were suffered to take their fate. One died early, having

married a master-builder; one died single; and the third married a

weaver in Spitalfields. It should be recollected that all three

daughters survived their father as well as mother, yet it does not

appear that they received the slightest notice or assistance from their

rich relations of Shotover. Yet his third daughter, Deborah, had great

need of it, and, in many respects, well deserved it. She lived to the

age of seventy-six. This is the daughter that used to read to her

father, and was well known to Richardson and Professor Ward: a woman of

a very cultivated understanding, and not inelegant of manners. She was

generously patronized by Addison, and by Queen Caroline, who sent her a

present of fifty guineas. She had seven sons and three daughters, of

whom Caleb and Elizabeth are remembered. Caleb emigrated to Fort Saint

George, where, perhaps, he died. Elizabeth, the youngest daughter,

married Thomas Foster, a weaver in Spitalfields, as her mother had done

before her, and had seven children, who all died. She is said to have

been a plain, sensible woman, and kept a petty grocer's or chandler's

shop, first at Lower Holloway, and afterward at Cock-lane, near

Shoreditch Church. In April, 1750, Comus was acted for her benefit:

Doctor Johnson, who wrote the prologue, says, "She had so little

acquaintance with diversion or gayety, that she did not know what was

intended when a benefit was offered her." The profits of the performance

were only £67, the expenses being deducted, although Dr. Newton

contributed largely, and Jacob Tonson gave £20. On this trifling

augmentation to their small stock, she and her husband removed to

Islington, where they both soon died.

Such is the history of Milton's posterity; that of Shakspeare was

sooner terminated, though the descendants of his sister Joan still

exist, in a poverty disgraceful to the nation.

With his two succeeding wives, Milton appears to have lived in great

harmony and affection. His second wife, a daughter of Captain Woodcock,

of Hackney, died in child-birth within a year of their marriage; and his

sonnet to her memory bears testimony to his tender regard for her. His

third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, of Cheshire, survived him, and went to

reside in her native county, among her own relatives.

From this melancholy review of Milton's domestic history, let us now

return to his homes in London after his return from Italy. He came back

with great intentions, but to the humble occupation of a schoolmaster;

and here we encounter one of the most disgraceful pieces of chuckling

over his lowly fate, to be found in that most disgraceful life of our

great poet and patriot, by Dr. Johnson. The Lives of the Poets, by

Johnson, in the aggregate, do him no credit. In point of research, even,

they are extremely deficient; but the warped and prejudiced spirit in

which they are written destroy them as authority. On Milton's head,

however, Johnson poured all the volume of his collected bile. Such a

piece of writing upon the greatest epic poet, as well as one of the most

illustrious patriots of the nation, is a national insult of the grossest

kind. Take this one passage as a specimen of the whole. "Let not our

veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on

great promises and small performances; on the man who hastens home

because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and, when he

reaches the scene of action, vapors away his patriotism in a private

boarding-school." The passage is as false as it is malicious. Milton did

not promise to come home and put himself at the head of armies or of

senates. He knew where his strength lay, and he came to use it, and did

use it most effectually. He did not say, "I will be another Cromwell,"

but he became the Cromwell of the pen. It was precisely because he was

poor--that he had no interest or connections to place him in the front

ranks of action, that he showed the greatness of his resolve, in

hastening to the scene of contest, and standing ready to seize such

opportunity as should offer, to strike for his country and for liberty.

He desired to do his duty in the great strife, whatever might be the

part he could gain to play; and had he only sincerely desired to do

that, and had yet not done it for want of opportunity, he would still

have been worthy of praise for his laudable desire.

