fllMlton's JEnglanb John Milton Photogravure from the engraving by T. Woolnoth of the miniature painted in 1667 by William Faithorne Xucta Hmcs flDeafc Butboc of "Oreat rbougbta for little 'Cbfnfeers," "flDcmo(ra of a /Billionaire," '"Co lUbom Aucb 1llu6tratcO Boston X, C. page & Company ADGCCCfff Copyright, igo2 BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY (INCORPORATED) All rights reserved Published, September, 1902 {Colonial tyrcss Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Slmonds & Co. Boston, Mass., U. S. A. THIS LITTLE STUDY OF BYGONE DAYS AND ANCIENT PLACES IS INSCRIBED TO THE PURITAN SCHOLAR AND DEAR FELLOW PILGRIM WHO WANDERED WITH ME ONE HAPPY SUMMER THROUGH MILTON'S ENGLAND. i 2 UONDON 3 WINDSOE .4- CTON 3 MOETON e BUNNIMCDC. 7 STOKC B 9 |O CHAUJONT ST. I I AMEBSHAM \SL CHENIEO 13 TMC CAM 14 THE: THAMC-3 Iff THC C01_Wt MAP OF MILTON'S ENGLAND flDUton's "Residences in Xonfcon 1. Bread Street, 1608-1624. 2. St. Bride's Churchyard, in 1639 or 1640. 3. Aldersgate Street, 16401645. 4. The Barbican, 1645-1647. 5. Holborn, near Lincoln's Inn, 1647-1649. 6. Charing Cross, opening into Spring Gardens, seven months in 1649. 7. Whitehall, by Scotland Yard, 1649-1652. 8. Petty France, now York Street, 1652-1660. 9. Bartholomew Close, and a prison, 1660. 10. Holborn, near Red Lion Square, in 1660. 11. Jewin Street, 1661-1663 or 1664. 12. Artillery Walk, by Bunhill Fields Cemetery, 1664-1665, and from 1666 to November, 1674. W2 "33 s- -= o oi Minories. J oc O X r nour's. wj 2 2 *4> c ^rt b SJ SJ :/: V re Si ^ M aj | ^ (X, -5 France. ^ a * ^ t ti 2 ^ C V H 2 V3 3 *; U w ~c -~l ~ c c s " i- Q ~z < Bl V -C u r; J Is ^M CQ ro r) CO M -r LT> \O fO CO fO cc to c_. o 5- 4- ? ? c o W -d S) *: TV "2 > ^ "a = c > j -b S 4 1 s^ ^5 - e & < *^ iS^ U ^ rtSw^^ 5 3-2^1dI*2_ 1 fi^ilI e c^^-g S !*]Jl{3*ii* a fJ ^^ rt P _e rt^ - .* J ^ .vc/) r^ ^ - C - n +3 4? M ? ^J 4^ M Ki/jc/3L>KH:.,cA!c/3PQU 13 life covered sixty-six of its one hundred years. It began with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1 588, and included the brilliant period of explora- tion and adventure just before Milton's birth, in which Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh, and other am- bitious 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. It included all of Milton's great Puritan contempo- raries, who, fighting for the rights of Englishmen, fought the world's battle for freedom. It ended in 1688 with the downfall of the house of Stuart and the final triumph of those principles for which Vane and Milton had struggled and died without seeing the fruit of their labours. Since 1688 no monarch has sat upon the English throne by any outworn theory of " divine right of kings," but only, explic- itly and emphatically, by the will of the English people. For all believers in the people, for all who honour Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, Robert Burns, John Bright and Gladstone, the century that knew Cromwell and Milton, Sir Harry Vane and Sir John Eliot, John Hampden, John Winthrop and i4 /iDflton's William Bradford must, more than most others, have significance. John Milton was born in London in 1608; and it is chiefly the London of the twenty years that intervened between the Spanish Armada and his birth which we are to consider in this chapter. As neither man nor anything that he has made can be well understood except as they are related to their origins, so to understand the names, the customs, and the daily sights that the boy Milton knew in this city, where for nearly two millenniums before his day history had been making, one must go back and take a brief survey. Into the mooted question of the origin of the name of London we need not enter. Suffice to say that when we first hear of London it was a little hamlet on a hill of perhaps one hundred feet in height, lying between two ranges of higher hills. At the north rose what we now call Highgate and Hampstead, about 450 feet high, and to the south, beyond the marshes and the Thames and a broad shallow lagoon, whose little islands once marked the site of Southwark, rose the Surrey hills, from one of which in our day the Crystal Palace gleams. Men with stone weapons slew antlered deer upon the little marshy island of Thorney, now Westminster. What is now St. flDtlton's England 15 James's Park was then an estuary. Streams flowed down the valleys between the wooded hills. Only their names remain to-day to tell us, among the present stony streets, where rivers and brooks once flowed. West Bourn, Ty Bourn, Hole Bourne, the southern part of which was called the " Fleet," flowed from the hills in the northwest in a south- easterly direction into the Thames. Just east of the last named was the little brook called " Wallbrook," by whose banks, on the present Cornhill, the first settlement was made. All these names, of course, belong to a time long subsequent to the first rude settlements made in unknown antiquity before the Christian era. The Tyburn at its mouth divided, enclosing the island Thorney, upon which in later times arose Westminster. Hole Bourne was so named because of its running through a deep hollow. The lower part of the river the Fleet was tidal, and formed the western bulwark of London for centuries. It emptied into the Thames where now is Blackfriars Bridge. Far eastward from the Wallbrook, through broad marshes, flowed the river Lea down from the country known to us as Essex and Hertfordshire. It emptied into the Thames east of the Isle of Dogs, which is now covered with huge docks for the shipping of the great modern city. The Lea still flows as in 16 flMlton's England the time of the Romans and Saxons, though its marshes have largely disappeared. But the other smaller streams are now obliterated, though in Milton's time their course could still partly be dis- cerned, and their degradation into drains was not complete. 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. By the time the Roman wall was built in about 360 A. D., the circumference of the city, counting the river front, was two miles and three quarters. Here stood the town, not in an area of fertile fields, but surrounded by forests on the north, and on all other sides by wide-spreading marshes. The enclosed space was originally 380 acres, to which later additions were made upon the north and east. The wall was built of layers of thin red brick and stone about twenty /Dillon's Enolanfc 17 feet high, and was finished by bastions and additional defences at the angles. Though scant traces of any of the original construction now re- main, much of the Roman wall, and, at all events, a complete wall of mingled Roman and mediaeval work, encircled the site of the ancient city limits in Milton's day, and its gates were nightly locked until long after his death. At first, two land gates had sufficed, but in 1600 there were seven; on the east, Aldgate; further north was Bishopsgate; further west, upon the northern wall, were Moorgate and Cripplegate ; upon the west, Aldersgate, protected by the Barbican, one of the gateway towers ; and south of this, Newgate and Ludgate. Upon the waterside, Dowgate, at the mouth of the ancient Wallbrook, now covered by the narrow street of the same name, and Billingsgate, further east toward the Tower of London, gave access to the city. In Roman days the whole enclosure was crossed by two great streets, Watling Street, which came from the northwest and entered near Newgate, and Ermyn Street, which came from the northeast. Where these two met was later the market or chepe, from the Saxon word meaning sale. Of the Saxon period, which followed the sudden and mysterious abandonment of their city by the is /IDtlton's England Romans after their occupation of it for three cen- turies, we have to-day a thousand traces in London names. Evidently the early Anglo-Saxon, like his descendants, had a marked love of privacy and seclusion. His sense of the sacred nature of prop- erty was as marked in him as it has always been in his posterity. The idea of inclosure or protection is made prominent in the constantly recurring termi- nations of ton, ham, worth, stoke, stow, fold, garth, park, hay, burgh, bury, brough, borrow. Philologic study of continental terms displays no such marked emphasis upon the idea of property and demarkation lines. Says the learned Taylor : " It may indeed be said, without exaggeration, that the universal preva- lence throughout England of names containing this word, Homes [viz., ham, ton, etc.], gives us the clue to the real strength of the national character of the Anglo-Saxon race." Kensington, Brompton, Pad- dington, Islington, are but a few of the local names which illustrate in their suffix the origin of the word town originally a little hedged enclosure. [German zaun or hedge.] The most important rem- nant of the Saxon influence is to be found in the syllable ing which occurs in thousands of London names. This was the usual Anglo-Saxon patronymic, and occurs most often in the middle syllable, as in Buckingham, the home of Buck's flDUton's Bnatant) 19 son; Wellington, the village of Wells's son, or the Wells clan. Family settlements are traceable by this syllable ing. Chipping or chepe was the old English term for market-place, and Westcheap and Eastcheap were the old London markets of Saxon days. When the word market takes the place in England of the old Anglo-Saxon chipping, we may assume the place to be of later origin. The Saxons, unlike the Romans, were not road- makers, and when they applied the English word street, corrupted from the Latin strata, as in the case of Watling Street the ancient road which they renamed we shall usually find that it marks a work of Roman origin. Clerkemvell, Bridewell, Holywell, and names with similar suffixes indicate the site of wells from which it would seem that the ancient Londoners derived their water supply when it was not taken from the Thames, the Holborn, or the Tyburn. Hithe, which means landing-place, has in later times largely disappeared, except at Rotherhithe near Greenwich. With the conversion of the Saxons in the seventh century appear the names of Saxon saints. Among the notable ones to whom churches were built was holy St. Ethelburga, the wife of Sebert, the first 20 flDUton's Christian king, whose church to-day stands on the site of its Saxon predecessor beside Bishopsgate, on the very spot where stood the Roman gate. Another was St. Osyth, queen and martyr, whose name also survives in Sise, or St. Osyth's Lane, and whose black and grimy churchyard was doubtless green in Milton's day. To these must be added St. Dunstan, St. Swithin, St. Edmund the Martyr, and St. Botolph, to whom no less than four churches were erected. The devastating fire of 1135 swept London from end to end, and not a Saxon structure remained, though the new ones that replaced them were built in similar fashion. With the coming of the Danes were built churches to their patrons, St. Olaf and St. Magnus; and in the centre of the Strand, St. Clement's, Danes, is said to mark the spot where tradition assigns a settlement of Danes. As of the Saxons, so of the Danes, the most permanent record of their influence on London and the Danish district of England was in their suffixes to words which still survive. By, meaning first a farm and later a village, is one which occurs some six hundred times. To this day our common term, a by-law, recalls the Dane. The names of the street on which Milton was born and of those in the near neighbourhood to the rtMlton's England 21 booths that once surrounded Cheap indicate the products formerly sold there, or the trades carried on within them. To the north the streets were called : Wood, Milk, Iron, Honey, Poultry; to the south they were named after Bread, Candles, Soap, Fish, Money-Changing. Friday Street was one on which fish and food for fast days were sold. Of Saxon and Danish London there remains in the old city proper not one stone. Of Norman London, we have to-day the great White Tower, the crypt of Bow Church, from whose round arches it received its name, the crypt of St. John's Priory out- side the city, part of the church of St. Bartholomew's the Great, and part of St. Ethelburga's, Bishopsgate. Much more existed before the Great Fire of 1666. The chief characteristics of the English Norman work are the half -circular Roman arch, seen in all Romanesque work: massive walls unsupported by great buttresses and not pierced by the large win- dows which appear in the later Gothic style; square towers without spires; barrel vaulting over nave and aisles in the churches; massive piers; the use of colour upon ornaments and wall surfaces instead of in the windows as in Gothic buildings; small interlacing round arches in wall surfaces; zigzag and " dog tooth " decoration ; " pleated " capitals ; carvings, more or less grotesque, of human or 22 animal forms. English Norman, like English Gothic, never equalled the French work in both these styles. In Milton's boyhood the impress of Plantagenet London was everywhere visible. Throughout the centuries, from the earliest to the latest Plantagenet, the influence of the Church reigned supreme. It has been estimated that then at least one-fourth of the area of all London was in some way connected with the Church, or the extensive conventual estab- lishments belonging to it. Their Gothic towers and steeples rose clean and pure to the soft blue of the London sky, unfouled with coal smoke. Their lofty walls, over which English ivy crept and roses bloomed, shut from the narrow streets of the old town stretches of soft greensward and shady walks. Among these rose dormitories, refectories, cloisters, and the more prosaic offices. At every hour bells pealed and constantly reminded the citizens of prayer and service. Hardly a street but had its monastery or convent garden. Most of these were just within or just without the city wall, as they were founded when the city had already become of a considerable size, and they were therefore located in the more open parts. The enormous size of the equipment of these religious establishments before the Reformation, in flDtlton's JEnolanfc 23 the century when Milton's grandfather was young, can scarcely be conceived to-day when the adjuncts of the Church have shrunk almost to nothingness. In Milton's boyhood, it must have been an easy task among the recent ruins and traditions of these great establishments to reconstruct them to the imagination in their entirety. Sir Walter Besant in his graphic book on " London " details the num- bers supported in this earlier period by St. Paul's alone. The cathedral body included the bishop, dean, the four archdeacons, the treasurer, the pre- centor, the chancellor, thirty greater canons, twelve lesser canons, about fifty chaplains or chantry priests, and thirty vicars. Of lower rank were the sacrist and three vergers, the servitors, the surveyor, the twelve scribes, the book transcriber, the bookbinder, the chamberlain, the rent-collector, the baker, the brewer, the singing men and choir boys, of whom priests were made, the bedesmen and the poor folk. In addition to these were the servants and assistants of all these officers; the sextons, gravediggers, gardeners, bell ringers, makers and menders of the ecclesiastical robes, cleaners and sweepers, carpen- ters, masons, painters, carvers, and gilders. A similar body, though somewhat smaller, was required in every other religious foundation. No wonder that not only one-fourth of the area but also 24 /IMlton's England one-fourth of the whole city population was needed to supply these demands. From Norman London there remained, besides St. Paul's vast monastic house, the priory of St. Bar- tholomew's, the house of St. Mary Overie's, the hospital of St. Katharine's, and the priory of the Holy Trinity. In Plantagenet London, we find the priory of Crutched that is, Crossed Friars, who wore a red cross upon their back and carried an iron cross in their hands. Farther north upon the other side of Aldgate stood the great monastery of Holy Trinity, the richest and most magnificent in the city ; and the priory of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, whose noble ruins had not disappeared more than a century after Milton's death. Farther west and north of Broad Street stood the splendid house of Austin Friars ; still farther west was St. Martin's le Grand, and just beyond, the foundation of the Gray Friars or Franciscans. Christ's Hospital, which lies chiefly on. the site of this old monastery, we shall consider in a later chapter. In the southwest corner of the London wall dwelt the Black Friars the Dominicans whose name to-day is perpetuated in Blackfriars Bridge. Outside the walls were other establishments as rich and splendid as these that were within them. Farther west than the house of the Black Friars was flMlton's England 25 the monastery of White Friars or Carmelites, and beyond these the ancient site of the Knights Tem- plar, whose Temple church, in Milton's day, as well as ours, alone remained. North of the Norman St. Bartholomew's was the house of the Carthusians, whose long history, ending in the Charterhouse, must be reserved to a later chapter. Northwest from the Norman house of St. Bartholomew's stood the Norman priory of St. John's of Jerusalem. Adjacent to it lay the twin foundation the priory of Black Nuns. South of the Thames lay two great establish- ments, Bermondsey and St. Thomas's Hospital, while of the hospitals situated among the priories and monasteries to the north were the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem and the great hospital of St. Mary Spital, both of which were originally planned for religious houses. This is but a dry, brief cata- logue, not of all the great religious houses, but only of those whose walls, more or less transformed or ruined, were within walking distance and most familiar to the boy Milton in his rambles around the city of his birth. Milton must have seen several " colleges " as well as monasteries ; among these were St. Michael's College on Crooked Lane, and Jesus Commons, and a " college " for poor and aged priests, called the 26 /HMiton's England " Papey." A portion of the " college " of Whit- tington 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 magnifi- cence 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. Then the unknown reverent artist wrought not for fame or earthly glory, but dedicated his labour to the God of Nature, whose laws and principles were his chief guide. These were the days when vine and tendril and the subtle curves of leaf and flower or supple animal form suggested the enrichment of capital and corbel. No cheap and servile imitation of lute and drum, of spear and sword and ribbon, of casque and crown and plume, displayed a paucity of inventive genius and aban- donment of nature's teaching for that of milliner and armourer. Let John Ruskin, in many ways the spiritual son of the beauty-loving Puritan, John Milton, interpret to us the meaning of those poems reared in stone, which Milton's age was fast dis- placing : /IMlton's England 27 " You have in the earlier Gothic less wonderful construction, less careful masonry, far less expres- sion of harmony of parts in the balance of the building. Earlier work always has more or less of the character of a good, solid wall with irregular holes in it, well carved wherever there was room. But the last phase of Gothic has no room to spare; it rises as high as it can on narrowest foundations, stands in perfect strength with the least possible substance in its bars ; connects niche with niche and line with line in an exquisite harmony from which no stone can be removed, and to which you can add not a pinnacle; and yet introduces in rich, though now more calculated profusion, the living elements of its sculpture, sculpture in quatrefoils, gargoyles, niches, in the ridges and hollows of its mouldings not a shadow without meaning and not a line with- out life. But with this very perfection of his work came the unhappy pride of the builder in what he had done. As long as he had been merely raising clumsy walls and carving them, like a child, in way- wardness of fancy, his delight was in the things he thought of as he carved; but when he had once reached this pitch of constructive science, he began to think only how cleverly he could put the stones together. The question was not now with him, What can I represent ? but, How high can I build 28 /BMlton's how wonderfully can I hang this arch in air? and the catastrophe was instant architecture became in France a mere web of woven lines, in England a mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for invention, and geometry for passion." ("The Two Paths.") It is in this later Gothic, for example the much admired Chapel of Henry VII. at Westminster, that we find this redundancy of motive and poverty of invention, as, for instance, in the repetition of the portcullis the Tudor heraldic ornament. Ruskin would teach us that heraldic signs, though suited for a few conspicuous places, as proclaiming the name or rank or office of the owner, become imperti- nent when blazoned everywhere, and are wholly devoid of beauty when they reproduce by the hun- dred some instrument of prosaic use. 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 sanc- tuaries; 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. . Gothic was formed in the baron's flMlton's Jn0lanfc 29 castle and the burgher's street. It was formed by the thoughts and hands and powers of labouring citizens and warrior kings." (" Crown of Wild Olive.") In a memorable passage in his lectures on Archi- tecture in Edinburgh, Ruskin recalls the power with which the Gothic forms appeal to the imagination when embodied in poetry and romance. He asks what would result were the words tower and turret, and the mental pictures that they conjure up, re- moved. Suppose Walter Scott had written, instead of " the old clock struck two from a turret adjoin- ing my bedchamber," " the old clock struck two from the landing at the top of the stair." " What," he asks, "would have become of the passage?" " That strange and thrilling interest with which such words strike you as are in any wise connected with Gothic architecture, as for instance, vault, arch, spire, pinnacle, battlement, barbican, porch, words everlastingly poetical and powerful, is a most true and sure index that the things themselves are delightful to you." As to stylobates, and pedi- ments, and triglyphs, and all the classic forms, even when pure and unvulgarised by decadent Renais- sance work, how utterly they fail to satisfy the poetic instinct of the man of English lineage is well expressed by James Russell Lowell, as he stood within the portals of Chartres Minster : 3 " The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, The one thing finished in this hasty world. But ah ! this other, this that never ends, Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of morals, half divined, as life, Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise Of hazardous caprices, sure to please, Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern, Imagination's very self in stone ! " Of the type of architecture most favoured by Milton's contemporaries, Ruskin says : " Renaissance architecture is the school which has conducted men's inventive and constructive faculties from the Grand Canal [in England, he might have said, old Chester or old Canterbury] to Gower Street, from the marble shaft and the lancet arch and the wreathed leafage ... to the square cavity in the brick wall." This is a strong expres- sion of a half truth. 