is not one that can be satisfactorily dismissed by a smart remark, nor does it at all follow that the principle advocated is false because the examples given of notation may not meet the approval of everyone. Many a vital principle is a stock on which one may graft great variety of opinion. I beg to offer my sincerest thanks to the Master and Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, for permission to publish a reduced reproduction of a page of their Milton MSS. Facsimile, and to Mrs. Butler for most kindly providing the necessary photograph. H. B. C. CLARENS, February, 1902 INTRODUCTION 1. MILTON'S LIFE The poet John Milton was born on Dec. 9th, 1608, a little more than seven years before the death of Shakespeare, in Bread Street, Cheapside, in a house which bore the sign of the Spread-Eagle-the device of the Milton family. The house, as well as the neighbouring church, "All Hallows", in which he was baptized, was destroyed by the Great Fire; but the register containing the notice of his baptism on December 30, 1608, is still extant. As the boy passed the first sixteen years of his life in Bread Street, it is not at all impossible, as Mr. Stopford Brooke remarks, that "the shadow of Shakespeare may have fallen on Milton's eager face, and the Master of English Drama may have touched the Master of English Epic". The poet's grandfather, Richard1 Milton, belonged to a yeoman family which probably derived its name from the parish of Great Milton near Thame, and members of which seem to have held estates in Oxfordshire during the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth. Richard Milton was a staunch Roman Catholic. His son John, who was at school in Oxford-perhaps as a chorister-became a Protestant, and was consequently disinherited. He set up in London as a "scrivener ”—a kind of solicitor or legal copyist--and 1 So Masson. Dr. Johnson says John. He also states that the ancestor who was one of the proprietors of Milton on Thame "forfeited his estate in the times of York and Lancaster". must have prospered, for he sent his two sons, the poet and his younger brother Christopher (who was a royalist and was afterwards a judge, and knighted by James I), to Cambridge, and by 1632 was able, as we shall see, to retire from his profession. His only daughter, Anne, became by her first husband the mother of John and Edward Phillips, to whom Milton afterwards acted as tutor.1 When about twelve years of age Milton was sent as a dayscholar to St. Paul's School. He also had tuition at home from Thomas Young, afterwards a well-known Puritan divine and Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, who seems to have first awakened his enthusiasm for classic literature. "With such eagerness", says Milton, "did I seize upon learning, that from the twelfth year of my age I scarce ever went to bed before midnight, and which indeed was the first cause of injury to my eyes." It must have been an indulgent, an unwisely indulgent, father (of the mother we hear little) who would so far connive at such proceedings as to "order the maid to sit up" for the boy, which Aubrey tells us was his practice. ture. Milton's father was a man by no means destitute of culHe had, as Dr. Johnson says, more than common literature", and was "eminent for his skill in music". It was from him that the poet inherited his love for music2 and learned to play the organ. Although unable to sympathize fully in matters intellectual and poetical, and expressing at times what seem to have been rather strong protests against a life devoted exclusively to the Muses, he was too goodnatured to offer any serious opposition to his son, and 1 Edward Phillips wrote a Memoir of Milton. From him and from John Aubrey, an acquaintance of Milton's, is derived most of our information about the poet's external life; but none of his acquaintances or relations seems to have had any true appreciation of Milton's genius or character. 2 See especially the lines At a Solemn Music; Paradise Lost, i. 708 seq.; Paradise Lost, xi. 560, seq.; Pens. 161. Milton's father composed popular madrigals, and two of his psalm-tunes (York and Norwich) are still to be found in hymnals. |