Lucia True Ames Mead

“ If he thinks of the old days when Roger Williams taught Dutch to his learned pupil, John Milton, he may let his fancy picture to him these men, who ranked among the nation-builders of their day, stepping some Sunday morning under its Gothic arches from out the greensward that then surrounded them, and listening to the gospel in the tongue of those brave exiles who, like them, had fought for freedom of conscience. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The London tourist, who visits London for the first time after 1902, will miss seeing one of its most fascinating sights, for he can never stand in the great dining-hall of Christ’s Hospital on a Sunday noon and see the procession of pink-cheeked lads in their knee-breeches and long skirts come trooping in an orderly procession into the great hall, bearing great platters of steaming meats and baskets piled with rolls. ”

“ Before marching from the oration hall to chapel, the stewards of the day’s dinner, according to the old-fashioned rite, have wands in their hands, walk to church at the head of the procession, and sit in places of honour. The boys are already on their seats with smug fresh faces and shining white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches, the chapel is lighted, the founder’s tomb, with its grotesque [Pg 207] carvings, monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful lights and shadows. ”

“ As mothers have shed tears there for imprisoned children, so children standing there have wondered which blocks in the grim masonry covered the dungeons of their fathers and mothers. Again and again, too, through the ages, all London has gathered, waiting in a hush for the dropping of the drawbridge before the Byward Tower, and the coming forth of the mournful train, conducting some world-famous man to the block draped with black, on the scaffold to the left, where the hill is highest.... ”

“ No more characteristic part of Milton’s London [Pg 225] exists to-day than the various Inns of Court that lead north and south from Holborn. As the sightseer passes from the jostle and turmoil of the thoroughfare, he is transported in a moment into a silence and seclusion that remind one of a Puritan Sabbath. Quadrangle opens out of quadrangle, shut in by rows of unpretentious buildings, whose monotony is broken by Gothic chapels or Tudor dining-halls surmounted by carved cupolas. ”

“ With a mind richly stored in history, and with the artist’s eye and prophet’s soul, every stone of this most venerable and beautiful of English churches must have been dear to him. It is not within the scope of this little volume even to touch upon the romantic history of this centre of English life or to examine its noble architecture, but only to indicate what may most have touched the mind and heart of the great scholar and patriot-reformer who often passed its portals on his walk from Petty France to Whitehall.
In the south aisle of the nave are buried two ladies whom Milton probably knew. ”

“ But the baldness and blankness of Gower Street and a thousand other streets is not so hopeless as the pretentious bastard Renaissance work which modern London shows. The rich modern world can not plead poverty as its excuse for ugliness. Even the village cottage of three centuries ago, as well as the city streets, showed a popular love of beauty and a power to attain it which few architects, or rather few of their patrons, permit the modern world to see. ”

“ Perhaps the visitor may be allowed to ascend the narrow winding stair with its carved railing to the humble chambers under the gables, whither the poet groped his way to bed, and to glance into narrow cupboards, where he may have piled his books and manuscripts. There is a tender, pathetic charm about the place, which even the greater poet’s house at Stratford lacks. The man Shakespeare—the successful dramatist—we know little of; his inner life we only guess at and infer. His consummate genius wins our worship; it does not touch our hearts. ”

“ Crutched Friars’ Church became a carpenter’s shop and tennis court; Shakespeare and his friends erected a playhouse on the site of the Black Friars’ monastery. A tavern replaced the church of St. Martin’s le Grand, and far and wide traces of the despoiler and rebuilder were manifest.
Stow had then but just written his invaluable chronicles, and little antiquarian interest prevailed. For the first time in human history men sailed around the globe. New worlds were opening to men’s visions. Not only dreams of wealth without labour, but golden actualities had dazzled the imagination of thousands. ”

“ The church itself is plain and bare; simply a Gothic nave, with no side aisles. Its chief interest to some may be its antique organ, of uncertain date, but old enough from its appearance to have been heard by the little lad from Bread Street whose soul was full of music. One can easily imagine the father of John Milton, who was himself so skilled in the great art, bringing his son to every church within his neighbourhood that boasted such an instrument. ”

“ It had two stories, and the upper one was occupied by the House of Commons. These walls have echoed to the ringing words of Eliot, Hampden, Pym, Sir Harry Vane, and Cromwell, to Burke and Fox and Pitt, and the long line of valiant Englishmen who never confounded patriotism and loyalty to country with subserviency to the will of any fallible man whom chance had placed upon the nation’s throne. ”

“ But let the lover of past beauty take new courage. Hundreds of signs disclose the dawn of a revival of true taste in which England and America bid fair to lead the world.
Though in most of its forms the Renaissance art that accompanied the new age of discovery and expansion of commerce in the century before Milton indicates a decadence of the love of beauty, exception must be made to much delightful domestic architecture that has the Tudor stamp and is distinctly English, and unknown on the Continent. ”

“ The lord mayor of London asked her whether the priest cannot make the body of Christ, to which she replied as shrewdly as Jeanne d’Arc to her inquisitors: “I have read that God made man; but that man can make God, I never yet read.” She was condemned at Guildhall to death for heresy. A daughter of a knight, this delicate lady, reared in comfort, was carried to the Tower, thrust into a cell, where but for a few brave friends she would have starved, and then her tender body was put on the rack, and Chancellor Wriothesley himself applied such power as nearly rent it in sunder. ”

