Milton's England Part 2

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

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

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

When Milton went to school in 1620, St. Paul's Cathedral was become old and much in need of restoration. It had been built on the site of an older church and was in process of erection and alteration from about 1090 to 1512, when its new wooden steeple, covered with lead, was completed. Its cross was estimated later by Wren to have been at least 460 feet from the ground. This had disappeared in a fire in 1561, and none replaced it. What Milton saw was a huge edifice, chiefly Gothic, with a central tower about 260 feet high. The cla.s.sical porch by Inigo Jones was not added, neither were certain buildings which ab.u.t.ted the nave torn down until after Milton's school-days were over. On the east end, next his schoolhouse, was a great window thirty-seven feet high, above which was a circular rose window. The choir stretched westward 224 feet, which, with the nave, made the entire length 580 feet. When Jones's portico was added, its whole length was 620 feet. The area which it covered was 82,000 feet, and it was by far the largest cathedral in all England. Upon the southwest corner was a tower once used as a prison, and also as a bell and clock tower.

This was the real Lollards' tower, rather than the one at Lambeth which is so called. The northwest tower was likewise a prison. The nave was of transitional Norman design, of twelve bays in length, and with triforium and clerestory. For many decades a large part of the cathedral was desecrated by a throng of hucksters, idlers, and fops.

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

Bishop Earle, writing when Milton was twenty years of age, describes St.

Paul's as follows: "It is a heap of stones and men with a vast confusion of languages; and were the steeple not sanctified, nothing liker Babel.

The noise in it is like that of bees mixed of walking tongues and feet. It is the exchange of all discourse, and no business whatsoever but is here stirring and afoot. It is the market of young lecturers, whom you may cheapen here at all rates and sizes. All inventions are emptied here, and not few pockets. The best sign of a temple in it is that it is the thieves' sanctuary."

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

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

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

In brief, the little "Haw" was a small edition of the Pisan Campo Santo.

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

About the year 1620, when William Bradford was writing his famous journal, and John Carver and Edward Winslow were sailing with him in the _Mayflower_, when Doctor Harvey had told London folk that man's blood circulates, and many new things were being noised abroad, twelve-year-old John Milton first went to school. His school had been founded in 1512 by Dean Colet, whose great tomb, just mentioned, was but a stone's throw distant. It was a famous school. Ben Jonson and the famous Camden had studied there, and learned Latin and Greek, the catechism, and good manners. There were 153 boys in all; the number prescribed had reference, curiously, to the number of fishes in Simon Peter's miraculous draught.

Over the windows were inscribed the words in large capital letters: "_Schola Catechizationis Puerorum In Christi Opt. Max. Fide Et Bonis Literis_." On entering, the pupils were confronted by the motto painted on each window: "_Aut Doce, Aut Disce, Aut Discede_"--either teach or learn or leave the place. There were two rooms, one called the _vestibulum_, for the little boys, where also instruction was given in Christian manners. In the main schoolroom the master sat at the further end upon his imposing chair of office called a _cathedra_, and under a bust of Colet said to have been a work of "exquisite art." Stow tells us that somewhat before Milton's time the master's wages were a mark a week and a livery gown of four n.o.bles delivered in cloth; his lodgings were free. The sub-master received weekly six shillings, eight pence, and was given his gown.

Children of every nationality were eligible; on admission they pa.s.sed an examination in reading, writing, and the catechism, and paid four pence, which went to the poor scholar who swept the school. The eight cla.s.ses included boys from eight to eighteen years of age, though the curriculum of the school extended over only six years. Milton's master was Doctor Alexander Gill, who from 1608-1635 held the mastership of St. Paul's School. A progressive man was this same reverend gentleman--a great believer in his native English and in spelling reform. Speaking of Latin, this remarkable Latin master said: "We may have the same treasure in our own tongue. I love Rome, but London better. I favour Italy, but England more. I honour the Latin, but worship the English." He was also an advocate of the retention of good old Saxon words as against the invasion of Latinised ones. "But whither," he writes, "have you banished those words which our forefathers used for these new-fangled ones? Are our words to be exiled like our citizens? O ye Englishmen, retain what yet remains of our native speech!" Under Mr. Gill's instruction, and that of his son, who was usher, Milton spent about four years of strenuous study. So great was his ambition for learning during the years when most boys find school hours alone irksome enough that he says: "My father destined me when a little boy for the study of humane letters, which I seized with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight; which indeed was the first cause of injury to my eyes, to whose natural weakness there were also added frequent headaches." Philips writes:

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

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

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

Likewise Psalm one hundred and thirty-six, beginning:

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

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

CHAPTER III.

