Milton, Massachusetts

“ It is served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway, and is primarily a residential suburb of Boston, with which it is connected by electric lines. The township covers an area of about 13 sq. m., and includes the villages of Milton, East Milton and Mattapan. The country is rolling and hilly, the Blue Hills (with the exception of a part included in Braintree in 1712 and now in Quincy) lying in Milton. ”

“ Where so many famous men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were to be numbered as [Pg 198] students,—Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and others,—the one name on its register that would have most interested Milton was that of William Camden who studied here, as well as at St. Paul’s. A visitor from Boston, Massachusetts, is interested to know that in 1626, one little lad in yellow stockings and dark blue coat, who studied Latin here to some purpose, was Ezekiel Cheever, who became the master of the Boston Latin School. ”

“ This James Russell was the father of John Russell of Berwick, K.G., created Baron Russell of Cheneys, 1538-9, and Earl of Bedford, 1550.
[22] A coffin chalice and paten have, within recent years, been discovered at Milton Abbey and Abbotsbury.
[23] One of these Norman fragments was sent in 1904, as a relic, to the parish church of Milton, near Boston, Massachusetts. The American town of Milton, incorporated in 1662, was named after Milton, in Dorset, and the crest on its corporate seal is a reproduction of the west front of Milton Abbey (see illustration at the end of this chapter) . ”

“ If only as the great Republican pamphleteer, one of the chief State officials under the Protectorate, Milton was a very eminent and important man, visited by many “persons of quality” besides Lady Ranelagh, and by all the learned foreigners of note who passed through London. Some of the old Hartlib-Durie circle of the Aldersgate and Barbican days, with Milton’s pupils, Henry Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner, came about Milton almost daily ”

“ Among these last Milton must have had in view chiefly such members of the Commons House in Richard's Parliament as Vane, Bradshaw, Harrison, Neville, Ludlow, and Scott, all of whom had been members of one, or several, or all, of the Councils of State of the old Commonwealth; but he may have had in view also such members of the present Upper House as Fleetwood, St. John, and Viscount Lisle. Above all, Vane must have been in his mind,—Vane, on whom half of his eulogy in 1652 had been.
"To know
Both spiritual power and civil, what each means,
What severs each, thou, hast learned ”

“ Beautiful figured writing and keen psychological observation of this kind are beside the purpose of Milton, and beyond his power.
For the time we must forego the attempt to see into the life of things, and must accept in imagination our position as citizens in this strange majestic commonwealth of angels and men. It is no mean city. Noble shapes pass before our eyes. High language is held, and great wars are waged. Events of tremendous import roll on to their destined accomplishment. Golden processions move across the dim expanse of Chaos. Worlds are blown and broken like bubbles. ”

“ Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton, and the other Army-chiefs, from their head- quarters at Putney, were negotiating with him; and, the march of the Army through London having disabled the ultra-Presbyterians for the moment and transferred the ascendancy to the Independents, people were looking forward to a settlement on the basis of an established Presbyterian Church for the nation at large, but with liberty of conscience and of worship for Dissenters. For Milton, among others, this was a pleasant prospect. His sympathies, nay his personal interests, were wholly with the Independents ”

“ Williams, we know, was happily on his way back to America at the time; but Milton was at hand, in his house in Aldersgate Street, whenever he should be wanted.
To be preached at before the two Houses of Parliament, on a solemn Fast Day, by an eminent Divine of the Westminster Assembly, was, I should say, a ten times greater trial of a man's equanimity in those days than it would be in these to waken one morning and find oneself the subject of a scathing onslaught in the columns of the leading newspaper. ”

“ Never surely did a youth leave the academic halls of England more full of fair promise than Milton, when, at the age of twenty-three, he quitted Cambridge to reside at his father’s house, amid the quiet beauties of a rural neighbourhood some twenty miles distant from London. Fair in person, with a clear fresh complexion, light brown hair which parted in the middle and fell in locks to his shoulders, clear grey eyes, and a well-knit frame of moderate proportions—there could not have been found a finer picture of pure and ingenuous English youth. ”

“ And now, it appears, through all the intermediate eight years of Milton's changes of residence and fortune, including his six in the Latin Secretaryship, the acquaintanceship has been kept up, and has been growing more intimate, till, in 1655, in his widowerhood and blindness in his house in Petty France, there is no one, and certainly no lady, that more frequently calls upon him, or whose voice, on the staircase, announcing who the visitor is, he is more pleased to hear. ”

“ For this purpose the Council of State determined to avail itself of the abilities of its new secretary, who wrote with his customary rapidity the Εικονοκλαστης, one of the most extraordinary of his works, of which his great learning, clear and energetic style and acute and close reasoning, lead the reader’s conviction with his admiration to the end.
Milton had scarcely finished this unanswerable work when he was called upon to do battle for the republican party on a wider field. Thus far his audience had been the English nation; he was now to address the family of civilized mankind. ”

“ In his later years Milton evidently believed himself to be, if not the greatest man in England, at least the greatest writer, and one whose egomet dixi was entitled to as much force in the intellectual commonwealth as the decree of a civil magistrate is invested with in the order of civil life. ”

“ The modern visitor, as he turns from the jostling crowds of Cheapside into Bread Street, which is scarcely wider than a good sidewalk, will find no trace of aught that Milton saw. The present mercantile establishment, at numbers 58-63, that covers the site of his house, covers as well the whole Spread Eagle Court, in which it stood. It bears no inscription, but, if one enters, the courteous proprietor may conduct him to the second story where a bust of Milton is placed over the spot where he was born. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is served by the Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia & Reading railways, and is connected with Lewisburg and Watsontown by an electric line. Milton has an attractive public park, is in an agricultural region, and has various manufactures. ”