But every thing that Milton promised he performed: who performed so

much? He did not make great promises, and show small performances; he

did not vapor away his patriotism in a private boarding-school. He took

to a school, because he must live; but he soon showed that every moment

not required for teaching his private pupils was ardently and

unceasingly devoted to teaching the nation and the world. His pen was

worth a thousand swords; his thoughts flew about and slew faster than

bullets or cannon-balls; his word became the word of exhortation and

command to his country. In his hand lay victory, not for the day and the

time only, but for all time. Shame to the old bigoted lexicographer!

must every true son of his country and lover of truth exclaim, when he

reads what Milton wrote and what he did. To say nothing of his Tractate

of Education, and a number of other works; to say nothing of his

Paradise Lost, and all his other noble poems; all breathing the most

lofty and godlike sentiments--those sentiments which create souls of

fire, of strength and truth, in every age as it arises; what are

his _Areopagitica_? his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates? his

_Eiconoclastes_? his _Defensio Populi_? his _Defensio Secunda_? his

Treatise on the Means of Removing Hirelings out of the Church? his Civil

Power in Ecclesiastical Cases? his State Letters, written at the

command of Cromwell and the Parliament? Are these nothing? If ever there

was a magnificent monument of human genius, of intellectual power, and

glorious patriotism, built up by one man, it exists in these immortal

works. Vapored away his patriotism in a private boarding-school! There

was no private boarding-school which could long hold such vaporing as

this; it was of a kind that did, or it needs must, come forth to the

face of the government, the country, and mankind. The poor schoolmaster,

who on the plains of Italy heard the cry of his country for help, flew

to her rescue as confidently as if he had been a prince, with fleets and

armies at his command. In a poor hired dwelling he prepared his missiles

and warlike machines. Men like Johnson, in the bigotry of despotism,

might despise him and them; for they were but a few quires of paper and

a gray goose-quill; but he soon shot that quill higher against the

towers of royalty, deeper into the ranks of the oppressors, than ever

the bullets of Cromwell and Fairfax could pierce. His papers flew

abroad, the unfurled banners of liberty, before which kings trembled,

and the stoutest myrmidons dropped their arms. The poor schoolmaster

became speedily the oracle of the government. His Tenure of Kings and

Magistrates vindicated in unanswerable eloquence the right of nations to

call their monarchs to account for their offenses against the laws. His

Defense of the People from the accursed charges of the hireling

Salmasius flew through Europe, and struck kings and servile senates

dumb. By the side of Cromwell the visage of the blind but divine old man

was seen, with awe and wonder; the learned and the wise from distant

realms came to gaze upon the unequaled twain; and when the inspired

secretary exclaimed,

"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones

Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold,"

the guilty persecutors shrunk aghast, for they knew that where the voice

of Milton could reach, the arm of Cromwell could reach too. Who shall

say how much of the renown of England at that day sprung from the pen

and soul of John Milton! how much he inspired of that which Cromwell

did! and how much of the grand march of political and social renovation,

which is now going on throughout the world, originated in the vaporings

of the poor schoolmaster! Before his fame how pales that of him who has

dared thus to revile him! What are all the works of Johnson--and we are

inclined to give them their fullest due--when compared with those of

Milton, and their consequences? Before him

"Whose soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,"

it became the man who so worthily chastised the meanness of a

Chesterfield, to have bowed with humility and reverential love. As it

is, we turn with disgust from this humiliating spectacle, of Johnson,

the reviler of the noble dead, to Johnson, the friend of Goldsmith, the

vindicator of Savage, and the sympathizer with the poor and suffering.

Of all the various residences of Milton in London, as I have remarked,

scarcely one has escaped the ravages of the fire, and the progress of

improvement and population. The habit which he had of selecting houses

standing in gardens, on account of their quietness, has more than any

thing else tended to sweep them away. These places, as population

increased, were naturally crowded, and the detached houses pulled down

to make way for regular streets. His first lodging was in St. Bride's

Church-yard, Fleet-street, on his return from Italy. Here he began

educating his two nephews, John and Edward Phillips. Of this lodging

nothing now remains. The house, as I learn from an old and most

respectable inhabitant of St. Bride's parish, who lives in the

church-yard, and very near the spot, was on the left hand, as you

proceed toward Fleet-street through the avenue. It was a very small

tenement, very old, and was burned down on the 24th of November, 1824,

at which time it was occupied by a hair-dresser. It was--a proof of its

age--without party walls, and much decayed. The back part of the

Punch-office now occupies its site.

