he proclaimed the rights of man as a rational immortal being, undismayed by menace and obloquy, amid a generation of servile and unprincipled sycophants. The blindness which excluded him from the things of earth opened to him more glorious and spiritualized conceptions of heaven, and aided him in exhibiting the full influence of those sublime truths which the privilege of free inquiry in religious matters had poured upon the mind. -PRESCOTT, WILLIAM HINCKLING, 184555, Biographical and Critical Miscellanies.

Perhaps no man ever inhabited more houses than our great epic poet, yet scarcely one of these now remains.

We come now to Milton's last house, the narrow house appointed for all living, in which he laid his bones beside those of his father. This was in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. He died on Sunday, the 8th of November, 1674, and was buried on the 12th. His funeral is stated to have been very splendidly and numerously attended. By the parish registry we find that he was buried in the chancel: "John Milton, gentleman. Consumption. Chancell. 12. Nov., 1674." Dr. Johnson Dr. Johnson supposed that he had no inscription, but Aubrey distinctly states that "when the two steppes to the communion-table were raysed in 1690, his stone was removed." Milton's grave remained a whole century without a mark to point out where the great poet lay, till in 1793 Mr. Whitbread erected a bust and an inscription to his memory. What is more, there is every reason to believe that his remains were, on this occasion of raising the chancel and removing the stone, disturbed. coffin was disinterred and opened, and numbers of relic-hunters were eager to seize and convey off fragments of his bones. The matter at the time occasioned a sharp controversy, and the public were at length persuaded to believe that they were not the remains of Milton, but of a female, that by mistake had been thus treated. But when the workmen had the inscribed stone before them, and dug down directly below it, what doubt can there be that the remains were those of the poet? By an alteration in the church. when it was repaired in 1682, that which was the old chancel ceased to be the present one, and the remains of Milton thus came to lie in the great central aisle.

The

His father, John Milton, died March, 1646. They were both interred in this church.

Samuel Whitbread posuit, 1793. -HOWITT, WILLIAM, 1847, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, vol. 1, pp. 75, 115.

No one can read Milton's writings, or contemplate his life, without being persuaded that his first desire was the freedom, and through that, the happiness of his country.-MITFORD, JOHN, 1851-63, ed., Works of John Milton, Life, vol. 1, p. cxxxii.

The best portraits of Milton represent him seated at the foot of an oak at sunset, his face turned towards the beams of the departing luminary, and dictating his verses to his well-beloved Deborah, listening attentively to the voice of her father; while his wife Elizabeth looks on him as Eve regarded her husband after her fault and punishment. His two younger daughters meanwhile gather flowers from the meadows, that he may inhale some of the odors of Eden which perfumed his dreams. Our thoughts turn involuntarily to the lot. of that wife and daughters, after the death of the illustrious old man on whom they were attending; and the poet, thus brought back to our eyes again, becomes more interesting than the poem. Happy are they whose glory is watered with tears! Such reputation penetrates to the heart, and in the heart alone the poet's name becomes immortal.-LAMARTINE, ALPHONSE DE, 1854, Memoirs of Celebrated Characters.

With respect to the worldly circumstances of this great man, little is known with certainty. It is evident that during his travels, and after his return, the allowance made him by his father was liberal. It was adequate, we may see, to the support of himself and his two nephews, for it is not likely that his sister paid him anything for them. He must also have considered himself able to support a family, without keeping school,

A

when he married Miss Powell. He of course inherited the bulk of his father's property, but of the amount of it we are ignorant; all we know is that it included the interest in his house in Bread-street. His losses were not inconsiderable. sum of £2000, which he had invested in the Excise Office, was lost at the Restoration, as the Government refused to recognize the obligations of the Commonwealth; according to the account of his granddaughter, he lost another sum of £2000, by placing it in the hands of a moneyscrivener; and he also lost at the Restoration a property of £60 a year out of the lands of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, which he very probably had purchased. His house in Bread-street was destroyed by the Great Fire. The whole. property which he left behind him, exclusive of his claim on the Powell family for his wife's fortune, and of his household goods, did not exceed £1500, including the produce of his library, a great part of which he is said to have disposed of before his death.-KEIGHTLEY, THOMAS, 1855, An Account of the Life, Opinions and Writings of John Milton, p. 75.

He stands before us as perhaps the grandest and mightiest individual man in literature, a man who transmuted all thoughts, passions, acquisitions, and aspirations into the indestructible substance. of personal character.-WHIPPLE, EDWIN P., 1857-66, The English Mind, Character and Characteristic Men, p. 194.

