Life of John Milton Part 1

Life of John Milton.

by Richard Garnett.

NOTE.

The number of miniature "Lives" of Milton is great; great also is the merit of some of them. With one exception, nevertheless, they are all dismissed to the shelf by the publication of Professor Ma.s.son's monumental and authoritative biography, without perpetual reference to which no satisfactory memoir can henceforth be composed. One recent biography has enjoyed this advantage. Its author, the late Mark Pattison, wanted neither this nor any other qualification except a keener sense of the importance of the religious and political controversies of Milton's time. His indifference to matters so momentous in Milton's own estimation has, in our opinion, vitiated his conception of his hero, who is represented as persistently yielding to party what was meant for mankind. We think, on the contrary, that such a mere man of letters as Pattison wishes that Milton had been, could never have produced a "Paradise Lost." If this view is well-founded, there is not only room but need for yet another miniature "Life of Milton,"

notwithstanding the intellectual subtlety and scholarly refinement which render Pattison's memorable. It should be noted that the recent German biography by Stern, if adding little to Professor Ma.s.son's facts, contributes much valuable literary ill.u.s.tration; and that Keighley's a.n.a.lysis of Milton's opinions occupies a position of its own, of which no subsequent biographical discoveries can deprive it. The present writer has further to express his deep obligations to Professor Ma.s.son for his great kindness in reading and remarking upon the proofs--not thereby rendering himself responsible for anything in these pages; and also to the helpful friend who has provided him with an index.

LIFE OF MILTON.

CHAPTER I.

John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, when Shakespeare had lately produced "Antony and Cleopatra," when Bacon was writing his "Wisdom of the Ancients" and Ralegh his "History of the World," when the English Bible was hastening into print; when, nevertheless, in the opinion of most foreigners and many natives, England was intellectually unpolished, and her literature almost barbarous.

The preposterousness of this judgment as a whole must not blind us to the fragment of truth which it included. England's literature was, in many respects, very imperfect and chaotic. Her "singing masons" had already built her "roofs of gold"; Hooker and one or two other great prose-writers stood like towers: but the less exalted portions of the edifice were still half hewn. Some literatures, like the Latin and the French, rise gradually to the crest of their perfection; others, like the Greek and the English, place themselves almost from the first on their loftiest pinnacle, leaving vast gaps to be subsequently filled in.

Homer was not less the supreme poet because history was for him literally an old song, because he would have lacked understanding for Plato and relish for Aristophanes. Nor were Shakespeare and the translators of the Bible less at the head of European literature because they must have failed as conspicuously as Homer would have failed in all things save those to which they had a call, which chanced to be the greatest. Literature, however, cannot remain isolated at such alt.i.tudes, it must expand or perish. As Homer's epic pa.s.sed through Pindar and the lyrical poets into drama history and philosophy, continually fitting itself more and more to become an instrument in the ordinary affairs of life, so it was needful that English lettered discourse should become popular and pliant, a power in the State as well as in the study. The magnitude of the change, from the time when the palm of popularity decorated Sidney's "Arcadia" to that when it adorned Defoe and Bunyan, would impress us even more powerfully if the interval were not engrossed by a colossal figure, the last of the old school in the erudite magnificence of his style in prose and verse; the first of the new, inasmuch as English poetry, hitherto romantic, became in his hands cla.s.sical. This "splendid bridge from the old world to the new," as Gibbon has been called in a different connection, was John Milton: whose character and life-work, carefully a.n.a.lyzed, resolve themselves into pairs of equally vivid contrasts. A stern Puritan, he is none the less a freethinker in the highest and best sense of the term. The recipient of direct poetical inspiration in a measure vouchsafed to few, he notwithstanding studies to make himself a poet; writes little until no other occupation than writing remains to him; and, in general, while exhibiting even more than the usual confidence, shows less than the usual exultation and affluence of conscious genius. Professing to recognize his life's work in poetry, he nevertheless suffers himself to be diverted for many a long year into political and theological controversy, to the scandal and compa.s.sion of one of his most competent and attached biographers. Whether this biographer is right or wrong, is a most interesting subject for discussion. We deem him wrong, and shall not cease to reiterate that Milton would not have been Milton if he could have forgotten the citizen in the man of letters. Happy, at all events, it is that this and similar problems occupy in Milton's life the s.p.a.ce which too frequently has to be spent upon the removal of misconception, or the refutation of calumny. Little of a sordid sort disturbs the sentiment of solemn reverence with which, more even than Shakespeare's, his life is approached by his countrymen; a feeling doubtless mainly due to the sacred nature of his princ.i.p.al theme, but equally merited by the religious consecration of his whole existence. It is the easier for the biographer to maintain this reverential att.i.tude, inasmuch as the prayer of Agur has been fulfilled in him, he has been given neither poverty nor riches. He is not called upon to deal with an enormous ma.s.s of material, too extensive to arrange, yet too important to neglect. Nor is he, like Shakespeare's biographer, reduced to choose between the starvation of nescience and the windy diet of conjecture. If a humbling thought intrudes, it is how largely he is indebted to a devoted diligence he never could have emulated; how painfully Professor Ma.s.son's successors must resemble the Turk who builds his cabin out of Grecian or Roman ruins.