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 mod- ern world can not plead poverty as its excuse for ugliness. Even the village cottage of three cen- turies 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. rtMlton's Bnalanfc 31 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, excep- tion must be made to much delightful domestic archi- tecture that has the Tudor stamp and is distinctly English, and unknown on the Continent. The introduction into the background of portraits of such classic outlines as domes, arches, and marble pilasters, is a device used by painters when they would flatter the vanity of their patrons and give them a courtly setting. No Byzantine or Norman arch, or Gothic spire or portal, however rich in dec- oration, can equal the severe but pompous lines of the Renaissance in conveying a sense of pride. Says Ruskin : " There is in them an expression of aristoc- racy in its worst characters : coldness, perfectness of training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy with the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, haughty insufficiency. All these characters are writ- ten in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as if they were graven on it in words. For, observe, all other architectures have something in them that com- 32 /iDilton's England mon men can enjoy ; some concession to the simplici- ties of humanity, some daily bread for the hunger of the multitude; quaint fancy, rich ornament, bright colour, something that shows a sympathy with men of ordinary minds and hearts, and this wrought out, at least in the Gothic, with a rudeness showing that the workman did not mind exposing his own ignorance if he could please others. But the Renaissance is exactly the contrary of this. It is rigid, cold, inhuman ; incapable of glowing, of stoop- ing, of conceding, for an instant. Whatever excel- lence it has is refined, high-trained, and deeply erudite, a kind which the architect well knows no common mind can taste. He proclaims it to you aloud. . . . All the pleasure you can have in any- thing I do is in its proud breeding, its rigid formal- ism, its perfect finish, its cold tranquillity. . . . And the instinct of the world felt this in a moment. . . . Princes delighted in it, and courtiers. The Gothic was good for God's worship, but this was good for man's worship. . . . The proud princes and lords rejoiced in it. It was full of insult to the poor in its every line. It would not be built of materials at the poor man's hand. ... It would be of hewn stone; it would have its windows and its doors and its stairs and its pillars in lordly order and of stately size." /IDUton's JEnalanfc 33 To the novice, who is beginning to decipher the inner meaning of sermons in stones in which the ages have recorded, all unconsciously, the life and aspiration of the past, these words may sound harsh and fantastic. With the memory of such rare geniuses as Michael Angelo and Wren, and their awe-inspiring cathedrals, built in the Renaissance forms, one may hesitate before completely accepting Ruskin's dictum. Ruskin himself has done homage to their genius and the greatness of their work. " There were of course," he says, " noble exceptions." Yet surely the devout Christian must feel under their glorious domes not so much like praying and reverencing his Maker as glorifying the work of men's hands. Under any dome and architectural reminder of Roman thought and life, whether it be Wren's mighty St. Paul's, or his small and exquisitely pro- portioned St. Stephen's, Wallbrook, almost in its shadow, the worshipper must feel something akin to Ruskin's sentiment. A meek and contrite heart feels alien and uncomforted amid its perfection. But Ruskin's word chiefly concerns the more per- fect Gothic of the Continent, and the manifestations there worse than any in England of riotous and insolent excess in its Renaissance work. The most ostentatious and offensive monument in West- 34 flMlton's England minster Abbey, which is adorned with meaningless mouldings, artificial garlands, and cherubs weeping hypocritic tears, is not so odious as those which Venice, Rome, Antwerp, and a hundred other cities reared upon the Continent. Those tasteless, costly structures which modern Englishmen are but now learning to condemn illustrate completely the pride and arrogance of a world drunk with new wealth, in which fashion supplants beauty. Yet to a large extent the England of the splendid Tudor period and the England of the Stuarts sub- stituted for the beautiful and sincere forms of an earlier period a style of construction and decoration which showed distinct decadence. Witness the carvings in the chapel and dining-hall of the Charter- house, 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 ante- dated and accompanied Milton's boyhood. Hun- dreds of such cosy, homelike residences with their ample windows of many leaded panes lined the city streets. The merchants who lived in them sold their wares in the shops beneath, and, if they were artifi- cers, housed their apprentices within them. They ADUton's Bnglanfc 35 were built solidly to last for centuries. Strong beams upheld the broad, low-studded ceilings. Capacious fireplaces opened into chimneys whose construction was often made a work of art. Around the house- door were carvings of saints or devils, of prophets, hobgoblins or grotesque dragons, of birds and bees, and any wild or lovely fancy that the craftsman loved to perpetuate in wood or stone. The home must be made beautiful as well as the sanctuary. In those days the mania of migration had not yet destroyed the permanence and sacredness of the homestead. Where the young man brought his bride, even in a city home, there he hoped to dwell and dandle his grandchildren upon his knee. It was Milton's fate to know many homes in London. Discoveries and travel of the Elizabethan period had broken many traditions of the past, and the old order in his day was yielding to the new. But half the architecture of two hundred years before him still remained, and all the traditions of the past were fresh. The dingy and mutilated relics of the time before the Tudors which, outside the Gothic churches, alone remain to us, reveal but little of what he saw. With Henry VIII. and the widespread and thor- ough dissolution of religious houses, London became a far more commercial and prosaic place. Green 36 /UMlton's England convent gardens were sold for the erection of narrow wooden tenements; ancient dormitories, refectories, and chapels were pulled down or trans- formed for more secular purposes. 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 imagi- nation of thousands. Drake and Hawkins, Fro- bisher and Raleigh were adding new lustre to an age hitherto unparalleled in prosperity and enter- prise. Emerson's description of the Englishman as having a " telescopic appreciation of distant gain " was exemplified. England was rich in poets, great even in Shake- speare's time. Of two hundred and forty who pub- lished verses, forty are remembered to-day. Yet of England's six million people, half could not read at all. Never was there among people of privilege flDUton's England 37 such a proportion of accomplished men. Every man tried his hand at verses, and learned to sing a madri- gal, and tinkle the accompaniment with his own fingers. Gentlemen travelled to Italy and brought back or made themselves translations of Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso. Not only learned ladies like Queen Elizabeth, who had had Roger Ascham for instruc- tor, wrote Latin, but many others were accomplished in those severer studies which ladies in a later age neglected. Sir Walter Besant tells us that from Henry IV. to Henry VIII. herbs, fruits, and roots were scarcely used. At this period, however, the poor again began to consume melons, radishes, cucumbers, parsley, carrots, turnips, salad herbs, and these things as well graced the tables of the gentry. Potatoes were unknown until a much later time. Much meat was eaten, and in different fashion from our own, e. g., honey was poured over mutton. Tobacco cost eighteen shillings a pound, and King James com- plained that there were those who " spent 300 a year upon this noxious weed." No vital statistics existed to show the average of longevity. But cer- tain it is that, with modern sanitation and cleanli- ness, 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 38 flMlton's England 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. In 1605 the bills of mortality included the ninety- seven parishes within the walls, sixteen parishes without the walls, and six contiguous outparishes in Middlesex and Surrey. During Milton's lifetime, they included the city of Westminster and the par- ishes of Islington, Lambeth, Stepney, Newington, Hackney, and Redriff. Scarlet fever was formerly confounded with measles, and does not appear to be reported as a separate disease until 1703. In 1682 Sir William Petty, speaking of the five plagues that had visited London in the preceding hundred years, remarks : " It is to be remembered the plagues of London do commonly kill one-fifth of the inhabitants, and are the chief impediment against the growth of the city." In Milton's boyhood common folk were crowded into such narrow, wooden tenements as one may still see within the enclosure of St. Giles's Church, Crip- plegate, almost the only ones that still remain within the city. There were no sewers and no ade- quate pavement until 1616. House refuse was not flDilton's Bnglaufc 39 infrequently thrown into the street, and sometimes upon the heads of passers-by, though ancient laws enjoined each man to keep the front of his house clean and to throw no refuse into the gutter. In short, ideas on sanitation in London were much like those in Havana before the summer of 1898. It is difficult to obtain accurate statistics of the population of London, but Loftie estimates that in 1636 seven hundred thousand people lived " within its liberties." Where now lofty, gray stone buildings of pre- tentious and nondescript architecture shelter banks and offices, gabled buildings with overlapping stories darkened the streets. The city was not dependent on the suburbs or upon other towns for aught but food and raw material. Wool and silk and linen, leather and all metals were wrought close to the shops where they were sold. The odours of glue and dyestuffs tainted the fresh air. The sound of tools and hammers, and of the simple looms and machinery of the day, worked by foot or hand power, were heard. New objects of luxury began to be manufactured fans, ladies' wigs, fine knives, pins, needles, earthen fire-pots, silk and crystal buttons, shoe- buckles, glassware, nails, and paper. New products from foreign lands were introduced and naturalised 40 flMlton's among them, turkeys, hops, and apricots. Forks had not yet appeared as a necessary table furnishing. Kissing was a universal custom, and a guest kissed his hostess and all ladies present. Though in the time of Milton's father the ameni- ties of life had much increased, cruelty and severe punishments were more frequent than in an earlier age. Three-fourths of all the heretics burned at the stake in England suffered in those five years of the bloody queen who, with her Spanish husband at her court, ruled from 1553 to 1558 over unhappy England. Many a time must the boy Milton have heard blood-curdling tales from aged men of these ghastly days when Ridley, Cranmer, Hooper, and John Rogers withered in the flames. His own father may have seen the later martyrdoms of Roman Catholics in Elizabeth's reign, or of that Unitarian in 1585 who suffered at the stake for the denial of the divinity of Christ a theological view with which Milton himself is shown to have had much sympathy. The historian tells us of men boiled and women burned for poisoning; of ears nailed to the pillory and sliced off for libellous and incendiary language. We read of frightful floggings through the streets and of an enormous number of men hanged. Many rogues escaped punishment altogether, for, though flDUton's BnQlanfc 41 punishment when it came was terrifically out of proportion to the offence, and in its publicity incited by suggestion to more crime, the law was often laxly administered. 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 be- ginning of the twentieth century, men's minds were receiving radical, new impressions, and had not yet assimilated or comprehended them. The doctrines of religious and political freedom were the dreams of prophets, and were yet to be conceived a possi- bility by the masses, who through dumb centuries had toiled and laughed and wept, and then stretched themselves in mother earth and slept among their fathers. The tender, growing shoots which in the days of Wiclif had sprung from the seed, small as a mustard seed, which he had planted, had grown. Birds now lodged among its branches. The time was ripening when, with the axe and hammer of Milton and his mighty compeers, some of its timbers should help rear a new structure for church and state; and others should be driven deep under the foundations of the temple which men of English blood should in the future rear to democracy. CHAPTER II. MILTON'S LIFE ON BREAD STREET DIRECTLY under the shadow of St. Mary le Bow Church, and almost within bow- shot of old St. Paul's, in a little court off Bread Street, three doors from Cheapside, John Milton, the son of John Milton, scrivener, was born, December gth in 1608. The house was marked by the sign of a spread eagle, probably adopted from the armorial bearings of the family, which appear on the original agreement for the publication of " Paradise Lost." John Milton, scrivener, whose business was much like that of the modern attorney, was the son of a well-to-do Catholic yeoman of Oxfordshire, and is said to have studied for a time at Christ Church, Oxford. Certain it is that he turned Protestant, was cast off by his father, and in Elizabeth's reign settled in London; by 1600, when he married his wife Sarah, the worldly goods with which he her endowed in the church of All Hallows, Bread Street, included two houses on that street, besides others elsewhere. 42 flDUton's EnQlanfc 43 We know little of Milton's mother, except that she was a woman of a warm heart and generous hand, and had weak eyes which compelled her to wear spectacles before she was thirty, while her husband read without them at the age of eighty- four. Three of their six little ones died in baby- hood, but the little John's elder sister, Anne, and younger brother, Christopher, grew with him to middle life. It was a musical household; an organ and other instruments were part of the possessions most highly prized in the Bread Street home. The little lad must have looked with pride at the gold chain and medal presented to his father by a Polish prince for a composition in forty parts which the former had written for him. Many chimes in country churches played the psalm tunes that he had har- monised. To this day a madrigal and other songs of his are known to music lovers. No wonder that the boy reared in this home was ever a lover of sweet sounds, and learned to evoke them with his own little ringers upon the organ keyboard. The Bread Street of Milton's day, though swept over by the Great Fire, was not obliterated, and still covers its old site. Just at the head of it, on Cheapside, stood the " Standard in Cheap " an ancient monument in hexagonal shape, with sculp- 44 /IDilton's England tures on each side, and on the top the figure of a man blowing a horn. Here Wat Tyler and Jack Cade had beheaded prisoners. A little west was the Gothic Cross in Cheap, one of the nine crosses erected in memory of Queen Eleanor, somewhat similar to the modern one at Charing Cross. Only a few steps from his father's house the little John found himself in the thickest traffic and bustle of the city. Here were mercers' and gold- smiths' shops, and much coming and going of carts, and occasionally coaches, which, as the antiquarian Stow declared, " were running on wheels with many whose parents had been glad to go on foot," for coaches were but newly come into fashion. As the little lad stood at the street corner looking east and west along Cheapside, the ancient market-place, his eye fell on well-built houses three and four stories high; they were turned gable end to the street, were built of timber, brick, and plaster, and had projecting upper stories of woodwork. Stow de- scribes a row built by Thomas Wood, goldsmith, of " fair large houses, for the most part possessed of mercers," and westward, beginning at Bread Street, " the most beautiful frame of fair houses and shops that be within the walls of London or elsewhere in England. It containeth in number ten fair dwelling-houses and fourteen shops, all in one 45 frame, uniformly builded, four stories high, beau- tified toward the street with the goldsmiths' arms and the likeness of woodmen, in memory of his name, riding on monstrous beasts; all of which is cast in lead, richly painted over and gilt." 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 mer- cantile 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 inscrip- tion, 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. A little farther south, on the corner of Watling Street, is the site of All Hallows Church, where Milton was baptised, and which is marked by a gray stone bust of the poet and the inscription : " MILTON BORN IN BREAD STREET 1608 BAPTISED IN CHURCH OF ALL HALLOWS WHICH STOOD HERE ANTE 1878." The register of his baptism referred to him as " John, sonne of John Mylton, Scrivener." 46 flDUton's Here the Milton family sat every Sunday and listened to the sermons of Reverend Richard Stocke, a zealous Puritan and most respected man, who is said to have had the gift of influencing young people. Further south, on the same side as All Hallows, were " six almshouses builded for poor decayed brethren of the Salter's Company," and beyond this the church of St. Mildred, the Virgin. Upon cross- ing Basing Lane, Milton saw the most noted house upon the street, known as " Gerrard Hall." This was an antique structure " built upon arched vaults and with arched gates of stone brought from Caen in Normandy," as Stow relates. A giant is said to have lived here, and the large fir pole in the high hall, which reached to the roof, was said to have been his staff. Stow thought it worth while to measure it, and declares it was fifteen inches in cir- cumference. Small boys in Bread Street may well have stood in awe of such a cane. Whether the famous " Mermaid " Tavern was in Bread or Friday Street or between them seems doubtful, but Ben Jonson's lines plainly indicate Bread Street: " At Bread-street's Mermaid having dined and merry, Proposed to go to Holborn in a wherry." As Milton was early destined for the Church, his unusually thoughtful disposition and quick per- OLD ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL The two upper views show the porch by Inigo Jones. The two lower views show the the church. Lesser Cloisters." Milton's -school stood at the rear of From an old engraving. flDUton's Enalanfc 47 ception must have given promise of his fulfillment of his father's hope. At the age of ten he was writing verses. At this time, a Dutch painter, Jansen, reputed to be " equal to Van Dyck in all except freedom of hand and grace," was employed to paint the scrivener's little son, as well as James I. and his children and various noblemen. This portrait shows us a sweet- faced, sober little Puritan in short-cropped auburn hair, wearing a broad lace frill about his neck, and an elaborately braided jacket. This portrait is now in private hands, from whence it is to be hoped that it will some day find its way to the National Portrait Gal- lery, and be placed beside the striking and noble likeness of the poet in middle life. The lines which were written beneath the first engraving of it may have been the poet's own : " When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set Serious to learn and know, and thence to do What might be public good ; myself I thought Born to that end, born to promote all truth And righteous things." Milton appears to have been very fond of his preceptor, a Scotch Puritan named Young. He seems to have well grounded the lad in Latin, aroused in him a love of poetry, and set him to 4 flDUton's EttQlant) making English and Latin verses. But the little John must go to school with other boys; and what more natural than that the famous St. Paul's School, within five minutes' walk, should have been selected ? When Milton went to school in 1620, St. Paul's Cathedral was become old and much in need of restoration. It had been built on the site of an older church and was in process of erection and alteration from about 1090 to 1512, when its new wooden steeple, covered with lead, was completed. Its cross was estimated later by Wren to have been at least 460 feet from the ground. This had disappeared in a fire in 1561, and none replaced it. What Milton saw was a huge edifice, chiefly Gothic, with a central tower about 260 feet high. The classical porch by Inigo Jones was not added, neither were certain buildings which abutted the nave torn down until after Milton's school-days were over. On the east end, next his schoolhouse, was a great window thirty-seven feet high, above which was a circular rose window. The choir stretched west- ward 224 feet, which, with the nave, made the entire length 580 feet. When Jones's portico was added, its whole length was 620 feet. The area which it covered was 82,000 feet, and it was by far the larg- est cathedral in all England. Upon the southwest flDUton's England 49 corner was a tower once used as a prison, and also as a bell and clock tower. This was the real Lollards' tower, rather than the one at Lambeth which is so called. The northwest tower was like- wise a prison. The nave was of transitional Nor- man design, of twelve bays in length, and with triforium and clerestory. For many decades a large part of the cathedral was desecrated by a throng of hucksters, idlers, and fops. Ben Jonson makes constant allusion to " Paul's." Here he studied the extravagant costumes of the day. According to Dekker, the tailors frequented its aisles to catch the newest fashions : "If you determine to enter into a new suit, warn your tailor to attend you in Paul's, who with his hat in his hand, shall like a spy discover the stuff, colour, and fashion of any doublet or hose that dare be seen there ; and stepping behind a pillar to fill his table- book with those notes, will presently send you into the world an accomplished man." Bishop Earle, writing when Milton was twenty years of age, describes St. Paul's as follows : " It is a heap of stones and men with a vast confusion of languages; and were the steeple not sanctified, nothing liker Babel. The noise in it is like that of bees mixed of walking tongues and feet. It is the exchange of all discourse, and no business what- 50 rtMlton's England soever but is here stirring and afoot. It is the market of young lecturers, whom you may cheapen here at all rates and sizes. All inventions are emptied here, and not few pockets. The best sign of a temple in it is that it is the thieves' sanctuary." Well may John Milton senior have cautioned his young son not to tarry in " Duke Humphrey's Walk," as this scene of confusion was called, on his way home from school, though he may well have taken him to inspect the lofty tomb of Dean Colet or the monuments to John of Gaunt and Duke Humphrey and the shrine of St. Erkenwald, which was behind the high altar. As a man, in later years, Milton may have walked down from Aldersgate on a December in 1641 and attended the funeral of the great painter, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who for nine years had made his residence in England, and was buried here. In a corner of the churchyard stood a covered pulpit surmounted by a cross, where in ancient times the folkmote of the citizens was held. For centuries before Milton, this was a famous spot for outdoor sermons and proclamations. Here the captured flags from the Armada had waved above the preacher. But in 1629, when Milton was in Cam- bridge, Oliver Cromwell, in his maiden speech in Parliament, declared that flat popery was being AUton's Englanfc S 1 preached at Paul's Cross. When Cromwell's day of power was come, and the cathedral during the war was sometimes used to stable horses, Paul's Cross was swept away, and its leaden roof melted into bullets. Before that, in 1633, preaching had been removed from there into the choir. Of the architecture of the bishop's palace, which stood at the northeast of the cathedral, we know nothing, but we know that it existed in Milton's school-days. Adjoining the palace was a " Haw," or small enclosure surrounded by a cloister, filled with tombs, and upon the walls was a grisly picture of the Dance of Death. Death was represented by a skeleton, who led the Pope, and emperor, and a procession of men of all conditions. In brief, the little " Haw " was a small edition of the Pisan Campo Santo. At the east end of the churchyard stood the Bell Tower, surmounted by a spire covered with lead and bearing a statue of St. Paul. The cloister of the Chapter House or Convocation House hid the west wall of the south transept and part of the nave. It was, unlike most structures of that character, two stories in height, and formed a square of some ninety feet, which was called the " Lesser Cloisters," doubtless to distinguish it from the other cloisters in the " Haw." During his most impressionable 52 flMlton's Bnglanfc years, the city boy John Milton could not have stirred from home without being confronted by majestic symbols of the Christian faith, and mighty structures already venerable with age, and rich in treasures of a great historic past. Religion and beauty played as large a part in the influences that moulded the life of his young contemporaries as science and athletics do in the life of every American boy to-day. Whatever faults the methods of educa- tion in Milton's age may be accused of, it can not be denied that they developed industry, reverence, and moral courage three qualities which with all our child study and pedagogical improvements are perhaps less common to-day than they were then. About the year 1620, when William Bradford was writing his famous journal, and John Carver and F.dward Winslow were sailing with him in the Mayflower, when Doctor Harvey had told Lon- don folk that man's blood circulates, and many new things were being noised abroad, twelve-year- old John Milton first went to school. His school had been founded in 1512 by Dean Colet, whose great tomb, just mentioned, was but a stone's throw distant. It was a famous school. Ben Jonson and the famous Camden had studied there, and learned Latin and Greek, the catechism, and good manners. There were 153 boys in all; the number prescribed /IMlton's Bnglanfc 53 had reference, curiously, to the number of fishes in Simon Peter's miraculous draught. Over the win- dows were inscribed the words in large capital let- ters : " Schola Catechizationis Puerorum In Christi Opt. Max. Fide Et Bonis Literis. On entering, the pupils were confronted by the motto painted on each window : " Aut Doce, Aut Disce, Aut Discede " either teach or learn or leave the place. There were two rooms, one called the vestibulum, for the little boys, where also instruction was given in Christian manners. In the main schoolroom the master sat at the further end upon his imposing chair of office called a cathedra, and under a bust of Colet said to have been a work of " exquisite art." Stow tells us that somewhat before Milton's time the master's wages were a mark a week and a livery gown of four nobles delivered in cloth; his lodgings were free. The sub-master received weekly six shillings, eight pence, and was given his gown. Children of every nationality were eligi- ble; on admission they passed an examination in reading, writing, and the catechism, and paid four pence, which went to the poor scholar who swept the school. The eight classes included boys from eight to eighteen years of age, though the curriculum of the school extended over only six years. Milton's master was Doctor Alexander Gill, who from 1608- 54 Hilton's 1635 held the mastership of St. Paul's School. A progressive man was this same reverend gentleman a great believer in his native English and in spelling reform. Speaking of Latin, this remark- able Latin master said : " We may have the same treasure in our own tongue. I love Rome, but London better. I favour Italy, but England more. I honour the Latin, but worship the English." He was also an advocate of the retention of good old Saxon words as against the invasion of Latinised ones. " But whither," he writes, " have you ban- ished those words which our forefathers used for these new-fangled ones? Are our words to be exiled like our citizens? O ye Englishmen, retain what yet remains of our native speech ! " Under Mr. Gill's instruction, and that of his son, who was usher, Milton spent about four years of strenuous study. So great was his ambition for learning during the years when most boys find school hours alone irksome enough that he says : " My father destined me when a little boy for the study of humane letters, which I seized with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before mid- night; which indeed was the first cause of injury to my eyes, to whose natural weakness there were also added frequent headaches." Philips writes: UEAN COLET, THE FOUNDER OF ST. PAUL'S SCHOOL From a plaster cast of tlie group sculptured by Hamo Thorny croft. fl&Uton's Enalanfc ss " He generally sat up half the night as well in voluntary improvements of his own choice as the exact perfecting of his school exercises; so that at the age of fifteen he was full ripe for academical training." During these years the boy probably learned French and Italian, as well as made a begin- ning in Hebrew. It was in his last year at school that he para- phrased the ninety-fourth Psalm, beginning: " When the blest seed of Terah's faithful son After long toil their liberty had won, And passed from Pharian fields to Canaan's land Led by the strength of the Almighty's hand, Jehovah's wonders were in Israel shown, His praise and glory were in Israel known." Likewise Psalm one hundred and thirty-six, be- ginning : " Let us with a gladsome mind Praise the Lord, for he is kind : For his mercies aye endure, Ever faithful, ever sure." The present St. Paul's School is now splendidly housed in a great establishment in Hammersmith. But Milton's school and the one which arose on its ashes after the Great Fire are remembered by the following inscription : " On this site, A. D. 1512 to A. D. 1884, stood St. Paul's School, founded by 5* /IMlton's Dr. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's." From the studio of Mr. Hamo Thornycroft at Kensington, whence came the heroic figures of Cromwell at Westminster and King Alfred at Winchester, St. Paul's School is to receive a noble statue of the great scholar. CHAPTER III. MILTON AT CAMBRIDGE iHE schoolmate whom Milton most loved was a physician's son, Charles Diodati, almost exactly his own age, who went to Cambridge a little in advance of him. After his sister, who was then eighteen years old, had been wooed and won by Mr. Philips, and had made the first break in the home on Spread Eagle Court, Milton, now sixteen years old, followed his friend to Cambridge. Doubtless he rode on the coach, which every week the hale old stage-coach driver Hobson drove from the Bull's Inn on Bishopsgate Street. A well-to-do man was this worthy, who, in spite of eighty winters, still cracked his whip behind his span, and kept forty horses in his livery stable. Milton took a great fancy to him. He soon learned, as did every young gentle- man intent on hiring a nag, that " Hobson's choice " meant taking the horse that stood nearest the stable door. Hobson is said to have been the first man in England to let out hackney-coaches. The modern 57 58 flDUton's Englaufc visitor to the university town finds the old carrier honoured by a memorial; for he became a public benefactor, and among many generous gifts be- queathed a sum that to this day provides for a fine conduit and for the runnels of sparkling water that flow along the streets and around the town. 1 Under the mastership of Doctor Thomas Bain- brigge, Milton became a " lesser pensioner " in February, 1624, at Christ's College. Students were classified according to social rank and ability to pay, and Milton stood above the poorer students, called " sizars," who had inferior accommodation ; he probably paid about 50 a year for his 1 ONE OF MILTON'S TWO EPITAPHS ON HOBSON " Here lies old Hobson. Death hath broke his girt, And here, alas, hath laid him in the dirt ; Or else, the ways being foul, twenty to one, He's here stuck in a slough, or overthrown. 'Twas such a shifter, that if truth were known, Death was half glad when he had got him down ; For he had any time these ten years full, Dodged with him, betwixt Cambridge and the ' Bull,' And surely death could never have prevailed, Had not his weekly course of carriage failed. But lately finding him so long at home, And thinking now his journey's end was come, And that he had ta'en up his latest inn, In the kind office of a chamberlain, Showed him his room, where he must lodge that night, Pulled off his boots and took away the light ; If any ask for him, it shall be said, Hobson has supt and's newly gone to bed.' " 3 1 c < o * a s flDilton's Englanfc 59 maintenance. Christ's College, as regards numbers, then stood nearly at the head of the sixteen col- leges and had one master, thirteen fellows, and fifty-five scholars, which, together with students, made the number two hundred and sixty, about the same that it has to-day. It stands between Sidney Sussex College and Emmanuel. In the former, Cromwell studied, from April, 1616, to July, 1617, and the room with its bay window and deep window-seats and little bedroom opening out of it, which is said to have been his, may still be seen in the second story of the building next to the street. The window is modern. His por- trait, painted in middle life, hangs in the dining- hall. Doctor William Everett, in what is the best book on life in Cambridge, his " On the Cam," thus sums up his estimate of the Protector : " Bigots may defame him, tyrants may insult him, but when the hosts of God rise for their great review and the champions of liberty bear their scars, there shall stand in the foremost rank, shining as the brightness of the firmament, the majestic son of Cambridge, the avenger and protector, Oliver Cromwell." A Royalist has written in a note that is appended to Cromwell's name in the college books : " Hie fuit grandis ille impostor carnifex perditissimus ; " and it is as " impostor " and " butcher " that two-thirds 60 Hilton's of Englishmen would have described him before Carlyle resurrected the real man. Emmanuel College is preeminently the Puritan college. It is dear to Americans as the one where William Blackstone, the learned hermit of Shawmut, John Harvard, the founder of Harvard College, and Henry Dunster, its first president, Bradstreet, the colonial governor, and Hugh Peters, the regi- cide, who lived in Boston, once studied. Here also Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, was a student, and here John Cotton was a fellow. This beloved preacher afterward left his ministry over St. Botolph's Church in Boston, England, to go to the little settlement of Winthrop's, which had changed its earlier names of " Shawmut " and " Trimountaine " to " Boston " before his arrival. American tourists, who find their way to the spacious grounds of Jesus College to see the Burne- Jones and Morris windows in the chapel, will be glad to note that in these stately halls John Eliot walked a student. Little he then dreamed of his future life in wigwams, a guest of mugwumps, in the forests of Natick, Massachusetts, and of the laborious years to be spent in turning Hebrew poetry and history and gospel message into their barbar- ous tongue. Francis Higginson, the minister to Salem, and the ancestor of Colonel Thomas W. rtMlton's En0la^ 61 Higginson, studied here as well. John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts colony, and President Chauncy of Harvard College studied at Trinity a generation before Wren erected its great library, and Isaac Newton was a student there. John Norton, Cotton's successor at the First Church, Boston, studied in Peterhouse, the oldest of all the colleges, and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, entered Pembroke College the year before Milton entered Christ's. Whether the two, whose lives were to touch so closely later, knew each other then or not is doubtful. William Brewster was the only man who came in the Mayflower who had a college education. He too studied at Cambridge; and so did John Robinson, the dearly loved pastor of the Pilgrims, who remained with the other Eng- lish refugees at Leyden. It was these men, with Shepard, Saltonstall, and a score more of Oxford and Cambridge men, who were the spiritual fathers of Samuel Adams, Warren, Otis, Hancock ; of Jonathan Edxvards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Channing, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks; of Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, and Hawthorne ; of Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner ; of Motley, Bancroft, Prescott, and John Fiske. The Cambridge that Milton knew was the mother and the grandmother of the founders of states 62 /IDilton's and of the architects of national constitutions and ideals. Though most of the New England Puritan leaders came from Cambridge, Oxford furnished several of the great Puritans who remained at home Pym, Vane, John Eliot, and Hampden. It is estimated that nearly one hundred university men, between 1630 and 1647, left their comfortable homes and the allurements that Oxford, Cambridge, and the picturesque England of their time presented, to undergo the hardships of pioneers in the raw colony upon Massachusetts Bay. Of these, two- thirds came from Cambridge, a particularly large proportion from Emmanuel College. Of the forty or fifty Cambridge or Oxford men who were in Massachusetts in 1639, one-half were within five miles of Boston or Cambridge. It was this element of culture and character that determined the history of New England, and forced its stony soil to bring forth such a crop of men in the ages that were to come as made New England, in the words of Mau- rice, " the realisation in plain prose of the dreams which haunted Milton his whole life long." Sidney Sussex, Christ's, and Emmanuel Colleges were erected during the Tudor period, Christ's Col- lege, founded in 1505, being the earliest of the three. The buildings of the latter now present a more jt, a a '^ II X Q U U flMlton's commonplace appearance than when the " Lady of Christ's," as the students called young Milton, walked among them in his cap and gown. One still may climb the narrow, shabby stairway to the room,, with a tiny, irregular bedroom and cupboard, where Milton lived, and which probably he shared with a roommate. It has no inscription or special mark, and probably few strangers seek it out. The visitor will note its two windows opposite each other, whose heavy window-frames, with the wainscoting and cornice, bear mark of age. No one, however, fails to seek within the secluded inner garden the decrepit mulberry-tree, which is said to have been planted by Milton. Its trunk is muffled high in a mound of sod, and its aged limbs, which still bear foliage and black berries, rest on supports. High, sheltering walls shut in the exqui- site green lawns around it, and birds, blossoms, and trees make the spot seem a paradise regained. Among the students of Christ's College, none in later years brought it such renown as two men of widely differing types the authors of " Evidences of Christianity " and " The Origin of Species." William Paley in 1766, when he was but twenty- three years old, was elected a fellow, and remained in Cambridge ten years. His famous work to-day forms part of the subjects required for the " Little 64 dDUton'0 Go." Charles Robert Darwin, the Copernicus of the nineteenth century, entered Christ's with the inten- tion of studying for the ministry. He left it to journey on the Beagle through the southern seas, and to bring back results which, with his later study, led to such a revolution in human thought as made it only second to that wrought in the minds of men who lived a generation before Milton was born. Masson tells us that in Milton's college days the daily routine was chapel service at five o'clock in the morning, followed sometimes by a discourse by one of the fellows, then breakfasts, probably served in the students' own rooms, as they are to-day. This was followed by the daily college lectures or university debates, which lasted until noon, when dinner was served in the college dining-halls ; there the young men, then as now, sat upon the hard, backless benches, and drank their beer beneath painted windows and portraits, perchance by Hol- bein, of the eminent men who had been their predecessors. After dinner, if they supped at seven, and attended evening service, they could do much as they pleased otherwise. In Milton's day, the rule of an earlier time, which prescribed that out of their chambers students should converse in some dead language, had been much relaxed. Probably the barbarous flDUton's Enalanfc 65 Latin and worse Greek and Hebrew, which this pre- scription must have caused, finally rendered it a dead letter. Smoking was a universal practice, and boxing matches, dancing, bear fights, and other for- bidden games were not unknown. Bathing in the sedgy little Cam was prohibited, but was neverthe- less a daily practice. In many colleges the undergraduates wore " new fashioned gowns of any colour whatsoever, blue or green, or red or mixt, without any uniformity but in hanging sleeves ; and their other garments light and gay, some with boots and spurs, others with stock- ings of divers colours reversed one upon another." Some had " fair roses upon the shoe, long frizzled hair upon the head, broad spread bands upon their shoulders, and long, large merchants' ruffs about their necks, with fair feminine cuffs at the wrist." The portrait of Milton, which hangs in a spacious apartment used by the dons at Christ's College, shows him a youth of rare beauty, in a rich and tasteful costume with broad lace collar. He holds a gilt-edged volume in his hand, and has the mien of a refined and elegant scholar, but not effeminate withal, for he was used to daily sword practice. Corporal punishment was then still in vogue, and delinquents under eighteen years old were not infrequently chastised in public. In fact, at Trinity 66 flMlton's England College, " there was a regular service of corporal punishment in the hall every Thursday evening at seven in the presence of all the undergraduates." Masson discredits the story that Milton was once subjected to corporal punishment. In Milton's day the old order was changing, and we note that on Fridays men ate meat, and that the clergy indulged in impromptu prayers, to the scandal of the good churchmen. It was complained that " they lean or sit or kneel at prayers, every man in a several posture as he pleases ; at the name of Jesus, few will bow, and when the Creed is repeated, many of the boys, by men's directions, turn to the west door." Milton seems to have attended plays at the university, and to have been a critical observer. Toland quotes him as saying : " So many of the young divines and those in next aptitude to Divinity have been seen so often on the stage writhing and unboning their Clergy Lims to all the antic and dishonest Gestures of Trinculos, Buffoons, and bands; prostituting the shame of that ministry which either they had or were nigh having, to the eyes of Courtiers and Court Ladies, with their grooms and Mademoiselles. There where they acted and overacted among other young Scholars, I was a Spectator; they thought themselves gallant Men flDilton's England 67 and I thought them Fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticisms, they were out and I hist." It is the boast of Cambridge that she educated Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, the three martyrs whom Oxford burned. It must likewise be noted that Erasmus, Spenser, Coke, Walsingham, and Burleigh were Cambridge men. The Cambridge of Milton's time \vas but a small town of seven thousand inhabitants, about one-sixth of its present size, but rich with a history of nearly six hundred years. Its most beautiful building then as now was King's College Chapel in fact, the most beautiful building in either Oxford or Cam- bridge, despite Mr Ruskin's just criticism upon it. No doubt, it would look less like a dining-table bottom-side up, with its four legs in air, were two of its pinnacles omitted; doubtless also the same criticism on its monotonous decoration of the alter- nate rose and portcullis, which we made in regard to the Chapel of Henry VII. , is here applicable. But its great length, its noble proportions, its rare rich windows, its splendid organ-screen old in Mil- ton's college days must appeal to every lover of beauty. One loves to think of the young poet mus- ing here upon those well-known lines in "II 68 ADtlton's England Penseroso " which this stately building may have inspired. " But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale, And love the high, embowered roof, With antick pillars massy proof, And storied windows, richly dight, Casting a dim religious light. There let the pealing organ blow, To the full voiced Quire below, In service high and anthem clear, As may with sweetness through mine ear Dissolve me into ecstasies, And bring all heaven before mine eyes." In King's Chapel Queen Elizabeth attended ser- vice several times, and listened with delight to a Latin sermon from the text " Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers." On the afternoon of the same Sunday she returned to the antechapel and witnessed a play of Plautus. Among many buildings which were very old even in Milton's time must be mentioned the church of St. Benedict on Bene't Street, which was once the chapel of Corpus Christi College. Its ancient tower is especially noteworthy. Its little double windows are separated by a baluster-shaped column. The tower is similar to one at Lincoln, and, with the whole structure, antedates the Norman conquest. A generation before Milton's time Robert Browne, flDilton's JEnglant) 6 9 the father of Congregationalism, drew great crowds within this venerable edifice to listen to his radical doctrine. At Cambridge, where he had studied, he became impressed with the perfunctoriness and worldliness of the Church of his time, and he re- solved to " satisfy his conscience without any regard to license or authority from a bishop." When the Pilgrim Fathers fled from Austerfield and Scrooby in 1608, it was as Brownists or Sepa- ratists that they went to Holland. They sought a refuge where they might worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience, without inter- ference of bishop or presbyter. It was Browne's doctrine, not only of the absolute separation of Church and state, but also of the independence of each individual congregation, that laid the founda- tion of church government in New England. Presby- terianism has gained little root east of the Hudson. After Browne had suffered for his faith in thirty of the dismal dungeons of that day, and, shattered in mind by his suffering, had recanted and returned to Mother Church, his disciples remained true to the light that he had shown them; the generation of scholars with whom Milton talked at Cambridge were as familiar with Browne's doctrine as the present generation is with that of Maurice and Martineau, and Milton must have been much influ- enced by it. 7 /IDUton's Bnglanfc Opposite St. John's Chapel is the little round church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is the earliest of the four churches in England built by the Tem- plars which still remain. It is similar to the Temple church in London, and was probably begun a little later than St. Benedict's, which has just been men- tioned. It is questionable whether the students of Milton's college days appreciated the beauty of this beautiful remnant of the Norman period that was in their midst. The taste of that day was decidedly for architecture of the Renaissance type, of which Cambridge boasts many examples. In Milton's time the most beautiful quadrangle in Cambridge, and perhaps in the world, that of Trinity, had been but newly finished by the architect, Ralph Symons, who altered and harmonised a group of older buildings. In the centre of the court is Neville's fountain, built in 1602, which is a fine example of good English Renaissance work. During four years of Milton's residence, part of St. John's College was in process of erection in the Italian Gothic style. This was at the expense of the Lord Keeper Williams, whose initials and the date, 1624, are lettered in white stone near the western oriel. It was completed in 1628. Clare Bridge was not finished until 1640, and most of the other beautiful bridges that span the Cam to-day were unknown ST. SEPULCHRE'S CHURCH, CAMBRIDGE From an old engraving. flMlton's Bnalanfc 71 to Milton when he mused beside its shady banks where " Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow, His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe." Only fifteen miles away, across the level fields, lay Ely Cathedral, built on what was once hardly more than an island in the Fens. Many a time during his seven years in the university town must Milton have walked over there, or ridden on one of Hobson's horses, perhaps with his dear Charles Diodati, to view the mighty structure, or to study its Norman interior. Its gray towers and octagonal lantern dominate the little town that clusters around it, and may be seen from far across the plain. During these studious years, while Milton walked among the colleges where Chaucer, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Erasmus had likewise walked as stu- dents, he was not only busied with logic, philosophy, and the literature of half a dozen living and dead languages, but his tender emotions seem to have been briefly touched by some unknown fair one; and his interest in public matters, for instance, Sir John Eliot's imprisonment in the Tower, is evident. In one letter he mentions the execution of a child but nine years old, for setting fire to houses. A scourge 72 ADilton's of the plague afflicted London on the year that he entered Cambridge, and five years later he was driven from town by its devastation there. The university ceased all exercises, and the few members of it that remained shut themselves in as close pris- oners. So great was the poverty and suffering inci- dent to this calamity, that the king appealed to the country for aid to the stricken town. During these years of quiet growth, Milton's first noteworthy poems appear, of which the Latin poems, according to good judges, deserve the preference. We here mention only some of his English poems. The longest of these, which was written the month and year when he came to his majority, was begun on Christmas morning, 1629. This serious youth of twenty-one longed to give " a birthday gift for Christ," and thus appeared his poem, " On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." Three or four years earlier he had written on the death of his baby niece, Mrs. Philips's child, his lines " On the Death of a Fair Infant." The revelation of self in his sonnet " On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty- Three," makes the latter the most interesting of these early flights of song. The most precious literary treasure which Cam- bridge possesses, and as Mr. Edmund Gosse asserts, " the most precious manuscript of English lit- rtMlton's EnQlanfc 73 erature in the world," is the packet of thirty loose and ragged folio leaves covered with Milton's hand- writing, which since 1691 has lain in Trinity Col- lege Library. For a generation, they attracted no attention, but later they were examined and handled by so many that they suffered seriously; within fifty years, seventeen lines of " Comus " were torn out and stolen by some unknown thief. Mr. Gosse, in a delightful article in the Atlantic Monthly, upon "The Milton Manuscripts at Cambridge, "gives reins to his imagination in picturing the sudden tempta- tion of this man, who, passing down the long ranges of " storied urn and animated bust," which adorn the interior of Wren's famous structure, advances beyond the beautiful figure of the youthful Byron to the gorgeous window in which the form of Isaac Newton shines resplendent. The careless attendant places in his hands the richly bound thin folio, " and now the devil is raging in the visitor's bosom; the collector awakens in him, the bibliomaniac is unchained. In an instant the unpremeditated crime is committed. . . . And so he goes back to his own place certain that sooner or later his insane crime will be discovered . . . certain of silent infamy and unaccusing outlawry, with no consolation but that sickening fragment of torn verse which he can never show to a single friend, can never sell nor give nor 74 /IMlton's England bequeath. Among literary criminals, I know not another who so burdens the imagination as this wretched mutilator of ' Comus.' ' These pages are the laboratory or studio of the poet, and reveal most interestingly the progress of his art during his earlier creative years. Like Beethoven's note-book, they teach the impatient and inaccurate that genius con- descends carefully to note little things and to take infinite pains, whether it be with symphonies or sonnets. Charles Lamb, on looking over the Milton manuscripts, whimsically recorded his astonishment that these lines had not fallen perfect and polished from the poet's pen. " How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure ! " But the average man, who despairs of ever attaining artistic excellence, and finds every kind of literary composition a formidable task, takes consolation in the fact here revealed, that even the creator of " L' Allegro " and " II Penseroso," before he reached the perfect phrase, " endless morn of light," experimented with no less than six others : " ever-endless light," " ever glorious," " uneclipsed," " where day dwells without night," and " in cloud- less birth of night." The authorities of Trinity College, having of late realised the invaluable service to men of letters that this glimpse into the poet's flMlton's England 75 workshop would be, have issued a limited edition, in sumptuous form, of a perfect facsimile of the Milton manuscripts. " Now, for the first time," as Mr. Gosse remarks, " we can examine in peace, and without a beating heart and blinded eyes, the price- less thing in its minutest features." When it is remembered that no line of Shakespeare's remains in his own handwriting, and nothing of any conse- quence of Chaucer's or Spenser's, Mr. Gosse cannot be accused of over-statement when he says that to all lovers of literature this volume is " a relic of inestimable value. To those who are practically interested in the art of verse, it reads a more preg- nant lesson than any other similar document in the world." Some day the great university may add to its charms not only an adequate memorial to its Puri- tans, but one to its poets Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tenny- son, 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. The time for a pilgrimage to Cambridge is term time, when window-boxes, gay with blossoms, brighten gray old walls within the " quads," and when the streets are enlivened by three thousand 76 rtMlton's favoured youths intent on outdoor sport. Then all points of interest are accessible, and perchance one may be so fortunate as to get entrance up narrow, worn stone stairways into some student's cosy study ; the visitor will find it lined w r ith books, rackets, and boxing-gloves, and decorated with trophies and photographs of some one else's sister. Bits