“ Milton is full of history. From the Revolutionary days, when the cannonading at Bunker Hill shook the foundations of the houses, but not the nerves of the Milton ladies, down to the year 1919, when the Fourth Liberty Loan of $2,955,250 was subscribed from a population of 9000, all the various vicissitudes of peace and war have been sustained on the high level that one might expect from men and women nobly nurtured by the strength of the hills. ”

“ HUMPHREY MOSELEY THE BOOKSELLER—TWO DIVORCE SONNETS AND SONNET TO HENRY LAWES—CONTINUED PRESBYTERIAN ATTACKS ON MILTON: HIS ANTI-PRESBYTERIAN SONNET OF REPLY—SURRENDER OF OXFORD: CONDITION OF THE POWELL FAMILY—THE POWELLS IN LONDON: MORE FAMILY PERPLEXITIES: BIRTH OF MILTON'S FIRST CHILD. The effect of Milton's Areopagitica, immediately after its publication in November 1644, and throughout the year 1645, seems to have been very considerable. Parliament, indeed, took no formal notice of the eloquent pleading for a repeal of their Licensing Ordinance of June 1643. ”

“ In office or out of office, it was the same to Milton. He had determined that he would not be suppressed, that he would not be silent, till they should tie his hands, or gag his mouth. There is no grander exhibition of dying resistance, of solitary and useless fighting for a lost cause, than in his conduct through April 1680. Alone he then stood, we may say, the last of the visible Republicans. Hasilrig, Scott, Ludlow, Neville, and Vane, had collapsed or were out of sight, the last under ban already by his former brothers of the Commonwealth; Needham was extinguished ”

“ It may have been some satisfaction to him that he could go on faithfully and honestly as a servant of Cromwell in the special business of the Latin Secretaryship, and for the rest be a lonely thinker and take refuge in silence. It is worth observing, indeed, that nothing of a political kind had come from Milton's pen during the last three or four years of Oliver's Protectorate,—nothing even indirectly bearing on the internal politics of the Commonwealth since his Pro Se Defensio against Morus in 1655, and nothing directly bearing thereon since his Defensio Secunda of 1654. ”

“ Thus we reach the year 1674, the last of Milton’s life. One incident of that year was the publication of the second edition of Paradise Lost, with the poem rearranged as now—into twelve books, instead of the original ten. Another was the publication of a small volume [4] containing his Latin Epistolae familiares, together with the Prolusiones oratoriae of his student-days at Cambridge—these last thrown in as a substitute for his Latin state-letters in his secretaryship for the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, the printing of which was stopped by order from the Foreign Office. ”

“ From that moment he was one of those who, with Vane, Marten, Cromwell, Ireton, and the Army officers generally, had forsworn all future allegiance to the Man in the Isle of Wight, and looked forward, through whatever intermediate difficulties, to his deposition and punishment, and the conversion of England iinto some kind of free Commonwealth. In such a matter, it could not, of course, be expected that a private citizen like Milton, who had no ambition to rank with Lilburne and other London Levellers of the coarser order, would anticipate Cromwell, Vane, and Ireton. ”

“ Hence, while the King was at Hampton Court, and the Army-chiefs, with Cromwell most prominent among them, were plying his royal mind with arguments to bring him round, there can have been no private person more interested in their endeavours, more willing to believe them in the right, than Milton. Hardly had he been settled in his new house in High Holborn, however, when there came the snap of all those negotiations by the King's flight from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight (Nov. 11, 1647) . ”

“ At all events, the fact of Milton's change of residence within a few months after his father's death is certified by Phillips. "It was not long," says Phillips, "after the march of Fairfax and Cromwell through the City of London, with the whole Army, to quell the insurrections Browne and Massey, now malcontents also, were endeavouring to raise in the City against the Army's proceedings, ere he left his great house in Barbican, and betook himself to a smaller in High Holborn, among those that open backward into Lincoln's-Inn Fields." ”

“ Of this original abode, our engraving is an accurate representation. One of Milton's ancestors forfeited his estate in the turbulent times of York and Lancaster. "Which side he took," says Johnson, "I know not; his descendant inherited no veneration for the White Rose." His grandfather was under ranger of the forest of Shotover, Oxon, who was a zealous Papist, and disinherited his son for becoming a Protestant. Milton's father being thus deprived of his family property, was compelled to quit his studies at Christ Church, Oxford, whence he went to London, and became a scrivener. ”

“ It is not probable that the man who had printed of Charles I. what Milton had printed, could have been offered office under Charles II. Even were court favour to be purchased by concessions, Milton was not the man to make them, or to belie his own antecedents, as Marchmont, Needham, Dryden, and so many others did. Our wish for Milton is that he should have placed himself from the beginning above party. But he had chosen to be the champion of a party, and he loyally accepted the consequences. He escaped with life and liberty. ”

“ The interior is well-preserved; it has a nave with two aisles and a chancel, and in the porch is an old Norman arch. Upon the wall at the rear are wooden tablets which record curious bequests of small annuities for monthly doles of bread to needy people.
Never since those five joyous years at Horton has any English poet blessed the world with verse of such rare loveliness and perfection as fell from the pen of Milton during this time, when spirit, heart, and mind were in attune. The world’s clamour had not broken in upon his peace. ”

“ In the month when his volume of Poems appeared Presbyterianism was at its fullest tide in Parliament; but in the succeeding months, what with the increase of Recruiters in the Commons, what with the tramp of Independency in the field growing louder and nearer as the New Model ended its work, he could see the political power of the Presbyterians gradually waning, until, in April 1646, when Cromwell reappeared in London, Anti-Toleration was abashed and the Westminster Assembly itself under control. The spectacle must have been quite to Milton's mind ”