Milton's genealogy has taxed the zeal and ac.u.men of many investigators.

He himself merely claims a respectable ancestry (_ex genere honesto_).

His nephew Phillips professed to have come upon the root of the family tree at Great Milton, in Oxfords.h.i.+re, where tombs attested the residence of the clan, and tradition its proscription and impoverishment in the Wars of the Roses. Monuments, station, and confiscation have vanished before the scrutiny of the Rev. Joseph Hunter; it can only be safely concluded that Milton's ancestors dwelt in or near the village of Holton, by Shotover Forest, in Oxfords.h.i.+re, and that their rank in life was probably that of yeomen. Notwithstanding Aubrey's statement that Milton's grandfather's name was John, Mr. Hyde Clarke's researches in the registers of the Scriveners' Company have proved that Mr. Hunter and Professor Ma.s.son were right in identifying him with Richard Milton, of Stanton St. John, near Holton; and Professor Ma.s.son has traced the family a generation further back to Henry Milton, whose will, dated November 21, 1558, attests a condition of plain comfort, nearer poverty than riches. Henry Milton's goods at his death were inventoried at 6 19s.; when his widow's will is proved, two years afterwards, the estimate is 7 4s. 4d. Richard, his son, is stated, but not proved, to have been an under-ranger of Shotover Forest. He appears to have married a widow named Jeffrey, whose maiden name had been Haughton, and who had some connection with a Ches.h.i.+re family of station. He would also seem to have improved his circ.u.mstances by the match, which may account for the superior education of his son John, whose birth is fixed by an affidavit to 1562 or 1563. Aubrey, indeed, next to Phillips and Milton himself, the chief contemporary authority, says that he was for a time at Christ Church, Oxford--a statement in itself improbable, but slightly confirmed by his apparent acquaintance with Latin, and the family tradition that his course of life was diverted by a quarrel with his father. Queen Mary's stakes and f.a.ggots had not affected Richard Milton as they affected most Englishmen. Though churchwarden in 1582, he must have continued to adhere to the ancient faith, for he was twice fined for recusancy in 1601, which lends credit to the statement that his son was cast off by him for Protestantism. "Found him reading the Bible in his chamber," says Aubrey, who adds that the younger Milton never was a scrivener's apprentice; but this is shown to be an error by Mr. Hyde Clarke's discovery of his admission to the Scriveners' Company in 1599, where he is stated to have been apprentice to James Colborn. Colborn himself had been only four years in business, instead of the seven which would usually be required for an apprentice to serve out his indenture--which suggests that some formalities may have been dispensed with on account of John Milton's age. A scrivener was a kind of cross between an attorney and a law stationer, whose princ.i.p.al business was the preparation of deeds, "to be well and truly done after my learning, skill, and science," and with due regard to the interests of more exalted personages. "Neither for haste nor covetousness I shall take upon me to make any deed whereof I have not cunning, without good advice and information of counsel." Such a calling offered excellent opportunities for investments; and John Milton, a man of strict integrity and frugality, came to possess a "plentiful estate." Among his possessions was the house in Bread Street destroyed in the Great Fire.

The tenement where the poet was born, being a shop, required a sign, for which he chose The Spread Eagle, either from the crest of such among the Miltons as had a right to bear arms, among whom he may have reckoned himself; or as the device of the Scriveners' Company. He had been married about 1600 to a lady whose name has been but lately ascertained to have been Sarah Jeffrey. John Milton the younger was the third of six children, only three of whom survived infancy. He grew up between a sister, Anne, several years older, and a brother, Christopher, seven years younger than himself.