of college gossip and local slang, hints of college traditions, prejudices, and customs pleasantly vary the tourist's hours spent over the fine print of Baedeker and in search for the tombs of eminent founders. Even if one is a tourist and not a " fresher," he will find it profitable to study contemporary Cam- bridge through " The Fresher's Don't," written by " A Sympathiser, B. A.," and addressed to freshers " in all courtesy." As to dress, the " fresher," among other pieces of sage advice, is told : " Don't forget to cut the tassel of your cap just level with the board. Only graduates wear long tassels." " Don't wear knickerbockers with cap and gown, nor carry a stick or umbrella. These are stock eccentricities of Fresherdom." (The genuine Cam- bridge student would rather be soaked to his skin and risk pneumonia, than encounter the derisive grin which an umbrella would evoke.) " Don't aspire to seniority by smashing your cap or tearing your gown, as you deceive no one." flDUton's Enalaito 77 " Don't be a tuft-head. The style is more fa- voured by errand boys than gentlemen." " Don't by any chance sport a tall hat in Cam- bridge. It will come to grief." Under other headings, the following injunctions may be selected: " Don't sport during your first month. You will only earn the undesirable appellation of * Smug.' ' " Don't speak disrespectfully of a man ' Who only got a third in his Trip., and so can't be very good.' Before you go down your opinion will be * That a man must be rather good to take the Trip, at all.' ' " Don't mistake a Don for a Gyp. The Gyp is the smarter individual." " Don't forget that St. Peter's College is ' Pot- House,' Caius is ' Keys,' St. Catherine's is ' Cats,' Magdalene is ' Maudlen,' St. John's College Boat Club is ' Lady Margaret/ and a science man is taking ' Stinks.' " " Don't forget that Cambridge men * keep ' and not ' live.' " CHAPTER IV. MILTON AT HORTON |N leaving Cambridge, when he was nearly twenty-four years old, Milton retired to his father's new home at Horton, about seventeen miles west of London. Here he tells us that, " with every advantage of leisure, I spent a complete holiday in turning over the Greek and Latin writers; not but that I sometimes exchanged the country for the town, either for the purpose of buy- ing books, or for that of learning something new in mathematics, or in music, in which sciences I then delighted." As Milton's father was in easy circumstances his son never earned money until after he was thirty- two years of age. These free and quiet years at Horton, when he was his own master, and was without a care, were the happiest of his life. The visitor from London now alights at the little station of Wraysbury, and if it be upon a July 4th, as when the writer made a pilgrimage to Horton, he will find no pleasanter way to celebrate the day than to stroll through level fields by the 78 /IMlton's lEnglant) 79 green country roadside a mile and a half to the little hamlet among the trees. On the way he will espy to the left, on the horizon, the gray towers of Windsor, and may imagine the handsome young poet, whose verse has glorified this quiet rural land- scape, pausing some morning in the autumn on his early walk to listen to the far sound of the hunts- man's horn, and presently to see the merry rout of gaily clad dames and cavaliers dash by, leaping fearlessly the hedgerows and barred gates. Horton is a tiny, tranquil village, with little that remains to-day, outside the ancient parish church, that John Milton saw, except the Horton manor- house of the Bulstrode family, which had had con- nections with Horton from the time of Edward VI. The modern Milton manor, situated in beautiful grounds, may or may not stand upon the site of Milton's former home, which remained until 1798, when it was pulled down. The old tavern of uncer- tain date upon the one broad street may perhaps have gathered around its antique hob, within the little taproom, gray-haired peasants who guided clumsy ploughs through the rich loam of the fields of Horton, while the white-handed poet sat on a velvet lawn under leafy boughs, and penned his blithe tribute to the nightingale, or in imagination sported with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the shepherds, 8o rtMlton's sprites, and nymphs who peopled his youthful dreams. As in Cambridge, runnels of clear water, which come from the little river Colne not far distant, flow beside the road. Even to-day one has not far to seek to find the suggestion for those exquisite lines in " Comus " which Milton wrote in Horton : " By the rushy-fringed bank, Where grows the willow and the osier dank, My sliding chariot stays, Thick set with agate and the azurn sheen Of turkis blue and emerald green That in the channel strays : Whilst from off the waters fleet Thus I set my printless feet O'er the cowslip's velvet head That bends not as I tread." The student of Milton finds the centre of interest in Horton to-day to be the beautiful old church where the Milton family attended service for five years, and where the mother lies buried. It stands in the green churchyard, back from the village street. Yew-trees and rose-bushes lend it shade and fragrance. The tombs for the most part are not moss-grown with age, but are rather new, though the slab at the entrance over which Milton passed is marked " 1612." The battlemented stone tower is draped with ivy and topped with reddish K .S 5- u O . SI flDflton's Englanfc 81 brick. Like scores of churches of the twelfth or thirteenth century, in which it was built, the gabled portico is on the side. The interior is well-pre- served ; 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. Probably at the request of his friend, the com- poser Lawes, he wrote his " Arcades " in honour of the Countess Dowager of Derby, who had been Spenser's friend. The venerable lady lived about ten miles north of Horton on her fine old estate of Harefield, where Queen Elizabeth had visited her and her husband. On that occasion a masque of welcome had been performed for her in an avenue of elms, which thus received the name of the " Queen's Walk." It was in this verdant theatre that Milton's " Arcades " was performed by the young relatives of the countess. Among these were Lady Alice and her boy-brothers, who on the fol- 82 flDilton's lowing year took part in Milton's " Comus," which he wrote anonymously to be played at Ludlow Castle upon the Welsh border, when the children's father was installed as lord president of Wales. Besides these longer poems, Milton wrote his " II Penseroso " and " L' Allegro " at Horton, as well as the noble elegy " Lycidas," which was written in memory of his gifted friend, Edward King, who was drowned in the summer of 1637, just before Milton left his father's home. In this peaceful valley of the Thames, his clear eye searched out every sight, his musical ear sought out every sound that revealed beauty or that sug- gested the antique, classic world in which his whole nature revelled. He walked in " twilight groves " of " pine or monumental oak; " he listened to " soft Lydian airs " and curfew bells, to the lark's song, and Philomel's. He watched " the nibbling flocks," the " labouring clouds," and saw, " bosomed high in tufted trees," towers and battlements arise, and beheld in vision his " Sabrina fair, . . . Under the glassy, cool translucent wave In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of her amber dropping hair." He lived in a world enchanted by the magic of his genius. Yet in his little world of loveliness flMlton's jEnglant) 83 he was not deaf to the distant hoarse cry of the coming storm, and at the last the Puritan within him awoke and cried out at those " who little reckoning make Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast . . . Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheephook or have learnt aught else the least That to the faithful herds-man's art belongs ! What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped ; And when they list, their lean and flashy songs, Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw ; The hungry sheep look up and are not fed But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread." In the spring of 1637, the last year that the poet spent at Horton, just before another outbreak of the plague, his mother died. We may think of brother Christopher, a young student of laws of the Inner Temple, and the widowed sister Anne and her two boys coming post-haste from London, and stand- ing beside the desolate father and the poet-brother in the chancel, when the tabernacle of clay was lowered to its resting-place. A plain blue stone now bears the record : " Heare lyeth the Body of Sarah Milton, the wife of John Milton, who died the 3rd of April, 1637." The American visitor to Horton on the day that commemorates his country's declaration of inde- 84 flDilton's Englanfc pendence will remember Runnymede and Magna Charta Island. And he will find nothing more con- sonant with his feeling, after visiting the home of the republican Milton, than to wend his way across the fields, golden with waving grain and gay with scarlet poppies, to the spot where his ancestors and Milton's in 1215 brought tyrant John to sullen submission to their just demands. On the margin of the river he may embark, and as the sun casts grateful shadows eastward, he may drift gently down beside the long, narrow island in the rushy margin of the stream, where white swans build their nests. A notice warns him not to tres- pass, for the gray stone house upon it, whose gables are half hid by dense shrubbery, is private property. 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. CHAPTER V. MILTON ON THE CONTINENT. IN ST. BRIDE'S CHURCHYARD. - AT ALDERSGATE STREET. - THE BARBICAN. - HOLBORN. - SPRING GARDENS year after his mother's death, and probably just after Christopher's wedding, the poet, now a man of thirty, arrived in Paris, accompanied by his servant, and bearing valuable letters of introduction, among others, some from Sir Henry Wotton. As we are dealing with Milton's England, scant space must be allowed to this year or more spent among the savants and the unwonted sights of France and Italy. In Paris the young scholar was introduced by Lord Scuda- more to the man whom he most desired to see, the great Hugo Grotius, a man of stupendous erudi- tion and lofty character. Milton declared that he venerated him more than any modern man, and well he might, for the Dutch hero and exile had not his equal upon the Continent, even in that age of great men. Passing through Provence, Milton entered Italy 85 86 flMlton's from Nice, and found himself in the land whose melodious language he had made his own, and whose history and literature few Italians of his age knew better than he. He went to Genoa, " La Su- perba," which then boasted of two hundred palaces; thence to Leghorn, and fourteen miles farther to Pisa on the Arno, and, farther up the Arno, to beautiful Florence. Here he paused two months, lionised by the best society, and hobnobbing with painters, poets, prelates, and noblemen as he walked in Santa Croce, or on the heights of Fiesole, or in the leafy shade of Vallombrosa. Here it was that he was presented to the blind Galileo, " grown old," he writes, " a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." Doubtless, in later years, when blindness and royal disfavour had embittered but failed to crush his spirit, the gray- haired poet often recalled this visit made in his radiant youth. Going by way of Siena, on its rocky height, Mil- ton passed on to Rome in the autumn, and here spent two months in the splendid city of the Popes, in which great St. Peter's was but newly finished. The city swarmed with priests and prelates, but the poet spoke freely of his own faith. One of his great joys was to listen to the incomparable singing of flDUton's England 87 Leonora Baroni, the Jenny Lind of his time, to whom he wrote exuberant panegyrics in Latin. In November, Milton drove to Naples, a hundred miles away, where he was favoured with the hospi- tality of the aged Manso, the friend of Tasso, and the wealthy patron of letters ; he showed the young Englishman his beloved city, presented him with valuable gifts, and welcomed him in his villa at Pozzuoli, overlooking the bay of Naples. Milton had planned to visit Sicily and Greece, but he writes : " The sad news of civil war coming from England called me back; for I considered it disgraceful that, while my fellow countrymen were fighting at home for liberty, I should be travelling abroad at ease for intellectual purposes." War, however, had not yet broken out, and Milton lingered another two months in Rome, little aware of the relics of the Caesars that lay buried in the Forum under the cow-pasture of his time. Another visit to Florence, where he was again the centre of attraction, was followed by trips to the quaint mediaeval cities of Lucca, Ferrara, Bologna, and to Venice by the sea. Guido Reni, Guercino, Domenichino, and Salvator Rosa were then living, and he may have chanced upon them in his wander- ings. From Venice he turned back through Verona and Milan, and paused a little in Geneva, which was 88 flDUton's England still under the strong influence of its great reformer, Calvin; then he journeyed on to Paris, where a royal infant, Louis XIV., had been born during his travels. On reaching home, after this journey into the great splendid world full of temptations to every man who was dowered with keen susceptibilities and a passionate, vehement disposition, Milton writes : "I again take God to witness that in all those places where so many things are considered lawful, I lived sound and untouched from all prof- ligacy and vice, having this thought perpetually with me, that though I could escape the eyes of men, I certainly could not the eyes of God." It was a chaste and modest love that inspired the six amatory sonnets in Italian, which were probably written during his stay abroad. It was a refined and high-bred man, who knew the world and took it at its just measure, who was now to lend his hand to fight the people's battle. On his return to England Milton did not take up his residence again in his father's home at Horton, which was then kept by his younger brother and his wife. He went to London, and for a brief time made his home with a tailor named Russel in St. Bride's Churchyard, near Fleet Street, within view of Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's. Here in the winter of 1639-40 he began teaching the little Phil- /BMlton'3 JBnfllanfc 89 ips boys, his nephews, and took entire charge of his small namesake John, but eight years old. His sister Anne by this time had remarried, and was now Mrs. Agar. During his stay in St. Bride's Church- yard, Milton jotted down on seven pages of the manuscript that is now in Trinity College Library suggestions for future work with which his brain was teeming. Of the ninety-nine subjects that he considered, sixty-one, including " Paradise Lost " and " Samson," are Scriptural, and thirty-eight, including " Alfred and the Danes " and " Harold and the Normans," are on British subjects. Like the young Goethe who projected " Faust," which was not finished until his hair had whitened, Milton conceived his epic when it was to wait a quarter of a century for completion. Says Edward Philips, the elder nephew whom he taught : " He made no long stay in his lodgings on St. Bride's Churchyard : necessity of having a place to dispose 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, besides that there are few streets in London more free from noise than that." At that time the entrance to the street from St. 9 /IMlton's Martin's-le-Grand was one of the seven gates of the city wall. A new one, on the site of a far older one, had been erected when Milton was nine years old ; this had " two square towers of four stories at the sides, pierced with narrow portals for the foot passengers and connected by a curtain of masonry of the same height across the street, having the main archway in the middle." Besides the figures of Samuel and Jeremiah, the gate was adorned with an equestrian statue of James I. on the Aldersgate side, and the same monarch on his throne on the St. Martin's-le-Grand side. In 1657 Howell says: " This street resembleth an Italian street more than any other in London, by reason of the spaciousness and uniformity of the buildings and straightness thereof, with the convenient distance of the houses." Amid the labyrinth of dingy, crowded alleys with which the garden spaces of the seventeenth century now are covered, one looks in vain to-day for any trace of Milton's home; in short, of all the houses that he occupied in London, no one remains, or even has its site marked. All we know of the house on Aldersgate Street is, that it stood in the second precinct of St. Botolph's parish, between the gate and Maidenhead Court on the right, and Little Britain and Westmoreland Alley on the left. Near by dwelt his old teacher, Doctor Gill, and flDUton's Enalanfc 91 Doctor Diodati, the father of his dearest friend, whose recent death he mourned in a touching elegy \vritten in Latin. Upon his walks into the open fields, which were not then far distant, he must have passed many fine town houses of the gentry, their sites now covered by a dreary waste of shops and factories. During these years we learn that he varied his studies in the classics, and his keen ob- servations on the doings of the newly assembled Long Parliament by an occasional " gaudy-day," in company with some " young sparks of his ac- quaintance." It was in Aldersgate Street that Milton began writing his vehement pamphlets, and it was Thomas Underhill, at the sign of the "Bible" in Wood Street, Cheapside, who published the first polemics which he and young Sir Harry Vane sent forth upon the burning questions of the day, into which the scope of this volume forbids us to enter. Mil- ton's future career was a complete refutation of Wordsworth's conception of him as a lonely star that dwelt apart. The gentle author of " Comus " and the composer of elegant sonnets had changed his quill for that " two-handed engine " which was to smite prelate and prince. During these days the post brought daily news of the horrors of the insurrection in Ireland ; Milton 92 flMlton's read " of two and twenty Protestants put into a thatched house and burnt alive " in the parish of Kilmore; of naked men and pregnant women drowned ; of " eighteen Scotch infants hanged on clothiers' tenterhooks;" of an Englishman, wife, and five children hanged, and buried when half alive; of eighty forced to go on the ice " till they brake the ice and were drowned." These, and the hideous tortures upon thousands, which history relates, may explain, if they do not palliate the cruelties a few years later which Cromwell committed, and which have made his name synonymous with " monster " to this day throughout this much tormented and turbulent Irish people. Americans who sharply condemn the devastation which old Oliver wrought will also do well to cry out no less loudly at the like barbaric slaughter in the island of Samar, which was ordered two hun- dred and fifty years later by some of their own officers. War opened. There were doubtless anxious days in the house on Aldersgate Street, for brother Christopher, who stood with the royal party, had moved with his father from Horton to Reading, which was besieged. But war was not the sole cause for anxiety. When old Mr. Milton arrived safely in London late in the summer he found his flMlton'0 England 93 son John married and already parted from his bride of seventeen, who had lived with him but one short month. Of the brief courting of Mary Powell at her father's house at Forest Hill, near Oxford, we know little. But one day in May, when King Charles I. had driven her brothers and all other students out of Christ Church, and had taken up temporary residence there himself, the venturesome lover came into the enemy's country and called on her. The family was well known to him; their comfortable mansion housed ten or eleven children and had fourteen rooms. We read of their " stilling- house," "cheese-press house," "wool-house," of their two coaches, one wain, and four carts. It was a merry household, and one well-to-do in worldly goods. Whether the girl was deeply enamoured of the grave, handsome man, twice her age, who asked her hand, is doubtful, but they were soon married, and in the Aldersgate house, the nephew relates, there was " feasting held for some days in celebration of the nuptials, and for entertainment of the bride's friends." Then the relatives bade the bride good- bye. But the young wife, having been brought up and lived " where there was a great deal of company and merriment, dancing, etc., when she came to live with her husband found it very solitary ; no 94 /lDUton'6 England company came to her;" consequently at the end of a month her preoccupied husband gave consent to the girl's request to pay a visit home, with the promise of returning in September. Some sons of intimate friends joined the nephews as pupils, and the elder Milton was added to the household. But the bride declined to answer her husband's letters or to return ; during the following months the irate man, thus deserted, wrote his pamphlets on " Divorce," while all England was astir with the meeting of the famous Westminster Assembly, the spread of Independency, and the king's defeat at Marston Moor. 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 pro- cess 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, study- ing not only Greek and Latin, but Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, and Italian. Milton's noble " Areopagitica " a plea for free- dom of the press was written during these melan- flDilton's In0lan& 95 choly, wifeless months, while the din of civil war was in the air, and he mused in wrath and bitterness over his country's miseries and his own. The fortunes of the Powell family had waned with the king's cause. One day, when Milton called on a relative who lived near by his home, on the site of the present post-office, " he was surprised," writes his nephew, " to see one whom he thought to have never seen more, making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him." A reconciliation was effected, and, with the wife of nineteen now two years older and wiser than since their first attempt at matrimony, they began house- keeping in the Barbican. This was a larger house than the one in Alders- gate Street, and only a three minutes' walk from it. It remained until Masson's lifetime and had, he says, " the appearance of having been a commo- dious enough house in the old fashion." " And I have been informed," he adds, " that some of the old windows, consisting of thick bits of glass lozenged in lead, still remained in it at the back, and that the occupants knew one of the rooms in it as a schoolroom, where Milton had used to teach his pupils." The visitor to the noisy, bustling Barbi- can to-day, close to old London wall, will find noth- ing that Milton saw. 96 /IDUton'8 Here he published the first edition of his col- lected poems. The title-page tells us that the songs were set to music by the same musician, Henry Lawes, " Gentleman of the King's Chapell," who had engaged him to write the " Arcades " and " Comus." It was to be " sold at the signe of the Princes Arms in Paul's Churchyard, 1645." The wretched botch of an engraving of the poet which accompanied it displeased him, and he humourously compelled the unsuspecting and unlearned artist to engrave in Greek beneath it the following lines : " That an unskilful hand had carved this print You'd say at once, seeing the living face ; But finding here no jot of me, my friends, Laugh at the botching-artist's mis-attempt." Unfortunately this was the only published por- trait of Milton during his life, and gave strangers at home and abroad the impression that his face was as grim as his pamphlets were caustic. By strange coincidence this house, where Milton lived when " Comus " was first published, was but a few yards distant from the town house of the earl in whose honour the masque had been com- posed a dozen years or more before this. With him was the " Lady Alice," now nearly twenty-four years old, who, as a girl of eleven, had sung Mil- 's J6nglan& 97 ton's songs in Ludlow Castle. The earl loved music, and his children's music teacher, Lawes, and others who had acted in the merry masque comforted his invalidism with concourse of sweet sounds, almost within hearing of the old scrivener and organist and his poet-son. Milton loved Lawes, and wrote a sonnet to him; doubtless during these days they were much together. About the time that Milton's first baby daughter appeared, the Barbican house was crowded with the disconsolate Powell family, who had nearly lost their all, and fled to Mary's husband for protection. Mother Powell seems to have been a woman of strong personality, and the new baby was christened " Anne " for her. Within two months, both the Milton and Powell grandfathers were buried from the house in Barbican. In the burials at St. Giles's Cripplegate appears, in March, 1646, the record: "John Milton, Gentleman, 15." While worrying over the settlement of the Powell estates and brother Christopher's as well, Milton continued his teaching ; his pupil writes : " His manner of teaching never savoured in the least any- thing of pedantry." Cyriack Skinner, grandson of the great Coke, to whom he wrote two sonnets in later years, was his pupil in the Barbican. In 1647, J ust after the march of Fairfax and 98 flDUton's Englanfc 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 republi- can at heart, and busied himself with the writing of a history of England, and compiling of a Latin diction- ary and a System of Divinity. The new home was among pleasant gardens, and near the bowling green and lounging-place for lawyers and citizens. Its exact site is unknown. In 1648 a second baby girl, called Mary, was born to the Miltons in the new home. By his bold tractate on the " Tenure of Kings and Magistrates," which was written during the terrible days of the king's trial and execution, Mil- ton put himself on the side of the regicides. Exactly a month after its appearance he was waited on at High Holborn by a committee from the Council of State, who asked him to accept the position of " Secretary for Foreign Tongues." His eyesight was already failing; he could no longer read by candle-light ; but here was a great opportunity for public service, and he did not long hesitate. On March 2Oth, when he entered upon office, he learned that all letters to foreign states and princes were to be put into dignified Latin form, so as to be instantly flDllton's Bnalanfc 99 read by government officials in all countries, and not into the " wheedling, lisping jargon of the cringing French," as his nephew calls it. His salary was a trifle over 288 worth about five times that sum to-day. Sometimes an early breakfast at High Hoi- born was necessary in order to meet the council at seven A.M. in Whitehall, but usually it met at eight or nine. It seemed, however, best for the Miltons to move nearer Whitehall, and while he waited for his apartments to be ready, Milton took lodging at Charing Cross, opening into Spring Garden, where now is the meeting-place of the London County Council. This was on the royal estate, and was so named from a concealed fountain which spurted forth when touched by the unwary foot. It must have been a pleasant spot, with its bathing pond and bowling green and pheasant yard, which led from what is now Trafalgar Square into St. James's Park. Opposite, at Charing Cross, was the palace of the Percys, later called " Northumberland House," and next to it, where now stands the Grand Hotel, was the home of Sir Harry Vane. Queen Eleanor's Cross had been taken down in 1647, an ^ the statue of Charles I., which on the year of Mil- ton's death replaced it on its site, was at this time kept in careful concealment. St. Martin's Lane was a genuine shady lane, bor- /BMlton's dered with hedges. The church which Milton saw upon the site of the present one was erected by Henry VIII. , and was even then in reality St. Martin's in the Fields. Upon the north side of what is now Trafalgar Square, which is occupied by the National Gallery, stood the Royal Stables. Pall Mall, which leads westward, was so named from the Italian outdoor game, resembling croquet, which was played upon a green in the vicinity. It was then a resort for travellers and foreigners, who, like the Londoners Pepys and Defoe, frequented the chocolate and coffee houses in the neighbourhood and for a shil- ling an hour were carried about in sedan-chairs. The latter tells us that " the chairmen serve you for porters to run on errands, as your gondoliers do at Venice." St. James's Palace, with its picturesque brick gateway, had but just seen the last hours of the monarch whom Milton had helped dethrone. Here Charles II. had been born in 1630, and here the Princess Mary was born in 1662, and was married to William, Prince of Orange, fifteen years later. 