Millstone

“ 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 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. ”

“ When one is as old as this—for Milton was discovered by a band from Plymouth who came up the Neponset River in 1621—one has many tales to tell.
Of all the towns along the South Shore there are few whose feet are so firmly emplanted in the economic history of the past and present as is Milton. That peculiar odor of sweetness which drifts to us with a turn of the wind, comes from a chocolate mill whose trade-mark of a neat-handed maid with her little tray is known all over the civilized world. And those mills stand upon the site of the first grist mill in New England to be run by water power. ”

“ Year by year Millsborough increased in numbers and in wealth. On the slopes above the town new, fine houses were being built. Her mill owners and her manufacturers, her coal-masters and her traders, with all their followers and their retainers, waxed richer and more prosperous. And along the low-lying land, beside the foul, black Wyndbeck, spread year by year new miles of mean, drab streets; and the life of her poor grew viler and more cursed.
St. Aldys’ Grammar School stood on the northern edge of the old town. Anthony’s way home led him through Hill Terrace. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Milton’s [Pg 13] life covered sixty-six of its one hundred years. It began with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and included the brilliant period of exploration and adventure just before Milton’s birth, in which Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh, and other ambitious and not too scrupulous sea-rovers sought, like Cecil Rhodes, jewels and gold, empire, expansion, and renown.
It covered the chief work of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lord Bacon, Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, Dryden, and fifty other men still read to-day. ”

“ The father’s fortune, never large, is found crippled at his death; and Milton, now thirty-two, must look out for his own earnings. He takes a house; first in Fleet Street, then near Aldersgate, with garden attached, where he has three or four pupils; his nephew Phillips [58] among them.
Milton’s Marriage.
It was while living there that he brought back, one day, a bride—Mary Powell; she was a young maiden in her teens, daughter of a well-established loyalist family near to Oxford. ”

“ Aubrey refers it to 1658, the last year of Oliver's Protectorate. As Cromwell's death virtually closed Milton's official labours, a Genie, overshadowing land and sea, arose from the shattered vase of the Latin Secretaryship.
Nothing is more interesting than to observe the first gropings of genius in pursuit of its aim. Ample insight, as regards Milton, is afforded by the precious manuscripts given to Trinity College, Cambridge, by Sir Henry Newton Puckering (we know not how he got them) , and preserved by the pious care of Charles Mason and Sir Thomas Clarke. ”

“ The forgotten Duke of York has his great column in Waterloo Place. The scholarly but uninspired Prince Consort has his gorgeous Memorial, and a hundred nobodies have their lofty monuments scattered all over England, teaching the rising generation [Pg 125] their fathers’ estimation of the relative worth of names in England’s history. The only statue of Milton known to me in England, except the one on the London University Building, is the modest figure which stands, together with Shakespeare and Chaucer, upon a fountain in Park Lane opposite Hyde Park. ”

“ He decided that night that he would write a story about Millstead; that he would do for Millstead what other people had already done for Eton and Harrow and Rugby. He would put down all the magic that he had seen and felt; he would transfer to paper the subtle enchantment of the golden summer days, the moonlit nights, the steamy warmth of the bathrooms, the shouting in the dormitories, the buzz of movement and conversation in the dining hall, the cool gloom of the chapel—everything that came effortlessly into his mind whenever he thought of Millstead. ”

“ Cyriack Skinner, grandson of the great Coke, to whom he wrote two sonnets in later years, was his pupil in the Barbican.
In 1647, just after the march of Fairfax and [Pg 98] Cromwell through the city, Milton removed to a smaller house in High Holborn, “among those that open backward into Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” which had been laid out by Inigo Jones. Here he ceased playing the schoolmaster, became definitely a republican at heart, and busied himself with the writing of a history of England, and compiling of a Latin dictionary and a System of Divinity. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Shocked they must have been; and, knowing Milton's temper, and with what demeanour he would front any remonstrances of theirs, they probably left him alone, and became scarcer in their visits to Aldersgate Street. It would not do to keep up the Smectymnuan connexion too visibly after what had happened. Or, if Young could not break off so easily, but would still call to see his old pupil, and to talk with old Mr. Milton about the Bread Street days, how the good man must have yearned to speak sometimes when the old gentleman was out of the way, and he and Milton were alone. ”

“ Under its high, embowered roof, Milton may have seen less warmth of colour than we, for the stained glass [Pg 251] is modern, but he was spared the majority of the pretentious and tasteless monuments which crowd the transepts and the side aisles to-day, and for the most part are in bulk in inverse proportion to their artistic merit, and to the importance of those whom they honour. Perhaps there was no man in England to whose sensitive soul the solemn minster spoke more eloquently. ”

