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THE

LIFE OF JOHN MILTON.

JOHN MILTON was born on the morning of the 9th December 1608, in Bread Street, London.

He was of an ancient Oxfordshire family that lost its estates during the "Wars of the Roses." His grandfather, a violent Romanist, was keeper of the forest of Shotover near Halton, in the ancestral county of the Miltons; and his father, on being disinherited for becoming a Protestant, established himself in London as a scrivener. To this profession he applied himself with so great success that he was at length able to retire from it with a considerable fortune; but, at the same time, he cultivated the polite arts, particularly music, of which he was both a performer and a composer. Milton's father therefore belonged to that superior order of minds in which a taste for the beautiful coexists with a just appreciation of the useful, so that the gratification of the one interferes not with the pursuit of the other. His mother too is said to have been an excellent woman; and thus our poet enjoyed the inestimable blessing of being brought up under good parents.. As his father, having suffered for changing his religion, no doubt strenuously maintained the rights of conscience, so this circumstance in the family history must be held as having recommended religious liberty to the future championship of the son.

Before being sent to St Paul's School, London, he was instructed at home by Thomas Young, a puritan, who afterwards became chaplain to the English merchants at Hamburgh, and this connexion probably tended to bias Milton's young mind

against the established order of things in church and state. In his early studies Milton manifested, instead of the waywardness usually attributed to genius, rather the laboriousness which is allowed to be the appanage of talent; for we are informed that from his twelfth year he used to study till midnight, an excessive application which, if it made him a first-rate classical scholar by 1625, when he went to Christ's College, Cambridge, also weakened his eyesight, and indeed was probably the remote cause of the total blindness with which he was ultimately affected.

He remained seven years at the University, taking his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1629, and that of Master of Arts in 1632. Whether Milton was a favourite at Cambridge may be doubted from his subsequent hostility to the Universities; but it is not true, as some of his opponents in fierce controversy afterwards alleged, that he was expelled, though Dr Johnson inclines to think that he was rusticated for some misdemeanour of which Milton himself however seems not to have been ashamed. It is superfluous to say that he became a proficient in mathematics; but it is important to observe that his poetical exercises during these years of academic discipline, were characterized by the same maturity of thought and dignity of expression which pervade his later compositions. He therefore misjudged himself when, at the age of 23, he wrote, in a fit of dejection perhaps, "But my late spring no bud or blossom show'th,"

and forecast his capabilities more justly at the age of nineteen, when in a vacation exercise he addresses the English language as desiring to make it the vehicle of some long and lofty flight. It would appear from the following extract, that the outlines of some grand conception, if not of Paradise Lost itself, were already floating in his brain :

"Yet I had rather, if I were to choose,

My service in some greater subject use,

Such as may make thee search thy coffers round,
Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound:
Such where the deep transported mind may soar
Above the wheeling poles, and at Heaven's door
Look in, and see each blissful deity

How he before the thunderous throne doth lie,

Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings

To the touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings
Immortal nectar to her kingly sire;

Then passing through the scenes of watchful fire,
And misty regions of wide air next under,
And hills of snow, and lofts of piled thunder,
May tell at length how green-eyed Neptune raves,
In Heaven's defiance mustering all his waves;
Then sing of secret things that came to pass
When beldame Nature in her cradle was;
And last of kings and queens and heroes old,
Such as the wise Demodocus once told
In solemn songs at king Alcinous' feast,
While sad Ulysses' soul and all the rest
Are held with his melodious harmony
In willing chains and sweet captivity."

Milton's parents had destined him for the church; but, at the close of his University career, he positively declined taking orders. This does not appear to have resulted from the absence of serious impressions; for, on his twenty-fourth birthday, he wrote thus solemnly of all he might have acquired,—

"All is, if I have grace to use it so

As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."

