LIFE OF MILTON.*

FIRST PERIOD.

AT SCHOOL AND AT THE UNIVERSITY.

A. D. 1608-1632.

A. ET. 1-24.

FAMILY names, as it is well known, not only in this country, but throughout all Europe, are in numerous instances derived from those of places. In every county of England are still to be found-and the cases were far more numerous in former days-families bearing the same names with its towns, villages, and hamlets. This however gives no indication of their original social position. It only shows that at one time they dwelt in or came from that place, and the name was given alike to the homeless vagrant and the lord of the manor.

In the sixteenth century a family which had derived its name of Milton from a town of that name† (the con

* See Note A. at the end of this Part.

There are at least twenty places of this name in England. Of these, two are in Oxfordshire,-Great Milton, a parish in the hundred of Thame, and Milton, a hamlet in the parish of Adderbury, within a few miles of Banbury. There is also a Milton seven miles south of Abingdon, in the adjoining county of Berks. It is this last that Phillips, the nephew and biographer of Milton, gives as the original seat of

B

traction of Middleton) in Oxfordshire, was resident in that county. It had formerly, we are told, been of considerable opulence and importance; but having taken the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses, it had shared in the misfortunes of that party, and been shorn of its wealth and consequence, the landed property having been confiscated, and the then proprietor left with nothing but what he held in right of his wife. We hear nothing more of the fortunes of the Milton family till the latter half of the sixteenth century, when we find John Milton holding the office of under-ranger of the royal forest of Shotover, in the vicinity of the city of Oxford.* He was, it appears, a rigid professor of the doctrines of the lately dominant superstition; and when his son, of the same name as himself, whom he had sent to the College of Christ Church in the adjacent University, had there learned and embraced the Reformed doctrines, he disinherited him, and there is no account of his ever having again taken him into favour; nor is the circumstance very likely, such was the spirit of religious rancour, we may add religious fervour and sincerity, which prevailed in those times.†

John Milton the younger was thus at an early age thrown, we may suppose, entirely on his own resources. It is not unlikely that the profession of the law had been his original destination; and now, probably seeing these higher prospects blighted, and being a young man of

the family; which he said was proved by the monuments to be seen in the church of that place. No such monuments however were to be seen when Newton sought for them. Wood said the family was from Great Milton.

* Aubrey says he resided at Holton, which is six miles to the east of Oxford, Shotover lying between them.

See Note B. at the end of this Part.

talent and energy, he resolved to devote himself to that inferior branch of the law, the professors of which were named Scriveners.* A friend, who was himself of that profession, having saved him from the necessity of serving an apprenticeship, he commenced business in the city of London, in Bread-street, near St. Paul's, as we are told. As was the usage, he had a sign to his shop, adopting for that purpose a spread eagle, the armorial bearing of his family.

From all that we can collect and conjecture respecting him, John Milton of Bread-street appears to have been a man of much more than ordinary talent. By skill and diligence in his profession, he was enabled to bring up and support a family in credit and respectability, and to accumulate such a fortune as enabled him eventually to retire from business, and pass his days in ease and independence. But he was at no period of his life the mere man of business. Amid his legal avocations, he found leisure to cultivate literature, and still more the science of music, for which he had a natural genius, and in which he became such a proficient as to rank among the most celebrated composers of the time.§

John Milton must have been more than forty years of

* The Scrivener would seem (as the name denotes) to have been originally merely a copyist, as at the present day. But in the time of John Milton, he answered to the notary of the Continent, and in some respects to the modern lawyer or attorney. His business was to draw up wills, bonds, mortgages, and all other legal contracts, and to this he usually added the occupation of a money-lender, using his own money or that of his clients.

Aubrey, Phillips. This perhaps is not quite correct, for Mr. Hunter (Milton, p. 10) notices a bond dated March 4, 1602, and made payable "at the new shop of John Milton, scrivener, in Bread

street."

Some wretched verses of his are given by Mr. Hunter, p. 13. § See Burney's Hist. of Mus. vol. iii. p. 134. "I have been told,"

*

age when his circumstances seemed to entitle him to enter into the state of matrimony. According to her grandson Phillips, the name of his wife was Sarah Caston, of a respectable family originally from Wales, but then probably settled in London, while Aubrey tells us, apparently on the authority of her son Christopher, that her name was Bradshaw. This is a point then not easy to decide it seems strange that a son should not know the maiden name of his mother, or a grandson that of his grandmother. Milton certainly appears to have been related to the celebrated John Bradshaw; and the most probable supposition is, that it was through his mother. We have the testimony of her son to the excellence of her character, and her numerous deeds of charity. It was probably from her that he derived his weakness of sight; for Aubrey tells us that her eyes were weak, and that she had to use spectacles at an early age.

The offspring of this marriage was two sons and three daughters, named, in the order of their births, Anne, John, Sarah, Tabitha, and Christopher. Of these Sarah and Tabitha died in infancy, the former very shortly after her birth; of Anne and Christopher we shall treat when we come to our poet's family.

says Phillips, and I take it by our author himself, that his father composed an Il Domine of forty parts, for which he was rewarded with a gold medal and chain by a Polish prince, to whom he presented it ; and that some of his songs are to be seen in old Whitby's set of airs, beside some compositions of his in Ravenscroft's Psalms.”

* As he died in 1617, and as Aubrey says that he was able to read without spectacles at the age of eighty-four, he must have been past forty at the time of his marriage.

Matre probatissima et eleemosynis per viciniam potissimum nota." -Defensio Secunda.

Todd gives the following extracts from the registry of Allhallows:

The xvth daye of July, 1642, was baptized Sara, the daughter of