These lodgings were too small, and he took a garden-house in

Aldersgate-street, situated at the end of an entry, that he might avoid

the noise and disturbance of the street. To his nephews he here added a

few more pupils, the sons of his most intimate friends. This house was

large and commodious, affording room for his library and furniture. Here

he commenced his career of pure authorship, all he did having public

reform and improvement for its object. Here he wrote, as a fitting

commencement, a treatise Of Reformation, to assist the Puritans against

the bishops, as he deemed the Puritans deficient in learning for the

defense of the great principles they were contending for. That Milton

would turn out a stern reformer of church matters, might be clearly seen

from a passage in his Lycidas, written before he was twenty-nine years

old. In this he is said even to anticipate the execution of Laud. The

passage is curious:

"How well could I have spared for thee, young swain.

Enow of such as for their bellies' sake

Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold?

Of other care they little reckoning make

Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast,

And shove away the worthy bidden guest;

Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold

A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else the least

That to the faithful herdman'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:

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw

Dayly devours apace, and nothing said;

But that two-handed engine at the door

Stands ready to smite once, and smites no more."

Here he next wrote his treatise, Of Practical Episcopacy, in defense of

the Smectymneans, against Archbishop Usher; then, Reasons of Church

Government, urged against Prelacy. In this work he revealed to his

readers his plans for a great poem--the Paradise Lost; which only was

deferred till the advocacy which the times demanded of him should be

completed. Here he finished the controversy, by his _Apology for

Smectymnus_, in 1642; and in 1643 married Mary Powell, and saw her

desert him at the instigation of her time-serving family. This led to

his writings of Divorce. These were followed by a Treatise of Education;

and, finally, by his famous _Areopagitica_--altogether an extraordinary

mass of labor to proceed from the private abode of a poor vaporing

schoolmaster!

It was in this house, on the approach of the troops of Prince Rupert to

the capital in 1642, soon after the battle of Edge Hill, that Milton

placed in imagination, if not in actual ink, his proudly deprecatory

sonnet:

"Captain, or colonel, or knight in arms,

Whose chance on these defenseless doors may seize,

If deed of honor did thee ever please,

Guard them, and him within protect from harms.

He can requite thee, for he knows the charms

That call fame on such gentle acts as these,

And he can spread thy name o'er lands and seas,

Whatever clime the sun's bright circle warms.

Lift not thy spear against the Muses' bower:

The great Emathian conqueror bid spare

The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower

Went to the ground; and the repeated air

Of sad Electra's poet had the power

To save th' Athenian walls from ruin bare."

His next remove was to a house in Barbican, now also, without doubt,

removed: this was a larger house, for it was necessary to accommodate,

not only his wife, but all her family. "When it is considered," says

Todd, "that Milton cheerfully opened his doors to those who had treated

him with indignity and breach of faith; to a father, who, according to

the poet's nuncupative will, never paid him the promised marriage

portion of a thousand pounds; and to a mother, who, according to Wood,

had encouraged the daughter in her perverseness; we can not but concede

to Mr. Hayley's conclusion, that the records of private life contain not

a more magnanimous example of forgiveness and beneficence. They are

supposed to have left him soon after the death of his father, who ended

a long life in 1647, and whose declining days had been soothed by every

attention of a truly affectionate son."

From the Barbican issued the first volume of his poems, including Comus,

Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, &c.; a strange Parnassus, as it now