“ At Scotland Yard, Milton’s only son, John, was born, and here his protracted labours in his vehement controversy with Salmasius brought on the blackness of great darkness which, at the age of forty-three, for ever shut his world from view. For the next twenty years and more it is the blind poet whose life we follow, during the period when his fiery spirit was chastened not only by his own afflictions, but by the nation’s also.
In 1652 Milton moved to Petty France, now York Street, near the Bird Cage Walk, which was so named from the king’s aviary there. ”

“ The story of her cruel death amid the flames at Smithfield belongs rather to that bloody spot than to the Guildhall. Her life she could have saved, even at the last moment, had her heroic soul faltered, and unsaid what conscience taught. Those were tales to freeze the life from out young hearts, that grandames told in Milton’s boyhood. To the men of his day, Guildhall stood chiefly connected with some of the most remarkable trials in England’s history.
[Pg 193] Among them was that of Throckmorton for complicity in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s attempt against the Catholic Queen Mary. ”

“ Some day the great university may add to its charms not only an adequate memorial to its Puritans, but one to its poets—Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson, who have enriched it by their presence, and have made Cambridge par excellence the university of the poets. It must be remembered that Chaucer and Shakespeare were not university men. ”

“ No vital statistics existed to show the average of longevity. But certain it is that, with modern sanitation and cleanliness, the great modern London, which to-day houses about as many souls as did all England then, has a much lower death-rate. When one remembers [Pg 38] that, spite of stupendous intellectual attainments, of exquisite taste in art and literature, spite of wise statesmanship and all manly virtues, the wise men of that day were children in their knowledge of chemistry and medicine, we cannot wonder at the recurrence of the plague in almost every generation. ”

“ Above the monastery doors which rose here after the Great Plague, might have been seen, only a half century before, the limb from the dismembered body of the martyred prior, who fell beneath the wrath of Henry VIII. He, with divers of his brethren, perished for their faith as nobly as John Rogers, a few years later, died for a different one. Heroism belongs to no one creed. ”

“ Only one who has delved long in the biography and literature of this great age can realise the stupendous scholarship of the men of this period,—Coke, Selden, Bacon, Newton, Milton, and their contemporaries across the Channel, Grotius, Spinoza, and Galileo,—who, with the men of action of their day, make the century in which they lived one of the most significant since time began. ”

“ Occasionally a cloistered walk under low Tudor arches, or a group of highly ornate terra cotta chimneys is seen, as one wanders around the dim and shadowy passages. All at once a turn, and behold, here in the heart of the life of this six million people of the great overgrown metropolis, still stretch long reaches of greensward, locked safely from the intrusion of the public by their handsome wrought-iron gates. ”

“ Where on earth since the days of Periclean eloquence and wisdom in Athens could be found one spot where so much genius and learning had its centre as in the England into which Milton was born, and in which he lived for two-thirds of a century?
“We are apt,” says Lowell, “to wonder at the scholarship of the men of three centuries ago and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterises them. They were scholars because they did not read so many things as we. ”

“ Plantagenet London, and its many remnants of domestic architecture, in Milton’s day, illustrated fully Ruskin’s dictum that “Gothic is not an art for knights and nobles; it is an art for the people; it is not an art [merely] for churches and sanctuaries; it is an art for houses and homes.... When Gothic was invented houses were Gothic as well as churches.... Good Gothic has always been the work of the commonalty, not of the churches.... ”

“ A portion of the “college” of Whittington still remained, and on the site of the present Mercers’ Chapel stood a college for the education of priests, whose splendid church remained until the Great Fire.
Every lover of the beautiful must fondly dwell upon the glorious period of Gothic architecture during which these structures rose. Though London in the Tudor period eclipsed in wealth and magnificence the city of earlier times, the Elizabethan age had no power in its development of pseudo-classic forms to equal the dignity and beauty of the Norman and Gothic work. ”

“ Through Bread Street, on which Milton was born, passed Watling Street, the old Roman road, named later by the Saxons, which with the Roman wall around the city alone left traces of the Roman occupation in the poet’s day. The mosaic floors, the coins, bronze weapons and scanty remains of the Roman period, before the fourth century A. D., are better known to us than to the Londoners of his time. The Roman city spread itself along the river from the Fleet on the west to the site of the present Tower of London on the east, and then gradually crept northward. ”

“ Witness the carvings in the chapel and dining-hall of the Charterhouse, new in Milton’s boyhood, the carvings in the dining-halls of the different Inns of Court, and mural tablets everywhere with their obese cherubs and ghastly death’s heads. In the quaint beam and plaster front of Staple’s Inn on Holborn still remains the ancient type of domestic architecture which antedated and accompanied Milton’s boyhood. Hundreds of such cosy, homelike residences with their ample windows of many leaded panes lined the city streets. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No wonder that girls of a dozen or sixteen years of age found life in Jewin Street dull, and Greek dictionaries and the daily records of the doings of the hosts of heaven and hell abominably irksome. They served their father with grudging pen, and pilfered from him, and tricked him in his helpless sightlessness—small blame to them, perhaps, whose rearing had been by servants and governesses, but pitiable for the father of fifty years, who fought his daily battles with fate alone in the dark. ”