Life of John Milton | Page 4

station. He would also seem to have improved his
circumstances by the match, which may account for the superior
education of his son John, whose birth is fixed by an affidavit to 1562
or 1563. Aubrey, indeed, next to Phillips and Milton himself, the chief
contemporary authority, says that 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