Milton's birth and nurture were thus in the centre of London; but the London of that day had not half the population of the Liverpool of ours.

Even now the fragrance of the hay in far-off meadows may be inhaled in Bread Street on a balmy summer's night; then the meadows were near the doors, and the undefiled sky was reflected by an unpolluted stream.

There seems no reason to conclude that Milton, in his early boyhood, enjoyed any further opportunities of resort to rural scenery than the vicinity of London could afford; but if the city is his native element, natural beauty never appeals to him in vain. Yet the influences which moulded his childhood must have been rather moral and intellectual than merely natural:--

"The starlight smile of children, the sweet looks Of women, the fair breast from which I fed,"

played a greater part in the education of this poet than

"The murmur of the unreposing brooks, And the green light which, s.h.i.+fting overhead, Some tangled bower of vines around me shed, The sh.e.l.ls on the sea-sand, and the wild flowers."

Paramount to all other influences must have been the character of his father, a "mute" but by no means an "inglorious" Milton, the preface and foreshadowing of the son. His great step in life had set the son the example from which the latter never swerved, and from him the younger Milton derived not only the independence of thought which was to lead him into moral and social heresy, and the fidelity to principle which was to make him the Abdiel of the Commonwealth, but no mean share of his poetical faculty also. His mastery of verbal harmony was but a new phase of his father's mastery of music, which he himself recognizes as the complement of his own poetical gift:--

"Ipse volens Phoebus se dispertire duobus, Altera dona mihi, dedit altera dona parenti."

As a composer, the circ.u.mspect, and, as many no doubt thought prosaic scrivener, took rank among the best of his day. One of his compositions, now lost, was rewarded with a gold medal by a Polish prince (Aubrey says the Landgrave of Hesse), and he appears among the contributors to _The Triumphs of Oriana_, a set of twenty-five madrigals composed in honour of Queen Elizabeth. "The Teares and Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soule"--dolorous sacred songs, Professor Ma.s.son calls them--were, according to their editor, the production of "famous artists," among whom Byrd, Bull, Dowland, Orlando Gibbons, certainly figure, and three of them were composed by the elder Milton. He also harmonized the Norwich and York psalm tunes, which were adapted to six of the Psalms in Ravenscroft's Collection. Such performance bespeaks not only musical accomplishment, but a refined nature; and we may well believe that Milton's love of learning, as well as his love of music, was hereditary in its origin, and fostered by his contact with his father. Aubrey distinctly affirms that Milton's skill on the organ was directly imparted to him by his father, and there would be nothing surprising if the first rudiments of knowledge were also instilled by him. Poetry he may have taught by precept, but the one extant specimen of his Muse is enough to prove that he could never have taught it by example.

We have therefore to picture Milton growing up in a narrow street amid a strict Puritan household, but not secluded from the influences of nature or uncheered by melodious recreations; and tenderly watched over by exemplary parents--a mother noted, he tells us, for her charities among her neighbours, and a father who had discerned his promise from the very first. Given this perception in the head of a religious household, it almost followed in that age that the future poet should receive the education of a divine. Happily, the sacerdotal caste had ceased to exist, and the education of a clergyman meant not that of a priest, but that of a scholar. Milton was instructed daily, he says, both at grammar schools and under private masters, "as my age would suffer," he adds, in acknowledgment of his father's considerateness. Like Disraeli two centuries afterwards (perhaps the single point of resemblance), he went for schooling to a Nonconformist in Ess.e.x, "who," says Aubrey, "cut his hair short." His own hair? or his pupil's? queries Biography. We boldly reply, Both. Undoubtedly Milton's hair is short in the miniature painted of him at the age of ten by, as is believed, Cornelius Jansen. A thoughtful little face, that of a well-nurtured, towardly boy; lacking the poetry and spirituality of the portrait of eleven years later, where the long hair flows down upon the ruff.

After leaving his Ess.e.x pedagogue, Milton came under the private tuition of Thomas Young, a Scotchman from St. Andrews, who afterwards rose to be master of Jesus College, Cambridge. It would appear from the elegies subsequently addressed to him by his pupil that he first taught Milton to write Latin verse. This instruction was no doubt intended to be preliminary to the youth's entrance at St. Paul's School, where he must have been admitted by 1620 at the latest.

