Milton | Page 5

intention. It is impossible to outface Milton, or to abash him with praise. His most enthusiastic eulogists are compelled merely to echo the remarks of his earliest and greatest critic, himself. Yet with all this, none of the later critics, not the most cavalier nor the dullest, has dared to call him vain. His estimate of himself, offered as simple fact, has been accepted in the same spirit, and one abyss of ineptitude still yawns for the heroic folly, or the clownish courage, of the New Criticism.
CHAPTER I?JOHN MILTON
John Milton, the son of a middle-aged scrivener, was born on Friday, December the 9th, 1608, at his father's house in Bread Street, Cheapside; and died on Sunday, November the 8th, 1674, in a small house, with but one room on a floor, in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, London. Of his father the records that remain show him to have been a convinced member of the Puritan party in the Church, a man of liberal culture and intelligence, a lover of music (which taste Milton inherited), a wise and generous friend to the son who became a poet. We owe it to his wisdom rather than to his prosperity that Milton was allowed to live at home without any ostensible profession until he was thirty years of age and more.
For the first sixteen years of his life Milton was educated partly at home, by a Presbyterian tutor called Thomas Young, partly at St. Paul's School, which he attended for some years as a day-scholar. From his twelfth year onward he was an omnivorous reader, and before he left school had written some boyish verses, void of merit. The next fourteen years of his life, after leaving school, were spent at Cambridge, in Buckinghamshire, and in foreign travel, so that he was thirty years old before he lived continuously in London again.
We know pretty well how he spent his time at Cambridge and at Horton, sedulously turning over the Greek and Latin classics, dreaming of immortality. We know less about his early years in London, where there were wider and better opportunities of gaining an insight into "all seemly and generous arts and affairs." London was a great centre of traffic, a motley crowd of adventurers and traders even in those days, and the boy Milton must often have wandered down to the river below London Bridge to see the ships come in. His poems are singularly full of figures drawn from ships and shipping, some of them bookish in their origin, others which may have been suggested by the sight of ships. Now it is Satan, who, after his fateful journey through chaos, nears the world,
And like a weather-beaten vessel holds?Gladly the port, though shrouds and tackle torn.
Now it is Dalila, whom the Chorus behold approaching.
Like a stately ship?Of Tarsus, bound for the isles?Of Javan or Gadire,?With all her bravery on, and tackle trim,?Sails filled, and streamers waving,?Courted by all the winds that hold them play.
Or, again, it is Samson reproaching himself,
Who, like a foolish pilot, have shipwracked?My vessel trusted to me from above,?Gloriously rigged.
The bulk of Satan is compared to the great sea-beast Leviathan, beheld off the coast of Norway by
The pilot of some small night-founder'd skiff.
In his approach to the happy garden the Adversary is likened to
them who sail?Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past?Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow?Sabaean odours from the spicy shore?Of Araby the Blest, with such delay?Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league?Cheered with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles;?So entertained those odorous sweets the Fiend.
And when he draws near to Eve in the rose-thicket,
sidelong he works his way,?As when a ship, by skilful steersman wrought,?Nigh river's mouth, or foreland, where the wind?Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail.
There is nothing here that is not within the reach of any inland reader, but Milton's choice of nautical similitudes may serve to remind us how much of the interest of Old London centred round its port. Here were to be heard those tales of far-sought adventure and peril which gave even to the boisterous life of Elizabethan London an air of triviality and security. Hereby came in "the variety of fashions and foreign stuffs," which Fynes Moryson, writing in Milton's childhood, compares to the stars of heaven and the sands of the sea for number. All sorts of characters, nationalities, and costumes were daily to be seen in Paul's Walk, adjoining Milton's school. One sort interests us pre-eminently. "In the general pride of England," says Fynes Moryson, "there is no fit difference made of degrees; for very Bankrupts, Players, and Cutpurses go apparelled like gentlemen." Shakespeare was alive during the first seven years of Milton's life, and was no doubt sometimes a visitor to the Mermaid, a stone's