Milton's England Part 4

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

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

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

CHAPTER V.

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

One year after his mother's death, and probably just after Christopher's wedding, the poet, now a man of thirty, arrived in Paris, accompanied by his servant, and bearing valuable letters of introduction, among others, some from Sir Henry Wotton. As we are dealing with Milton's England, scant s.p.a.ce must be allowed to this year or more spent among the _savants_ and the unwonted sights of France and Italy. In Paris the young scholar was introduced by Lord Scudamore to the man whom he most desired to see,--the great Hugo Grotius, a man of stupendous erudition and lofty character.

Milton declared that he venerated him more than any modern man, and well he might, for the Dutch hero and exile had not his equal upon the Continent, even in that age of great men.

Pa.s.sing through Provence, Milton entered Italy from Nice, and found himself in the land whose melodious language he had made his own, and whose history and literature few Italians of his age knew better than he.

He went to Genoa, "La Superba," which then boasted of two hundred palaces; thence to Leghorn, and fourteen miles farther to Pisa on the Arno, and, farther up the Arno, to beautiful Florence. Here he paused two months, lionised by the best society, and hobn.o.bbing with painters, poets, prelates, and n.o.blemen as he walked in Santa Croce, or on the heights of Fiesole, or in the leafy shade of Vallombrosa. Here it was that he was presented to the blind Galileo, "grown old," he writes, "a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." Doubtless, in later years, when blindness and royal disfavour had embittered but failed to crush his spirit, the gray-haired poet often recalled this visit made in his radiant youth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On his return to England Milton did not take up his residence again in his father's home at Horton, which was then kept by his younger brother and his wife. He went to London, and for a brief time made his home with a tailor named Russel in St. Bride's Churchyard, near Fleet Street, within view of Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's. Here in the winter of 1639-40 he began teaching the little Philips boys, his nephews, and took entire charge of his small namesake John, but eight years old. His sister Anne by this time had remarried, and was now Mrs. Agar. During his stay in St.

Bride's Churchyard, Milton jotted down on seven pages of the ma.n.u.script that is now in Trinity College Library suggestions for future work with which his brain was teeming. Of the ninety-nine subjects that he considered, sixty-one, including "Paradise Lost" and "Samson," are Scriptural, and thirty-eight, including "Alfred and the Danes" and "Harold and the Normans," are on British subjects. Like the young Goethe who projected "Faust," which was not finished until his hair had whitened, Milton conceived his epic when it was to wait a quarter of a century for completion.

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

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

Amid the labyrinth of dingy, crowded alleys with which the garden s.p.a.ces of the seventeenth century now are covered, one looks in vain to-day for any trace of Milton's home; in short, of all the houses that he occupied in London, no one remains, or even has its site marked. All we know of the house on Aldersgate Street is, that it stood in the second precinct of St.

Botolph's parish, between the gate and Maidenhead Court on the right, and Little Britain and Westmoreland Alley on the left. Near by dwelt his old teacher, Doctor Gill, and Doctor Diodati, the father of his dearest friend, whose recent death he mourned in a touching elegy written in Latin. Upon his walks into the open fields, which were not then far distant, he must have pa.s.sed many fine town houses of the gentry, their sites now covered by a dreary waste of shops and factories. During these years we learn that he varied his studies in the cla.s.sics, and his keen observations on the doings of the newly a.s.sembled Long Parliament by an occasional "gaudy-day," in company with some "young sparks of his acquaintance."

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

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

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

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

"cheese-press house," "wool-house," of their two coaches, one wain, and four carts. It was a merry household, and one well-to-do in worldly goods.

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

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

Milton's n.o.ble "Areopagitica"--a plea for freedom of the press--was written during these melancholy, wifeless months, while the din of civil war was in the air, and he mused in wrath and bitterness over his country's miseries and his own.

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

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

Here he published the first edition of his collected poems. The t.i.tle-page tells us that the songs were set to music by the same musician, Henry Lawes, "Gentleman of the King's Chapell," who had engaged him to write the "Arcades" and "Comus." It was to be "sold at the signe of the Princes Arms in Paul's Churchyard, 1645." The wretched botch of an engraving of the poet which accompanied it displeased him, and he humourously compelled the unsuspecting and unlearned artist to engrave in Greek beneath it the following lines:

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

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

By strange coincidence this house, where Milton lived when "Comus" was first published, was but a few yards distant from the town house of the earl in whose honour the masque had been composed a dozen years or more before this. With him was the "Lady Alice," now nearly twenty-four years old, who, as a girl of eleven, had sung Milton's songs in Ludlow Castle.

The earl loved music, and his children's music teacher, Lawes, and others who had acted in the merry masque comforted his invalidism with concourse of sweet sounds, almost within hearing of the old scrivener and organist and his poet-son. Milton loved Lawes, and wrote a sonnet to him; doubtless during these days they were much together.

About the time that Milton's first baby daughter appeared, the Barbican house was crowded with the disconsolate Powell family, who had nearly lost their all, and fled to Mary's husband for protection. Mother Powell seems to have been a woman of strong personality, and the new baby was christened "Anne" for her. Within two months, both the Milton and Powell grandfathers were buried from the house in Barbican. In the burials at St.

Giles's Cripplegate appears, in March, 1646, the record: "John Milton, Gentleman, 15."

While worrying over the settlement of the Powell estates and brother Christopher's as well, Milton continued his teaching; his pupil writes: "His manner of teaching never savoured in the least anything of pedantry."

Cyriack Skinner, grandson of the great c.o.ke, to whom he wrote two sonnets in later years, was his pupil in the Barbican.

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

By his bold tractate on the "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates," which was written during the terrible days of the king's trial and execution, Milton put himself on the side of the regicides. Exactly a month after its appearance he was waited on at High Holborn by a committee from the Council of State, who asked him to accept the position of "Secretary for Foreign Tongues." His eyesight was already failing; he could no longer read by candle-light; but here was a great opportunity for public service, and he did not long hesitate. On March 20th, when he entered upon office, he learned that all letters to foreign states and princes were to be put into dignified Latin form, so as to be instantly read by government officials in all countries, and not into the "wheedling, lisping jargon of the cringing French," as his nephew calls it. His salary was a trifle over 288--worth about five times that sum to-day. Sometimes an early breakfast at High Holborn was necessary in order to meet the council at seven A.M.

in Whitehall, but usually it met at eight or nine. It seemed, however, best for the Miltons to move nearer Whitehall, and while he waited for his apartments to be ready, Milton took lodging at Charing Cross, opening into Spring Garden, where now is the meeting-place of the London County Council. This was on the royal estate, and was so named from a concealed fountain which spurted forth when touched by the unwary foot. It must have been a pleasant spot, with its bathing pond and bowling green and pheasant yard, which led from what is now Trafalgar Square into St. James's Park.

Opposite, at Charing Cross, was the palace of the Percys, later called "Northumberland House," and next to it, where now stands the Grand Hotel, was the home of Sir Harry Vane. Queen Eleanor's Cross had been taken down in 1647 and the statue of Charles I., which on the year of Milton's death replaced it on its site, was at this time kept in careful concealment.

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

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: PART OF WHITEHALL

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

_From an old engraving._]

CHAPTER VI.