At the time of Milton's entry, St. Paul's stood high among the schools of the metropolis, competing with Merchant Taylors', Westminster, and the now extinct St. Anthony's. The headmaster, Dr. Gill, was an admirable scholar, though, as Aubrey records, "he had his whipping fits." His fitful severity was probably more tolerable than the systematic cruelty of his predecessor Mulcaster (Spenser's schoolmaster when he presided over Merchant Taylors'), of whom Fuller approvingly records: "Atropos might be persuaded to pity as soon as he to pardon where he found just fault. The prayers of c.o.c.kering mothers prevailed with him as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children." Milton's father, though by no means "c.o.c.kering," would not have tolerated such discipline, and the pa.s.sionate ardour with which Milton threw himself into the studious life of the school is the best proof that he was exempt from tyranny. "From the twelfth year of my age," he says, "I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight." The ordinary school tasks cannot have exacted so much time from so gifted a boy: he must have read largely outside the regular curriculum, and probably he practised himself diligently in Latin verse. For this he would have the prompting, and perhaps the aid, of the younger Gill, a.s.sistant to his father, who, while at the University, had especially distinguished himself by his skill in versification. Gill must also have been a man of letters, affable and communicative, for Milton in after-years reminds him of their "almost constant conversations," and declares that he had never left his company without a manifest accession of literary knowledge. The Latin school exercises have perished, but two English productions of the period, paraphrases of Psalms executed at fifteen, remain to attest the boy's proficiency in contemporary English literature. Some of the unconscious borrowings attributed to him are probably mere coincidences, but there is still enough to evince acquaintance with "Sylvester, Spenser, Drummond, Drayton, Chaucer, Fairfax, and Buchanan." The literary merit of these versions seems to us to have been underrated. There may be no individual phrase beyond the compa.s.s of an apt and sensitive boy with a turn for verse-making; but the general tone is masculine and emphatic. There is not much to say, but what is said is delivered with a "large utterance," prophetic of the "os magna soniturum," and justifying his own report of his youthful promise:--"It was found that whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or betaken to of mine own choice, in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly by this latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live."

Among the incidents of Milton's life at St. Paul's School should not be forgotten his friends.h.i.+p with Charles Diodati, the son of a Genevese physician settled in England, whose father had been exiled from Italy for his Protestantism. A friends.h.i.+p memorable not only as Milton's tenderest and his first, but as one which quickened his instinctive love of Italian literature, enhanced the pleasure, if it did not suggest the undertaking, of his Italian pilgrimage, and doubtless helped to inspire the execration which he launched in after years against the slayers of the Vaudois. The Italian language is named by him among three which, about the time of his migration to the University, he had added to the cla.s.sical and the vernacular, the other two being French and Hebrew. It has been remarked, however, that his use of "Penseroso," incorrect both in orthography and signification, shows that prior to his visit to Italy he was unacquainted with the niceties of the language. He entered as "a lesser pensioner" at Christ's College, Cambridge, on February 12, 1625; the greatest poetic name in an University roll already including Spenser, and destined to include Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Tennyson. Why Oxford was not preferred has been much debated.

The father may have taken advice from the younger Gill, whose Liberalism had got him into trouble at that University. He may also have been unwilling to place his son in the neighbourhood of his estranged relatives. Shortly before Milton's matriculation his sister had married Mr. Edward Phillips, of the office of the Clerk of the Crown, now abolished, then charged with the issue of Parliamentary and judicial writs. From this marriage were to spring the young men who were to find an instructor in Milton, as he in one of them a biographer.

The external aspect of Milton's Cambridge is probably not ill represented by Lyne's coloured map of half a century earlier, now exhibited in the King's Library at the British Museum. Piles of stately architecture, from King's College Chapel downward, tower all about, over narrow, tortuous, pebble-paved streets, bordered with diminutive, white-fronted, red-tiled dwellings, mere dolls' houses in comparison. So modest, however, is the chartographer's standard, that a flowery Latin inscription a.s.sures the men of Cambridge they need but divert Trumpington Brook into Clare Ditch to render their town as elegant as any in the universe. Sheep and swine perambulate the environs, and green s.p.a.ces are interspersed among the colleges, spa.r.s.ely set with trees, so pollarded as to justify Milton's taunt when in an ill-humour with his university:--

"Nuda nec arva placent, umbrasque negantia molles, Quam male Phoebicolis convenit ille locus!"

