Milton

1674, in a small house, with but one room on a floor, in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, London. Of his father the records that remain show him to have been a convinced member of

at Milton was allowed to live at home without any ostens

ears as a day-scholar. From his twelfth year onward he was an omnivorous reader, and before he left school had written some boyish verses, void of merit. The next fourteen years

insight into "all seemly and generous arts and affairs." London was a great centre of traffic, a motley crowd of adventurers and traders even in those days, and the boy Milton must often have wandered down to the river below London Bridge to see the ships c

eather-beate

though shrouds

whom the Chorus

state

bound for

an or

bravery on, a

d, and stre

the winds that

is Samson repr

olish pilot, h

rusted to m

usly r

the great sea-beast Leviathan,

me small night-

e happy garden the Ad

who

pe of Hope, a

at sea north-e

urs from th

e Blest, wi

slack their course

grateful smell

those odorous s

s near to Eve in

he work

by skilful ste

uth, or forelan

t so steers, and

to the stars of heaven and the sands of the sea for number. All sorts of characters, nationalities, and costumes were daily to be seen in Paul's Walk, adjoining Milton's school. One sort interests us pre-eminently. "In the general pride of England," says Fynes Moryson, "there is no fit difference made of degrees; for very Bankrupts, Players, and Cutpurses go apparelled like gentlemen." Shakespeare was alive during the first seven years of Milton's life, and was no doubt sometimes a

ll-trod s

s learned

hakespeare, F

native wood

ut these are doubtless the memories of reading. In the Apology for Smectymnuus, when he has to reply to the charge that he "haunted playhouses" during his college days, he retorts the charge, it is true, rather than denies it. Yet the retort bespeaks a certain severity and preciseness in judging of plays and their actors, which can hardly have found gratification in the licenses and exuberances of the contemporary drama. It was not difficult, he remarks, to see plays, "when in the Colleges so many of the young divines, and those

Spenser was still the dominant influence in English poetry. "He hath confessed to me," said Dryden, "that Spenser was his original,"--an incredible statement unless we understand "original" in the sense of his earliest admiration, his poetic godfather who first won him to poetry. He read Shakespeare and Jonson in the first editions. He read Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas, His Divine Weekes and Workes; and perhaps thence conceived the first vague idea of a poem on a kindred subject. It is necessary to insist on his English masters, because, although the greater part of his time and study was devoted to the classics, the instrument that he was to use was learned in a native school. His metre, his magnificent vocabulary, his unerring phraseology, took learning and practice. He attached a high value to his study of English poetry. When he spoke of "our sage and serious Spenser (whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas)," he was conscious that he was maintaining

had been hastily pulled down; the new government offices that were to replace it had as yet been but partially built, and commanded no general approval. Considered as a social organisation, moreover, the Church throughout large parts of the country had fallen into a state not unlike decay. Richard Baxter, whose testimony there is no sufficient reason to reject, tells of its state in Shropshire during the years of his youth, from 1615 onwards:--"We lived in a country that had but little preaching at all: In the Village where I was born there was four Readers successively in Six years time, ignorant Men, and two of them immoral in their lives; who were all my School-masters. In the Village where my Father lived, there was a Reader of about Eighty years of Age that never preached, and had two Churches about Twenty miles distant: His Eyesight failing him, he said Common-Prayer without Book; but for the Reading of the Psalms and Chapters he got a Common Thresher and Day-Labourer one year, and a Tayl

t against this state of things, were at fierce variance with each other, and Milton's ear, from his youth upward, was "pealed with noises loud and ruinous." The age of Shakespeare was irrecoverably past, and it was impossible for any but a few imperturbable Cyrenaics, like Herrick, to "fleet the time carelessly, as they d

But they are also the poems of an age that was closing, and they have a touch of the sadness of evening. "I know not," says Dr. Johnson, speaking of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, "whether the characters are kept sufficiently apart. No mirth can indeed be found in his melancholy, but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth." It

t last my

he peacefu

gown and m

sit and ri

r that heave

erb that si

experienc

g like prop

periods. It was not so; political passion dominates and informs all his later poems, dictating even their subjects. How was it possible for him to choose King Arthur and his Round Table for the subject of his epic, as he had intended in his youthful days; when chivalry and the spirit of chivalry had fought its last fight on English soil, full in the sight of all men, round the forlorn banner of King Charles? The policy of Laud and Stratford kept Milton out of the Church, and sent him into retirement at Horton; the same policy, it may be plausibly c

n the fighters in the plain. Before we follow him we may well "interpose a little ease" by looking at some of the beauties proper to the ear

with secu

hamlets w

erry bells

ocund reb

youth and

the chequ

d old come f

nshine

air. Already the Maypole, that "great stinking idol," as an Elizabethan Puritan called it, had been doomed to destruction. So