seems to us. In 1647, his large troop of inmates having left him, he

once more flitted, to use the good old Saxon term, into a smaller house

in Holborn, opening backward into Lincoln's Inn Fields; this house will

now be sought in vain. Here he published, in 1649, his bold Tenure of

Kings and Magistrates, in which he vindicated what the Parliament had

done in 1648, in the execution of the king; this was followed by some

other political pamphlets. As he had made himself a marked man before,

this open defense of the royal decapitation bound him up at once with

the measures of the ruling government. Such a champion was not to be

overlooked; and accordingly, immediately afterward, he was invited by

the Council of State, without any expectation or solicitation on his

part, to become Latin secretary; as they had resolved neither to write

to others abroad, nor to receive answers from any, except in that

language, which was common to them all. Thus the vaporing schoolmaster,

without any anxious solicitation, any flatteries, or compromise of his

dignity and integrity, had steadily advanced to that post in which he

could effectually serve his country. He was here not merely the

secretary, he was the champion of the government; and, accordingly, the

_Eicon Basiliké_, attributed to King Charles himself, was ordered by him

to have an answer; which answer was his _Eiconoclastes_, or the

Image-breaker. Then came his great Defense of the People of England

against Salmasius; this work was received, both at home and abroad, with

the greatest excitement, abuse, and applause, as the different parties

were affected: at Paris and Toulouse it was burned; at home, Milton was

complimented on his performance of his task, by the visits or

invitations of all the foreign ministers in London; his own government

presented him with a thousand pounds, as a testimony of their

approbation of the manner in which he had acquitted himself; and even

Queen Christina, of Sweden, the patron of Salmasius, could not avoid

applauding it, and soon after dismissed Salmasius from her court. The

work itself, and the effect it produced, are said to have shortened the

life of Salmasius, who died about two years afterward, without having

finished his reply, upon which he was laboring.

On being made Latin secretary, Milton quitted Holborn, and took lodgings

in Scotland-yard, near Whitehall: here he lost his infant son; and his

own health being impaired, he removed to a more airy situation; that is,

into one of his favorite garden-houses, situated in Petty-France,

Westminster, which opened into St. James's Park, in which he continued

till within a few weeks of the Restoration: in this house some of the

greatest domestic events of his life occurred. Here he lost the entire

use of his eyes; his left eye having become quite dark in 1651--the year

in which he published his _Defensio Populi_--the second in 1653. His

enemies triumphed in his blindness as a judgment from Heaven upon his

writing against the king; he only replied by asking them, if it were a

judgment upon him to lose his eyes, what sort of judgment was that upon

the king, which cost him his head; and by adding, that he had charity

enough to forgive them. We have seen that he laid the foundation of this

deprivation in his youth, by unremitted and nocturnal study; and, when

writing the Defense of the People, the physicians announced to him that

he must desist, or lose his sight: he believed his duty required him to

go on, and he went on, knowing the sacrifice he made.

In this house he lost, too, his first wife, Mary Powell; their infant

son was dead, but she left him three daughters, the only children that

survived him. Of this ill-starred marriage we have said and seen enough.

He afterward married Catharine, the daughter of Captain Woodcock, of

Hackney, who died in childbed within a year of their marriage. Of the

beautiful character of this excellent woman, he has left us that

beautiful testimony, his twenty-second sonnet:

"Me thought I saw my late espoused saint

Brought to me, like Alcestis from the grave,

Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,

Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.

Mine, as whom washed from spot of childbed taint,

Purification in the old law did save,

And such, as yet once more I trust to have

Full sight of her in heaven without restraint,

Came, vested all in white, pure as her mind:

Her face was veiled, yet, to my fancied sight,

Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined

So clear, as in no face with more delight.

But, oh! as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."

Here Milton wrote his Second Defense of the People against the attack

made in a book called _Regii Sanguinis clamor ad Coelum adversus

parricidas Anglicanos_; written by one Peter du Moulin, afterward

Prebendary of Canterbury; with other things in the same controversy. As

he was now blind, he had the excellent Andrew Marvel associated with him

as assistant secretary. His industry continued at writing, as if he had

full use of his eyes. He published now his Civil Power in Ecclesiastical

Cases, and The Means of Removing Hirelings out of the Church; collected

the Original Letters and Papers addressed to Oliver Cromwell concerning

the affairs of Great Britain, from 1649 to 1658, with other things.

This memorable dwelling is yet standing. It no longer opens into St.

