INTRODUCTION

I. LIFE OF MILTON

Edmund Spenser had been ten years dead and William Shakespeare had still about eight years longer to live when John Milton was born. The day was the 9th of December, 1608, and the place was his father's house, known as "The Spread Eagle," in Bread Street, Cheapside, near St. Paul's, London. The maiden name of Milton's mother was Sarah Jeffrey. She seems to have had very little direct influence upon the poet's literary development, his account of her being that she was "a most excellent mother and particularly known for her charities through the neighbourhood." To his father, at every opportunity, Milton pays the tribute of affectionate gratitude and enthusiastic respect. The character of this father obviously deserved all that the son's eloquence could commemorate. In the first place, he was a man who had made his own way in London to a plentiful estate," after he had been disinherited by his father, Richard Milton, one of the stanchest of Oxfordshire Roman Catholics, for becoming a Protestant. How this commercial success was accomplished is not known in detail; for it was not until February, 1599–1600, when he

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was thirty-seven years old, and married to a wife of about twenty-eight, that he was duly qualified as a member of the Scriveners' Company and that he set up house and shop in Bread Street. At this time, a scrivener was much more than a mere scribe or legal copyist. He was a notary, one who did some of the less important work of an attorney, in drawing up wills, bonds, mortgages, in lending money and placing investments. Furthermore, this particular scrivener was a thoughtful and cultivated man, with a talent for music which gave him standing among the composers of his time. Certain aspects of his character and his relation to his son are best set forth in that son's own words:

"My father destined me while yet a child to the study of polite literature, which I embraced with such avidity that from the twelfth year of my age I hardly ever retired to rest from my studies till midnight, which was the first source of injury to my eyes, to the natural weakness of which were added frequent headaches; all of which not retarding my eagerness after knowledge, he took care to have me instructed daily both at school and by other masters at home."

The first of John Milton's teachers was Thomas Young, a Puritan clergyman, of whom, in one of his Latin poems, Milton says that this master is dearer to him than was Socrates to Alcibiades, Aristotle to Alexander, or Chiron to Achilles. In his twelfth year he was sent as a dayscholar to St. Paul's School, near his father's home, but Young still continued to teach him. This prolonged

service on the part of Young may have served as a relief to the discipline supplied by the master of St. Paul's, Alexander Gill, who is described as "an ingeniose person, notwithstanding his humours, particularly his whipping fits." Of the master's son, another Alexander Gill, and usher in the school, Milton became an intimate friend. During the four or five years of his study at this time of his life, he made good progress in Greek and Latin, learned some Hebrew and, by his father's advice, studied. French and Italian. His own account is: "When I had acquired various tongues, and also some not insignificant taste for the sweetness of philosophy, he sent me to Cambridge." Besides his regular schooling, the young poet was trained by books and reading to a more liberal culture. The printer, Humphrey Lowndes, who also lived in Bread Street, lent him books of poetry, among them Spenser, and Du Bartas, translated by Sylvester. Another important influence in Milton's life at St. Paul's was his friendship with the young Italian, Charles Diodati, so often and so feelingly characterized in his letters and in his Latin Elegia Prima, Sexta, and Epitaphium Damonis. While he was still a scholar in St. Paul's, his sister Anne, a year or two older than himself, married, in 1624, Mr. Edward Phillips, second clerk in the Crown office in Chancery, leaving John and his younger brother, Christopher, the only children at home in Bread Street. To the year of his sister's marriage belong the earliest preserved specimens of John Milton's verse. They are Paraphrases on Psalms cxiv and cxxxvi. This work,

mechanical as it may seem to readers out of sympathy with the type of literature it represents, still gives clear evidence to the close observer of the peculiar genius of Milton, of his habits of life and of mind, and of that characteristic result of them all, his culture. It must be remembered that before he went to Cambridge he had probably "ceaselessly studied" and "insatiably read" the books of "his day," what we now call contemporary literature; Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Sonnets, and Tempest, Chapman's Iliad, J. Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, the King James Version of the Bible, Bacon's Novum Organum, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and the First Folio of Shakespeare. Drummond, Drayton, and Wither had written poetry commanding attention, and the year after Milton entered college, the final form of Bacon's Essays appeared. All this justifies Edmond Schérer's assertion that "he belongs at once to the Renaissance and to Puritanism. The whole character of his work is explained by this double filiation. He is a poet, not of the great creative age, but of that age's morrow, a morrow still possessed of spontaneity and conviction. Yet he is a didactic and theological poet, that is to say, the only kind of poet which it was possible for an English republican of the seventeenth century to be. . . . But also what a transition was that from the Renaissance to Puritanism ! And yet the one sprang from the other, for Puritanism is but Protestantism in an acute form, and Protestantism itself is but the Renaissance carried into the sphere of religion and theology."