Life of John Milton | Page 4

he was for a time at Christ Church, Oxford--a statement in itself improbable, but slightly confirmed by his apparent acquaintance with Latin, and the family tradition that his course of life was diverted by a quarrel with his father. Queen Mary's stakes and faggots had not affected Richard Milton as they affected most Englishmen. Though churchwarden in 1582, he must have continued to adhere to the ancient faith, for he was twice fined for recusancy in 1601, which lends credit to the statement that his son was cast off by him for Protestantism. "Found him reading the Bible in his chamber," says Aubrey, who adds that the younger Milton never was a scrivener's apprentice; but this is shown to be an error by Mr. Hyde Clarke's discovery of his admission to the Scriveners' Company in 1599, where he is stated to have been apprentice to James Colborn. Colborn himself had been only four years in business, instead of the seven which would usually be required for an apprentice to serve out his indenture--which suggests that some formalities may have been dispensed with on account of John Milton's age. A scrivener was a kind of cross between an attorney and a law stationer, whose principal business was the preparation of deeds, "to be well and truly done after my learning, skill, and science," and with due regard to the interests of more exalted personages. "Neither for haste nor covetousness I shall take upon me to make any deed whereof I have not cunning, without good advice and information of counsel." Such a calling offered excellent opportunities for investments; and John Milton, a man of strict integrity and frugality, came to possess a "plentiful estate." Among his possessions was the house in Bread Street destroyed in the Great Fire. The tenement where the poet was born, being a shop, required a sign, for which he chose The Spread Eagle, either from the crest of such among the Miltons as had a right to bear arms, among whom he may have reckoned himself; or as the device of the Scriveners' Company. He had been married about 1600 to a lady whose name has been but lately ascertained to have been Sarah Jeffrey. John Milton the younger was the third of six children, only three of whom survived infancy. He grew up between a sister, Anne, several years older, and a brother, Christopher, seven years younger than himself.
Milton's birth and nurture were thus in the centre of London; but the London of that day had not half the population of the Liverpool of ours. Even now the fragrance of the hay in far-off meadows may be inhaled in Bread Street on a balmy summer's night; then the meadows were near the doors, and the undefiled sky was reflected by an unpolluted stream. There seems no reason to conclude that Milton, in his early boyhood, enjoyed any further opportunities of resort to rural scenery than the vicinity of London could afford; but if the city is his native element, natural beauty never appeals to him in vain. Yet the influences which moulded his childhood must have been rather moral and intellectual than merely natural:--
"The starlight smile of children, the sweet looks Of women, the fair breast from which I fed,"
played a greater part in the education of this poet than
"The murmur of the unreposing brooks, And the green light which, shifting overhead, Some tangled bower of vines around me shed, The shells on the sea-sand, and the wild flowers."
Paramount to all other influences must have been the character of his father, a "mute" but by no means an "inglorious" Milton, the preface and foreshadowing of the son. His great step in life had set the son the example from which the latter never swerved, and from him the younger Milton derived not only the independence of thought which was to lead him into moral and social heresy, and the fidelity to principle which was to make him the Abdiel of the Commonwealth, but no mean share of his poetical faculty also. His mastery of verbal harmony was but a new phase of his father's mastery of music, which he himself recognizes as the complement of his own poetical gift:--
"Ipse volens Phoebus se dispertire duobus, Altera dona mihi, dedit altera dona parenti."
As a composer, the circumspect, and, as many no doubt thought prosaic scrivener, took rank among the best of his day. One of his compositions, now lost, was rewarded with a gold medal by a Polish prince (Aubrey says the Landgrave of Hesse), and he appears among the contributors to The Triumphs of Oriana, a set of twenty-five madrigals composed in honour of Queen Elizabeth. "The Teares and Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soule"--dolorous sacred songs, Professor Masson calls them--were, according to their editor, the production