His own college stands conspicuous at the meeting of three ways, aptly suggestive of Hecate and infernal things. Its spiritual and intellectual physiognomy, and that of the university in general, must be learned from the exhaustive pages of Professor Ma.s.son. A book unpublished when he wrote, Ball's life of Dr. John Preston, Master of Emmanuel, vestige of an entire continent of submerged Puritanism, also contributes much to the appreciation of the place and time. We can here but briefly characterize the University as an inst.i.tution undergoing modification, rather by the decay of the old than by the intrusion of the new. The revolution by which mathematics became the princ.i.p.al instrument of culture was still to be deferred forty years. Milton, who tells us that he delighted in mathematics, might have been nearly ignorant of that subject if he pleased, and hardly could become proficient in it by the help of his Alma Mater. The scholastic philosophy, however, still reigned. But even here tradition was shaky and undermined; and in matters of discipline the rigid code which nominally governed the University was practically much relaxed. The teaching staff was respectable in character and ability, including many future bishops. But while the academical credentials of the tutors were unimpeachable, perhaps not one among them all could show a commission from the Spirit.

No one then at Cambridge seems to have been in the least degree capable of arousing enthusiasm. It might not indeed have been easy for a Newman or a Green to captivate the independent soul of Milton, even at this susceptible period of his life; failing any approach to such external influence, he would be likely to leave Cambridge the same man as he entered it. Ere, indeed, he had completed a year's residence, his studies were interrupted by a temporary rupture with the University, probably attributable to his having been at first placed under an uncongenial tutor. William Chappell was an Arminian and a tool of Laud, who afterwards procured him preferment in Ireland, and, as Professor Ma.s.son judges from his treatise on homiletics, "a man of dry, meagre nature." His relations with such a pupil could not well be harmonious; and Aubrey charges him with unkindness, a vague accusation rendered tangible by the interlined gloss, "Whipt him." Hence the legend, so dear to Johnson, that Milton was the last man to be flogged at college. But Aubrey can hardly mean anything more than that Chappell on some occasion struck or beat his pupil, and this interpretation is supported by Milton's verses to Diodati, written in the spring of 1626, in which, while acknowledging that he had been directed to withdraw from Cambridge ("_nec dudum vet.i.ti me laris angit amor_") he expresses his intention of speedily returning:--

"Stat quoque juncosas Cami remeare paludes, Atque iterum raucae murmur adire scholae."

A short rustication would be just the notice the University would be likely to take of the conduct of a pupil who had been engaged in a scuffle with his tutor, in which the fault was not wholly or chiefly his. Formal corporal punishment would have rendered rustication unnecessary. That Milton was not thought wholly in the wrong appears from his not having been mulcted of a term's residence, his absence notwithstanding, and from the still more significant fact that Chappell lost his pupil. His successor was Nathaniel Tovey, in whom his patroness, the Countess of Bedford, had discerned "excellent talent."

What Milton thought of him there is nothing to show.

This temporary interruption of the smoothness of Milton's University life occurred, as has been seen, quite early in its course. Had it indeed implied a stigma upon him or the University, the blot would in either case have been effaced by the perfect regularity of his subsequent career. He went steadily through the academic course, which to attain the degree of Master of Arts, then required seven years'

residence. He graduated as Bachelor at the proper time, March, 1629, and proceeded Master in July, 1632. His general relations with the University during the period may be gathered partly from his own account in after years, when perhaps he in some degree "confounded the present feelings with the past," partly from a remarkable pa.s.sage in one of his academical exercises, fortunately preserved to us, the importance of which was first discerned by his editor and biographer Mitford.

Professor Ma.s.son, however, ascertained the date, which is all important.