James's Park. The ancient front is now its back, and overlooks the fine

old, but house-surrounded garden of Jeremy Bentham. Near the top of this

ancient front is a stone, bearing this inscription: "SACRED TO MILTON,

THE PRINCE OF POETS." This was placed there by no less distinguished a

man than William Hazlitt, who rented the house some years, purely

because it was Milton's. Bentham, when he was conducting people round

his garden, which is now in the occupation of Mr. Gibs, the engineer,

used to make them sometimes go down on their knees to this house. The

house is tall and narrow, and has nothing striking about it. No doubt,

when it opened into St. James's Park, it was pleasant; now it fronts

into York-street, which runs in a direct line from the west end of

Westminster Abbey. It is number 19, and is occupied by a cutler. The

back, its former front, is closed in by a wall, leaving but a very

narrow court; but above this wall, as already said, looks into the

pleasant garden of the late venerable philosopher.

But the time of the Restoration was approaching, and Milton began to

retrace his steps toward the city, by much the same regular stages as he

had left it. After secreting himself in Bartholomew-close till the storm

had blown over, and his pardon was signed, he once more took a house in

Holborn, near Red Lion Fields; and thence removed to Jewin-street, near

Aldersgate. All these places have been rebuilt, and no house of Milton

is now to be found in these thickly-populated parts. People have often

wondered why Milton always showed such a preference for the city. There

are many reasons. In the first place, he was born and brought up till

his seventeenth year in it; the associations of youth form strong

attractions. In the second, as Dr. Johnson considerately tells us,

Aldersgate-street and the like were not then so much out of the world as

now. Besides this, after the Restoration, it would be far more

agreeable to Milton to be at some distance from the West End, where

cavaliers and courtiers were now flaunting with newly-revived insolence;

and nothing but taunts, insults, and the hearing of strange and most

odious doings, could have awaited him. Here Milton married his third and

last wife, Elizabeth Minshull, of a good family in Cheshire, with whom

he seems to have lived in great affection; so much so, that he wished to

leave her all that was left him of his property.

From Jewin-street he made his last remove, as to his London residences,

into Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. Bunhill Fields were probably, in

those days, open, and airy, and quiet; at present, with the exception of

the Artillery Ground itself, and the thickly-populated burial-ground

which contains the bones of Bunyan and De Foe, the whole of that

neighborhood is covered with a dense mass of modern houses. Artillery

Walk, Bunhill Fields, is no longer to be found. The nearest approach

that you get, even to the name, is Artillery Place, Bunhill Row, which

is merely a row of new houses adjoining the Artillery Ground, and a new

church, which has been erected in that busy, ordinary, and dingy street,

still called Bunhill Row. Besides an Art of Logic, his Treatise on True

Religion, Heresie, Schism, Toleration, and what best means _may be used

against the growth of Popery_; his Familiar Letters in Latin; and a

translation of a Latin Declaration of the Poles in favor of John III.,

their heroic sovereign--the last two published in the last year of his

life; his residence in Bunhill Fields was made remarkable by the

publication of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.

He left, moreover, in manuscript, a Brief History of Muscovy, and of

other less known Countries lying Eastward of Russia as far as Cathay,

which was published in 1682, and his System of Theology, which was long

supposed to have perished, but has been recovered and published of late

years, much to the scandal of the orthodox.

Thus to the last did this wonderful man live and labor. Never did any

man less "vapor away his patriotism." There is something singularly

interesting and impressive in our idea of him, as he calmly passed his

latter days in his quiet habitation in Bunhill Fields. He had outlived

the great battle of king and people, in which extraordinary men and as

extraordinary events had arisen, and shaken the whole civilized world.