3 J j S _ ': W = PL. o ^ o- 5 ~ *, X CHAPTER VI. MILTON AT WHITEHALL. SCOTLAND YARD. PETTY FRANCE. BARTHOLOMEW CLOSE. HIGH HOLBORN. JEWIN STREET. ARTIL- LERY WALK i [ILTON remained in Spring Gardens about seven months, when his new apartments in the north end of Whitehall Palace were ready. These opened from Scotland Yard, in which was the Guard House. The yeomen of the guard wore red cloth roses on back and breast, and must have seemed very gay and imposing personages to the little girls of the Milton family. Their rooms were connected with the various courts and suites of apartments that extended down to the Privy Garden. The palace in Cromwell's time probably retained in residence a large portion of the small army of caterers, butchers, brewers, confectioners, glaziers, etc., who provided for the constant needs of the huge establishment. The Horse Guards, built for gentlemen pensioners, was erected in 1641, and was 101 102 flMlton's Englanfc still quite new. This apparently was not on the site of the present Horse Guards, which was built in 1753- At Scotland Yard, Milton's only son, John, was born, and here his protracted labours in his vehe- ment controversy with Salmasius brought on the blackness of great darkness which, at the age of forty-three, for ever shut his w r orld 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. Here the next year his little daughter Deborah was born, and soon after his wife, at the age of twenty-six, after nine years of married life, died. After the first estrangement and reconciliation, so far as we know, all had gone well. Her little John, who had scarcely learned to speak his father's name, soon followed her to the grave. The household then consisted of the poet, his nephew and amanuensis John, and his three mother- less little girls. Masson describes the house as he saw it before its destruction in 1875. It was then No. 19 York Street, and had a squalid shop in its REAR OF MILTON'S HOUSE, AND TREE PLANTED BY HIM, YORK STREET, WESTMINSTER (PETTY FRANCE) From an old engraving. flMUon's England 103 lower part, and a recess on one side of it used for stacking wood. On entering by a small door and passage at the side of the shop, one groped up a dark staircase, where several tenants lived, in the rooms that were once all Milton's. " The larger ones on the first floor are not so bad, and what are now the back rooms of the house may have been even pleasant and elegant when the house had a garden of its own behind it, and that garden opened directly into the park." Jeremy Bentham, who over a century later was landlord of the house and lived close by, placed a tablet on the rear wall inscribed " Sacred to Milton, Prince of Poets." After 1811 Bentham's tenant was William Hazlitt ; before that his friend James Mill occupied the house. Lord Scudamore, who had given Milton an introduction to Grotius, was his next-door neigh- bour at York Street. To-day the loftiest apartment house in London stands upon the unmarked site of Milton's house. The frequent walk which Milton took to Whitehall, with a guide to his dark steps, during his eight years' residence here, led him half a mile across St. James's Park from Queen Anne Gate to Spring Gardens or the Horse Guards. The ornamental water was not then there, but there were ponds and trees and pleasant stretches of green turf. 104 flDUton's Charles II. had it later all laid out by the famous French landscape artist, Le Notre. Occasional sonnets those to Cromwell, Vane, " On his Blindness," and " On the Late Massacre in Piedmont " appeared in the increasing leisure of this period, when his duties lessened, and he retired on a diminished salary. But Milton was become a man who was sought out by foreigners of note and persons of quality; among his friends, Andrew Marvell, the poet, and his pupil, Cyriack Skinner, were frequent visitors, with charming Lady Ranelagh, his neighbour, who persuaded him to teach her little son, and who he said had been to him in the place of kith and kin. After four years of widowerhood, when his little girls were sadly in need of a mother, Milton mar- ried Katharine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney, in the church of St. Mary Aldermanbury, on November 12, 1656. Her com- ing into the home in Petty France brought serenity and happiness to all its inmates. During the brief fifteen months of their married life, a little daughter came, who followed her soon after to her grave in St. Margaret's Church beside the Abbey, and the sorrowing husband was again left in his blindness to bring up his three motherless little daughters. After eighteen years, the poem, sketched out in flDilton's Bnglan& 105 St. Bride's Churchyard, was resumed, and in the lonely house in Petty France, the first lines of " Paradise Lost " were dictated, just before the clos- ing days of Cromwell's life. Under Richard Crom- well, Milton retained his secretaryship, but with the return of Charles II., in May, 1660, he fled his home in Petty France, for he well knew the vengeance that might follow. His little girls were sent no one knows whither, and he took refuge in a friend's house in Bartholomew Close, a passage which led from- West Smithfield, through an ancient arch. It was filled with quaint old tenements, where Doctor Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge, had lived, and also Le Sceur, who had modelled the statue of Charles I., which, as has been stated, was concealed during the Commonwealth, and was soon to be erected. Sixty-five years later, young Benjamin Franklin set up type in a printing-office here. To the blind refugee, it mattered little that he had left his garden to be hemmed in by narrow walls. The labyrinth of little courts and tortuous passages was his safeguard. During those days of arrests and executions of his friends, Milton must have known that any day might bring the hang- man's summons for him. Many a time during the nearly four months that he was hidden here must he in imagination have heard the shouts of the fickle io6 flMlton's England populace, and seen himself haled in a cart to Tyburn gallows. Says Masson : " Absolutely no man could less expect to be pardoned at the Restora- tion than Milton," and " there is no greater histor- ical puzzle than this complete escape." But his faithful friend, Andrew Marvell, pleaded for him, and other powerful friends did their utmost in his behalf; the brain that was to give birth to a great epic was spared to England. Though Milton lay in some prison for a little time, during which his " infamous " books " were solemnly burnt at the Session house in the Old Bailey by the hand of the common hangman," he was soon a free man, though many of his com- panions were meanwhile hanged and quartered, or like Goffe and Whalley fled beyond seas and even there scarcely escaped the king's swift avengers. In December, Milton emerged from prison and moved temporarily into a little house on the north side of Holborn near Red Lion Square, which was behind it, and nearer Bloomsbury than was his former residence upon the street. Close by was the Red Lion Inn, where in January, on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I., lay on a hurdle, amidst a howling mob, the ghastly bodies of Crom- well, Ireton, and Bradshaw, which had been dis- interred and were on their way to Tyburn to be flMlton's Bnglanfc 107 swung upon the gallows. It was well for Milton to sit behind barred doors in silence in those days, while Sir Harry Vane languished in prison, bold Algernon Sidney was in exile, and the England that he loved seemed in eclipse. In 1 66 1, Milton, who had good reason to reside as far away from Petty France and the court end of town as possible, returned to the neighbourhood of his early married life, and took a house in Jewin Street, off Aldersgate, at the end of the street near- est St. Giles's, Cripplegate, where his father lay buried. For the remainder of his life, here and in Artillery Walk, he was a parishioner of this church. During the three years spent here, Vane was be- headed, two thousand clergy were ejected from their livings, and many, as Richard Baxter tells us, starved on an income of only eight or ten pounds a year for a whole family; men of Milton's way of thinking struggled for daily bread on six days in the week, and preached on the seventh with the police upon their track. During these fruitful years in Jewin Street, while " Paradise Lost " was growing apace, Milton had about him his motherless and ill-educated girls. The oldest, about seventeen years of age, was hand- some, but lame, and had a defect of speech. It fell to Mary and little eleven-year-old Deborah to io8 /RMlton's England read, with scanty comprehension of the words, as their father required their services, from his Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian works. To them, and to a group of young men who felt it an honour to serve him, he dictated the sonorous lines of his great epic. 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. Andrew Marvell and Cyriack Skinner sought him out, and doubtless told him the latest literary news of Henry More, the Platonist; of Howell, but just appointed historiographer royal; of Samuel Butler, who had just gone with the Lady Alice of " Comus " to Ludlow Castle ; of Richard Baxter, whose popu- lar book, " The Saints' Everlasting Rest," Milton had doubtless read when it appeared five years before; of Pepys, now secretary to the Admiralty; of Izaak Walton, whose " Complete Angler " Mil- ton may have read ten years before ; of Evelyn and flDUton's Bnglanfc 109 of the poet Cowley; of Bishop Jeremy Taylor; of George Fox, the valiant Quaker, and the philoso- phers, Hobbes, and John Locke, who was then at Oxford ; and the budding poet, John Dryden. We learn from Richardson that Milton usually dictated " leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it, though often when lying in bed in a morning." Sometimes he would lie awake all night without composing a line, when a flow of verse would come with such an impetus that he would call Mary and dictate forty lines at once. During these days a newly converted young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, who was desirous of improving his Latin, and to see John Milton, who, he writes, " was a gentleman of great note for learning throughout the learned world," betook himself to the modest home on Jewin Street, got lodging hard by, and engaged to read Latin to him six afternoons a week. Milton, noticing that he used the English pronunciation, told him that if he wanted to speak with foreigners in Latin he must learn the foreign pronunciation, This Ellwood by hard labour accomplished, when Milton, seeing his earnestness, helped him greatly in translation. These happy hours were interrupted by Elhvood's arrest for attending the Quaker meet- ing in Aldersgate Street. Three months were spent no /ftilton's England in Bridewell and Newgate, where he saw the bloody quarters and boiled heads of executed men, and wrote out in detail an account of the hideous spec- tacle. One heavenly day in a quiet library reading of Dido and ^Eneas with Milton, the next in an English hell of bestiality, filth, and cruelty a memorable experience for a young man of twenty- two, was it not? Household affairs were going from bad to worse in Jewin Street, and the unhappy home needed a wife and mother. When the news came to the daughter Mary that her father was to marry again, she exclaimed that it was " no news to hear of his wedding, but if she could hear of his death, that would be something." The third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, was twenty- four years old when Milton married her, in the church of St. Mary Aldermary, a little south of his boyhood's home near Cannon Street. She proved an excellent wife, and was of a " peaceful and agreeable humour." There are tra- ditions that the young stepmother had golden hair and could sing; her good sense and housewifely accomplishments brought peace, comfort, and thrift into the discordant household. Soon after his marriage, the Milton family re- moved to a house in Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields. This was on the roadway which is flDilton's England m the southern part of Bunhill Row. Not only was there a garden here, but the site of the present Bunhill Fields Cemetery, where Defoe, Bunyan, Richard Cromwell, and Isaac Watts lie buried, was then an open field; while, close at hand, was Artil- lery Ground, where trained bands occasionally paraded, as they have done from 1537 to the present time. Of the house we know little, except that it had four fireplaces. Near by was " Grub " Street, since changed to " Milton " Street, partly perhaps to commemorate the fact of the poet's residence in the neighbourhood. In June, 1665, while the Great Plague had begun its desolating course, Milton had completed the last lines of " Paradise Lost." It was then that young Ellwood came to his assistance, and engaged for him " a pretty box in Giles-Chalfont," whither he was driven with his wife and daughters. CHAPTER VII. CHALFONT ST. GILES. ARTILLERY WALK [F the pilgrim to the shrines of Puritans and poets has thought worth while to spend an afternoon at Horton, he may well spare two or three days more for a drive from there to Stoke Pogis, Harefield, and the region thirteen miles north of Horton in lovely Bucking- hamshire, among the Chiltern hills. Here stands, about twenty-three miles northwest of London, in the little village of Chalfont St. Giles, the only house that still exists in which Milton ever lived. The village lies in a quiet hollow among the hills, three or four miles removed from the shriek of any locomotive. One may approach it by train from the little stations of Chorley Wood or Chalfont Road. It will well repay one before doing so to make a detour of a mile and a half to Chenies, one of the loveliest villages in all England, beside the tiny Chess, where Matthew Arnold loved to angle. A delightful hostelry is the " Bedford Arms," where he always "put up." The chief 112 fl&tlton's feature of the place is the mortuary chapel of the Russell s, where the family have been buried from 1556 until the present day. But the lover of the picturesque will more admire the adjoining Tudor mansion. American multi-millionaires have built no Newport palace that is so attractive to the lover of the beautiful. As one drives toward Chalfont, he enters it at the end farthest from Milton's cottage, which is one of the last houses upon the left of the main street. It is on the road that leads to Beaconsfield, four miles away. The cottage lies at the foot of a slope close by the roadside; it is built of brick and timber, and has two entrances, four sitting- rooms, and five bedrooms. On the floor which is level with the garden are two sitting-rooms that look toward the hill slope and Beaconsfield. Their quaint old windows are filled with diamond panes, which are set in lead and open outward. The long carved dining-table, in the room at the left, and the small table, cabinet, and stools in the room at the right, which is seen in the illustration, were Milton's own. Here at the open casement, during those days of horror in the stricken city, Milton sat and breathed the fragrant air, and in the evening listened to the nightingales which haunt the Chalfont groves. Hither the brave "4 flMlton's young Ellwood came to greet him, fresh as he was from another imprisonment; he returned with his comments the manuscript of " Paradise Lost," which Milton had loaned to him, and added : " Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?" To which the poet answered nothing at the time, but, as the result proved, the query brought later a fitting response in " Paradise Regained." 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. But the blind poet, the passionate lover of liberty and fearless pleader for justice, the man who like blind Samson shook his locks in defiance of fate, and would not be cast down, this man we know. We have followed step by step his brilliant youth, his strenuous manhood, and his brave, declining years. With all his faults of temper we love him as we love Dante and Michael flDUton's jencjlan& 115 Angelo and Beethoven. We linger reverently in the little house made dear to England by his pres- ence there. Then we wander back a little on our way, to a row of antique houses and go through a passage to the venerable parish church and churchyard where Milton's feet doubtless have trod. En route to Beaconsfield the traveller will not fail to pause at Jordan's, a plain, square structure in a leafy grove, beside a green God's Acre. It was the Quaker meeting-house in Milton's day as it is still. At the rear is a concealed gallery where the worshippers took refuge when their service was broken up by armed pursuers. Close by are many unmarked graves, and among them is Ellwood's. But the grave of William Penn, the founder of a great American State, and the graves of his wife and children, have low modern headstones, for their position was well known. Here the man of gentle birth, the hero and saint, who is dear to all Ameri- cans, sleeps peacefully among his English kindred. During the year when Milton was at Chalfont, Penn was a youth in Paris, seeing the world, but keeping himself unspotted from it. At Beaconsfield we drive through a broad country road to the Saracen's Head a conspicuous land- mark. We turn our steps at once to the gray old church and its battlemented tower, whose walls of flint rise in rugged strength from the churchyard with its mossy tombs. Within the centre aisle lies buried the valiant apostle of American freedom Edmund Burke. He was a man with whom the refugee at Chalfont would have found much in common had he lived a century and a quarter later. The inscription over his grave is modern, and so are the bas-relief and inscription to him on the side wall. His former seat within the parish church is marked upon the floor, and a fine carved desk is made from his old pew. Within the churchyard gay roses and solemn yews droop over ancient monuments, among them, the showy obelisk on Waller's grave. Nothing is lovelier than the drive late in an afternoon over the high hills, from which one catches far distant views, to Amersham, which lies in a little valley among the hills. This was a seat of the Puritan revolt and earlier martyrdoms. John Knox preached here an obnoxious personage to the worthy sexton of the beautiful church, who told the writer that he had buried every man and woman in the parish for forty years. " The fact is," quoth this worthy, " John Knox traduced Mary Queen of Scots ; now I've no use for a man who isn't good to the ladies." On being reminded that Elizabeth did worse and cut flDilton's J6n0lant> n; her head off, he condoned that as being " probably an affair of state." A lover of poets was this sexton. " I've read 'em all," he said, " but my favourite is Pope." Isaac Watts likewise shared his approval, and he volunteered upon the spot a number of his hymns from memory. " But I take a lugubrious view of life," continued this digger of many graves, " for it's just grub, grub, grub, all your life, and then be shovelled under ; the fact is, as any man can see with half an eye, that this is the age of mammon and no mistake." Shakespeare would have found a gravedigger to his mind in the sexton of Amersham. Amersham does not offer so favourable accommo- dations for the night as does Wendover. which has a choice of hostelries, and is but a few minutes' ride by train from the Amersham station, a quarter of a mile away. After viewing the early English church in Wendover next morning, one may hire a trap and drive to Great Hampden, three miles dis- tant, to the stately home of John Hampden, within a large park. There are still traces of the ancient road which was cut through the park for Queen Elizabeth. The shady avenue of beeches around the side leads up to the little church of gray flint stone which stands near the great mansion and its mighty cedars of Lebanon. The little churchyard is carpeted with velvet turf, starred with tiny white flowers us dbtlton's Englanfc which recall the foregrounds in the brilliant paintings of Van Eyck. The reader of Puritan history is reminded of that mournful day after the battle gf Chalgrove Field, when the body of John Hampden was brought home. As many soldiers as could be spared accompanied it, marching with arms reversed and muffled drums, while, with uncovered heads, they chanted the solemn words of comfort that begin the ninetieth Psalm: " Lprd, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations." They laid him in a grave within the chancel, which still remains unmarked; it is close beside the slab on which he had written his beauti- ful epitaph to his wife. When they marched back beneath the beeches their voices rang out with the lines of Psalm Forty-three : " Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope in God." Says a writer of that time : " Never were heard such piteous cries at the death of one man, as at Master Hampden's." Within the spacious mansion, which once was red brick and now is covered with gray plaster, are various relics of Hampden and Cromwell, and a por- trait of Queen Elizabeth in the room which she occupied on her visit here. Two miles further, on one of the finest estates in the county, is Chequer's Court, an imposing brick mansion of the Tudor flMlton's period, once owned by Cromwell's youngest daughter and her husband. It stands in a park, and contains the greatest collection of Cromwelliana in the king- dom. But these and the Hampden relics owned by the Earl of Buckingham at Great Hampden are rarely shown to visitors who do not apply in writing some time in advance of their visit. It is to be hoped that some day the nation may own these and make them freely accessible to all scholars. Through a circuitous drive between beautiful fields of grain, in view of the Chiltern Hills, the traveller reaches the old parish church at Great Kimble, where John Hampden, the sturdy cousin of Cromwell, in 1635 made his refusal to pay King Charles's demands for ship money. Near by lies the field whose tax was in question. The sum was paltry, only- twenty shillings, but, like George Third's tax on tea in the colonies, the refusal to pay it meant war in the end. This whole section of beautiful Bucks is rich with memories of Milton, and of the men whom he knew and loved. Ellwood records that " when the city was cleansed and become safely habitable," the Miltons returned to Artillery Walk. This must have been about March, 1666. The open fields close to their house had been filled with the bodies of thousands of the plague victims, many of whom were uncoffined. 