I did not hold the reader’s attention long to the nightmare tragedies of Webster and Ford, though they show shining passages of amazing dramatic power. Marston was touched upon, and that satiric vein of his, better known perhaps than his more ambitious work. We spoke of Massinger, whose money-monster, Giles Overreach, makes one think of the railway wreckers of our time; then came the gracious and popular Beaumont and Fletcher, twins in work and in friendship; the former dying in the same year with Shakespeare, and Fletcher dying the same year with King James (1625). I spoke of that Prince Harry who promised well, but died young, and of Charles, whose sad story will come to ampler mention in our present talk. We made record of the death of Ben Jonson—of the hack-writing service of James Howell—of the dilettante qualities of Sir Henry Wotton, and of the ever-delightful work and enduring fame of the old angler, Izaak Walton. And last we closed our talk with sketches of two poets: the one, George Herbert, to whom his priestly work and his saintly verse were “all in all;” and the other, Robert Herrick, born to a goldsmith’s craft, but making verses that glittered more than all the jewels of Cheapside.

King Charles and his Friends.

We open this morning upon times when New-England towns were being planted among the pine-woods, and the decorous, courtly, unfortunate Charles I. had newly come to the throne. Had the King been only plain Charles Stuart, he would doubtless have gone through life with the reputation of an amiable, courteous gentleman, not over-sturdy in his friendships[47]—a fond father and good husband, with a pretty taste in art and in books, but strongly marked with some obstinacies about the ways of wearing his rapier, or of tying his cravat, or of overdrawing his bank account.

In the station that really fell to him those obstinacies took hold upon matters which brought him to grief. The man who stood next to Charles, and who virtually governed him, was that George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who by his fine doublets, fine dancing, and fine presence, had very early commended himself to the old King James, and now lorded it with the son. He was that Steenie who in Scott’s Fortunes of Nigel plays the braggadocio of the court: he had attended Prince Charles upon that Quixotic errand of his, incognito, across Europe, to play the wooer at the feet of the Infanta of Spain; and when nothing came of all that show of gallantry and the lavishment of jewels upon the dusky heiress of Castile, the same Buckingham had negotiated the marriage with the French princess, Henrietta. He was a brazen courtier, a shrewd man of the world; full of all accomplishments; full of all profligacy. He made and unmade bishops and judges, and bolstered the King in that antagonism to the Commons of England which was rousing the dangerous indignation of such men as Eliot and Hampden and Pym. Private assassination, however, took him off before the coming of the great day of wrath. You must not confound this Duke of Buckingham with another George Villiers, also Duke of Buckingham, who was his son, and who figured largely in the days of Charles II.—being even more witty, and more graceful, and more profligate—if possible—than his father; a literary man withal, and the author of a play[48] which had great vogue.

Another striking figure about the court of Charles was a small, red-faced man, keen-eyed, sanctimonious, who had risen from the humble ranks (his father having been a clothier in a small town of Berkshire) to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. So starched was he in his High-Church views that the Pope had offered him the hat of a cardinal. He made the times hard for Non-conformists; your ancestors and mine, if they emigrated in those days, may very likely have been pushed over seas by the edicts of Archbishop Laud. His monstrous intolerance was provoking, and intensifying that agitation in the religious world of England which Buckingham had already provoked in the political world; and the days of wrath were coming.

This Archbishop Laud is not only keen-sighted but he is bountiful and helpful within the lines of his own policy. He endowed Oxford with great, fine buildings. Some friend has told him that a young preacher of wonderful attractions has made his appearance at St. Paul’s—down on a visit from Cambridge—a young fellow, wonderfully handsome, with curling locks and great eyes full of expression, and a marvellous gift of language; and the Archbishop takes occasion to see him or hear him; and finding that beneath such exterior there is real vigor and learning, he makes place for him as Fellow at Oxford; appoints him presently his own chaplain, and gives him a living down in Rutland.

Jeremy Taylor.

This priest, of such eloquence and beauty, was Jeremy Taylor,[49] who was the son of a barber at Cambridge, was entered at Caius College as sizar, or charity scholar, just one year after Milton was entered at Christ College, and from the door of his father’s shop may have looked admiringly many a time upon the

which belonged even then to the young Puritan poet. But Jeremy Taylor was not a Puritan; never came to know Milton personally. One became the great advocate and the purest illustration of the tenets of Episcopacy in England; and the other—eventually—their most effective and weighty opponent. In 1640, only one year after Jeremy Taylor was established in his pleasant Rutland rectory, Archbishop Laud went to the Tower, not to come forth till he should go to the scaffold; and in the Civil War, breaking out presently, Jeremy Taylor joined the Royalists, was made chaplain to the King, saw battle and siege and wounds; but in the top of the strife he is known by his silvery voice and his exuberant piety, and by the rare eloquence which colors prayer and sermon with the bloody tinge of war and the pure light of heaven. He is wounded (as I said), he is imprisoned, and finally, by the chances of battle, he is stranded in a small country town near to Caermarthen, in South Wales.