“ His spires were in the Renaissance forms, but of endless variations. The most beautiful are so placed as rarely to be seen to advantage. Probably the most admired of all of them are St. [Pg 305] Bride’s and St. Mary le Bow. The former, which overshadows the spot where Milton conceived the plan of “Paradise Lost,” is situated on a little narrow street called after St. Bride or Bridget, the Irish maiden, who died in 525. She had a holy well, which is commemorated by an iron pump within a niche upon its site.
Larger Image
BOW STEEPLE, CHEAPSIDE
From a print published in 1798. ”

“ From the highest point one looks down on two worlds: old Millsborough, small and picturesque, with its pleasant ways and its green spaces, and beyond its fine new houses with their gardens and its tree-lined roads winding upward to the moor; on the other hand, new Millsborough, vast, hideous, deathlike in its awful monotony. ”

“ All periods are more or less transitional, but the England into which Milton came in the first years of the seventeenth century was peculiarly in a state of transformation and unsettlement. As in the beginning of the twentieth century, men’s minds were receiving radical, new impressions, and had not yet assimilated or comprehended them. ”

“ Milton himself borrowed as much as Glover. Aye, ten times more; yet every passage in his poetry is Miltonic,—more than anything else. On the other hand, his imitators Miltonize, yet produce nothing worthy of Milton, the important characteristic of whose writings my father well expressed, when he said 'The reader of Milton must be always on his duty: he is surrounded with sense.' A man must have his sense to imitate him worthily. ”

“ The girl left them on the mat and knocked at a door just inside.
"Come in," said a man's voice.
"Please, sir," said the girl, "there are two children asking about someone named Milton."
The owner of the voice laughed. "Are they?" he said. "Well, they've come to the right shop." And then the door opened wider and a tall and handsome young man came out, dressed in a cricket blazer over a clergyman's waistcoat and collar, and smoking a large pipe.
"What's all this about Milton?" he said cheerily. "What Milton? ”

“ The life of Milton has been already written in so many forms, and with such minute inquiry, that I might perhaps more properly have contented myself with the addition of a few notes on Mr. Fenton’s elegant abridgment, but that a new narrative was thought necessary to the uniformity of this edition.
John Milton was by birth a gentleman, descended from the proprietors of Milton, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, one of whom forfeited his estate in the times of York and Lancaster. Which side he took I know not; his descendant inherited no veneration for the White Rose. ”

“ Lawes, the famous musician and friend of Milton, was set to composing music for the occasion. On an evening in 1633, when Milton was living at Horton, the magnificent procession wended its way through crowds of enthusiastic spectators toward Whitehall. One hundred gentlemen on the best horses that the stables of royalty and the nobility could offer, all clad in gold and silver, and each accompanied by a page and two lackeys carrying torches, were only one feature of the pageant ”

“ In the first Milton, still angry, clenches his fist in the face of his generation, as a generation of mere hogs and dogs, unable to appreciate any real form of the liberty for which they are howling and grunting; in the second the spleen is less, and he is content with a rigmarole of rhyme about the queer effects among the illiterate of the Greek title of his last Divorce Pamphlet. And here what is chiefly interesting in the rigmarole is the evidence that Milton had been recently attending to the news from Scotland. ”

“ Till All Things become One Great Satan, in Holiness
Oppos’d to Mercy, and the Divines Delusion, Jesus, be no more.’
Suddenly around Milton on my Path the Starry Seven
Burn’d terrible! My Path became a solid fire, as bright
As the clear Sun, & Milton silent came down on my Path.
And there went forth from the Starry limbs of the Seven, Forms
Human, with Trumpets innumerable, sounding articulate
As the Seven spake; and they stood in a mighty Column of Fire
Surrounding Felpham’s Vale, reaching to the Mundane Shell, Saying:
‘Awake, Albion awake! ”

“ Were we to define in one word our impression of the prevailing tone, the characteristic mood and disposition of Milton’s mind, even in his early youth, we should say that it consisted in a deep and habitual seriousness. [Pg 127] We use the word in none of those special and restricted senses that are sometimes given to it. We do not mean that Milton, at the period of his early youth with which we are now concerned, was, or accounted himself as being, a confessed member of that noble party of English Puritans with which he afterwards became allied, and to which he rendered such vast services. ”

“ Conquered the age, conquered himself and died.”
A tomb that may have interested Milton is that of Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which sent so many Puritans to the new colonies in Massachusetts. It was this Mildmay to whom, when he came to court, Queen Elizabeth said: “I hear, Sir Walter, that you have erected a Puritan foundation.” ”

“ These churches remain like the tombs of the old citizens who lie beneath them—monuments of another age. They are worth a Sunday exploration, for they echo to the time when the City of London really was London; when the Prentices and Trained Bands were of mark in the state; when even the Lord Mayor himself was a reality.”
In Milton’s day, on the street of the Crutched Friars, named from the ancient convent of Crossed Friars, was the row of almshouses built by Sir John Milborne in 1535 in honour of God and the Virgin. ”

“ 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. ”