1660.

from his country, and bringing home this hereditary prince, they made him King Charles II. This restoring of the prince to his father's throne is a notable point in English history, and is known as the Restoration. Never did any English sovereign have a nobler opportunity to make himself immortal in history and blessed in the memories of his people, than Charles II. He was welcomed to the throne with such joy as the cool-blooded English rarely show. If there had been in him one spark of kingliness, one spark of true manliness, he might have been a great monarch. He could easily, by his influence, have ennobled politics; have made manners pure without making them too severe; have elevated literature, and kept religion on a high level, free from the gloom and hardness of Puritanism on the one side, and the empty hollowness of forms on the other. All this Charles, by his own example, if he had been a noble gentleman, might have done. But he was an unprincipled, dishonorable man. He brought with him a crowd of courtiers, many of whom had been in France, and who had brought back all the vices they found there to graft them on those of England. Literature, especially the drama, reflected all these vices. Never was the stage so degraded as in the reign of Charles. Women went in masks to the theater, ashamed to show their faces there; and men of rare wit and great brilliancy devoted all their talents to the production of a poetry so full of coarseness that it is now, happily, almost unread and unknown.

As would be natural, nearly all the literary men and poets, from the beginning of the civil war struggle, were on the side of the King, and many of them shed their blood for his sake. From the earliest times that the minstrel first sounded his harp in the banquet halls of his chief, the poet had generally been under the King's patronage. Most of the singers of whom I have already spoken were royalists— Lovelace, Suckling, Herrick and the rest. Waller was a

turncoat, and could write odes either for Cromwell or Charles II, as occasion offered; and Wither is almost the only man among them who was a Puritan and suffered in the cause. There was, however, one poet, so great that he over-topped all others, and made amends for the loss of all the rest, whose heart and brain were enlisted in the Puritan cause. This was JOHN MILTON, the great English epic poet-the great poet immediately following Shakspeare— and it is of him that I begin my account of the writers of this period.

EIGHT

Born 1608.

TALK XXIX.

ON JOHN MILTON.

years before the death of Shakspeare, John Milton was born. His father's house was in Bread Street, Died 1674. London, where the clanging of Bow Bells must have been one of the first sounds in his baby ears. Close by, in the same street, was the Mermaid tavern, and when a toddling child, Milton may have seen the figures of Shakspeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, or any of the notable members of that club at the Mermaid, as they passed the door of his father's house on their way to the famous old inn.

Milton stands alone in my imagination, a grand and solitary figure in English literature. We do not see him as we see Shakspeare, surrounded by a group of poets of his own kind, even though far below him in genius; or, like Shakspeare again, followed by a host of imitators. He stands apart dignified, sublime, the great epic poet of our language.

he "

Somebody says, in a description of Milton's father, that was a good musician and a bad poet." That the elder Milton had an excellent talent for music is proved by some of his compositions which still remain, and he loved the art so much that his son was trained in the knowledge of it from babyhood. Perhaps this early culture attuned Milton's ear to catch that grand movement and harmony which is the charm and power of his poetry.

He was a precocious boy, delicate and scholarly, and so beautiful, with his fair skin, curling light hair and brown eyes, that his fellow students nick-named him the “lady"

in college. He wrote verses at seventeen, studied till midnight when a mere child, and in college says of himself: "There for seven years I studied the learning and arts wont to be taught, far from all vice and approved by all good men." At twenty-four he left college, and spent four or five years in writing and study. During this time, he wrote his two plays-Comus and Arcades-his lyrics-L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and the Lament for Lycidas, and some sonnets. After this he went to France and Italy. Here he spent a happy season, going to literary parties in Rome, where he met the poets and scholars of the time, and making some life-long friends in these journeyings. But the strife between the court and the Puritans had broken out fiercely. England had begun to be in a turmoil, and Milton was too anxious about his country to stay away in content; so he returned, and, taking a house in St. Bride's Churchyard, began as a school-master, teaching his two nephews and some other pupils their Greek, Latin and mathematics-writing meanwhile vigorous tracts in favor of the revolutionary sentiments, every day growing stronger. No more verse like L'Allegro, no masques like Comus, were again to come from his pen.

When Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, Milton was made his Latin secretary, and was in close commerce with the heads of the Puritan party, writing in favor of political liberty, and the liberty of the press. During this time he undertook an answer to the theory of the divine right of kings, which, since Charles I was beheaded, had been strongly proclaimed in Europe. His physicians, who saw symptoms of coming blindness, begged him not to begin this work, but he would not be moved from what he thought was duty, and continued until he became totally

blind.

After Cromwell's death, and Charles II had been restored to the throne of his father, Milton, whose head was for a time in danger, settled down in the leisure of old age and blindness, with the design of writing a great poem, a design

which no doubt had been in his thoughts while affairs of state had held him busy. For twenty years he had written no poetry. Now he resolved that he would take something worthy of him: an heroic subject with heroic treatment. He would write no more light verses as in his earlier poems; no rhymes, which he now called "the jingling sounds of like endings," " "the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre."

At first he thought of taking the British King Arthur for the hero of his work, but finally chose a subject more supernatural, the revolt of Satan in Heaven, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, which, in an earlier age, had been the theme of Cadmon's untaught pen. Paradise Regained followed Paradise Lost, and these epics, with the tragedy of Samson Agonistes, whose hero was the mighty Hebrew, smitten with blindness, were the work of Milton's latest days.

You will notice that Milton's writings are in three distinct groups. His early poems, when he wrote in the lyric style; his prose works, written in the middle period of his life, and his later days, when he wrote in the epic style, and only in blank verse.

I fancy that Milton, in his later days, when he wrote Paradise Lost, did not have a great admiration for his early poems. Yet they are so musical and so graceful that I am very glad he did not hold his severe opinions about rhyme when, in early manhood, he wrote these fanciful verses, with their "jingling sound of like endings."

The lightest of all his pieces are L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, two odes to mirth and to melancholy. The first begins with this gay invocation:

"Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee

Jest and youthful Jolity,

Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles,

Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles,

Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,

And love to live in dimple sleek;