Milton | Page 6

anything else which now keep those works alive: and, coming from a man so proudly truthful as Milton evidently was, they are of the greatest interest and value. The second reason why we know so much about him is that he played an active part in politics, a far more certain way of {24} attracting contemporary attention in England than writing Hamlet or building St. Paul's Cathedral. And the third is that his life has been made the subject of perhaps the most minute and elaborate biography in the language. Mr. Masson's labours enable us to know, if we choose, every fact, however insignificant, which the most laborious investigation can discover, not only about Milton himself but, one may almost say, about everybody who was ever for five minutes in Milton's company.
From this mass of material, all that can be touched here is a few of the most salient facts of the life and the most striking features of the character.
Milton's life is naturally divided into three periods. The first is that of his education and early poems. It extends from his birth in 1608 to his return from his foreign travels in 1639. The second is that of his political activity, and extends from 1639 to the Restoration. The third is that of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson. It concludes with his death, on November 8, 1674.
Milton was born on December 9, 1608, at a house in Bread Street, Cheapside. The house is gone, but the street is a very short one, and it is still pleasant to step out of the {25} roar of Cheapside into its quietness, and think that there, on the left, close by, under the shadow of Bow Church, was born the greatest poet to whom the greatest city of the modern world has given birth. London ought to hold fast to the honour of Milton, for his honour is peculiarly hers. He was not only born a Londoner but lived in London nearly all his life. And his mind is throughout that of the citizen. Neither agriculture nor sport means much to him; and, much as he loves the sights and sounds of the open country, his allusions to them are those of the delighted but still wondering alien, not those of the native. None is more often quoted than the passage in the ninth book of Paradise Lost--
"As one who, long in populous city pent, Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe Among the pleasant villages and farms Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight-- The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine, Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound-- If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass, What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more, She most, and in her look sums all delight."
{26} And the secret of its charm obviously lies partly in the note of a personal experience. Just in that way must Milton, as boy and man, have often issued forth from the weariness of his studies and the noise and confinement of the streets, for a walk among the open fields that then lay so close at hand for the Londoner. And perhaps, as the inhabitants of towns often do, he took a pleasure in the very hedgerows unknown to those who saw them every day. The present Poet Laureate, who has spent most of his life in the country, has asked a question to which it is not easy for the countryman to give the answer he would like--
"Whose spirit leaps more high, Plucking the pale primrose, Than his whose feet must fly The pasture where it grows?"
If the town-dweller never attains to that mystical communion with the secret soul of Nature which Wordsworth and such as Wordsworth owe to a life spent in the "temple's inmost shrine," yet his eye, undulled by familiarity, commonly sees more in trees and flowers than the eyes of nearly all those who live every day among them. At its highest familiarity breeds intimacy, but more often what it breeds is indifference. A man who {27} reads the Bible for the first time in middle life will never live inside it as some saints have lived; but he will see much that is hidden from most of those who have been reading it every day since they could read at all.
Milton remained in London, so far as we know, for the first sixteen years of his life. He was educated at St. Paul's School by a private tutor, one Thomas Young, who was later a conspicuous Presbyterian figure, and by his father, to whom he owed far more than to any one except himself. The elder John Milton was a remarkable man. He had, to begin with, deserted