Life of John Milton | Page 5

of "famous artists," among whom Byrd, Bull, Dowland, Orlando Gibbons, certainly figure, and three of them were composed by the elder Milton. He also harmonized the Norwich and York psalm tunes, which were adapted to six of the Psalms in Ravenscroft's Collection. Such performance bespeaks not only musical accomplishment, but a refined nature; and we may well believe that Milton's love of learning, as well as his love of music, was hereditary in its origin, and fostered by his contact with his father. Aubrey distinctly affirms that Milton's skill on the organ was directly imparted to him by his father, and there would be nothing surprising if the first rudiments of knowledge were also instilled by him. Poetry he may have taught by precept, but the one extant specimen of his Muse is enough to prove that he could never have taught it by example.
We have therefore to picture Milton growing up in a narrow street amid a strict Puritan household, but not secluded from the influences of nature or uncheered by melodious recreations; and tenderly watched over by exemplary parents--a mother noted, he tells us, for her charities among her neighbours, and a father who had discerned his promise from the very first. Given this perception in the head of a religious household, it almost followed in that age that the future poet should receive the education of a divine. Happily, the sacerdotal caste had ceased to exist, and the education of a clergyman meant not that of a priest, but that of a scholar. Milton was instructed daily, he says, both at grammar schools and under private masters, "as my age would suffer," he adds, in acknowledgment of his father's considerateness. Like Disraeli two centuries afterwards (perhaps the single point of resemblance), he went for schooling to a Nonconformist in Essex, "who," says Aubrey, "cut his hair short." His own hair? or his pupil's? queries Biography. We boldly reply, Both. Undoubtedly Milton's hair is short in the miniature painted of him at the age of ten by, as is believed, Cornelius Jansen. A thoughtful little face, that of a well-nurtured, towardly boy; lacking the poetry and spirituality of the portrait of eleven years later, where the long hair flows down upon the ruff.
After leaving his Essex pedagogue, Milton came under the private tuition of Thomas Young, a Scotchman from St. Andrews, who afterwards rose to be master of Jesus College, Cambridge. It would appear from the elegies subsequently addressed to him by his pupil that he first taught Milton to write Latin verse. This instruction was no doubt intended to be preliminary to the youth's entrance at St. Paul's School, where he must have been admitted by 1620 at the latest.
At the time of Milton's entry, St. Paul's stood high among the schools of the metropolis, competing with Merchant Taylors', Westminster, and the now extinct St. Anthony's. The headmaster, Dr. Gill, was an admirable scholar, though, as Aubrey records, "he had his whipping fits." His fitful severity was probably more tolerable than the systematic cruelty of his predecessor Mulcaster (Spenser's schoolmaster when he presided over Merchant Taylors'), of whom Fuller approvingly records: "Atropos might be persuaded to pity as soon as he to pardon where he found just fault. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed with him as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children." Milton's father, though by no means "cockering," would not have tolerated such discipline, and the passionate ardour with which Milton threw himself into the studious life of the school is the best proof that he was exempt from tyranny. "From the twelfth year of my age," he says, "I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight." The ordinary school tasks cannot have exacted so much time from so gifted a boy: he must have read largely outside the regular curriculum, and probably he practised himself diligently in Latin verse. For this he would have the prompting, and perhaps the aid, of the younger Gill, assistant to his father, who, while at the University, had especially distinguished himself by his skill in versification. Gill must also have been a man of letters, affable and communicative, for Milton in after-years reminds him of their "almost constant conversations," and declares that he had never left his company without a manifest accession of literary knowledge. The Latin school exercises have perished, but two English productions of the period, paraphrases of Psalms executed at fifteen, remain to attest the boy's proficiency in contemporary English literature. Some of the unconscious borrowings attributed to him are probably mere coincidences, but there is still enough to evince acquaintance with "Sylvester, Spenser, Drummond, Drayton, Chaucer, Fairfax, and Buchanan." The literary merit of these versions seems to us to have