Charles I., Laud, and Strafford had fallen in their blood; the monarchy

and the Church had fallen. Pym, Hampden, Marvel, Vane, and the dictator

Cromwell, had not only pulled down the greatest throne in Europe, but

had made all others seem to reel by the terrific precedent. All these

stern agents, with the generals Ireton, Harrison, Lambert, Fleetwood,

and their compeers, who had risen from the people to fight for the

people, were gone, like the actors in an awful tragedy who had played

their rôle; some had perished in their blood, others had been torn from

their graves; the monarchy and the Church, the peerage and all the old

practices and maxims, were again in the ascendant, and had taken bloody

vengeance; yet this one man, he who had incited and applauded, who had

defended and made glorious, through his eloquence and his learning, the

whole Republican cause, was left untouched. As if some especial

guardianship of Providence had shielded him, or as if the very foes who

pulled the dreaded Cromwell from his grave, feared the imprecations of

posterity, and shrunk from the touch of that sacred head--there sat the

sublime old man at his door, feeling with grateful enjoyment the genial

sunshine fall on him. There he sat, erect, serene, calm, and trusting to

God the Father of mankind. He had lived even to fulfill that

long-deferred task of poetic glory; the vision of Paradise Lost passed

before him, and had been sung forth in the most majestic strains that

had ever made classical the English tongue. His trust in Providence had

been justified; he had served his country, and had yet not missed his

immortality. The great and the wise came from every quarter to converse

with him; and the wonderful passages through which he and his nation had

lived, were food for the musings of the longest day or the most solitary

moments.

Many have thought that those melancholy lines in Samson Agonistes,

commencing

"O loss of sight! of thee I most complain,"

were his own wretched cogitations. But Milton, unlike Samson, had no

weak seductions from the path of his great duty to reproach himself

with; and far likelier were it that the whole apostrophe to light,

spoken in his own character in the opening of the third book of Paradise

Lost, was the more usual expression of his feelings:

"Thee I revisit safe,

And feel thy sov'ran, vital lamp; but thou

Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain

To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;

So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,

Or dim suffusion veil'd. Yet, not the more

Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt

Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,

Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief

Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,

That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,

Nightly I visit: nor sometimes forget

Those other two equaled with me in fate,

So were I equaled with them in renown,

Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides,

And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old:

Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move

Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird

Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,

Tunes her nocturnal note."

Such is the view that Richardson has given us of him in his declining

days: "An ancient clergyman, of Dorsetshire, Dr. Wright, found John

Milton in a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in an

elbow-chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale, but not cadaverous; his

hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk stones. He used, also, to sit

in a gray, coarse cloth coat, at the door of his house in Bunhill

Fields, in warm, sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air; and so, as well

as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts as

well as quality."

Much pains have been taken to represent Milton as morose and exacting in

domestic life; and as proof of it has been adduced, the leaving of him

by his first wife, and the statement that he made his daughters read to

him in Latin and Greek, though he would not allow them to learn a

syllable of those languages. If these things were true, I should be the

last man to defend them, or to endeavor to gloss them over; but they are

at least very doubtful. We must remember that these were the charges of

his enemies, and they were many and bitter, and by no means truthful.

The causes for his wife's desertion we have already examined, and they

reflect discredit on her and her family, and not on him. In that

account, all that is generous and honorable lies on his side. As to his

daughters, probably they did not wish to learn the classical languages;

and how they could read in them, while ignorant of them, so as to

satisfy his ear, is not so easily conceivable, when we recollect that

when Elwood did not understand what he was reading, he immediately

detected it, and stopped him. Be this, however, as it may, Dr. Newton

tells us, that all who had written accounts of Milton agreed that "he

was affable and instructive in conversation, and of an equal and

cheerful temper." It is not so easy to excuse him for refusing to leave

any of his property to his daughters, "because they had been very

undutiful to him." No doubt he had much to complain of in that

disposition which they had imbibed from their mother and her family, but

it became a great man, like Milton, to cherish a great affection toward

his own children, and to manifest toward them a great forgiveness.