MILTON AT CAMBRIDGE

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

After his sister, who was then eighteen years old, had been wooed and won by Mr. Philips, and had made the first break in the home on Spread Eagle Court, Milton, now sixteen years old, followed his friend to Cambridge.

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

Under the mastership of Doctor Thomas Bainbrigge, Milton became a "lesser pensioner" in February, 1624, at Christ's College. Students were cla.s.sified according to social rank and ability to pay, and Milton stood above the poorer students, called "sizars," who had inferior accommodation; he probably paid about 50 a year for his maintenance.

Christ's College, as regards numbers, then stood nearly at the head of the sixteen colleges and had one master, thirteen fellows, and fifty-five scholars, which, together with students, made the number two hundred and sixty, about the same that it has to-day. It stands between Sidney Suss.e.x College and Emmanuel. In the former, Cromwell studied, from April, 1616, to July, 1617, and the room with its bay window and deep window-seats and little bedroom opening out of it, which is said to have been his, may still be seen in the second story of the building next to the street. The window is modern. His portrait, painted in middle life, hangs in the dining-hall. Doctor William Everett, in what is the best book on life in Cambridge,--his "On the Cam,"--thus sums up his estimate of the Protector: "Bigots may defame him, tyrants may insult him, but when the hosts of G.o.d rise for their great review and the champions of liberty bear their scars, there shall stand in the foremost rank, shining as the brightness of the firmament, the majestic son of Cambridge, the avenger and protector, Oliver Cromwell." A Royalist has written in a note that is appended to Cromwell's name in the college books: "_Hic fuit grandis ille impostor carnifex perditissimus_;" and it is as "impostor" and "butcher" that two-thirds of Englishmen would have described him before Carlyle resurrected the real man.

Emmanuel College is preeminently the Puritan college. It is dear to Americans as the one where William Blackstone, the learned hermit of Shawmut, John Harvard, the founder of Harvard College, and Henry Dunster, its first president, Bradstreet, the colonial governor, and Hugh Peters, the regicide, who lived in Boston, once studied. Here also Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, was a student, and here John Cotton was a fellow. This beloved preacher afterward left his ministry over St.

Botolph's Church in Boston, England, to go to the little settlement of Winthrop's, which had changed its earlier names of "Shawmut" and "Trimountaine" to "Boston" before his arrival. American tourists, who find their way to the s.p.a.cious grounds of Jesus College to see the Burne-Jones and Morris windows in the chapel, will be glad to note that in these stately halls John Eliot walked a student. Little he then dreamed of his future life in wigwams, a guest of mugwumps, in the forests of Natick, Ma.s.sachusetts, and of the laborious years to be spent in turning Hebrew poetry and history and gospel message into their barbarous tongue. Francis Higginson, the minister to Salem, and the ancestor of Colonel Thomas W.

Higginson, studied here as well. John Winthrop, the governor of the Ma.s.sachusetts colony, and President Chauncy of Harvard College studied at Trinity a generation before Wren erected its great library, and Isaac Newton was a student there. John Norton, Cotton's successor at the First Church, Boston, studied in Peterhouse, the oldest of all the colleges, and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, entered Pembroke College the year before Milton entered Christ's. Whether the two, whose lives were to touch so closely later, knew each other then or not is doubtful. William Brewster was the only man who came in the _Mayflower_ who had a college education. He too studied at Cambridge; and so did John Robinson, the dearly loved pastor of the Pilgrims, who remained with the other English refugees at Leyden.

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

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHRIST'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

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

_From an old engraving._]

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

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

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

Ma.s.son tells us that in Milton's college days the daily routine was chapel service at five o'clock in the morning, followed sometimes by a discourse by one of the fellows, then breakfasts, probably served in the students'

own rooms, as they are to-day. This was followed by the daily college lectures or university debates, which lasted until noon, when dinner was served in the college dining-halls; there the young men, then as now, sat upon the hard, backless benches, and drank their beer beneath painted windows and portraits, perchance by Holbein, of the eminent men who had been their predecessors.

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

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

ruffs about their necks, with fair feminine cuffs at the wrist."

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

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

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

Milton seems to have attended plays at the university, and to have been a critical observer. Toland quotes him as saying: "So many of the young divines and those in next apt.i.tude to Divinity have been seen so often on the stage writhing and unboning their Clergy Lims to all the antic and dishonest Gestures of Trinculos, Buffoons, and bands; prost.i.tuting the shame of that ministry which either they had or were nigh having, to the eyes of Courtiers and Court Ladies, with their grooms and Mademoiselles.

There where they acted and overacted among other young Scholars, I was a Spectator; they thought themselves gallant Men and I thought them Fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they misp.r.o.nounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticisms, they were out and I hist."

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