The little boat he speaks of was the obscure mountain home where he taught school, and where he received, some time, visits from the famous John Evelyn,[50] who wrote charming books in these days about woods and gardens, and who befriended the poor stranded chaplain. Here, too, he wrote that monument of toleration, The Liberty of Prophesying, a work which would be counted broad in its teachings even now, and which alienated a great many of his more starched fellows in the Church. A little fragment from the closing pages of this book will show at once his method of illustration and his extreme liberality:

Jeremy Taylor did not learn this teaching from Archbishop Laud, but from the droiture of his own conscience, and the kindness of his own heart. He wrote much other and most delectable matter in his years of Welsh retirement, when a royal chaplain was a bugbear in England. He lost sons, too—who had gone to the bad under the influences of that young Duke of Buckingham I mentioned; but at last, when the restoration of Charles II. came, he was given a bishopric in the wilds of Ireland, in a sour, gloomy country, with sour and gloomy looks all around him, which together, broke him down at the age of fifty-five. I have spoken thus much of him, because he is a man to be remembered as the most eloquent, and the most kindly, and the most tolerant of all the Church of England people in that day; and because his treatises on Holy Living and Holy Dying will doubtless give consolation to thousands of desponding souls, in the years to come, as they have in the years that are past. He was saturated through and through with learning and with piety; and they gurgled from him together in a great tide of mellifluous language. The ardors and fervors of Elizabethan days seem to have lapped over upon him in that welter of the Commonwealth wars. He has been called the Shakespeare of the pulpit; I should rather say the Spenser—there is such unchecked, and uncheckable, affluence of language and illustration; thought and speech struggling together for precedence, and stretching on and on, in ever so sweet and harmonious jangle of silvery sounds.

A Royalist and a Puritan.

Another Royalist of these times, of a different temper, was Sir John Suckling:[52] a poet too, very rich, bred in luxury, a man of the world, who had seen every court in Europe worth seeing, who dashed off songlets and ballads between dinners and orgies; which songlets often hobbled on their feet by reason of those multiplied days of high living; but yet they had prettinesses in them which have kept them steadily alive all down to these prosaic times. I give a sample from his “Ballad upon a Wedding,” though it may be over-well known:

He was a frequenter of a tavern which stood at the Southwark end of London Bridge. Aubrey says he was one of the best bowlers of his time. He played at cards, too, rarely well, and “did use to practise by himself abed.” He was rich; he was liberal; he was accomplished—almost an “Admirable Crichton.” His first military service was in support of Gustavus Adolphus, in Germany. At the time of trouble with the Scots (1639) he raised a troop for the King’s service that bristled with gilded spurs and trappings; but he never did much serious fighting on British soil; and in 1641—owing to what was counted treasonable action in behalf of Strafford, he was compelled to leave England.

He crossed over to the Continent, wandered into Spain, and somehow became (as a current tradition reported) a victim of the Inquisition there, and was put to cruel torture; a strange subject surely to be put to the torture—in this life. He was said to be broken by this experience, and strayed away, after his escape from those priest-fangs, to Paris, where, not yet thirty-five, and with such promise in him of better things, he came to his death in some mysterious way: some said by a knife-blade which a renegade servant had fastened in his boot; but most probably by suicide. There is, however, great obscurity in regard to his life abroad.

He wrote some plays, which had more notice than they should have had; possibly owing to a revival of dramatic interests very strangely brought about in Charles I.’s time—a revival which was due to the over-eagerness and exaggeration of attacks made upon it by the Puritans: noticeable among these was that of William Prynne[53]—“utter barrister” of Lincoln’s Inn. “Utter barrister” does not mean Æsthetic barrister, but one not yet come to full range of privilege.