There is an episode in the later life of Milton which we are made

acquainted with by Thomas Elwood, the Quaker, and which has something

very pleasing and picturesque about it. It is that of his abode at

Chalfont St. Giles, in Buckinghamshire. Elwood, who was the son of a

country justice of peace, was one among the first converts to Quakerism,

and has left us a most curious and amusing autobiography. In this he

tells us that, while Milton lived in Jewin-street, he was introduced to

him as a reader, the recompense to Elwood being that of deriving the

advantage of a better knowledge of the classics, and of the foreign

pronunciation of Latin. A great regard sprung up between Milton and his

reader, who was a man, not only of great integrity of mind, but of a

quaint humor and a poetical taste. On the breaking out of the plague in

London, Milton, who was then living in Bunhill Fields, wrote to Elwood,

who had found an asylum in the house of an affluent Quaker, at Chalfont,

to procure him a lodging there. He did so; but before Milton could take

possession of his country retreat, Elwood, with numbers of other

Quakers, was hurried off to Aylesbury jail. The persecution of that sect

subsiding for a while, Elwood, on his liberation, paid Milton a visit,

and received the MS. of Paradise Lost to take home and read. With this,

Elwood had the sense to be greatly delighted, and, in returning it,

said, "Thou hast said a great deal upon _Paradise Lost_; what hast thou

to say upon _Paradise Found_?" Milton was silent a moment, as pondering

on what he had heard, and then began to converse on other subjects.

When, however, Elwood visited him afterward in London, Milton showed him

the _Paradise Regained_, saying, "This is owing to you, for you put it

into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont; which before I

had not thought of."

Thus, in this abode at Chalfont, we hear the first mention of Paradise

Lost, and to it we owe Paradise Regained. It is supposed that Milton

wrote the whole of the latter poem there, and that he must have done, or

the greater part of it, from his being able so soon after his return to

show it to Elwood.

It says much for the proprietors of the cottage at Chalfont, and for the

feeling of the country in general, that this simple dwelling has been

sacredly preserved to this time. You see that all the others near it are

much more modern. This is of the old framed timber kind, and is known,

not only to the whole village, but the whole country round, as Milton's

house. Mr. Dunster, in the additions to his edition of Paradise

Regained, says that the cottage at Chalfont "is not pleasantly situated;

that the adjacent country is extremely pleasant; but the immediate spot

is as little picturesque or pleasing as can well be imagined." He might

have recollected, that it could signify very little to Milton whether

the spot was picturesque or not, if it were quiet, and had a good air;

for Milton was, and had been, long quite blind. But, in fact, the

situation, though not remarkably striking, is by no means unpleasing. It

is the first cottage on the right hand as you descend the road from

Beaconsfield to Chalfont St. Giles.

Standing a little above the cottage, the view before you is very

interesting. The quiet old agricultural village of Chalfont lies in the

valley, amid woody uplands, which are seen all round. The cottage stands

facing you, with its gable turned to the road, and fronting into its

little garden and field. A row of ordinary cottages is built at its

back, and face the road below. To the right ascends the grass field

mentioned; but this, with extensive old orchards above the house, is

pleasing to the eye, presenting an idea of quiet, rural repose, and of

meditative walks in the shade of the orchard-trees, or up the field, to

the breezy height above. Opposite to the house, on the other side of the

way, is a wheelwright's dwelling, with his timber reared among old

trees, and above it a chalk-pit, grown about with bushes. This is as

rural as you can desire. The old house is covered in front with a vine;

bears all the marks of antiquity; and is said by its inhabitant, a

tailor, to have been but little altered. There was, he says, an old

porch at the door, which stood till it fell with age. Here we may well

imagine Milton sitting, in the sunny weather, as at Bunhill Fields, and

enjoying the warmth, and the calm sweet air. Could he have seen the view

which here presented itself, it would have been agreeable; for though in

this direction the ascending ground shuts out distant prospect, its

green and woody upland would be itself a pleasant object of

contemplation; shutting out all else, and favorable to thought. The

house below consists of two rooms, the one on the left, next to the

road, a spacious one, though low, and with its small diamond casements

suggesting to you that it is much as when Milton inhabited it. Here he

no doubt lived principally; and to all probability, here was Paradise

Regained dictated to his amanuensis, most likely at that time his wife,

Elizabeth Minshull. The worthy tailor and his apprentice were now

mounted on a table in it, busily pursuing their labor.

Outside, over the door, is an armorial escutcheon, at the foot of which

is painted, in bold letters, MILTON. The old man, who was very civil and

communicative, said that it was not really the escutcheon of Milton, but

of General Fleetwood, who purchased the house for Milton, and who at

that time lived at the manor-house, and lies buried in the church here.

