INTRODUCTION ALMOST everything is known about Milton, and Milton is the second greatest poet that England, the land of poets, has produced; but in a little book like this the briefest sketch of the poet's life must suffice. John Milton was born at his father's shop, the "Spread Eagle," Cheapside, on the 9th of December, 1608. The father was a scrivener, a sort of solicitor, and had made money; a man of sense, too, and accomplishments, skilled to compose tunes and airs; able and glad to provide good instruction for the son, who was ever grateful for this forethought. In music, we may suppose that Milton, the most musical of England's singing birds, gained much from a father's skill and early care. In the classics, he had as private tutor one Thomas Young, of whose instruction he speaks highly in later life. Young was with him also after he went to St. Paul's School, which was then presided over by that "ingeniose person" Alexander Gill, esteemed the best teacher of the day, notwithstanding, or perhaps to some extent in consequence of, his whipping fits. At sixteen Milton proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he went through the usual University course, misliking somewhat the lack of enthusiasm and the necessity of performing certain tasks required rather for the employment of the A 2 pupils than for advancement in true learning; known for delicate beauty of life and person, retaining previous friendships and making others, but now as always select in the circle of his acquaintance. Milton was designed for Holy Orders, and disposed to enter them, but upon maturer consideration learnt "to prefer a blameless silence." So then at the age of twentyfour he retired to "his father's house in the country," at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, with what aim and purpose those will see who read the sonnet written by him "On his being arrived at the age of twenty-three." Fortunately his father was a man of means, able and willing to permit the son to follow his bent. Milton's working life divides well into three periods, with a brief interlude. First poetical, or Horton period, five years, from 1632-37; interlude of Italian travel, 1638-39; prose period, lightened by glorious sonnets, twenty years, from 1639-60; second, or great poetical period, 1660-71. The Horton period produced such poems as L'Allegro,. Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas-poems themselves perhaps enough to have marked out Milton as the second greatest poet which England had hitherto produced. The poet is young, living a rural life, and L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and parts at least of Comus, are distinguished by a light delicate touch, a spontaneity and exquisiteness hardly found in later poems; yet they do not lack a certain gravity, to deepen soon into the great spirit of religious and patriotic song, which sinks and swells in the ardent sentiment and haunting music of Lycidas. I cannot dwell upon the interlude of Italian travel. To travel in Italy is still the ambition of generousminded students, who find there, beneath a bright sun and a blue sky, much of the worth and beauty of a distant past, and of the revival of Art and Science in the Middle Ages: In Milton's time there was the additional charm, that Italy outstripped other countries in knowledge and culture. The best known incident of the tour is the famous interview at Florence with Galileo, "grown old, a prisoner* to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought;" blind too, as the poet himself one day would be. Milton had purposed also to see Greece, but civil and religious troubles called him home to spend twenty years in defence of liberty of conscience and action. His political influence does not seem ever to have been very great, even after he became Latin Secretary to the Committee for Foreign Affairs, in 1649; nor do his later poems show much sign of the influence upon him of the new world with which he was now for so many years to be in daily contact. The twenty years of prose are chiefly remembered for the autobiographical passages, and for many splendid specimens of style. With important exceptions they are mainly on matters of religious or political controversy, and we are often reminded of what the king said to Dr. Johnson in another reference, "Why truly, when once it comes to calling names, argument is pretty well at an end." Most poets would here have lost their poetry, but not so Milton, because of the pure and high purpose of his * In his own house. life, the daily constant thought, some day, in God's good time, to write a great world poem. In 1643 Milton married a young girl, daughter of an Oxfordshire squire. The marriage was a failure-neither appreciated the other; and all the poet's view of woman was marred by the misery which he had rashly brought upon his own sensitive, sensuous nature-a nature headstrong too, and severe, and inexperienced in woman's ways, good or bad. His wife left him, and there were divorce pamphlets, and a return, and submission. Three daughters were the offspring of the union, two at least of whom fared no better than their mother with a father who exacted implicit obedience, and who, with mind fully occupied in great matters, condescended not to small humanities of daily life. Servants, not friends, his elder daughters later on helped to "cheat him in his marketings," even, with incredible hardness of heart, to sell his books, unseen by those dark eyes. There were two subsequent and apparently happier marriages, both after the poet became blind. The second wife is the "espoused saint" of the Sonnet. "She died in childbed of a daughter, who did not survive her." The third, who long survived her husband, is the "Betty," comforter of his declining years. When the king came back, in 1660, the poet was in hiding for a time, even for a while in the custody of the serjeant-at-arms, but he escaped, with the loss of £2000 invested in Government securities, and of course the Secretaryship. The new rulers, however, were not vindictive. Moreover, though Milton had written much against the Royalists, |