We must picture Milton "affable, erect, and manly," as Wood describes him, speaking from a low pulpit in the hall of Christ's College, to an audience of various standing, from grave doctors to skittish undergraduates, with most of whom he was in daily intercourse. The term is the summer of 1628, about nine months before his graduation; the words were Latin, but we resort to the version of Professor Ma.s.son:--

"Then also there drew and invited me, in no ordinary degree, to undertake this part your very recently discovered graciousness to me. For when, some few months ago, I was about to perform an oratorical office before you, and was under the impression that any lucubrations whatsoever of mine would be the reverse of agreeable to you, and would have more merciful judges in Aeacus and Minos than almost any of you would prove, truly, beyond my fancy, beyond my hope if I had any, they were, as I heard, nay, as I myself felt, received with the not ordinary applause of all--yea, of those who at other times were, on account of disagreements in our studies, altogether of an angry and unfriendly spirit towards me. A generous mode of exercising rivalry this, and not unworthy of a royal breast, if, when friends.h.i.+p itself is wont often to misconstrue much that is blamelessly done, yet then sharp and hostile enmity did not grudge to interpret much that was perchance erroneous, and not a little, doubtless, that was unskilfully said, more clemently than I merited."

It is sufficiently manifest from this that after two years' residence Milton had incurred much anger and unpopularity "on account of disagreements in our studies," which can scarcely mean anything else than his disapprobation of the University system. Notwithstanding this he had been received on a former occasion with unexpected favour, and on the present is able to say, "I triumph as one placed among the stars that so many men, eminent for erudition, and nearly the whole University have flocked hither." We have thus a miniature history of Milton's connection with his Alma Mater. We see him giving offence by the freedom of his strictures on the established practices, and misliking them so much as to write in 1642, "Which [University] as in the time of her better health and mine own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, so now much less." But, on the other hand, we see his intellectual revolt overlooked on account of his unimpeachable conduct and his brilliant talents, and himself selected to represent his college on an occasion when an able representative was indispensable. Cambridge had all imaginable complacency in the scholar, it was towards the reformer that she a.s.sumed, as afterwards towards Wordsworth, the att.i.tude of

"Blind Authority beating with his staff The child that would have led him."

The University and Milton made a practical covenant like Frederick the Great and his subjects: she did what she pleased, and he thought what he pleased. In sharp contrast with his failure to influence her educational methods is "that more than ordinary respect which I found above any of my equals at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the Fellows of that College wherein I spent seven 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 that I would stay; as by many letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, I was a.s.sured of their singular good affection toward me." It may be added here that his comeliness and his chast.i.ty gained him the appellation of "Lady" from his fellow collegians: and the rooms at Christ's alleged to have been his are still pointed out as deserving the veneration of poets in any event; for whether Milton sacrificed to Apollo in them or not, it is certain that in them Wordsworth sacrificed to Bacchus.

For Milton's own sake and ours his departure from the University was the best thing that could have happened to him. It saved him from wasting his time in instructing others when he ought to be instructing himself.

From the point of view of advantage to the University, it is perhaps the most signal instance of the mischief of strictly clerical fellows.h.i.+ps, now happily things of the past. Only one fellows.h.i.+p at Christ's was tenable by a layman: to continue in academical society, therefore, he must have taken orders. Such had been his intention when he first repaired to Cambridge, but the young man of twenty-three saw many things differently from the boy of sixteen. The service of G.o.d was still as much as ever the aim of his existence, but he now thought that not all service was church service. How far he had become consciously alienated from the Church's creed it is difficult to say. He was able, at all events, to subscribe the Articles on taking his degree, and no trace of Arianism appears in his writings for many years. As late as 1641 he speaks of "the tri-personal Deity." Curiously enough, indeed, the ecclesiastical freethought of the day was then almost entirely confined to moderate Royalists, Hales, Chillingworth, Falkland. But he must have disapproved of the Church's discipline, for he disapproved of all discipline. He would not put himself in the position of those Irish clergymen whom Strafford frightened out of their conscientious convictions by reminding them of their canonical obedience. This was undoubtedly what he meant when he afterwards wrote: "Perceiving that he who would take orders must subscribe slave." Speaking of himself a little further on as "Church-outed by the prelates," he implies that he would not have refused orders if he could have had them on his own terms. As regarded Milton personally this att.i.tude was reasonable, he had a right to feel himself above the restraints of mere formularies; but he spoke unadvisedly if he meant to contend that a priest should be invested with the freedom of a Prophet. His words, however, must be taken in connection with the peculiar circ.u.mstances of the time. It was an era of High Church reaction, which was fast becoming a shameful persecution. The two moderate prelates, Abbot and Williams, had for years been in disgrace, and the Church was ruled by the well-meaning, but sour, despotic, meddlesome bigot whom wise King James long refused to make a bishop because "he could not see when matters were well." But if Laud was infatuated as a statesman, he was astute as a manager; he had the Church completely under his control, he was fast filling it with his partisans and creatures, he was working it for every end which Milton most abhorred, and was, in particular, allying it with a king who in 1632 had governed three years without a Parliament. The mere thought that he must call this hierarch his Father in G.o.d, the mere foresight that he might probably come into collision with him, and that if he did his must be the fate of the earthen vessel, would alone have sufficed to deter Milton from entering the Church.