Of this, Elwood tells us nothing, but, on the contrary, that he procured

the house for Milton. Whether this escutcheon be really Fleetwood's or

not, I had no means of ascertaining, as it was not only very indistinct,

but too high to examine without a ladder; but as Milton's armorial

bearing contained spread eagles, and as there were birds in the shield,

it no doubt had been intended for Milton by those who placed it there.

Fleetwood's living at Chalfont might be an additional reason for

Milton's choosing it for his then retreat; but Elwood, and not

Fleetwood, took the house, and it is doubtful even whether Fleetwood

was still living, being one of the regicides condemned, but never

executed. Independent, however, of any other consideration, Milton had

many old associations with Buckinghamshire, which would recommend it to

him; and in summer the air amid the heaths and parks of this part of the

country is peculiarly soft, delicious, and fragrant.

We come now to Milton's last house, the narrow house appointed for all

living, in which he laid his bones beside those of his father. This was

in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. He died on Sunday, the 8th of

November, 1674, and was buried on the 12th. His funeral is stated to

have been very splendidly and numerously attended. By the parish

registry we find that he was buried in the chancel: "John Milton,

gentleman. Consumption. Chancell. 12. Nov., 1674." Dr. Johnson supposed

that he had no inscription, but Aubrey distinctly states that "when the

two steppes to the communion-table were raysed in 1690, his stone was

removed." Milton's grave remained a whole century without a mark to

point out where the great poet lay, till in 1793 Mr. Whitbread erected a

bust and an inscription to his memory. What is more, there is every

reason to believe that his remains were, on this occasion of raising the

chancel and removing the stone, disturbed. The coffin was disinterred

and opened, and numbers of relic-hunters were eager to seize and convey

off fragments of his bones. The matter at the time occasioned a sharp

controversy, and the public were at length persuaded to believe that

they were not the remains of Milton, but of a female, that by mistake

had been thus treated. But when the workmen had the inscribed stone

before them, and dug down directly below it, what doubt can there be

that the remains were those of the poet? By an alteration in the church

when it was repaired in 1682, that which was the old chancel ceased to

be the present one, and the remains of Milton thus came to lie in the

great central aisle. The monument erected by Whitbread marks, as near

as possible, the place. The bust is by Bacon. It is attached to a

pillar, and beneath it is this inscription:

JOHN MILTON,

Author of Paradise lost,[7]

Born Dec'r., 1608.

Died Nov'r., 1674.

His father, John Milton, died March, 1646.

They were both interred in this church.

*...*...*...*

Samuel Whitbread posuit, 1793.

This church is remarkable for the marriage of Oliver Cromwell having

taken place in it, and for being the burial-place of many eminent men.

In the chancel, in close neighborhood with Milton, lay old John Speed,

the chronicler, and Fox, the martyrologist, whose monuments still remain

on the wall. That of Speed is his bust, in doublet and ruff, with his

right hand resting on a book, and his left on a skull. It is a niche,

representing one of the folding shrines still seen in Catholic churches

on the Continent. There is a monument, also, seen there, to a lady of

the family of Sir Thomas Lucy, of Shakspeare notoriety; and another of

some noble person, having beneath the armorial escutcheon an opening

representing skulls, bones, and flames, within a barred grating,

supposed to be symbolic of purgatory. The burial-ground of Bunhill

Fields, where Bunyan and De Foe lie, belongs also to this parish, and

their interments are contained in the registry of this church.

Thus the Prince of Poets, as Hazlitt styled him, sleeps in good company.

The times in which he lived, and the part he took in them, were certain

to load his name with obloquy and misrepresentation; but the solemn

dignity of his life, and the lofty tone and principle of his writings,

more and more suffice not only to vindicate him, but to commend him to

posterity. No man ever loved liberty and virtue with a purer affection;

no man ever labored in their cause with a more distinguished zeal; no

man ever brought to the task a more glorious genius, accomplished with a

more consummate learning. Milton was the noblest model of a devoted

patriot and true Englishman; and the study of his works is the most

certain means of perpetuating to his country spirits worthy of her

greatness.