120 flDilton's Thereafter it was made a regular cemetery, and was surrounded with a brick wall, and became what Southey called, " the Campo Santo of the Dis- senters." On a side street near by, next to a kind of institutional meeting-house belonging to the Friends, is a beautiful green inclosure where fourteen thousand Quakers lie buried in unmarked graves. One humble headstone alone marks a grave near the fence, which was opened in the nineteenth cen- tury, and was found to be that of Milton's con- temporary, George Fox, the tailor with the leather suit, who founded the sect of the uncompro- mising democrats who called no man " Lord," who used no weapons but their tongues, and who thun- dered with them to such purpose as to make men quake. While Milton was on the point of publishing his " Paradise Lost," another calamity, to be described later, befell the stricken city. For three days the Great Fire crackled and roared, and drove man and beast before its fearful heat westward to Temple Bar, and swept away Milton's birthplace, which he still owned. It wiped out the church where he was christ- ened, the school where he had studied, and came so far north as almost to bury his father's grave under the walls of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. Amid the horror of smoke and the sound of distant explosions jflDtlton's and wild confusion, the poet sat during those awful days, when it seemed as if the fate of Sodom had befallen his dear London town. Up to that date his birthplace had been visited by admiring foreigners. This was the only real estate that he then owned, and its loss must have crippled his resources. The precious manuscript of " Paradise Lost " fell to the censorship of the young clergyman of twenty- eight, who had married Milton to his youthful wife, Elizabeth. This man, named Tomkyns, like Pobedo- nostzeff two hundred and fifty years later, held that liberty of conscience was a " highly plausible thing," but did not work well in practice, and he came near suppressing the volume, so tradition says, for imagi- nary! treason in some lines ; but he relented, and the world was spared its greatest epic poem since the JEntid. The many booksellers around St. Paul's suffered terrible losses, and Pepys estimates that books to the value of 150,000 were burnt in the vicinity. Most of them were hurriedly stowed in the crypt of old St. Paul's Church, but when the walls of the great cathedral fell, they let in the fire which consumed them. In April, 1667, when the ruins had hardly ceased smoking, Milton agreed, for 5 down and three times as much at certain future dates, to sell his copyright to Samuel Symons, printer. Thir- 122 flDUton's teen hundred copies constituted the edition. Through the days of dusty turmoil while the new city was slowly rising on the ashes of the old, the proof-sheets passed from the printing-press in Aldersgate Street to Artillery Walk. There was only an interruption of five anxious days in June, when the bugle sounded, and terrified citizens assembled to ward off the Dutch, who, bent on vengeance, burnt English ships and sent cannon-balls hurtling at English forts. In August " Paradise Lost " appeared as a rather fine looking, small quarto of 342 pages, which could be bought for three shillings in three bookstores. For artistic purposes the poem is written according to the Ptolemaic theory of cosmos, though Milton of course accepted the Copernican view. While John Milton was expecting 15 or 20 for his work of more than seven years, John Dryden, who was much more in fashion in those days of Nell Gwynne and the reopened theatres, was receiving a yearly income of 700. But John Dryden knew a poet when he read him. After reading " Paradise Lost," he exclaimed : " This man cuts us all out, and the ancients, too." About 1670, Milton's three daughters left their father's home. Knowing that they needed to be fitted for self-support, he paid for their apprentice- ship, and had them taught embroidery in gold and /HMlton's Enalanfc 123 silver. Doubtless bright silks and gay patterns were much more to their mind than their father's folios, and the change was best for all concerned. Their father sat at his door on pleasant days, dressed in his gray camblet coat, wearing a sword with a small silver hilt. He received many visitors some of them men of rank and note. He is described as wearing at this time his light brown hair parted from the crown to the middle of the forehead, " somewhat flat, long and waving, a little curled." His voice was musical and he " pro- nounced the letter r very hard." He rose early, began his day by listening to the Hebrew Bible, and spent his morning listening and dictating. Music, as much walking as his gouty feet permitted, and, in the evening, a smoke, were his sole recreations. He belonged to no church, and attended no service at this period. As his end drew near he told his brother that he left only the residue of his first wife's property to their three daughters, who had " been very un- dutiful ; " but everything else to his " loving wife, Elizabeth." Just one month before he had com- pleted his sixty-sixth year, John Milton died on a Sunday night, November 8, 1674. He was buried beside his father in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, and was followed to the grave by many friends. What /Baton's hymns were sung we do not know, but certainly none could more fitly have been sung than that noble one by his dear friend, Sir Henry Wotton : " How blessed is he born or taught Who serveth not another's will, Whose armour is his honest thought, And simple truth his highest skill. " This man is freed from servile bands, Of hope to rise or fear to fall ; Lord of himself, though not of lands, And having nothing, yet hath all." Milton's wife was thirty-six years old when the poet died. She lived to be nearly eighty-nine years old, but never remarried. Deborah lived until 1727, when Voltaire writes : " I was in London when it became known that a daughter of blind Milton was still alive, old and in poverty, and in a quarter of an hour she was rich." The latest descendants of John and Christopher Milton died about the middle of the eighteenth century, but their sister Anne's posterity may perhaps be traced to-day. 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 scat- tered all over England, teaching the rising genera- flMlton's Jn0lan& 125 tion 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. No student of the period which is treated in this little volume should fail to visit the upper floor of the National Portrait Gallery, and view the por- traits of the many rioted men who were Milton's contemporaries. Besides portraits of the royal families, he will note those of William Harvey, Samuel Pepys, Cowley, old Parr, Sir Henry Vane, Andrew Marvell, Cromwell and his daughter, Inigo Jones, Selden, Sir Julius Caesar, Samuel Butler, Hobbes, Dryden, Ireton, Algernon Sidney, Sir Christopher Wren, and the Chandos Shakespeare portrait. Milton's own portrait in middle life, which is little known, is most impressive, and very different from the common portraits. CHAPTER VIII. THE TOWER. TOWER HILL IXCEPT Westminster Abbey, no spot in England is so connected with every phase of England's history as is the Tower of London. A map, printed in the generation before Milton, shows us the ancient moat full of water, and the space within its walls that now is gravelled then covered with greensward. North of St. Peter's little church, where lay the bones of Anne Boleyn, stretched a row of narrow gabled houses like those seen in the neighbouring London streets. The White Tower, built by William the Conqueror, stands to-day practically as it stood in William's time and Milton's. Built of durable flint stones, it has withstood time's decay as few other buildings erected far more recently have done, when they were of the soft, disintegrating quality of stone so often used in London. True, Christopher Wren faced the windows with stone in the Italian style, and somewhat modernised the exterior, but the interior 126 flbilton's Englanfc 127 remains practically as it was built over eight hun- dred years ago. As there is no need of duplicating here the main facts about its history, which are to be found in every guide-book, let us confine ourselves to the chief literary and historical associations with it, that must have appealed to the boy and man, John Milton. One can imagine few things more exciting and stimulating to the mind of an observant boy in 1620 than a visit to the Tower. In the days when circuses were unknown, and menageries of strange beasts were a rare sight, the view of such behind the grated walls of Lion's Tower must have delighted any London lad. The wild beasts were not very numerous, only a few lions and leopards and " cat lions," but no doubt they were as satisfactory as the modern " Zoo " to eyes that were unsatiated with such novelties. Whether small boys were al- lowed for sixpence to see the rich display of state jewels is not quite clear, yet it is certain that they were shown to strangers. Says that indefatigable antiquarian, Stow, whose old age almost touched the babyhood of Milton: " This Tower is a citadel to defend or command the city; a royal palace for assemblies or treaties; a prison of state for the most dangerous offenders; the only place of coinage for all England at the 128 /HMlton's England time; the armory for warlike provisions; the treas- ury of the ornaments and jewels of the Crown ; and general conserver of the records of the king's courts of justice at Westminster." In Milton's boyhood, the royal palace in the south- east corner of the inclosure was standing. But in his manhood, his staunch friend, Oliver, having got possession, it was pulled down. The little Norman chapel of St. John, within the Tower, is one of the best bits of Norman work now extant in England. Its triforium, which extends over the aisles and semi- circular east end, probably was used in ancient days to permit the queen and her ladies to attend the celebration of the mass, unseen by the congregation below. The chapel was dismantled before Milton's time. But doubtless as he entered it he could pic- ture in it, more vividly than we in our later age, that scene when from sunset until sunrise forty-six noble- men and gentlemen knelt and watched their armour, before King Henry IV., on the next day, bestowed upon them the newly created Order of the Bath. In this chapel, while he was kneeling in prayer, the lieutenant of the Tower received an order to murder the young Edward V. and his brother, and refused to obey it. Here Queen Mary attended mass for her brother, Edward VI. In the present armory, once the council chamber, flMlton's En^la^ 129 King Richard II. was released from prison, and sceptre in hand and the crown on his head, abdicated in favour of Henry IV. Shakespeare thus depicts the scene, and puts the following words into the mouth of the mournful king : " I give this heavy weight from off my head, And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths, My manors, rents, revenues I forego ; My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny. God pardon all oaths that are broke to me, God keep all oaths unbroke are made to thee. Make me that nothing have with nothing grieved, And thou with all pleased that hath all achieved ! Long may'st thou live in Richard's seat to sit, And soon lie Richard in an earthen pit! God save King Henry, unkinged Richard says, And send him many years of sunshine days ! " On this same spot, in 1483, the Protector, after- ward Richard III., came in among the lords in council, and asked the Bishop of Ely to send to his gardens in Ely Place, off Holborn, for some strawberries. The terror which royalty inspired and with good reason in that day is well described by Sir Thomas More, who was himself a prisoner in 130 flMlton's less than a half century after the scene which he so graphically describes : " He returned into the chamber, among them, all changed, with a wonderful sour, angry countenance, knitting the brows, frowning and frothing and gnawing of the lips; and so sat him down in his place, all the lords much dismayed and sore mar- velling of this manner of sudden change, and what thing should him ail." Then asking what should be the punishment of those who conspired against his life, and being told that they should be punished as traitors, he then accused his brother's wife and his own wife. " ' Then,' said the Protector," con- tinues More, " ' ye shall see in what wise that sorcer- ess and that other witch . . . have by their sorcery and witchcraft wasted my body ! ' And therewith he plucked up his doublet sleeve to his elbow upon his left arm, and he shewed a werish withered arm, and small as it was never other. And thereupon every man's mind sore misgave him, well perceiving that this matter was but a quarrel ... no man was there present but well knew that his arm was ever such since his birth. Nevertheless the lord chamber- lain answered, and said : ' Certainly, my lord, if they have so heinously done they be worthy heinous pun- ishment.' * What,' quoth the Protector, * thou serv- est me ill with ifs and with ands; I tell thee they flDUton'8 England 131 have so done, and that I will make good on thy body, traitor! ... I will not to dinner until I see ihy head off.' Within an hour, the lord chamber- lain's head rolled in the dust." The author of the " Utopia," being a knight, was leniently treated while in the Tower. He paid ten shillings a week for himself and five shillings for his servant. Occasionally his friends came to see him, and urged in vain that he should propitiate Henry VIII. and his wife, Anne Boleyn, against whose marriage he had objected. But he remained immovable. " Is not this house as nigh heaven as my own ? " he asked, serenely, when wife and daugh- ters pleaded with him to reconsider. Lady More petitioned Henry for her husband's pardon, on the ground of his illness and her poverty ; she had been forced to sell her clothing to pay her husband's fees in prison. But Henry had no mercy on the gentle scholar, the greatest English genius of his day, and who had been lord chancellor of England. For a time he was allowed to write, but later, books and writing materials were removed; yet he occasionally succeeded in writing to his wife and daughter Margaret on scraps of paper with pieces of coal. " Thenceforth," says his biographer, " he caused the shutters of his cell to be closed, and spent most of his time in the dark." 132 flDUton's England When the end came, his sentence to be hanged at Tyburn was commuted by the king to beheadal at Tower Hill. Cheerful, and even with a tone of jest, he said to the lieutenant on the scaffold, " I pray thee, see me safely up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself." He removed his beard from the block, saying, " it had never committed treason," and told the bystanders that he died " in and for the faith of the Catholic Church," and prayed God to send the king good counsel. More's body was buried in St. Peter's Church, where that of the fair young Anne Boleyn herself was soon to lie. His head, after the savage custom of the time, was parboiled and affixed to a pole on London Bridge. Dark and bloody were the associations that centre around the Tower in the century preceding Milton's. Few of these have touched the popular heart more than those which cluster around the girl-queen of nine days the fair Lady Jane Grey. In the Brick Tower, where she was imprisoned, she wrote her last brave, pathetic words to her father and sister upon the leaves of her Greek Testament. From her prison window she saw the headless body of her boy- husband pass by in a cart from Tower Hill, and cried : " Oh, Guildford ! Guildford ! the antepast is not so bitter that thou hast tasted, and which I soon shall taste, as to make my flesh tremble; it flDilton's England 133 is nothing compared with that feast of which we shall partake this day in heaven." When she was ready to lay her fair young head upon the block, she cried : " I pray you all, good Christian people, to bear me witness that I die a true Christian woman." " Then tied she the handkerchief about her eyes, and feeling for the block, she said, ' What shall I do ? W r here is it ? ' One of the standers-by guiding her thereunto, she laid her head down upon the block, and then stretched forth her body, and said : ' Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.' ' So perished this girl of eighteen, whose beauty, learning, and tragic fate make her one of the most pathetic figures in history. The most interesting parts of the Tower, includ- ing St. Peter's Church, the dungeons, Raleigh's cell, and the spot where he wrote his " History of the World," are not shown to ordinary visitors. They can be seen, however, by the receipt of a written order from the Constable of the Tower, and should not be missed by any student of English history. Even a few moments spent in those dark lower vaults help the torpid imagination of those who live in freedom as cheap and common as the air they breathe to realise through what horror and bloody sweat of brave men and women in the past his free- 134 /HMlton's England dom has been bought. Though these dungeons now are clean and a few modern openings through the massive walls admit some feeble rays of light, it is not difficult to conjure up the black darkness, filth,, and vermin, and noisome odours of the past, or the shrieks of saint or sinner, who, like Anne Askew and Guy Fawkes, suffered upon the rack. Only two years before Milton's birth, the conspira- tors of the Gunpowder Plot were immured in these dungeons, and then hanged, cut down, and dis- embowelled while they were still living. In Milton's youth, in 1630, while he was writing Latin verses at Christ's College, Cambridge, that brave, heroic, noble soul, Sir John Eliot, was com- mitted to the Tower. Those were sad days for England. Free speech in Parliament was throttled. The nation's ancient liberties were in jeopardy. Says the historian, Green : " The early struggle for Parliamentary liberty centres in the figure of Sir John Eliot. . . . He was now in the first vigour of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated, and familiar with the poetry and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and devout, a fearless and vehement temperament. But his intellect was as clear and cool as his temper was ardent. What he believed in was the English Parliament. He saw in it the collective wisdom of the realm, and in that /IDUton's England 135 wisdom he put a firmer trust than in the statecraft of kings." Of the memorable scene in Parliament in which he moved the presentation to the king of a remonstrance, in the session of 1628, a letter of the times gives a description. By royal orders the Speaker of the House stopped him, and Eliot sat abruptly down amid the solemn silence of the mem- bers. " Then appeared such a spectacle of passions as the like had seldom been seen in such an assembly ; some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesy- ing of the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in confessing their sins and country's sins. . . . There were above an hundred weeping eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted and silenced by their own passions." Says President Theodore Roosevelt of Sir John Eliot : " He took his stand firmly on the ground that the king was not the master of Parliament, and of course this could but mean ultimately that Parlia- ment was master of the king. In other words, he was one of the earliest leaders of the movement which has produced English freedom and English government as we now know them. He was also its martyr. He was kept in the Tower, without air or exercise, for three years, the king vindictively refusing to allow the slightest relaxation in his con- finement, even when it brought on consumption. 136 /IDUton's EnglanD In December, 1632, he died; and the king's hatred found its last expression in denying to his kinsfolk the privilege of burying him in his Cornish home." At last the " man of blood," who had tried to wrest England's liberties, himself perished upon the scaffold at Whitehall, and in his condemnation the same author cites his treatment of Sir John Eliot as one of his greatest crimes. " Justice was certainly done, and until the death penalty is abolished for all malefactors, we need waste scant sympathy on the man who so hated the upholders of freedom that his vengeance against Eliot could be satisfied only with Eliot's death; who so utterly lacked loyalty, that he signed the death-warrant of Strafford when Strafford had merely done his bidding; who had made the blood of Englishmen flow like water, to establish his right to rule; and who, with incurable duplicity, incurable double-dealing, had sought to turn the generosity of his victorious foes to their own hurt." These grisly tales of executions and of scenes of fortitude we close with a few words on that valiant, noble soul, Sir Harry Vane, to whom Milton dedi- cated the well-known sonnet beginning : " Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old." Speaking before the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard University, Wendell Phillips, America's silver- flDtlton's JEnQlanfc 137 tongued orator, uttered a memorable word upon the man whose governorship of Massachusetts for two years of its infant history makes the name of Vane for ever dear to the American descendants of the Puritans : "... Roger Williams and Sir Harry Vane, the two men deepest in thought and bravest in speech of all who spoke English in their day, and equal to any in practical statesmanship. Sir Harry Vane in my judgment the noblest human being who ever walked the streets of yonder city I do not forget Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington or Fayette, Garrison or John Brown. But Vane dwells an arrow's flight above them all, and his touch conse- crated the continent to measureless toleration of opinion and entire equality of rights. We are told we can find in Plato ' all the intellectual life of Europe for two thousand years.' So you can find in Vane the pure gold of two hundred and fifty years of American civilisation, with no particle of its dross. Plato would have welcomed him to the Academy, and Fenelon kneeled with him at the altar. He made Somers and John Marshall possible ; like Carnot, he organised victory; and Milton pales before him in the stainlessness of his record. He stands among English statesmen preeminently the representative, in practice and in theory, of serene 138 flDilton's Englanfc faith in the safety of trusting truth wholly to her own defence. For other men we walk backward, and throw over their memories the mantle of charity and excuse, saying reverently, ' Remember the temp- tation and the age.' But Vane's ermine has no stain ; no act of his needs explanation or apology; and in thought he stands abreast of the age like pure intellect, belongs to all time. Carlyle said, in years when his words were worth heeding, ' Young men, close your Byron and open your Goethe.' If my counsel had weight in these halls, I should say, ' Young men, close your John Winthrop and Wash- ington, your Jefferson and Webster, and open Sir Harry Vane.' It was the generation that knew Vane who gave to our Alma Mater for a seal the simple pledge, Veritas." Wendell Phillips, in his Har- vard address on the " Scholar in the Republic." To the profligate Charles II. few men must have seemed more dangerous than the man who had dared to teach that the king had three " superiors, God, Law, and Parliament." The man who had once walked through the stately halls of Raby Castle as its master found a Tower cell his last earthly abiding-place. When Sir Harry Vane was arraigned as a " false traitor," he made his own defence, well knowing what the end would be, but determined, for the sake /IMlton's England 139 of England and the cause he loved, to put his plea on record. For ten hours he fought for his life without refreshment, then later, in his prison, wrote out the substance of his plea. Though, as his biographer relates. " he had torn to pieces as if they were so much rotten thread the legal meshes in which his hunters sought to hold him fast," his doom was sealed. Something was gained when the original sentence of hideous torture and dismemberment was commuted into simple beheading. The day before his execution, Vane said to his children : " Resolve to suffer anything from men rather than sin against God. ... I can willingly leave this place and out- ward enjoyments, for those I shall meet with here- after in a better country. I have made it my business to acquaint myself with the society of Heaven. Be not you troubled, for I am going home to my Father." " As one goes through Eastcheap to-day, out upon the open space of Tower Hill, he finds himself among prosaic surroundings. Over the pavement rattles the traffic from the great London docks close at hand. High warehouses rise at the side; the sooty trail of steamers pollutes the air toward the river. In one direction, however, the view has sug- gestions the reverse of commonplace. Looking thither the sensitive beholder feels with deep emotion i4 /BMlton's JEnglant) the fact brought home to him, that to men of Eng- lish speech, the earth has scarcely a spot more mem- orable than the ground where he is standing. There rise, as they have risen for eight hundred years, the gray walls of the Tower, the moat in the foreground, the battlemented line of masonry behind ; within, the white keep, with its four turrets. . . . As mothers have shed tears there for impris- oned children, so children standing there have won- dered 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 com- ing 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. . . . On the 1 4th of June in 1662 in the full glory of the summer, Vane, in the strength of his man- hood, was brought forth to die." Thus writes James K. Hosmer in his scholarly biography of Vane. He quotes an eye-witness, who relates how cheerfully and readily Vane went from his chamber to the sledge which took him to the scaffold, and how " from the tops of houses, and out of windows, the people used such means and gestures as might best discover, at a distance, their respects and love flDilton's to him, crying aloud, ' The Lord go with you, the great God of Heaven and Earth appear in you and for you.' When asked how he did, he answered, ' Never better in my life.' Loud were the acclama- tions of the people, crying out, ' The Lord Jesus go with your dear soul.' ' As Vane stepped upon the scaffold, clad in a black suit and cloak and scarlet \\aistcoat, a silence fell, and calmly, serenely, he addressed the throng around him. His address dis- pleased the officers, and the trumpets were com- manded to silence him. His words, however, had been well prepared and delivered in writing to a friend, so that the world to-day knows with what dignity and truth he spoke. His prayer, however, was not thus broken. " Thy servant, that is now falling asleep, doth heartily desire of thee, that thou shouldst forgive his enemies, and not lay this sin to their charge. ... I bless the Lord that I have not deserted the righteous cause for which I suffer." The heads of Cromwell and Bradshaw hung on the poles of Westminster Hall when Vane's fell. Blake's and Ireton's bodies had been flung into dis- honoured graves. Pym and Hampden had died early in the civil strife. Algernon Sidney was to be a later victim. In Jewin Street the blind Milton was solacing himself in an uncertain seclusion and quietude, with the preparation of his " Paradise 142 rtMlton's Lost." Everything the Puritans had stood for seemed eclipsed. But the truths these men had lived and died for could not die. Says Lowell, writing for his countrymen : "It was the red dint on Charles's block that marked one in our era." The reign of the Stuarts was doomed, and the Nemesis of what they stood for was assured. Says John Richard Green : " England for the last two hundred years has done little more than carry out in a slow and tentative way, but very