This Prynne was a man of dreadful insistence and severities; he would have made a terrific schoolmaster. He was the author, in the course of his life, of no less than one hundred and eighty distinct works; many of them, it is true, were pamphlets, but others terribly bulky—an inextinguishable man; that onslaught on the drama and dramatic people, and play-goers, including people of the Court, called Histriomastix, was a foul-mouthed, close-printed, big quarto of a thousand pages. One would think such a book could do little harm; but he was tried for it, was heavily fined, and sentenced to stand in the pillory and lose his ears. He pleaded strongly against the sentence, and for its remission upon “divers passages [as he says in his petition] fallen inconsiderately from my pen in a book called Histriomastix.”

But he pleaded in vain; there was no sympathy for him. Ought there to be for a man who writes a book of a thousand quarto pages—on any subject? The violence of this diatribe made a reaction in favor of the theatre; his fellow-barristers of Lincoln’s Inn hustled him out of their companionship, and got up straightway a gay masque to demonstrate their scorn of his reproof.

They say he bore his punishment sturdily, though the fumes of his book, which was burned just below his nose, came near to suffocate him. Later still, he underwent another sentence for offences growing out of his unrelenting and imperious Puritanism—this time in company with one Burton (not Robert Burton,[54] of the Anatomy of Melancholy), who was a favorite with the people and had flowers strown before him as he walked to the pillory. But Prynne had no flowers, and his ears having been once cropt, the hangman had a rough time (a very rough time for Prynne) in getting at his task. Thereafter he was sent to prison in the isle of Jersey; but he kept writing, ears or no ears, and we may hear his strident voice again—hear it in Parliament, too.

Cowley and Waller.

Two other poets of these times I name, because of the great reputation they once had; a reputation far greater than they maintain now. These are Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller.[55] The former of these (Cowley) was the son of a London grocer, whose shop was not far from the home of Izaak Walton; he was taught at Westminster School, and at Cambridge, and blazed up precociously at the age of fifteen in shining verses.[56] Indeed his aptitude, his ingenuities, his scholarship, kept him in the first rank of men of letters all through his day, and gave him burial between Spenser and Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. He would take a humbler place if he were disentombed now; yet, in Cromwell’s time, or in that of Charles II., the average reading man knew Cowley better than he knew Milton, and admired him more. I give you a fragment of what is counted his best; it is from his “Hymn to Light:”

If I were to read a fragment from Tennyson in contrast with Cowley’s treatment of a similar theme I think you might wonder less why his reputation has suffered gradual eclipse. Shall we try? Cowley wrote a poem in memory of a dear friend, and I take one of the pleasantest of its verses:

Tennyson wrote of his dead friend, and here is a verse of it:

Can I be wrong in thinking that under the solemn lights of these stanzas the earlier poet’s verse grows dim?

Cowley was a good Kingsman; and in the days of the Commonwealth held position of secretary to the exiled Queen Henrietta, in Paris; he did, at one time, think of establishing himself in one of the American colonies; returned, however, to his old London haunts, and, wearying of the city, sought retirement at Chertsey, on the Thames’ banks (where his old house is still to be seen), and where he wrote, in graceful prose and cumbrous verse, on subjects related to country life—which he loved overmuch—and died there among his trees and the meadows.

Waller was both Kingsman and Republican—steering deftly between extremes, so as to keep himself and his estates free from harm. This will weaken your sympathy for him at once—as it should do. He lived in a grand way—affected the philosopher; was such a philosopher as quick-witted selfishness makes; yet he surely had wonderful aptitudes in dealing with language, and could make its harmonious numbers flow where and how he would. Waller has come to a casual literary importance in these days under the deft talking and writing of those dilettante critics who would make this author the pivot (as it were) on which British poesy swung away from the “hysterical riot of the Jacobeans” into measured and orderly classic cadence. It is a large influence to attribute to a single writer, though his grace and felicities go far to justify it. And it is further to be remembered that such critics are largely given to the discussion of technique only; they write as distinct art-masters; while we, who are taking our paths along English Letters for many other things besides art and rhythm, will, I trust, be pardoned for thinking that there is very little pith or weighty matter in this great master of the juggleries of sound.

Waller married early in life, but lost his wife while still very young; thenceforth, for many years—a gay and coquettish widower—he pursued the Lady Dorothy Sidney with a storm of love verses, of which the best (and it is really amazingly clever in its neatness and point) is this:

But neither this, nor a hundred others, brought the Lady Dorothy to terms: she married—like a wise woman—somebody else. And he? He went on singing as chirpingly as ever—sang till he was over eighty.

John Milton.

