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17

SHADES OF THE DEPARTED.

I. MILTON.

MILTON'S memory is one of our most frequent and cherished visitants, as we ramble through the streets of London. He meets us in many a spot, which his name, like a spiritual presence, has hallowed; for from first to last of his earthly history he belonged to the mother-city of his native land. It was the scene of his birth and burial, and in various localities within its precincts he also spent the greater portion of his manhood. His love of the beautiful and sublime in nature was not the outgrowth of scenes that encircled his infant senses, but was itself a living root of poetry in his soul, producing, like leaves and flowers in their springtide freshness and abundance, those aspirations after the beautiful and sublime in nature which led him to go forth in quest of them; for he could have said, in the words of one gifted with the like endowments,

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In the great city-pent mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars."

We turn out of the tumultuous traffic of Cheapside into Breadstreet—rather comfortless and melancholy-looking, as it strikes us-and soon reach, on the left hand, the site of what was the dwelling of John Milton, scrivener; some old house, we fancy, which rose like inverted steps, story projecting beyond story, till the top, with beetling brows, overshadowed no small portion of the

narrow street. We know that a sign hung over the door, bearing the armorial badge of the family, a spread eagle; and under it we seem to stand, on a cold December day, the 20th of the month, in the year of grace 1608, while there issues from the oak-carved doorway, the citizen-inhabitant with his wife, a woman known and loved all round the parish for her benevolence; and a nurse bearing in her arms a boy, of whose high mental destiny no one of the little party on their way to the church of Allhallows could ever dream. The Allhallows church of that day was destroyed in the Fire of London; and the edifice now in existence is one of Sir Christopher Wren's, of a totally different character from the first; but the parish register remains, exhibiting the record of the poet's baptism; of this a memorial has been inscribed on the wall, by the church door in Watling-street, on which there is this inscription, rarely read, we apprehend, by the passers by:

Three poets in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn;
The first in loftiness of thought surpast;
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The force of nature could no further go,
To make a third she joined the other two.

JOHN MILTON

was born in Bread-street on Friday, the 9th day of December, 1608, and was baptized in the parish church of Allhallows, Bread-street, on Tuesday, the 20th day of December, 1608.

Leaving the shade of the infant, we meet in the close vicinity of his paternal abode the shade of the schoolboy. Every passenger through St. Paul's churchyard must have noticed the dark imprisoned court, under the colonnade opposite to the east end of the cathedral. It makes itself known at times as the playing place of the boys in St. Paul's school, by the sportive shouts and the bursts of glee which issue from between the close iron rails.

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St. Paul's school, in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, was quite another sort of building. A gothic edifice in the Tudor style then stood upon the site, probably with open courts patched over with a little green; and thither wended the boy from the Spread Eagle, "with satchel on back," to play with his longsince forgotten school-fellows. He was studious, and, when only twelve years of age, many a time did he sit up till midnight, conning his books, thus not only laying the foundation of his marvellous scholarship, but of his blindness too. Nor was his muse unfledged even then. Ere eleven summers had rolled over him, he would sing of "the golden-tressed sun," "the spangled sisters of the night," and "the thunder-clasping hand of the Almighty." When a youth he must have had a countenance of calm majestic beauty, judging by what he was in manhood; and with this agrees the legend of the Italian lady, who fell in love with him as she saw him asleep one day beneath a tree.

Descending Ludgate-hill to St. Bride's churchyard, the shade revisits us, now risen into manliness, and just returned from Italy full of ripe learning and rich taste. Milton took lodgings at the house of one Russel, a tailor, and there educated his two nephews. And in that noisy lodging-place, he formed acquaintance with Patrick Young, the librarian of Charles I.; the republican and the royalist sympathizing in a common love for literature.

Wherever we meet with the memory of Milton in old London, we find the place so changed that we have to bring back the shades of departed scenes, as well as of the departed man, to give any thing like vivid reality to our image of him. Manuscripts in the middle ages were defaced and written over again, but antiquaries have deciphered in some cases the original writing, and thus restored the book to what it was of old. A like process fancy performs in reference to London streets and houses, in these literary perambulations.

Ancient scenes defaced, and covered with modern architecture, we endeavour by a little imaginative power to reproduce. It requires rather an effort to do this in the next locality sacred to Milton. "He made no long stay at his lodging in St. Bride's churchyard; necessity for having a place to dispose of 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, by reason of the privacy, besides that there are few streets in London more free from noise than that." Aldersgate-street free from noise! a garden house there! Well, after all we can fancy it, and there we see him plunging into prose authorship, and writing eloquent books on ecclesiastical reform. He unwisely marries a lady "accustomed to a great deal of company, merriment and dancing," and little fitted therefore to sympathize with him in his severe tastes and classic sort of life; so in that garden house there is domestic strife, over which we sorrowfully draw a veil. But he continues still to write and study, and receives more pupils, when storms assail him from without, aroused by the displeasure of the presbyterian clergy. Then comes domestic reconciliation with Mrs. Milton, at the house of a relation in St. Martin-le-Grand, after which we find him settling in a new house in Barbican. There, where had once stood the watch-tower of the city, many architectural transformations had taken place before Milton's time; but the Barbican of the present day is more altered still. Yet, tradition points to No. 17, now inhabited by a dyer-an altered yet still old-looking house, with bay-windows from bottom to top-as being the identical abode in which Milton dwelt. We have diligently sought out the spot, and been informed by the present inhabitant that it is the veritable residence of the great Commonwealth's poet. A neighbour assured us he had gone over the rooms, many

years ago, when they preserved unmistakable traces of the 17th century. They are altered now.

Wandering up High Holborn, again the poet meets us, issuing from his new dwelling, the back of which opened into Lincoln'sinn-fields. His removal there occurred just after the march of the army to London to put down an insurrection which had been excited by Massey and Brown.

Charing Cross, and the region round about, are abundant in associations connected with the Commonwealth. Whitehall was the residence of Cromwell. In 1649 Milton was appointed Latin secretary to the Council of State, and composed those despatches and documents in his favourite tongue, which show what a master he was of its style and rhythm.* His biographer Symmons informs us, that, on his appointment, he removed to a lodging in the house of one Thompson, at Charing Cross, and afterwards to apartments in Scotland-yard. Scotland-yard is connected with Whitehall, and perhaps we should identify Milton's residence in the former place with the lodgings in the palace once occupied by Sir J. Hippesley.

This glimpse of the poet is vague and indistinct; but such can hardly be said of our view of Milton in his next abode. He removed to Petty France to a "house next door to the Lord Scudamore's, and opening into St. James's Park." Petty France is now York-street, and No. 19 is marked in the London Handbook as the place where Milton dwelt. We have been on a pilgrimage to it, expecting to find some remains of an aristocratic-looking mansion; indeed we could not help fancying we had made a mistake when we entered a small cutlery shop. The front is modern, but the back is old, probably as old as the time of Milton. The present occupier

* Art has depicted Cromwell and Milton together—the man of action and the man of thought; the latter listening to the apparently oratorical-like dictation of the former. We do not think Milton and his master managed things after that fashion. How the Protector gave his instructions to the great Latin Secretary we cannot presume to imagine.

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