surely, the pro- gramme laid down by Vane and his friends at the close of the Civil War." It was government of the people, by the people, for the people, for which Vane and Washington and Lincoln lived. Without the foresight and the valour of the brave man who died on Tower Hill the work accomplished by the two later heroes might not have been assured. CHAPTER IX. ALL HALLOWS, BARKING. ST. OLAVE's. ST. CATHERINE CREE's. ST. ANDREW UNDER- SHAFT ; T the end of Great Tower Street is the church of All Hallows, Barking, anciently known as " Berkynge Church by the Tower." The edifice, which is situated close to Mark Lane Station on the Metropolitan Railway, ranks as the oldest parish church with a continuous history as such in the city of London. One hundred and fifty years before the union of the seven king- doms under Egbert, over four hundred years before the Conqueror and the building of the White Tower, a thousand years before the boy Milton visited its historic site, the foundation of the church was laid. For six hundred years a close connection existed between the court and this church when the Tower was a royal residence. Some traces of old Norman work remain, but the present building belongs to the Perpendicular type, 43 144 flDilton's and assumed nearly its present shape about one hundred years before Milton's age. From its nearness to the Tower, the church be- came the burial-place of some of its victims. Here was placed the headless body of Lord Thomas Grey, uncle of Lady Jane, who was beheaded in 1554 for taking part in the rebellion under Wyatt. The heart of Richard the Lion Heart was once placed under its high altar. After his execution on Tower Hill, the body of Archbishop Laud rested here some years, and was " accompanied to earth with great multitudes of people, whom love or curiosity or remorse of conscience had drawn to- gether, and decently interred . . . according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, in which it may be noted as a remarkable thing, that being, whilst he lived, the greatest champion of the Common Prayer Book ... he had the honour, being dead, to be buried in the form therein pro- vided, after it had been long disused and almost reprobated in most of the churches of London." Two hundred and fifty years later an Archbishop Laud Commemoration was celebrated here, and where the scaffold stood on Tower Hill services were held. The chief interest of the church for American vis- itors may be the baptismal register, in which is /IMlton's Enalanfc 145 recorded the baptism, during Milton's early man- hood, of Sir William Penn's infant son, the apostle of peace, who was destined to found a great state in the New World. The Great Fire of 1666 touched the church so closely that Pepys tells us the " dyall and part of the porch was burnt." Its interior is beautifully preserved. Its old brasses attract so many who desire to make rubbings that a snug sum tor church purposes has been raised by the small fees charged. The church possesses the oldest indenture for the construction of an organ known in England. Its date is 1519. On the south side of Tower Street, at number 48, w r as formerly a public house painted with the head of the Czar of Muscovy. Here Peter the Great, when he was studying the dockyards and maritime establishments of England under William III., used to resort with his attendants and smoke his pipe and drink beer and brandy. Near by is Muscovy Court, a present reminder of the ancient name. A little farther north, on Hart Street, once stood the richly decorated timber house, called " Whit- tington's Palace." According to doubtful tradition this was where the famous Dick Whittington, with princely magnanimity, burnt the royal bond for a debt of 60,000, when Henry V. and his queen came to dine with him. '' Never had king such a subject," 146 flDtlton's England Henry is reported to have said, when Whittington replied to the hero of Agincourt, " Surely, Sire, never had subject such a king." This palace, with its whole front of diamond-paned windows, stood in Milton's time. Near by, on Hart Street, is the church of St. Olave, which with All Hallows, Barking, escaped the Great Fire, and stands as it stood in Milton's life. The tourist must time his visit to it on a week day to the noon hour, as, unlike All Hallows, Barking, it is not open all day. The monastery of the Crutched Friars must have covered in ancient days a large part of the parish of this church. Its dimensions are of the smallest it is only fifty-four feet long. Its name takes us back to the times of the Danish settlement, for St. Olave is but the corruption of St. Olaf. the Norwegian saint who was the martyred king of the Northmen. The body of this saint rests in the great cathedral at Trondheim, Norway. His history is closely connected with the immediate region. As a boy of twelve he started on his career as viking; later he fought with Ethelred against the usurping Danes in London. The latter held the bridge which connected the walled town with low-lying Southwark across the Thames. The struggle waxed desperate, when the bold Norwegian rtMlton's England 147 at a critical juncture fastened cables to the bridge, and then ordered his little ships, which were attached to them, to row hard down stream. The piles tot- tered, the bridge, which swarmed with the Danes, fell, and those that were not drowned were driven away. When William the Conqueror sailed up the Thames a half century later, the stories of the intrepid Olaf, who had become Norway's king and had died in battle, must have been fresh in mind. Not only this church, but others in the city were erected in his name. The present structure was probably built about 1450, and was repaired about the time that Milton returned to London from Italy. During the Reformation, in 1553, St. Olave's had " a pair of organes." During the Civil War in 1644, an ordinance was passed that all organs in churches " should be taken away and utterly de- faced." It is very certain that the music-loving Milton, who joyed to hear "... the organ blow, to the full-voiced choir below " must have mourned this stern decree. In conse- quence of this, most organ builders for sixteen years were obliged to work as carpenters and joiners. The famous diarist, Pepys, who attended St. Olave's, writes on June 17, 1660: "This day the organs did begin to play at Whitehall Chapel, where 148 flMlton's jn0lan& I heard very good musique, the first time that ever I remember to have heard the organs and singing men in surplices in my life." On April 20, 1667, he records : " To Hackney Church, and found much difficulty to get pews. That which I went chiefly to see was the young ladies of the schools, whereof there is great store, very pretty, and also the organ, which is handsome, and tunes the psalms and plays with the people, which is mighty pretty, and makes me mighty earnest to have a pair at our church " which meant St. Olave's. About the time of Pepys's writing, a peal of six remarkably sweet-toned bells was placed in the tower. In the church are quaint brasses and monu- ments, the most interesting of which is the tomb of Pepys. An elegant monument of alabaster, with a bust of Pepys, taken from his portrait in the National Gallery, was unveiled in 1884. It bears the dates: " b. 1632, d. 1703." The monument is near the door where Pepys used to enter the church from Seething Lane. Pepys, like Milton, was educated at St. Paul's School. His fame rests chiefly on his diary, which was written in cipher, and not deciphered and pub- lished until 1825. On the unveiling of his monu- ment, James Russell Lowell, in his address, spoke of Pepys as " a type perhaps of what is now called 's Englanfc 149 a Philistine. We have no word in English which is equivalent to the French adjective ' bourgeois,' but at all events, Samuel Pepys was the most per- fect type that ever existed of the class of people whom this word describes. He had all its merits, as well as many of its defects." With all these defects, perhaps in spite of them, Lowell maintained, Pepys had written one of the most delightful books that it was man's privilege to read in the Eng- lish language, or in any other. There was no paral- lel to the character of Pepys in respect of naivete unless it were found in that of Falstaff, and Pepys showed himself, too, " like Falstaff, on terms of unbuttoned familiarity with himself. . . . Pepys's naivete was the inoffensive vanity of a man who loved to see himself in the glass." It was ques- tionable, he said, whether Pepys could have had any sense of humour at all, and yet permitted himself to be so delightful. The lightest part of the diary was of value historically, for it enabled us to see the London of two hundred years ago, and, what was more, to see it with the eager eyes of Pepys. It was not Pepys the official, the clerk of the acts and secretary of the Admiralty, who had brought that large gathering together it was Pepys the diarist. Pepys's diary was begun in 1660, when he was i5 flDtlton's BnQlant) in his twenty-seventh year. Ten years later, when he feared blindness, he ceased writing it. He be- queathed it in six volumes, written in cipher as above stated, with his library of three thousand books, to his old college, Magdalen, at Cambridge, and it is now its greatest treasure. Pepys was no Puritan. His comments on the Calvinistic teach- ing of his pastor, Daniel Mills, are characteristic. In 1666, he writes: " Up and to church, where Mr. Mills, a lazy, simple sermon upon the Devil's having no right to anything in this world ; " and again he writes : " Mr. Mills made an unnecessary sermon on original sin, neither understood by himself nor the people." He writes that when he invited the reverend gentleman to dinner on a Sunday, he " had a very good dinner and very merry." Among the notable men buried near Pepys is William Turner, an early Puritan, who was educated under Latimer and died in 1568. He wrote the earliest scientific work by any Englishman on botany. His great object was to learn the materia medica of the ancients throughout the vegetable kingdom. But he wrote against the Roman Anti- christ as well. The title of one book illustrates the orthography of his day : " The Hunting and Fynd- ing of the Romish Fox: which more than seven years hath been among the Bysshoppes of England, flMlton's England is 1 after that the Kynges Hyghnes, Henry VIII. had commanded hym to be driven out of hys Realme." Of Sir James Deane, a merchant adventurer to India, China, and the Spice Islands, it is recorded that he gave generous bequests, and directed 500 to be expended on his funeral, a vast sum for those days, yet probably no more than was customary for wealthy men. Of Sir John Mennes, who is buried here, Pepys tells us that " he brought many fine expressions of Chaucer which he doats on mightily," and naively adds, " and without doubt he is a very fine poet." Droll, lively, garrulous Pepys! Who would have dreamed that this boyish writer was in reality a great military authority, and in a large measure responsible for the care of England's navy ? As in All Hallows, Barking, and several old " city " churches, the visitor will notice in St. Olave's the remarkable, wrought-iron " sword- stands," used in Elizabeth's reign and placed in the pews of distinguished persons. The pulpit, with its elaborate carving, said to have been done by Grinling Gibbons, is one that was removed from the " deconsecrated " church of St. Benet. St. Olave's had one of the churchyards in which the victims of the plague were buried in great numbers, and of which Pepys writes : " It fright- is 2 rtMlton's ened me indeed to go through the church, to see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard where people have been buried of the plague." The gruesome skulls and crossbones, carved over its gateway, are a dismal reminder of the horrors of that time. In the chapter on the "City of the Absent," in his " Uncommercial Traveller," Dickens thus graphically describes his visit to it : " One of my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard of Saint Ghastly Grim; touching what men in general call it, I have no information. It lies at the heart of the City, and the Blackwall Railway shrieks at it daily. It is a small, small churchyard, with a ferocious strong spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought in stone; but it like- wise came into the mind of Saint Ghastly Grim that to stick iron spikes atop of the stone skulls, as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant device. Therefore the skulls grin aloft, horribly thrust through and through with iron spears. Hence there is attraction of repulsion for me in Saint Ghastly Grim, and having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn toward it in a thunder-storm at midnight. * Why not ? ' I said ; ' I have been to the Colosseum by the light of the moon ; is it wcrse to go to see Saint Ghastly flDUton's EtiQlanfc 153 Grim by the light of the lightning?' I repaired to the Saint in a hackney cab, and found the skulls most effective, having the air of a public execution, and seeming, as the lightning flashed, to wink and grin with the pain of the spikes." In the chapter on " A Year's Impressions," in which Dickens depicts repeated visits to the deserted churches of the London of the past, he, with a deft touch, describes the commercial atmosphere which now impregnates all of what poetry, history, and romance remain to-day. " From Rood Lane unto Tower Street, and there- abouts, there was often a subtle flavour of wine. In the churches about Mark Lane, for example, there was a dry whiff of wheat, and I accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an aged hassock in one of them. One church near Mincing Lane smelt like a druggist's drawer. Behind the Monu- ment the service had the flavour of damaged oranges, which, a little farther down toward the river, tempered into herrings and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan blast of fish. . . . The dark vestries and registers into which I have peeped, and the little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have left impressions on my memory, dis- tinct and quaint. In all those dusty registers that the worms are eating, there is not a line but made iS4 /BMlton's England some heart leap, or some tears flow, in their day. Still and dry now, still and dry, and the old tree at the window, with no room for its branches, has seen them all out. 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. In some way, the relief of the Assumption of the Virgin at the entrance gate escaped destruc- tion by the Puritans, and remained with the alms- houses to a late period. To the American, to whom the word "almshouse" signifies the English "work- house," an institution of paupers where all live in common, little idea is conveyed of the com- fortable, and usually quaint and picturesque re- treat which " almshouse " signifies to the English mind. In many London suburbs one may see little rows of cottages within walled gardens, where, in quiet and comfort and serenity, aged couples spend A&Uton's En0lan& 155 their last days, in some ways the happiest of their lives, though it be in an almshouse. At 53 Fenchurch Street, in Milton's time, stood the Queen's Head Tavern, where the Princess Eliza- beth dined on pork and peas after her release from the Tower in 1554. The modern building erected on the site bears a commemorative statue of her. Mincing Lane, in the vicinity, was named from houses which belonged to the Minchuns or nuns of Saint Helen's. Near its entrance is the Hall of the Clothworkers' Company, whose badge is a ram; within are gilt statues of James I. and Charles I., which were saved from the Great Fire. Its garden was once the churchyard of All Hallows, Staining, whose fine old tower, which escaped the Fire, still stands as when Milton strolled past and gazed on it. The church, which was demolished recently, was reputed to have been the earliest stone church in the city. " Stane " is the Saxon word for stone, and the word " Staining " indicates the fact men- tioned above. Passing north to Aldgate, Milton must have seen the great gate, which was not destroyed until 1760. It was the chief outlet to the eastern counties from the time of the Romans until its destruction. In the dwelling over the gate, according to Loftie, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer lived in 1374. This is 6 flMlton's gate, however, was pulled down just before Milton's birth, and rebuilt the year after he was born, in 1609. When he saw it, a gilded statue of James I. adorned its eastern side, and on the west were statues of Peace, Fortune, and Charity. Aldgate to-day is the entrance into that sordid, dismal region, known as Whitechapel, where within easy walking distance from the site of the ancient gate is its chief attraction to all tourists. On Com- mercial Street, standing in a group, are the little church of St. Jude, and close beside it that Social Settlement, reared in memory of the gentle Oxford scholar and philanthropist, Arnold Toynbee. This is one of the few beautiful oases in a desert of squalor and commonplaceness, which the name Whitechapel now signifies to most readers. But for Milton's haunts, we need not wander farther east than Aldgate; for though Whitechapel Street was thickly lined with houses for some dis- tance even in his day, little of interest remains. Turning back through Leadenhall Street, one sees a little gray stone church, with a low tower and round- arched windows, known as St. Catherine Cree's. This was rebuilt in Milton's youth in 1629, and con- secrated two years later by the ill-fated Archbishop Laud. The ceremonies which he used on this occa- sion savoured so much of Popery, however, that 0) . O . S-g 00 5 ^5 .S " c J: I U o *3 g c i| I 8 "o rt I 1 2 3 6 u flMlton's England 157 they were later brought against him, and helped to accomplish his downfall. In an older church, upon this site, the famous Hans Holbein, to whom we are indebted for his portraits of Henry VIIL, Sir Thomas More, and other famous Englishmen, was buried in 1554, after his death by the plague. Within the church may be seen the effigy in armour of a man who played an important part in England when Milton's father was a boy. To-day, only the historian recalls the name of Sir Nicholas Throck- morton, whose daughter married Walter Raleigh, who was chamberlain of the exchequer, ambassa- dor, and chief butler of England. The stories of his fruitless embassy to Mary Queen of Scots to prevent her marriage with Darnley, and the rec- ords of his trial, imprisonment, and death of a broken heart must have been as familiar to the youth of Milton's time as the life of Disraeli or Joseph Chamberlain is to Cambridge youth to-day. Above the gateway, in the churchyard, is a ghastly memorial to the builder of it in the form of a shrouded skeleton on a mattress. In Shakespeare's time, within this churchyard, which is now much smaller than it was then, and is concealed by modern buildings, scaffolds were erected on all sides, and religious plays were performed on Sundays. Every year, on October i6th, the " lion sermon " is* flMlton's is preached within the church in memory of an ancient worthy, who in 1648 gave it the sum of 200, in remembrance of his delivery from a lion's paws in Arabia. As at St. Olave's, the noon hour, when daily service is performed for the benefit of the one or two worshippers who may stray in, is the time to visit this historic church. The first edition of " Paradise Lost " bears the imprint : " Printed, and are to be sold by Peter Parker, under Creed Church near Aldgate, 1667." " Creed Church " was this same Catherine Cree's. A little north of Leadenhall, at the entrance to the ancient street called St. Mary Axe, stands the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, another of the churches which remain, of those that Milton saw within the city walls. Its name recalls the ancient English custom of the May-day dance. A lofty May-pole, higher than the tower of the church, once stood beside it, and was pulled down on " Evil May Day," in the reign of Henry VIII., about the time the church was built, 1520-32. It is a gray stone edifice, well preserved, and well worth a visit if for no other end than to see the tomb of the learned and devoted chronicler, Stow a name dear to every student of ancient London and of English history. Of his " Survey," Loftie says : " It was a wonder even in the age which produced Shake- speare." /IMlton's England 159 Stow was bred a tailor, but in middle life retired on a modest competence, and for forty years almost immediately preceding Milton's birth had with unparalleled industry studied the history of his city and native land. His collection for the Chronicles of England, now in the British Museum, fills sixty quarto volumes. Every street of London and promi- nent building, every church, and almost every monu- ment and inscription, are faithfully recorded in his volumes on London and Westminster. To him and to his editor, Strype, who has continued his work until a later period, modern London, and all who love her and her long history, owe an incalcula- ble debt of gratitude. But so little was his invaluable service recognised in his day that his great collection of books aroused suspicion in some quarters, and his outspoken words on public questions stirred up the jealous and malevolent, as his biographer shows. He was reduced to poverty in his old age, for he had spent his substance in his great enterprise. Like a genuine historian, he sought original sources, and " made use of his own legs (for he could never ride), trav- elling on foot to many cathedral churches and other places where ancient records and charters were ; and with his own eyes to read them." He studied the records in the Tower, and was expert in decipher- 160 flDilton's ing old wills and registers and muniments belonging to monasteries. He seems to have been somewhat conservative; perhaps, as his biographer suggests, " being a lover of antiquity and of the old Religious Buildings and monuments, he was the more preju- diced against the Reformed Religion, because of the havoc and destruction those that pretended to it made of them in those days." One instance of Protestant fanaticism that tended to make him more opposed to zeal without knowledge was that a curate of St. Paul's, which was his parish, inveighed " fervently against a long Maypole called a Shaft in the next Parish to his, named St. Andrew Under- shaft, and calling it an Idol; which so stirred up the devotion of many hearers that many of them in the afternoon went, and with violence pulled it down from the place where it hung upon hooks ; and then sawed it into divers pieces, each householder taking his piece as much as hung over his door or stall, and afterward burnt it." Sir Walter Besant, in a delightful chapter in his " London," describes an imaginary visit to the learned man, and a stroll with him through the town five years before Milton opened his eyes in Bread Street : " I found the venerable antiquary in his lodging. He lived it was the year before he died with his old wife in a house over against MONUMENT TO JOHN STOW St. Andrew Undershaft. /IMlton's Engla^ 161 the Church of St. Andrew Undershaft. The house itself was modest, containing two rooms on the ground floor, and one large room, or solar, as it would have been called in olden time, above. There was a garden at the back, and behind the garden stood the ruins of St. Helen's Nunnery, with the grounds and gardens of that once famous house, which had passed into the possession of the Leather- sellers' Company. ... I passed within, and mount- ing a steep, narrow stair, found myself in the library and in the presence of John Stow himself. The place was a long room, lofty in the middle, but with sloping sides. It was lit by two dormer windows; neither carpet nor arras nor hangings of any kind adorned the room, which was filled so that it was difficult to turn about in it, with books, papers, parchments, and rolls. They lay in piles on the floor, they stood in lines and columns against the walls; they were heaped upon the table. I ob- served too that they were not such books as may be seen in a great man's library, bound after the Italian fashion, with costly leather, gilt letters, golden clasps, and silken strings. Not so; these books were all folios for the most part ; their backs were broken ; the leaves, where any lay open, were discoloured, many of them were in the Gothic black letter. On the table were paper, pens, and ink, and 162 flfcilton's in the straight-backed armchair sat the old man himself, pen in hand, laboriously bending over a huge tome. He wore a black silk cap; his long white hair fell down upon his shoulders. The case- ments of the window stood open, and the summer sunshine poured warm and bright upon the scholar's head." In an age of many elaborate and tasteless monu- ments, Stow's is singularly interesting and tasteful An almost life-size figure of him is seated, dressed in a long robe, before a table on which rests a book in which he is writing. The whole is placed within a niche in the tomb; upon the sculptured sides, the artist has carved, among other devices, a beggar's wallet, indicative of Stow's poverty, for which James I. in his old age issued him letters patent per- mitting him to solicit aid. These letters grant " to our loving subject, John Stow, who hath to his own great charge, and with neglect to his ordinary means of maintenance, for the general good of Posteritie, as well as the present age, compiled and published diverse necessary books and chronicles, and there- fore we in recompense of his painful labours, and for the encouragement of the like . . . authorise him and his deputies to collect among our loving subjects their contributions and kind gratuities." Thus was the man who has chiefly contributed to /Mlton's England 163 our knowledge of ancient London allowed in his extreme old age to live in unappreciation and neglect. The visitor cannot but query, as he surveys the handsome monument erected to him by his wife, how this was paid for, but there are many explana- tions that suggest themselves. Many a time may Milton as a boy and man have stood before this tomb, and viewed the fine timber roof and the late Perpendicular windows, which to-day remain just as he saw them. If the modern visitor would study the fashions of his day, he can do no better than inspect such monuments as the costly Hammersley erected here. The date thereon is 1636, when Milton was a young man of twenty- eight. The absence in the life-size kneeling figure of the huge