and harmelesse

e love and am

llage did a M

es and May gam

lusty Yonk

sses danced t

to their banquet

r'd the better

nter's Tale where Shakespeare draws a vivid

tles, Manners, T

hey beheld the

down unto the

try gallants da

th his tenant's

liking, and es

ing-man, and

some farme, wi

oles, what shou

lmost banish't

e rebellious

ime was harmeles

gnant spirit w

tall Pirami

*

ive towne, whi

-fires burn'd an

assell-cups we

er of Peace an

ese went down, th

hismes and hum

d I hope thy

see once more

om Milton. The Court roysterers, the Hectors, Nickers, Scourers, and Mohocks, among whom were numbered Sedley and Rochester, and others of the best p

d palaces he

ous cities, w

s above their

d outrage; an

eets, then wand

own with inso

hese later days are glanc

ordliest in

asted priest th

aught religion

people on th

insolent, u

ave livers, majestic, but not sprightly. In L' Allegro the morning song of the milk-maid is "blithe," and the music of the village dance is "jocund." But Eve is described as "jocund" and "bl

meets the eye in the Hesperian wildernesses of Eden. Or take the world of fairy lore that Milton inherited from the Elizabethans--a world to which not only Sh

s told of m

Mab the ju

cription is put into the mouth of Comus himself, chief of

eas, with all th

on in waverin

tawny sands

fairies and th

brook and f

hs decked wit

wakes and pa

ight to do

he is master of! The pleasure that Milton forswore was a young god, the companion of Love and Youth, not an aged Silenus among the wine-skins. He viewed and described one whole realm of pagan loveliness, and then he turned his face the other way, and never looked back. Love is of the valley, and he lifted his eyes to the hills. His guiding star was not Christianity, which in its most characteristic and beautiful aspects had no fasc

e of men the

dering lo

perish as th

name, no mor

Chorus in Sam

hou hast sole

d graces emin

eat work,

fety, which in

's Puritanism enabled him to combine his classical and Biblical studies, to reconcile his pagan and Christian admirati

icius, Curius

ghty things, an

offered from th

e himself. There is no beatific vision to keep his eyes from wandering among the shows of earth. Milton's heaven is colder than his earth, the home of Titans, whose employ is political and martial. W

s He, with

ience from th

consolation h

mind, all pa

on of the young, who, while they read poetry by the ear and eye for its sonorous suggestions, and its processions of vague shapes, love Milton; but when they come to read it for its matter and sentiment, leave him--in most cases never to return. The atmosphere of his later poems is that of some great public institution. Heaven is an Oriental despotism. Hell is a Secession parliament. In the happy garden itself th

n can ever know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged; beholds no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself; he has, therefore, little natural curiosity and

e incomparable grandeur of Milton's characters and situations springs. The conversations that he records are like international parleyings. Eve

t more

than with hi

n himself was

an the tedious

hen their ric

and grooms bes

owd and sets t

doings he felt himself to be a "cause," an agent of mighty purposes. This it is that more than excuses, it glorifies, his repeated magniloquent allusions to himself throughout the prose works. Holding himself on trust or on com

some ge

rds favour my

he pass

peace be to m

singular ending, no doubt, to an elegy! But it is blind and hasty to conclude that therefore the precedent laments are "not to be considered as the effusion of real passion." A soldier's burial is not the less honoured because his comrades must turn from his grave to give their thought and strength and courage to the cause which was also his. The maimed rites, interrupted by the trumpet calling to action, are a loftier commemoration than the desolatin

o time for la

ause. Samson ha

and heroicly

roic, on

reve

reathes through all his numerous refere

yet comely,

some great m

f people, cities, states, and councils of the wise and eminent, through the wide expanse of anxious and listening E

rts me, do

riend, to have lo

defence, my

urope talks fr

pathos of a lost cause. It was remarked by Johnson that there is in the Paradise Lost little opportunity for the pathetic; only one passage, indeed, is allowed by him to be truly deserving of that n

g with mortal v

te, though fall

ough fallen, an

d with dangers

yet not alon

umbers nightly

st. Still gove

t audience fin

lers goes roaring by. The king is enjoying his own again; and the poet, hunted and harassed in his last retreat, raises his petition again to the Muse whom he had invoked at the beginning of his task,--not Clio nor her sisters, but the spirit of heavenly power and heavenly wisdom; his mind reverts to that

off the barbar

nd his revel

ut that tore th

ere woods and

ll the savage

oice; nor could

l not thou, who

eavenly, she a

ich had gone a-begging among the politicians of his time, were stripped by him of the rags of circumstance, and cleansed of its dust, to be enthroned where they might secure a hearing for all time. The surprise that he prepared for the courtiers of the Restoration world was like Samson's revenge, in that it fell on them from above; and, as elsewhere in the poem of Samson Agonistes, Milton was thinking not very remotely of his own case when he wrote that jubilant semi-chorus, with the marvellous fugal succession of figures, wherein Samson, and b

ough blind

thought exti

rd eyes i

ry virt

ashes into

evening dr

on the per

s in ord

atic fowl, b

thunder bolted

e, given

d overthrown

self-beg

abian woo

cond knows

rewhile a

r ashy womb

ourishes, the

t unacti

r body die, he

bird, ages