And now we come to a poet of a larger build—a weightier music—and of a more indomitable spirit; a poet who wooed the world with his songs; and the world has never said him “Nay.” I mean John Milton.[57]

He is the first great poet we have encountered, in respect to whom we can find in contemporary records full details of family, lodgement, and birth. A great many of these details have been swooped together in Dr. Masson’s recently completed Life and Times of Milton, which I would more earnestly commend to your reading were it not so utterly long—six fat volumes of big octavo—in the which the pith and kernel about Milton, the man, floats around like force meat-balls in a great sea of historic soup. Our poet was born in Bread Street, just out of Cheapside, in London, in the year 1608.

In Cheapside—it may be well to recall—stood the Mermaid Tavern; and it stood not more than half a block away from the corner where Milton’s father lived. And on that corner—who knows?—the boy, eight years old, or thereby, when Shakespeare died, may have lingered to see the stalwart Ben Jonson go tavern-ward for his cups, or may be, John Marston, or Dekker, or Philip Massinger—all these being comfortably inclined to taverns.

The father of this Bread Street lad was a scrivener by profession; that is, one who drafted legal papers; a well-to-do man as times went; able to give his boy some private schooling; proud of him, too; proud of his clear white and red face, and his curly auburn hair carefully parted—almost a girl’s face; so well-looking, indeed, that the father employed a good Dutch painter of those days to take his portrait; the portrait is still in existence—dating from 1618, when the poet was ten, showing him in a banded velvet doublet and a stiff vandyke collar, trimmed about with lace. In those times, or presently after, he used to go to St. Paul’s Grammar School; of which Lily, of Lily’s Latin Grammar, was the first master years before. It was only a little walk for him, through Cheapside, and then, perhaps, Paternoster Row—the school being under the shadow of that great cathedral, which was burned fifty years after. He studied hard there; studied at home, too; often, he says himself, when only fourteen, studying till twelve at night. He loved books, and he loved better to be foremost.

He turns his hand to poetry even then. Would you like to see a bit of what he wrote at fifteen? Well, here it is, in a scrap of psalmody:

It is not of the best, but I think will compare favorably with most that is written by young people of fifteen. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, whither he went shortly afterward—his father being hopeful that he would take orders in the Church—he was easily among the first; he wrote Latin hexameters, quarrelled with his tutor (notwithstanding his handsome face had given to him the mocking title of “The Lady”), had his season of rustication up in London, sees all that is doing in theatrics thereabout, but goes back to study more closely than ever.

The little Christmas song,

belongs to his Cambridge life; though his first public appearance as an author was in the “Ode to Shakespeare,” attaching with other and various commendatory verses to the second folio edition of that author’s dramas, published in the year 1632.

Milton was then twenty-four, had been six or seven at Cambridge; did not accept kindly his father’s notion of taking orders in the Church, but had exaggerated views of a grandiose life of study and literary work; in which views his father—sensible man that he was—did not share; but—kind man that he was—he did not strongly combat them. So we find father and son living together presently, some twenty miles away from London, in a little country hamlet called Horton, where the old gentleman had purchased a cottage for a final home when his London business was closed up.

Here, too, our young poet studies—not books only, borrowed where he can, and bought if he can; but studies also fields and trees and skies and rivers, and all the natural objects that are to take embalmment sooner or later in his finished verse. Here he wrote, almost within sight of Windsor towers, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” You know them; but they are always new and always fresh; freshest when you go out from London on a summer’s day to where the old tower of Horton Church still points the road, and trace there (if you can)

In reading such verse we do not know where to stop—at least, I do not. He writes, too, in that country quietude, within sight of Windsor forest, his charming “Lycidas,” one of the loveliest of memorial poems, and the “Comus,” which alone of all the masques of that time, and preceding times, has gone in its entirety into the body of living English literature.

In 1638, then thirty years old, equipped in all needed languages and scholarship, he goes for further study and observation to the Continent; he carries letters from Sir Henry Wotton; he sees the great Hugo Grotius at Paris; sees the sunny country of olives in Provence; sees the superb front of Genoa piling out from the blue waters of the Mediterranean; sees Galileo at Florence—the old philosopher too blind to study the face of the studious young Englishman that has come so far to greet him. He sees, too, what is best and bravest at Rome; among the rest St. Peter’s, just then brought to completion, and in the first freshness of its great tufa masonry. He is fÊted by studious young Italians; has the freedom of the Accademia della Crusca; blazes out in love sonnets to some dark-eyed signorina of Bologna; returns by Venice, and by Geneva where he hobnobs with the Diodati friends of his old school-fellow, Charles Diodati; and comes home to England to find changes brewing—the Scotch marching over the border with battle-drums—the Long Parliament portending—Strafford and Laud in way of impeachment—his old father drawing near to his end—and bloody war tainting all the air.