stiff crinoline on the tombs of a little earlier date shows that the fashions changed as sharply as in the latter half of the nineteenth cen- tury. The date of the handsome organ is 1695. CHAPTER X. CROSBY HALL. ST. HELENAS. ST. ETHELBURGA^S. ST. GILES'S, CRIPPLEGATE ^ASSING by the tiny churchyard of St. Andrew Undershaft, by several narrow and obscure passages amid crowded busi- ness blocks, one comes upon the famous Crosby Hall on Bishopsgate Street. This presents to-day one of the most picturesque examples of the beam and plaster houses of the fifteenth century to be found in England. It was, says Stow, " the highest at that time in London," that is, about 1475. Doubt- less his reference is to a high turret which once sur- mounted it, but of which no traces now remain. This was before the more pretentious Tudor build- ings of the next century, of whose high towers Stow's biographer says : " He could not endure the high turrets and buildings run up to a great height, which some citizens in his time laid out their money upon to overtop and overlook their neighbours. Such sort of advanced works, both towers and chimneys, they built both in their summerhouses in Moorfields 164 flMlton's nglant> 165 and in other places in the suburbs, and in their dwell- ing houses in the City itself. They were like mid- summer Pageants, ' not so much for use and profit as for show and pleasure,' ' bewraying,' said he, ' the vanities of men's minds. And that it was unlike to the disposition of the ancient citizens, who delighted in the building of hospitals and almshouses for the poor; and therein both employed their wits, and spent their wealth in the preferment of the common commodity of this our city/ ' Crosby House was, as Sir Thomas More relates, where Richard, Duke of Gloucester, " lodged him- self, and little by little all folks drew unto him, so that the Protector's court was crowded and King Edward's left desolate." Here he probably planned his treasonable and malicious scheme for the death of the little princes. In his play of " Richard III.," Shakespeare mentions Crosby Hall more than once; doubtless he knew it well, for ten years before the birth of Milton it seems evident that he resided in a house hard by. It is quite certain that it is to his immortalising Crosby Hall that its preservation to this day is due, when almost everything else that was contemporaneous in secular architecture has disappeared in its vicinity. The building has been much restored, and its banquet-hall is now utilised for a first-class restau- 166 rtMlton's Englanfc rant, where he who will may dine where dukes and princes dined four centuries ago. Sir Thomas More lived here for several years, and here doubtless wrote his life of the base king, to the echo of whose voice these walls had once resounded. Sir Thomas sold the place to that dear friend to whom he wrote with a coal a sad letter of farewell from his Tower cell before his execution. Later, his daugh- ter, who loved the place where her dear father had passed so many days, hired it, and came here to live. Some years later, in 1594, the rich mayor of London, Sir John Spencer, bought the place, and entertained an ambassador from Henry IV. to King James I. An interesting incident of this visit is related in the memoirs of this ambassador. It ap- pears that much scandal had been wrought by the mad pranks and rioting of the attendants of former envoys. What, then, was the horror of the French duke, when he discovered that one of the young nobles in his train, on going out of Crosby Hall in quest of sport, had got into a fight and murdered an English merchant close by in Great St. Helen's. The duke, determined on making an example, bade all his servants and attendants range themselves in a row against the wall, and taking a lighted torch, he looked sharply in the face of each in turn until he found the terrified face of the guilty man. Deter- /IMlton's England 167 mined to wreak speedy vengeance, he ordered, after the arbitrary method of the times, his instant decapi- tation. But the lord mayor pleaded for mercy, and the youth's life was spared; whereupon, the duke records, " the English began to love, and the French to fear him more." This same Lord Spencer, Mayor of London, had one fair daughter, a gay deceiver of her honoured sire, and as much a lover of fine clothes and service as any modern dame who orders gowns from Worth's, or buys her jewels on Bond Street. She loved, or at all events made up her mind to marry the Earl of Northampton, a man who was persona non grata to her father, who had no mind to wed his daughter, the greatest heiress in England, to this gentleman. But the young folks were not daunted. One day when the mayor gave a sixpence to the baker's boy, who had come with a covered barrow to bring bread, he learned later that the barrow con- tained not bread, but his own naughty Elizabeth, who was trundled off by her lover in disguise. When their baby came, some time later, grand- papa was wheedled into a reconciliation, and the gay young bride again lived in Crosby Place, the past forgiven. As an illustration of what wealthy ladies in Milton's boyhood demanded for their pleasure, a quotation from her letter written to her husband 168 flDUton's shortly after marriage, may prove entertaining : " I pray and beseech you to grant me, your most kind and loving wife, the sum of 2,600 quarterly to be paid. Also I would, besides that allowance, have 600 quarterly to be paid, for the performance of charitable works; and those things I would not, neither will be, accountable for. Also I will have three horses for my own saddle, that none should dare to lend or borrow ; none lend but I, none bor- row but you. Also I would have two gentlewomen . . . when I ride a hunting or a hawking, or travel from one house to another, I will have them attend- ing; so for either of these said women, I must and will have for either of them a horse. Also I will have six or eight gentlemen. And I will have my two coaches, one lined with velvet to myself, with four very fine horses; and a coach for my women, lined with cloth and laced with gold, otherwise with scarlet and laced with silver, with four good horses. Also I will have two coachmen. Also, at any time when I travel, I will be allowed not only coaches and spare horses for me and my women, but I will be having such carriages as shall be fitting for all; orderly, not pestering my things with my women's nor theirs with their chambermaids, nor theirs with their washmaids. . . . And I must have two foot- men; and my desire is that you defray all the flDtlton's Englanfc 169 charges for me. And for myself, besides my yearly allowance, I would have twenty gowns of apparel. Also I would have to put me in my purse 2,000 and 200, and so you to pay my debts. Also I would have 6,000 pounds to buy me jewels, and 4,000 to buy me a pearl chain. Now, seeing I have been and am so reasonable unto you, I pray you do find my children apparel and their schooling, and all my servants, men and women, their wages. . . . So for my drawing-chambers in all houses, I will have them delicately furnished, both with hangings, couch, canopy, glass, carpet, chairs, cushions, and all things thereunto belonging. ... I pray you when you be an earl to allow me 2,000 more than I now desire, and double attendance." The Countess of Pembroke, sister of Sir Philip Sidney and friend of Ben Jonson, once lived as mis- tress in the halls of Crosby Place. The latter's epi- taph upon her is well known : " Underneath this sable hearse Lies the subject of all verse : Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. Death, ere thou canst find another Good and fair and wise as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee." Crosby Hall originally occupied far more ground than is indicated by that part of it which stands 170 flMlton's England to-day. A wine cellar with finely groined roof prob- ably belonged to a crypt of its chapel, which has vanished. In its great hall, fifty-four feet long and forty feet high, one sees to-day, in beautiful modern workmanship, the arms of St. Helen's Priory, the earliest proprietor of the place ; of Sir John Crosby, its builder ; of the " crook-backed tyrant," Richard, and of the wise, the gentle, the learned author of the " Utopia." Its " louvre," or opening in the roof, is found in ancient halls in lieu of a chimney. This hall, however, has a regular fireplace, but perhaps of later construction. The louvre now is closed by the same piece of woodwork that formerly was raised above it. The beautiful carved roof itself is now as it was over four centuries ago, the chief glory of the place. Beneath it the most accomplished musicians of the past discoursed sweet music, and the noble, the learned, and the fashionable gathered at the hospitable board. Not unlikely, the author of " Comus " and " Lycidas," in the days before its owner fought under Charles I., may have been among their company. In Milton's blind old age, Crosby Hall became a Presbyterian meeting-house, and for a century after- ward devout worshippers sang psalms beneath its carved oak roof, which had echoed for two hundred years to sounds of mirth and feasting. < 73 ac "o S3 Z. C/5 O SI O v flDUton's jEnalanfc 171 A little to the left of Crosby Hall, through a low gateway, the sightseer passes from the noisy thor- oughfare into a quiet court. Its pavement covers the ancient garden of Crosby Place. But it is not all paved. A small green churchyard still occu- pies a part of the site of the ancient priory of St. Helen's, and surrounds the low Gothic church to which one descends a few steps from the modern pavement. Helena, the mother of Constantine, according to tradition, discovered the tomb of Christ and there- upon was canonised. From remote antiquity a church in her honour has stood here. Three cen- turies before Milton's day, the Benedictine nuns built a priory close by the ancient church. They built their church, and finally, getting possession of St. Helen's, incorporated it with their own. To-day the ends of the two naves, with a little cupola at the intersection, present an irregular and picturesque aspect; the interior, likewise, by its irregularities, recalls the curious origin of the structure. An agreeable harmony of differing forms and propor- tions has been accomplished. The old, old church, dim even on a sunshiny June day, is pervaded by a strange charm. Business has crowded to its very walls ; but the rumble of the streets is dulled by the intervening structures of modern prosaic type that 172 flDUton's hem in its peaceful solitude. Unlike the last three churches of which we have spoken, its doors are open all day long, and the traveller has not to make painful search amid warehouses and down cross streets for the sexton's keys. St. Helen's is large enough and beautiful enough to lure the frequent visitor; and perhaps it is a welcome refuge to many a perplexed and overwearied man of business, who, for a few moments, now and then, flees from his office and commercial cares, to rest and lift his thoughts to heavenly things within this sanctuary. St. Helen's is noted for its tombs, and has been called the Westminster Abbey of the " City." Here lies that noted and remarkable man, Sir Thomas Gresham. The visitor to the upper floor of the National Portrait Gallery, in those rooms where hang the portraits of the Elizabethan era, will remember the strong face and figure, elegantly clad, of the man whose bones rest here, and of whom we shall have more to say in connection with his college and the exchange which rose under his direc- tion. His monument is a large marble slab full of fossil shells, and raised table high. The date is 1579. From the beautiful, great window of the Nun's Church, the coloured rays of his own arms fall on his tomb. Upon the wall behind it are niches ; one of them /IMlton's Englanfc 173 faced by a little carved arcade, through which, it is said, the nuns who were in disgrace listened to the mass from the crypt below. A large ugly piece of masonry on the same wall near the farther end once contained the embalmed body of Francis Ban- croft, whose face was visible through the glass lid of his coffin. A few years since both body and tomb were placed within the crypt. According to his will, on the occasion of an annual memorial sermon for which he had arranged, his body was exhibited to certain humble folk for whom he had erected, in expiation of his misdeeds, the almshouses now at Mile End. Browning has with characteristic power depicted the Roman Jew scourged to the Christian church, and forced to hear a sermon once a year for his conversion. Perhaps some later poet may find as gruesome a theme for his sarcastic pen in the scene which imagination conjures up when these feeble and aged recipients of the gift of this erratic snob were yearly brought to listen to the tale of his benefactions, and to gaze upon his shrivelling corpse. Bancroft as a magistrate had been so unpopular that the people tried to upset his coffin on its way to the tomb, and pealed the bells. The oldest monument in the church is to Thomas Langton, chaplain, buried in the choir in 1350. One tomb bears the remarkable name of Sir Julius 174 flMlton'8 Caesar. The inscription is in form of a legal docu- ment with a broken seal, in which Sir Julius gives his bond to Heaven to surrender his life whenever it shall please God to call him. If one would see Sir Julius as Milton saw him, let him look upon his por- trait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery with his great contemporaries. The obdurate father-in-law, the rich Sir John Spencer of Crosby Hall, is commemorated, by his son-in-law, the Earl of Northampton, in a stately alabaster tomb. The figures of Sir John and his wife rest under a double canopy, and at their feet kneels the runaway daughter, in the enormous stiff crinoline of 1609, the date of her father's death. Some thousand men in mourning cloaks are said to have attended his funeral. The tomb of Sir John Crosby and his wife, of 1475, the beautiful and perfectly preserved tomb of Oteswich and his wife, of the time of Henry IV., and the fine figure of a girl reading, are a few of the works of art that deserve careful attention. The beauty of that which antedates the Tudor and Stuart periods, as con- trasted with the works of art of those periods, is almost as marked as it is at Westminster Abbey. When Milton lived he must have seen still stand- ing the refectory and cloisters, and the old hall of the nuns, which was later used by the Company flDUton's England 175 of Leathersellers. The whole group of buildings, with the adjacent gardens, must have formed a highly picturesque reminder of the days before King " Hal " had ruthlessly swept his besom of destruc- tion over the many houses in the land which shel- tered nuns and friars. During Milton's life there stood on Bishopsgate Street the first charitable institution for the insane that was ever established. Its name, " Bethlehem Hospital," was corrupted into Bedlam, and has become a term of general application to scenes of disorder. Just after Milton's death, it was removed to Southwark, where the gray dome of the present structure rises conspicuous amid the London smoke. Passing northeast along the crowded thorough- fare of Bishopsgate Street, but a short distance from St. Helen's, the student of antiquities may see, al- most concealed by parasitic houses, the little ancient church of St. Ethelburga. He will need to cross the street in order to perceive the name inscribed in large letters upon the church, beneath the short tower and cupola, and above the clock and the shop that masks its front. In Milton's boyhood, this church was ancient, and had been standing for at least three hundred and fifty years, for it is men- tioned as early as 1366. Here Chaucer may have knelt to say his Paternosters. 176 flDilton's Bnglanfc The visitor should time his coming to the middle of the day, when the door opening upon the sidewalk is unlocked, and he may enter into the solemn little sanctuary, and at the farther end step out into the tiny garden at the rear. Here, if it be summer, he may sit in this shady retreat and meditate upon the history of the bit of ancient wall said by the verger to be a Roman wall, the fragments of which are preserved here. 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. The church stands on the site of a much older one, and is named from the daughter of the French princess, Bertha, who brought to Canterbury, to the home of her Saxon husband, Ethelbert, the Christian religion, which was then new to pagan England. Visitors to the little church of St. Martin's at Can- terbury will recall the font in which this king was baptised into the faith of his wife. Not far down Bishopsgate Street, upon the oppo- flDilton'5 England 177 site side from St. Ethelburga's, when Milton lived, stood a house with such a marvellous carved front with oriel windows, that when it made way for a modern business block, it was transferred to the South Kensington Museum, where it may now be seen in one of its lofty halls. In Milton's youth, Sir Paul Pindar, its owner, was the richest merchant in the kingdom, and often loaned money to James I. and his son Charles. As ambassador to Constanti- nople, he did much to improve England's trade in the East. On his return, when Milton was a schoolboy of a dozen years at St. Paul's School, he brought, among his other treasures, a great diamond, valued at 30,000, which he loaned to the king to wear at his opening of the Parliaments; it was afterward sold to Charles I. Twenty years later, when Crom- well and Milton were fighting for the rights of Eng- lishmen, and Charles's strength was failing, this same Paul Pindar provided funds for the escape of Queen Henrietta Maria and her children. He gave 10,000 for the restoration, before the fire, of St. Paul's Cathedral. But his loyalty to the house of Stuart was put to a hard test, for the king borrowed such enormous sums that he was all but ruined. When Milton walked down Bishops- gate Street, past his quaint dwelling-house, he must have seen the mulberry-trees planted in the park 178 flDtlton's Jn0lan& to please James I. by his devoted subject. These ancient mulberry-trees disappeared only within the memory of men now living. Passing westward along the northern site of the old city wall, in search of the few landmarks that escaped the Great Fire and still remain, we come to that church of all others most dear to Milton lovers. St. Giles's, Cripplegate, is not easily entered on Sun- day, except during hours of service. But a courteous question to the burly guardian of the peace who patrols the neighbourhood may effect an unlocking of the gates and a quiet stroll through the green garden that surrounds the church upon two sides. The big policeman is a good talker, and relates with gusto the ravages of the great fire a few years since, which came so near as to melt the lead upon the church roof. The massive wall which forms a corner of the green yard is a bastion of the city wall in the time of Edward IV. Possibly the long, narrow bricks which still gleam red in the lower part may be a lingering remnant of the old Roman wall. Cer- tainly they are the type that the Romans were wont to use. The policeman assures us that there are mysterious " submarine " passages leading from this wall, and one may well believe almost anything as one thinks of the strange sights that it has witnessed. - si 2 *j a 8.* r* C >i -g-2 ^ E 1 3 '* c S s c -g 2 flMlton'8 EttQlaufc 179 High walls of business blocks of nondescript style replace the gaps made by the recent fire, which fortu- nately stopped before it touched the narrow, gabled houses of wood which cluster close about the church. These give almost the only example to-day in London of the type of building which housed the poorer class of Londoners of Milton's time. The church is on the site of an older one of 1090, and was built about one hundred years before Mil- ton's birth. It is late Perpendicular, and has some good detail. As one enters the church from the garden, the first monument on his right is Milton's, which con- tains his bust, under a Gothic canopy. The poet's bones lie by his father's, under the pavement near the choir. According to the evidence of a little book written about 1790, it seems that his coffin was opened by irresponsible persons, who found the lead much decayed and easily bent back the top. A servant-maid for a consideration let in sightseers through a window, some of whom, after satisfying their curiosity in gazing on the well-preserved fig- ure, snatched hair and teeth and even an arm-bone to carry away as relics. A later authority questions whether it is certain that the grave thus desecrated was indeed Milton's or another's, and leaves a grain flDilton's of comfort in the thought that perhaps his honoured remains still rest untouched by vandals. Within this church Ben Jonson was married in 1623, and here Oliver Cromwell, a sturdy youth of twenty-one, married his bride on August 22d in 1620. Little thought the parson, as he and Eliza- beth Bourchier knelt before him, to be joined in holy wedlock, that one day he would be entitled not only " Protector of England," but " Protector of Prot- estantism." A marvellous man, this Oliver, whose deeds left much to be forgiven by a later age, for they sometimes had more of the spirit of Joshua than of the Founder of the Christian Faith, and yet as a lover of England, and a minister to the court of Queen Victoria from England's lusty kin beyond the sea has said : " He lived to make his simple oaken chair More terrible, more grandly beautiful, Than any throne before or after of a British king. One of the few who have a right to rank With the true Makers ; for his spirit wrought Order from Chaos ; proved that right divine Dwelt only in the excellence of truth ; And far within old Darkness' hostile lines Advanced and pitched the shining tents of Light Nor shall the grateful Muse forget to tell, That not the least among his many claims /IMlton'9 EnQlanfc 181 To deathless honour he was MILTON'S friend, A man not second among those who lived To show us that the poet's lyre demands An arm of tougher sinew than the sword." " A Glance Behind tJie Curtain" Lowell. One grave within the church may have been dear to Milton besides that of his honoured father. As he lived only one generation removed from the martyrs of Smithfield, he must often have pored over the record of their heroism and cruel deaths, by Fox, the famous martyrologist. Near the west door lies the slab above his grave. The date is 1587. Here, no doubt, Milton, who, as has been said, at different times had dwellings near the church, must often have entered within its doors and paused. Says the historian Marsden : " Fox placed the Church of England under greater obligations than any writer of his time, and had his recompense in an old age of poverty and shame. . . . Nor were his writings undervalued even then ; they were com- manded to be chained up in churches by the side of the homilies and the English Bible ; . . . thus the ' Book of Martyrs ' stood amongst the high, au- thentic records of our Church, whilst its venerable author yet lived." Frobisher, the great navigator, is also buried within the church. i8a flMlton's England On the left wall, as one faces the choir, is a curi- ous doggerel inscription to one Busbie. If it be on a Sunday afternoon, and the children have gathered for the Sunday school, it may be interesting to pause a bit, as we have done, before the epitaph, and, while copying it, to lend a half ear to the teach- ing that goes on within hearing. Three small boys sit on a bench before a solemn youth who holds a book and instructs their infant minds as follows : " Who is God ? Where is God ? How many per- sons are there in the Godhead ? Keep still there don't answer until it is your turn. When God put Adam and Eve out of Eden, what did he prom- ise them ? " " That they should be saved," mumbles one youngster. " Whom did he promise should save them? " " His Son." " What do we call his Son?" "Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." The next class and all the others scattered through the church are progressing in Christian nurture in much the same way, and one wonders whether the pedagogical skill of the teachers has advanced one whit in all the hundreds of years since the church was built. We hear no " opening exercises," no joyous singing, no tender, earnest talk about right- doing and the temptations that little boys on Fore Street may encounter on Monday morning. There is nothing but a purely formal catechising of these flDilton's England 183 eager, impressionable little souls as to a theology that they cannot understand, and a history of the world which their first lesson on geology will under- mine. This modern Sunday school is the one blot upon the memory of the beautiful old church so dear to every lover of Milton. On a week day one may stand on Redcross Street, and behold, as did the travellers in " The Hand of Ethelberta," " the bold shape of the tower they sought, clothed in every neutral shade, standing clear against the sky, dusky and grim in its upper stages, and hoary gray below, where every corner of stone was rounded off by the waves of wind and storm. All people were busy here; our visitors seemed to be the only idle persons that the city contained ; and there was no dissonance there never is between antiquity and such beehive industry. . . . This intramural stir was a fly-wheel, transparent by infinite motion, through which Milton and his day could be seen as if nothing intervened." CHAPTER XI. GRESHAM COLLEGE. AUSTIN FRIARS. GUILD- HALL. ST. MARY'S, ALDERM ANBURY. CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. ST. SEPULCHRE'S. Milton's lifetime and for nearly a century after, there stood on Gresham Street and Basinghall Street the famous Gresham College, founded in 1579, in honour of Sir Thomas Gresham, who gave the Royal Ex- change to the city on condition that the corporation should institute lectures on divinity, civil law, astronomy, music, geometry, rhetoric, and physics, to be delivered at his residence. His dwelling-house was a spacious edifice of brick and timber, " with open courts and covered walks which seemed all so well suited for such an intention, as if Sir Thomas had it in view, at the time he built his house." Seven professors were appointed and lectured in the morning in Latin, in the afternoon in English for two hours each day. Among the number was Sir Christopher Wren, who not only was the greatest architect, but, as is elsewhere said, was one of the 184 a