He attends no church, belongs to no communion, and has no form of worship in his family; notable circumstances, which we may refer, in part at least, to his blindness, but significant of more than that. His religion was of the spirit, and did not take kindly to any form. Though the most Puritan of the Puritans, he had never stopped long in the ranks of any Puritan party, or given satisfaction to Puritan ecclesiastics and theologians. In his youth he had loved the night; in his old age he loves the pure sunlight of early morning as it glimmers on his sightless eyes. The music which had been his delight since childhood has still its charm, and he either sings or plays on the organ or bass violin every day. In his grey coat, at the door of his house in Bunhill Fields, he sits on clear afternoons; a proud, ruggedly genial old man, with sharp satiric

touches in his talk, the untunable fibre in him to the last. Eminent foreigners come to see him; friends approach reverently, drawn by the splendour of his discourse. It would range, one can well imagine, in glittering freedom, like "arabesques of lightning," over all ages and all literatures. He was the prince of scholars; a memory of superlative power waiting as handmaid on the queenliest imagination. The whole spectacle of ancient civilisation, its cities, its camps, its landscapes, was before him. There he sat in his grey coat, like a statue cut in granite. recanted nothing, repented of nothing. England had made a sordid failure, but he had not failed. His soul's fellowship was with the great Republicans of Greece and Rome, and with the Psalmist and Isaiah and Oliver Cromwell.—BAYNE, PETER, 1878, The Chief Actors in the Puritan Revolution, p. 345.

He

I do not find that Milton, though he wrote against paid ministers as hirelings, ever expressly formulated an opinion against ministers as such. But as has already been hinted, there grew up in him, in the last period of his life, a secret sympathy with the mode of thinking which came to characterise the Quaker sect. Not that Milton adopted any of their peculiar fancies. He affirms categorically the permissibility of oaths, of military service, and requires that women should keep silence in the congregation. But in negativing all means of arriving at truth except the letter of Scripture interpreted by the inner light, he stood upon the same platform as the followers of George Fox. -PATTISON, MARK, 1879, Milton (English Men of Letters), p. 148.

As a man, too, not less than as a poet, Milton has a side of unsurpassable grandeur: A master's touch is the gift of nature.

Moral qualities, it is commonly thought, are in our own power. Perhaps the germs of such qualities are in their greater or less strength as much a part of our natural constitution as the sense for style. The range open to our own will and power, however, in developing and establishing them, is evidently much larger. Certain high moral dispositions Milton had from nature, and he sedulously trained and developed them until they became habits of great power. - ARNOLD, MATTHEW, 1879, Mixed Essays, p. 269.

On the 4th of August, 1790, according to a small volume written by Philip Neve, Esq. (of which two editions were published in the same year), Milton's coffin was removed and his remains exhibited to the public on the 4th and 5th of that month. Mr. George Stevens, the great editor of Shakspere, who justly denounced the indignity intended, not offered, to the great Puritan poet's remains by Royalist Landsharks, satisfied himself that the corpse was that of a woman of fewer years than Milton. Mr. Stevens's assurance gives us good reason for believing that Mr. Philip Neve's indignant protest is only good in general, and that Milton's hallowed reliques still rest undisturbed within their peaceful shrine.—INGLEBY, C. M., 1883, Shakspere's Bones.

Although the "Prince of Poets" was born and died in London, received part of his education in London, was married frequently in London, and lived in many houses in the metropolis, there is left today hardly a trace of anything that he has touched, or that is in any way associated with him. Even his grave was desecrated, and the precise spot in which his bones lie cannot now be discovered.HUTTON, LAURENCE, 1885, Literary Landmarks of London, p. 210.

On the whole, Milton's character was not an amiable one, nor even wholly estimable. It is probable that he never in the course of his whole life did anything that he considered wrong; but unfortunately, examples are not far to seek of the facility with which desire can be made to confound itself with deliberate approval. That he was an exacting, if not a tyrannical husband and father, that he held in the most peremptory and exaggerated fashion the doctrine of the superiority of man to woman, that his egotism in a man who had actually accomplished less would be held ludicrous and half disgusting, that his faculty of appreciation beyond his own immediate tastes and interests was small, that his intolerance surpassed that of an inquisitor, and that his controversial habits and manners outdid the license even of that period of controversial abuse, these are propositions which I cannot conceive to be disputed by any competent critic aware of the facts. If they have ever been denied, it is merely from the amiable but uncritical point of

view which blinks all a man's personal defects in consideration of his literary genius. That we cannot afford to do here, especially as Milton's personal defects had no small influence on his literary character. SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 317.