The father’s fortune, never large, is found crippled at his death; and Milton, now thirty-two, must look out for his own earnings. He takes a house; first in Fleet Street, then near Aldersgate, with garden attached, where he has three or four pupils; his nephew Phillips[58] among them.

Milton’s Marriage.

It was while living there that he brought back, one day, a bride—Mary Powell; she was a young maiden in her teens, daughter of a well-established loyalist family near to Oxford. The young bride is at the quiet student’s house in Aldersgate a month, perhaps two, when she goes down for a visit to her mother; she is to come back at Michaelmas; but Michaelmas comes, and she stays; Milton writes, and she stays; Milton writes again, and she stays; he sends a messenger—and she stays.

What is up, then, in this new household? Milton, the scholar and poet, is up, straightway, to a treatise on divorce, whereby he would make it easy to undo yokes where parties are unevenly yoked. There is much scriptural support and much shrewd reasoning brought by his acuteness to the overthrow of those rulings which the common-sense of mankind has established; even now those who contend for easy divorce get their best weapons out of this old Miltonian armory.

Meantime the poet went on teaching, I suspect rapping his boys over the knuckles in these days for slight cause. But what does it all mean? It means incongruity; not the first case, nor will it be the last. He—abstracted, austere, bookish, with his head in the clouds; she—with her head in ribbons, and possibly loving orderly housewifery:[59] intellectual affinities and sympathies are certainly missing.

Fancy the poet just launched into the moulding of such verse as this:

when a servant gives sharp rat-tat at the door, “Please, sir, missus says, ‘Dinner’s waiting!’” But the poet sweeps on—

And there is another rat-tat!—“Please, sir, missus says, ‘Dinner is all getting cold.’” Still the poet ranges in fairyland—

And now, maybe, it is the pretty mistress who comes with a bounce—“Mr. Milton, are you ever coming?”—and a quick bang of the door, which is a way some excellent petulant young women have of—not breaking the commandments.

There is a little prosaic half-line in the “Paradise Lost” (I don’t think it was ever quoted before), which in this connection seems to me to have a very pathetic twang in it; ’tis about Paradise and its charms—

However, it happens that through the advocacy of friends on both sides this great family breach is healed, or seems to be; and two years after, Milton and his recreant, penitent, and restored wife are living again together; lived together till her death; and she became the mother of his three daughters: Anne, who was crippled, never even learned to write, and used to be occupied with her needle; Mary, who was his amanuensis and reader most times, and Deborah, the youngest, who came to perform similar offices for him afterward.

Meantime the Royalist cause had suffered everywhere. The Powells (his wife’s family having come to disaster) did—with more or less children—go to live with Milton. Whether the presence of the mother-in-law mended the poet’s domesticity I doubt; doubt, indeed, if ever there was absolute harmony there.

On the year of the battle of Naseby appeared Milton’s first unpretending booklet of poems,[60] containing with others, those already named, and not before printed. Earlier, however, in the lifetime of the poet had begun the issue of those thunderbolts of pamphlets which he wrote on church discipline, education, on the liberty of unlicensed printing, and many another topic—cumbrous with great trails of intricate sentences, wondrous word-heaps, sparkling with learning, flaming with anger—with convolutions like a serpent’s, and as biting as serpents.

A show is kept up of his school-keeping, but with doubtful success; for in 1647 we learn that “he left his great house in Barbican, and betook himself to a smaller in High Holborn, among those that open back into Lincoln’s Inn Fields;” but there is no poem-making of importance (save one or two wondrous Sonnets) now, or again, until he is virtually an old man.

The Royal Tragedy.

Meantime the tide of war is flowing back and forth over England and engrossing all hopes and fears. The poor King is one while a captive of the Scots, and again a captive of the Parliamentary forces, and is hustled from palace to castle. What shall be done with the royal prisoner? There are thousands who have fought against him who would have been most glad of his escape; but there are others—weary of his doublings—who have vowed that this son of Baal shall go to his doom and bite the dust.

Finally, and quickly too (for events move with railroad speed), his trial comes—the trial of a King. A strange event for these English, who have venerated and feared and idolized so many kings and queens of so many royal lines. How the Royalist verse-makers must have fumed and raved! Milton, then just turned of forty, was, as I have said, living near High Holborn; the King was eight years his senior—was in custody at St. James’s, a short way above Piccadilly. He brought to the trial all his kingly dignity, and wore it unflinchingly—refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the Parliament, cuddling always obstinately that poor figment of the divine right of kings—which even then Milton, down in his Holborn garden, was sharpening his pen to undermine and destroy.