He objected to the "servitude and forswearing" connected in his view with the clerical office; and it may therefore be concluded that he was unwilling to shackle his freedom of investigation by subscription to articles about some of which he might still have misgivings, or his freedom of action by formally iden tifying himself with an ecclesiastical system to which he already entertained a hostile disposition.

On leaving the University in 1632, he retired to his father's country residence at Horton, near Colebrook, Buckinghamshire, where he spent five years in a thorough review of both ancient and modern literature, music being his chief relaxation during this interval of learned retirement, as in his later years it was his chief solace. To this period belong his Comus, Arcades, Lycidas, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso. The first of these pieces, a Mask, was suggested by the Earl of Bridgewater's daughter missing her way during the night in the forest of Haywood; and, as it was represented at Ludlow Castle on Michaelmas

Eve 1634, by the young lady herself and her two brothers, and in 1637 was printed, though without the author's name, it brought Milton's genius, so conspicuously displayed in it, under the notice of distinguished men. One of these was Sir Henry Wotton, formerly ambassador to the republic of Venice; and to him Milton was indebted for directions and introductory letters when the death of his mother in 1638 set him at liberty to gratify a long cherished desire of travelling on the Continent. It is said that Sir Henry endeavoured to impress upon Milton a maxim of prudence which will never be out of date till despotism is extinct, recommending as it does to the Englishman abroad, "i peusieri stretti, ed il viso sciolto," i. e., close thoughts and an open countenance.

Milton's route lay through Paris, Nice, Genoa, Leghorn, Pisa, Florence, and Rome, to Naples, and thence back through Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Geneva, and Paris. In Paris he was introduced to the learned Hugo Grotius, but he seems not to have been much interested by that city, and to have hastened on to Italy, where he formed friendships with many distinguished literati, especially at Florence. Some of these attachments are commemorated in the Latin and Italian Odes exchanged between the parties. No one does he appear to have esteemed more highly than Deodati, a theologian of Geneva; witness the "Epitaphium Damonis," composed on occasion of his death. But of all Milton's interviews with great men abroad, the most interesting to posterity, perhaps also the most influential in his own experience, was with the famous Galileo, whom he found "a prisoner in the Inqusition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought."

On setting out Milton had intended to pursue his travels from Naples into Sicily and Greece; but hearing of the differences between the King and the Parliament in England, and feeling that he had a part to act in the opening drama, he gave up his original plan, and returned after an absence of only fifteen months. It seems strange that, having hastened his return from patriotic considerations, he should have engaged almost immediately in the laborious and time-engrossing work

of tuition; for we find him very soon quietly established in Aldersgate Street, and afterwards in a larger house in the Barbican, with two nephews, and the sons of several intimate friends, under his care. His father being still alive, Milton's allowance was probably small; and as no man could have been fitter than he was to instruct youth, so he could not have selected a more honourable calling in order to eke out an adequate subsistence. This occupation, however, did not prevent him from doing battle for the Puritans with his pen; and some idea may be formed of his literary activity from the number of works published by him in one year, 1641, viz., two books on "Reformation in England;" a tract on "Prelatical Episcopacy," in answer to one by Archbishop Usher; a treatise entitled "Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy," and "Animadversions" on a "Defence" by Bishop Hall. These works display, in a remarkable degree, that constitutional self-confidence which enabled Milton to differ from current as well as traditional opinions without the least misgiving; and there occurs in his "Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy," a passage exemplifying that prophetic anticipation of leaving "something so written to after times, as they should not willingly let it die," which so often impels great minds to attempt great things. "This," he says, "is not to be obtained but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit that can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases. To this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs; till which in some measure be compassed, I refuse not to sustain this expectation." Here again is another dim foreshadowing of Paradise Lost.

In 1643, at the age of thirty-five, Milton married the eldest daughter of Richard Powell, a wealthy royalist and justice of the peace in that part of Oxfordshire where his own grandfather had been under-ranger. Notwithstanding Milton's personal beauty, on account of which he had been called at Cambridge "the lady of Christ's College," it soon appeared that

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