There is something very fascinating in the records we have of Milton's one visit to the Continent. A more impressive Englishman never left our shores. Sir Philip Sidney perhaps approaches him nearest. nearest. Beautiful beyond praise, and just sufficiently conscious of it to be careful never to appear at a disadvantage, dignified in manners, versed in foreign tongues, yet full of the ancient learning,

a gentleman, a scholar, a poet, a musician, and a Christian, he moved about in a leisurely manner from city to city, writing Latin verses for his hosts and Italian sonnets in their ladies' albums, buying books and music, and creating, one cannot doubt, an all too flattering impression of an English Protestant.-BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1887, Obiter Dieta, Second Series, p. 14.

The new world honors him whose lofty plea For England's freedom made her own more

sure,

Whose song, immortal as its theme, shall be Their common freehold while both worlds endure.

-WHITTIER, JOHN GREENLEAF, 1888, Milton, Inscription on the Memorial Window in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, the gift of George W. Childs, of America.

The vision we have of him is that of a blind, fresh-complexioned, and lightishhaired man, of middle stature or somewhat less, and of slender figure, dressed still usually in a grey suit, and with a small silver-hilted sword by his side, piloted about by some boy or more mature companion, partly for exercise and partly for calls at favourite book-shops. Blind though he was, it was only by his gait that you knew it, for his eyes were clear and without speck or blemish. Nor, though the face was sad and careworn, did it tell the age at which he had arrived. From the still lightish hair and a tinge of colour still in the fair complexion, you would have judged him younger than he was. MASSON, DAVID, 1893, In the Footsteps of the Poets, p. 98.

Milton was nicknamed the "lady" at college, from his delicate complexion and slight make. He was, however, a good fencer, and thought himself a "match for any one." Although respected by the authorities, his proud and austere character probably kept him aloof from much of the coarser society of the place. He shared the growing aversion to the scholasticism against which one of his exercises is directed. Like Henry More, who entered Christ's in Milton's last year, he was strongly attracted by Plato, although he was never so much a philosopher as a poet. He already considered himself as dedicated to the utterance of great thoughts, and to the strictest chastity and self-respect, on the ground that he who would write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem." -STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1894, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XXXVII, p. 25.

66

In Milton's life, as in Milton's prose writings, occur passages which are not admirable, which are indeed the reverse of admirable. The student of literature, we may presume, is a lover of beauty, and the temptation with him to shirk the ugly passages of a life is a temptation easily understood. Here he may say, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has said of Shelley, here, in "Comus" and "Samson," here in the Council Chamber sheltering Davenant from dangers incurred through his Royalist ardours, here, in company with Lawrence, listening to the lute well touched, is the Milton we desire to know, the Milton who delights. Let us, at least as long as we are able, avert our eyes from the Milton who disgusts, from the unamiable Milton, the Milton who calls his opponent "an idiot by breeding and a solicitor by presumption," the Milton who helped to embitter his daughters' lives, and remembered them as "unkind children" in his will. What is gained by forcing this disgusting Milton on our attention? We choose, if we can, to retain a charming picture of the great poet. The delightful Milton is the true Milton after all. Ah, give us back the delightful Milton!-DOWDEN, EDWARD, 1895, New Studies in Literature, p. 442.

But he is more than idealist or artisthe was a superlatively noble, brave, truly conscientious man, who could never have intentionally done a mean thing; who was

pure and clean in thought, speech, and action; who was patriotic to the point of sublime self-sacrifice; who loved his neighbor to the point of risking his life for republican principles of liberty; who, finally, spent his every moment as in the sight of the God he both worshiped and loved. Possessed of sublime powers, his thought was to make the best use of them to the glory of God and the good of his fellow-man. We may not think that he always succeeded; but who among the men of our race save Washington is such an exemplar of high and holy and effective purpose? Beside his white and splendid flame nearly all the other great spirits of earth burn yellow, if not low. Truly, as Wordsworth said, his soul was like a star; and, if it dwelt apart, should we therefore love it the less? It is more difficult to love the sublime than to love the approximately human, but the necessity for such love is the essence of the first and greatest commandment.-TRENT, WILLIAM P., 1899, John Milton, A Short Study of his Life and Works, p. 55.