The sentence was death—a sentence that gave pause to many. Fairfax, and others such, would have declared against it; even crop-eared Prynne, who had suffered so much for his truculent Puritanism, protested against it; two-thirds of the population of England would have done the same; but London and England and the army were all in the grip of an iron man whose name was Cromwell. Time sped; the King had only two days to live; his son Charles was over seas, never believing such catastrophe could happen; only two royal children—a princess of thirteen and a boy of eight—came to say adieu to the royal prisoner. “He sat with them some time at the window, taking them on his knees, and kissing them, and talking with them of their duty to their mother, and to their elder brother, the Prince of Wales.” He carried his habitual dignity and calmness with him on the very morning, going between files of soldiers through St. James’s Park—pointing out a tree which his brother Henry had planted—and on, across to Whitehall, where had come off many a gay, rollicking masque of Ben Jonson’s, in presence of his father, James I. He was led through the window of the banqueting-hall—the guides show it now—where he had danced many a night, and so to the scaffold, just without the window, whence he could see up and down the vast court of Whitehall, from gate to gate,[61] paved with a great throng of heads. Even then and there rested on him the same kingly composure; the fine oval face, pale but unmoved; the peaked beard carefully trimmed, as you see it in the well-known pictures by Vandyke, at Windsor or at Blenheim.

He has a word with old Bishop Juxon, who totters beside him; a few words for others who are within hearing; examines the block, the axe; gives some brief cautions to the executioner; then, laying down his head, lifts his own hand for signal, and with a crunching thud of sound it is over.

And poet Milton—has he shown any relenting? Not one whit; he is austere among the most austere; in this very week he is engaged upon his defence of regicide, with its stinging, biting sentences. He is a friend and party to the new Commonwealth; two months only after the execution of the King, he is appointed Secretary to the State Council, and under it is conducting the Latin correspondence. He demolishes, by order of the same Council, the Eikon Basilike (supposed in that day to be the king’s work) with his fierce onslaught of the Eikonoklastes. His words are bitter as gall; he even alludes, in no amiable tone—with acrid emphasis, indeed—to the absurd rumor, current with some, that the King, through his confidential instrument, Buckingham, had poisoned his own father.

He is further appointed to the answering of Salmasius,[62] an answer with which all Europe presently rings. It was in these days, and with such work crowding him, that his vision fails; and to these days, doubtless belongs that noble sonnet on his blindness, which is worth our staying for, here and now:

Wonderful, is it not, that such a sonnet—so full of rare eloquence and rare philosophy—so full of all that most hallows our infirm humanity could be written by one—pouring out his execrations on the head of Salmasius—at strife in his own household—at strife (as we shall find) with his own daughters? Wonderful, is it not, that Carlyle could write as he did about the heroism of the humblest as well as bravest, and yet grow into a rage—over his wife’s shoulders and at her cost—with a rooster crowing in his neighbor’s yard? Ah, well, the perfect ones have not yet come upon our earth, whatever perfect poems they may write.

Change of Kings.

But at last comes a new turn of the wheel to English fortunes. Cromwell is dead; the Commonwealth is ended; all London is throwing its cap in the air over the restoration of Charles II. Poor blind Milton[63] is in hiding and in peril. His name is down among those accessory to the murder of the King. The ear-cropped Prynne—who is now in Parliament, and who hates Milton as Milton scorned Prynne—is very likely hounding on those who would bring the great poet to judgment. ’Tis long matter of doubt. Past his house near Red Lion Square the howling mob drag the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton, and hang them in their dead ghastliness.

Milton, however, makes lucky escape, with only a short term of prison; but for some time thereafter he was in fear of assassination. Such a rollicking daredevil, as Scott in his story of Woodstock, has painted for us in Roger Wildrake (of whom there were many afloat in those times) would have liked no better fun than to run his rapier through such a man as John Milton; and in those days he would have been pardoned for it.

That capital story of Woodstock one should read when they are upon these times of the Commonwealth. There are, indeed, anachronisms in it; kings escaping too early or too late, or dying a little out of time to accommodate the exigencies of the plot; but the characterization is marvellously spirited; and you see the rakehelly cavaliers, and the fine old king-ridden knights, and the sour-mouthed Independents, and the glare and fumes and madness of the civil war, as you find them in few history pages.