Even so resolute a spirit as Milton's could hardly contemplate the relinquishment of every definite calling in life without misgiving, and his friends could hardly let it pa.s.s without remonstrance. There exists in his hand the draft of a letter of reply to the verbal admonition of some well-wisher, to whom he evidently feels that he owes deference. His friend seems to have thought that he was yielding to the allurements of aimless study, neglecting to return as service what he had absorbed as knowledge. Milton pleads that his motive must be higher than the love of lettered ease, for that alone could never overcome the incentives that urge him to action. "Why should not all the hopes that forward youth and vanity are afledge with, together with gain, pride, and ambition, call me forward more powerfully than a poor, regardless, and unprofitable sin of curiosity should be able to withhold?" And what of the "desire of honour and repute and immortal fame seated in the breast of every true scholar?" That his correspondent may the better understand him, he encloses a "Petrarchean sonnet," recently composed, on his twenty-third birthday, not one of his best, but precious as the first of his frequent reckonings with himself:--

"How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

My hasting days fly on with full career; But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.

Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth, That I to manhood am arrived so near; And inward ripeness doth much less appear, Than some more timely-happy spirits indu'th.

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure even To that same lot, however mean or high, Towards which Time leads me, and the Will of Heaven.

All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."

The poetical temperament is especially liable to misgiving and despondency, and from this Milton evidently was not exempt. Yet he is the same Milton who proclaimed a quarter of a century afterwards--

"I argue not Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer Right onward."

There is something very fine in the steady resolution with which, after so fully admitting to himself that his promise is yet unfulfilled, and that appearances are against him, he recurs to his purpose, frankly owning the while that the gift he craves is Heaven's, and his only the application. He had received a lesson against over-confidence in the failure of his solitary effort up to this time to achieve a work on a large scale. To the eighth and last stanza of his poem, "The Pa.s.sion of Christ," is appended the note: "This subject the author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished." It nevertheless begins n.o.bly, but soon deviates into conceits, bespeaking a fatigued imagination. The "Hymn on the Nativity," on the other hand, begins with two stanzas of far-fetched prettiness, and goes on ringing and thundering through strophes of ever-increasing grandeur, until the sweetness of Virgin and Child seem in danger of being swallowed up in the glory of Christianity; when suddenly, by an exquisite turn, the poet sinks back into his original key, and finally harmonizes his strain by the divine repose of concluding picture worthy of Correggio:--

"But see, the Virgin blest Hath laid the Babe to rest; Time is our tedious song should here have ending; Heaven's youngest-teemed star Hath fixed her polished car, Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending; And all about the courtly stable Bright harnessed Angels sit in order serviceable."

In some degree this magnificent composition loses force in our day from its discordance with modern sentiment. We look upon religions as members of the same family, and are more interested in their resemblances than their antagonisms. Moloch and Dagon themselves appear no longer as incarnate fiends, but as the spiritual counterparts of antediluvian monsters; and Milton's treatment of the Olympian deities jars upon us who remember his obligations to them. If the most Hebrew of modern poets, he still owed more to Greece than to Palestine. How living a thing Greek mythology was to him from his earliest years appears from his college vacation exercise of 1628, where there are lines which, if one did not know to be Milton's, one would declare to be Keats's. Among his other compositions by the time of his quitting Cambridge are to be named the superb verses, "At a Solemn Music," perhaps the most perfect expression of his ideal of song; the pretty but over fanciful lines, "On a fair Infant dying of a cough;" and the famous panegyric of Shakespeare, a fancy made impressive by dignity and sonority of utterance.