It was fortunate for the harmonious development of Milton's genius that during the critical years between youth and manhood, years which in most men's lives are fullest of turmoil and dubiety, he was enabled to live a life of quiet contemplation. tion. His nature was fiercely polemical, and without this period of calm set between his college life and his life as a public disputant, the sweeter saps of his mind would never have come to flower and fruitage. It was particularly fortunate, too, that this interim should be passed in the country, where the lyric influences were softest, where all that was pastoral and genial in his imagination was provoked. The special danger of men of his stamp, in whom will and doctrine are constantly president over impulse, is the loss of plasticity, the stiffening of imagination in its bonds.-MOODY, WILLIAM VAUGHN, 1899, ed., Poetical Works of Milton, Life, Cambridge ed., p. xiii.

COMUS

1634-37

MY LORD: This poem, which received its first occasion of birth from your self and others of your noble family, and much honour from your own person in the performance, now returns again to make a

finall dedication of itself to you. Although not openly acknowledged by the author, yet it is a legitimate offspring, so lovely, and so much desired, that the often copying of it hath tired my pen to give my severall friends satisfaction, and brought me to a necessity of producing it to the publike view, and now to offer it up in all rightful devotion to those fair hopes and rare endowments of your much-promising youth, which gave a full assurance, to all that knew you, of a future excellence. -LAWES, HENRY, 1637, To Lord-Viscount Bracly, First ed.

Since your going, you have charged me with new obligations, both for a very kinde letter from you, dated the sixth of this month, and for a charity piece of entertainment which came therewith, wherein I should much commend the tragical part if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your songs and odes; whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen nothing parallel in our language.-WOTTON, SIR HENRY, 1638, Letter to John Milton, April 13.

On the whole, whether "Comus" be or be not deficient as a drama, whether it is considered as an epic drama, a series of lines, a mask, or a poem, I am of opinion that Milton is here only inferior to his own "Paradise Lost."- WARTON, THOMAS, 1785, ed., Milton's Poems on Several Occasions, p. 263.

A work more truly poetical is rarely found; allusions, images, and descriptive epithets, embellish almost every period with lavish decoration. As a series of lines, therefore, it may be considered as worthy of all the admiration with which. the votaries have received it.—JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1779, John Milton, Lives of the English Poets.

Even Milton deigned to contribute one of his most fascinating poems to the service of the drama; and, notwithstanding the severity of his puritanic tenets, "Comus" could only have been composed by one who felt the full enchantment of the theatre. SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1805, The Life of John Dryden.

other composition save "The Tempest" of Shakspeare.-DRAKE, NATHAN, 1817, Shakspeare and his Times, vol. II, p. 579.

It is, certainly, the noblest performance of the kind which exists in any language. --MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1825, Milton, Edinburgh Review; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

What sensibility breathes in the descriptions of the benighted Lady's singing, by Comus and the Spirit.-CHANNING, WILLIAM ELLERY, 1826, Remarks on the Character and Writings of John Milton.

A young girl and her brothers are benighted and separated as they pass through a forest in Herefordshire. How meagre is this solitary fact! how barren a paragraph would it have made for the Herefordshire journal, --had such a journal been then in existence! Submit it to Milton, and beautiful is the form which it assumes. Then rings that wood with the jocund revelry of Comus and his company; and the maiden draws near, in the strength of unblemished chastity, and her courage waxes strong as she sees

"A sable cloud Turn forth her silver lining on the night"and she calls upon Echo to tell her of the flowery cave which hides her brothers, and Echo betrays her to the enchanter. Then comes the spirit from the "starry threshold of Jove's court," and in shepherd-weeds leads on the brothers to her rescue; and the necromancer is put to flight, but not till he has bound up the lady in fetters of stone; and Sabrina hastens from under her "translucent wave" to dissolve the spelland again they all three bend their happy steps back to the roof of their fathers. This is not extravagant rhapsody-the tale is still actually preserved; but it is preserved like a fly in amber. The image is a mere thing of wood, but Milton enshrines it, and it becomes an object of worship. SOUTHEY, ROBERT, 1827, Todd's Edition of Milton, Quarterly Review, vol. 36, p. 45.

One of the last and loveliest radiations of the dramatic spirit, which seemed almost to live its life out in about half a century of English literature, beginning in the times of Queen Elizabeth, and ending in those of Charles the First.

Of "Comus," I think, it might be said, as truly as of any poem in the language, that it is admirably adapted to inspire a