Milton, meanwhile, in his quiet home again, revolves his old project of a great sacred poem. He taxes every visitor who can, to read to him in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch. His bookly appetite is omnivorous. His daughters have large share of this toil. Poor girls, they have been little taught, and not wisely. They read what they read only by rote, and count it severe task-work. Their mother is long since dead, and a second wife, who lived only for a short time, dead too. We know very little of that second wife; but she is embalmed forever in a sonnet, from which I steal this fragment:—

The Miltonian reading and the work goes on, but affection, I fear, does not dominate the household; the daughters overtasked, with few indulgences, make little rebellions; and the blind, exacting old man is as unforgiving as the law. Americans should take occasion to see the great picture by Munkacsy, in the Lenox Gallery, New York, of Milton dictating Paradise Lost; it is in itself a poem; a dim Puritan interior; light coming through a latticed window and striking on the pale, something cadaverous face of the old poet, who sits braced in his great armchair, with lips set together, and the daughters, in awed attention, listening or seeming to listen.

I am sorry there is so large room to doubt of the intellectual and affectionate sympathy existing between them; nevertheless—that it did not is soberly true; his own harsh speeches, which are of record, show it; their petulant innuendoes, which are also of record, show it.

Into this clouded household—over which love does not brood so fondly as we would choose to think—there comes sometimes, with helpfulness and sympathy, a certain Andrew Marvell, who had been sometime assistant to Milton in his official duties, and who takes his turn at the readings, and sees only the higher and better lights that shine there; and he had written sweet poems of his own, (to which I shall return) that have kept his name alive, and that will keep it alive, I think, forever.

There comes also into this home, in these days, very much to the surprise and angerment of the three daughters, a third wife to the old poet, after some incredibly short courtship.[64] She is only seven years the senior of the daughter Anne; but she seems to have been a sensible young person, not bookishly given, and looking after the household, while Anne and Mary and Deborah still wait, after a fashion, upon the student-wants of the poet. In fits of high abstraction he is now bringing the “Paradise” to a close—not knowing, or not caring, maybe, for the little bickerings which rise and rage and die away in the one-sided home.

I cannot stay to characterize his great poem; nor is there need; immortal in more senses than one; humanity counts for little in it; one pair of human creatures only, and these looked at, as it were, through the big end of the telescope; with gigantic, Godlike figures around one, or colossal demons prone on fiery floods. It is not a child’s book; to place it in schools as a parsing-book is an atrocity that I hope is ended. Not, I think, till we have had some fifty years to view the everlasting fight between good and evil in this world, can we see in proper perspective the vaster battle which, under Milton’s imagination, was pictured in Paradise between the same foes. Years only can so widen one’s horizon as to give room for the reverberations of that mighty combat of the powers of light and darkness.

We talk of the organ-music of Milton. The term has its special significance; it gives hint of that large quality which opens heavenly spaces with its billows of sound; which translates us; which gives us a lookout from supreme heights, and so lifts one to the level of his “Argument.” There is large learning in his great poem—weighty and recondite; but this spoils no music; great, cumbrous names catch sonorous vibrations under his modulating touch, and colossal shields and spears clash together like cymbals. The whole burden of his knowledges—Pagan, Christian, or Hebraic, lift up and sink away upon the undulations of his sublime verse, as heavy-laden ships rise and fall upon some great ground-swell making in from outer seas.

A bookish color is pervading; if he does not steal flowers from books, he does what is better—he shows the fruit of them. There are stories of his debt to CÆdmon, and still more authentic, of his debt to the Dutch poet Vondel,[65] and the old ProvenÇal Bishop of Vienne,[66] who as early as the beginning of the sixth century wrote on kindred themes. There is hardly room for doubt that Milton not only knew, but literally translated some of the old Bishop’s fine Latin lines, and put to his larger usage some of his epithets.

Must we not admit that—in the light of such developments—when the Puritan poet boasts of discoursing on

that it is due to a little lurking stimulant of that Original Sin which put bitterness into his Salmasian papers, and an ugly arrogance into his domestic discipline? But, after all, he was every way greater than his forerunners, and can afford to admit CÆdmon and Vondel and Avitus, and all other claimants, as supporting columns in the underlying crypt upon which was builded the great temple of his song.

Last Days.

The home of Milton in these latter days of his life was often changed. Now, it was Holborn again; then Jewin Street; then Bunhill Row; and—one while—for a year or more, when the great plague of 1665 desolated the city, he fled before it to the little village of Chalfont, some twenty miles distant from London on the Aylesbury road. There the cottage[67] may still be seen in which he lived, and the garden in which he walked—but never saw. There, too, is the latticed window looking on the garden, at which he sat hour by hour, with the summer winds blowing on him from over honeysuckle beds, while he brooded, with sightless eyes turned to the sky, upon the mysteries of fate and foreknowledge.

A young Quaker, Ellwood, perhaps his dearest friend, comes to see him there, to read to him and to give a helping hand to the old man’s study; his daughters, too, are at their helpful service; grateful, maybe, that even the desolation of the plague has given a short relief from the dingy house in the town and its treadmill labors, and put the joy of blooming flowers and of singing birds into their withered hearts.

The year after, which finds them in Bunhill Row again, brings that great London fire which the Monument now commemorates; they passing three days and nights upon the edge of that huge tempest of flame and smoke which devoured nearly two-thirds of London; the old poet hearing the din and roar and crackle, and feeling upon his forehead the waves of fierce heat and the showers of cinders—a scene and an experience which might have given, perhaps, other color to his pictures of Pandemonium, if his great poem had not been just now, in these fateful years, completed—completed and bargained for; £20 were to be paid for it conditionally,[68] in four payments of £5 each, at a day when London had been decimated by the plague, and half the city was a waste of ruin and ashes. And to give an added tint of blackness to the picture, we have to fancy his three daughters leaving him, as they did, tired of tasks, tired of wrangling. Anne, the infirm one, who neither read nor wrote, and Mary, so overworked, and Deborah, the youngest (latterly being very helpful)—all desert him. They never return. “Undutiful daughters,” he says to Ellwood; but I think he does not soften toward them, even when gone. Poor, stern, old man! He would have cut them off by will from their small shares of inheritance in his estate; but the courts wisely overruled this. Anne, strangely enough, married—dying shortly after; Mary died years later, a spinster; and Deborah, who became Mrs. Clark, had some notice, thirty years later, when it was discovered that a quiet woman of that name was Milton’s daughter. But she seems to have been of a stolid make; no poetry, no high sense of dignity belonging to her; a woman like ten thousand, whose descendants are now said (doubtfully) to be living somewhere in India.

But Milton wrought on; his wife Betty, of whom he spoke more affectionately than ever once of his daughters, humored his poor fagged appetites of the table. Paradise Regained was in hand; and later the “Samson Agonistes.” His habits were regular; up at five o’clock; a chapter of the Hebrew Bible read to him by his daughter Mary—what time she stayed; an early breakfast, and quiet lonely contemplation after it (his nephew tells us) till seven. Then work came, putting Quaker Ellwood to helpful service, or whoever happened in, and could fathom the reading—this lasting till mid-day dinner; afterward a walk in his garden (when he had one) for two hours, in his old gray suit, in which many a time passers-by saw him sitting at his door. There was singing in later afternoon, when there was a voice to sing for him; and instrumental music, when his, or a friendly hand touched the old organ. After supper, a pipe and a glass of water; always persistently temperate; and then, night and rest.

He attended no church in his later years, finding none in absolute agreement with his beliefs; sympathizing with the Quakers to a certain degree, with the orthodox Independents too; but flaming up at any procrustean laws for faith; never giving over a certain tender love, I think, for the organ-music and storied splendors of the Anglican Church; but with a wild, broad freedom of thought chafing at any ecclesiastic law made by man, that galled him or checked his longings. His clear, clean intellect—not without its satiric jostlings and wrestlings—its petulancies and caprices—sought and maintained, independently, its own relation with God and the mysterious future.

Our amiable Dr. Channing, with excellent data before him, demonstrated his good Unitarian faith; but though Milton might have approved his nice reasonings, I doubt if he would have gone to church with him. He loved liberty; he could not travel well in double harness, not even in his household or with the elders. His exalted range of vision made light of the little aids and lorgnettes which the conventional teachers held out to him. Creeds and dogmas and vestments and canons, and all humanly consecrated helps, were but Jack-o’-lanterns to him, who was swathed all about with the glowing clouds of glory that rolled in upon his soul from the infinite depths.

In the year 1674—he being then sixty-five years old—on a Sunday, late at night, he died; and with so little pain that those who were with him did not know when the end came. He was buried—not in the great cemetery of Bunhill Fields, close by his house—but beside his father, in the old parish church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where he had been used to go as a boy, and where he had been used to hear the old burial Office for the Dead—now intoned over his grave—“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” There was no need for the monument erected to him there in recent years. His poems make a monument that is read of all the world, and will be read in all times of the world.