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up all his reason and deliberation to assist him, searched, meditated, been industrious, and likely consulted and conferred with his judicious friends, he arranges the expression of his thought as he best can, he meets as he goes the objections that are likely to arise from men of differing opinion, ranging all to the utmost of his own capacity into one clear enforcement of what he thinks is for the public good. Of course, also, he applies as he goes his principles,—immutable, if they be true,—to mutable condition of the time for which he writes.

In that way Milton wrote the pieces that are here collected. Of every argument that seemed to strike too boldly against custom and tradition he had to continue the defence against hot controversialists at a time when controversy was a graceless work. And even now it is of little grace. We have not learnt yet how much that most necessary factor in the progress of the world would gain in reason by the loss of passion, how much force there is in fairness, and that only poverty of spirit turns debate to quarrel. Milton's Eikonoklastes" is an answer to "Eikon Basilike,” following that work section by section. The famous Latin works in defence of the People of England were replies to attacks. But the defence in each case is of principles which Milton had set forth in his own way, and upon his own motion, in his treatise on "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates." Only that treatise falls, therefore, within the plan of this collection of Milton's reasonings upon the principles that should control the settlement of Church and State. To bring the whole collection within the compass of one volume it has been necessary that the suggestion of a plan for the establishment of a Free Commonwealth should be given at the close of the book in smaller type, and that whatever may be said by way of annotation should be confined to the Introduction. Inasmuch as the purpose of this volume is to enable many readers to know clearly for themselves what Milton really taught in his prose writings, and inasmuch as he wrote with an emphasis that made his meaning upon each point in the argument entirely clear, there may, after all, be some advantage in the enforced absence of notes. Notes might possibly divert too much attention from

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the main course of the argument, by establishing a side interest in many scholarly allusions to books now seldom read and facts known but to few. Thus we lose the fuller sense of wit and knowledge used for illustration and enforcement of each thought; but this is partly, perhaps, compensated by the gain of a less broken attention to the substance and the continuity of reasoning.

All the great books in the world deal with essentials. Those written in former time are of the past and of the present, as those written now are of the present and the future. The true reader of the true old book looks to the soul of it, and while hearing that speak to the day for which it lived and worked, adapts its voice also to the changed conditions of the later day in which it may be still living and working. Custom and tradition have confined too much the reading of Milton's reasonings on Church and State within a narrow circle. Much that he battled for has been already The Church of England now leaves conscience free. Our Monarchy has lost its despotism: were Milton living now how would he shape to these our days his exhortation to look upward and be free? Still, if we read them with clear eyes, there is a life beyond life in the prose writings of John Milton.

won.

Of Milton himself, as he was when he published them, let us recall first the memory; then, looking at the time for which he wrote, fix our attention on the purport of his teaching, as it concerned those times and these. We shall not be less loyal subjects or worse Churchmen, but we shall be stronger men to-day for taking Milton into council.

John Milton was born in the reign of James the First, at his father's house in Bread Street, Cheapside, on the 9th of December 1608. That was between seven and eight years before the death of Shakespeare. The Milton family was of Oxfordshire, and in early times may have been named from the Oxfordshire village of Great Milton, about eight miles from Oxford near Halton and Thame. There are some eighteen Miltons in different parts of England, groups of homesteads that first took this name from the wind or water mill conspicuous among them. The poet's grandfather was probably a Richard Milton of Stanton St. Johns, about

half a mile from Forest Hill, near the royal forest of Shotover (Chateau vert). He is also said to have been a John Milton, living at Holton, which is two miles from Stanton St. Johns, and to have been underranger of Shotover Forest. He is known to have remained a Roman Catholic after the Reformation; and there is record that Richard Milton of Stanton St. Johns was as late as 1601 in the roll of recusants. Twenty pounds a month being the price of his opinions, he was fined £60 for absence from his parish church during three months dated from the 6th of December 1600, and another £60 for three months from the 13th of July 1601, as he had "neither made submission nor promised to be conformable, pursuant to the act." Milton's father, John Milton, whose birth-date may have been very near to that of Shakespeare, was sent to Oxford for study at Christ Church, but he accepted the teaching of the Church Reformers, conformed to the Church as established by Elizabeth, and was then cast off by his father. At a date near to the time when Shakespeare came to London, John Milton the elder came to London, learned the business of a scrivener, and practised it very successfully in Bread Street. He married, probably, about the year 1600; and he had six children, of whom three died in infancy. The three who lived were Anne, a few years older than her brother John; John, born on the 9th of December 1608; and Christopher, who was seven years younger. Between John and Christopher two daughters were born who died, so that until the age of seven John Milton was the only son. Bread Street, when Milton's father settled there, was a street which Stow described as wholly inhabited by rich merchants, and with divers fair inns for good receipt of carriers and other travellers. It is clear that, through family connections now not to be traced, Milton's father had some money of his own when he was cast out from home. He could not have traded as a money scrivener without a little capital from which to make his loans. Milton the poet also had, in his father's lifetime, when he went to Cambridge, money of his own.

John Milton the father was, then, a religious man, not without

university training. He had suffered for his fidelity to conscience. His religious character would influence his choice of friends; but among his friends also were some of the chief musicians of the day, for the bent of his own genius was towards music. Seven years before the birth of his poet son he had contributed one (the eighteenth) to a collection of twentyfive madrigals in praise of Queen Elizabeth—"The Triumphs of Oriana." To this work the chief living musicians were contributors, and its editor was Thomas Morley. When his son was a child of six, John Milton, the father, joined again a company of chief musicians of the day, by contributing the music to three pieces in a volume of "Teares and Lamentations of a Sorrowfull Soule." When his son was a boy of thirteen, John Milton, the father, again joined with chief musicians of the day as one of the contributors of harmonised tunes for the whole Book of Psalms from the church psalmody of Europe. The tunes known as Norwich and York are those which the elder Milton harmonised, and Sir John Hawkins said in his "History of Music" that within memory half the nurses in England were used to sing the tenor part of York tune by way of lullaby, and that the chimes of many country churches had played it for many years six or eight times in four and twenty hours.

So Milton grew up as a child, with his father's earnest life breathing its harmonies about him; in care of a mother of whom we hear only that her health was delicate and that she was most known for her charities, and with his sister Anne for a small guide and senior companion. When he was five years old there was another sister born, Tabitha, who lived to be two years and a half, and died five or six months after the birth of Christopher. He had also as teacher before he was sent to a public school, a graduate of St. Andrews and licentiate of the Scottish Kirk, Thomas Young of Loncardy, who had afterwards as a Puritan divine a living in Suffolk, and was made Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. The relation with this early tutor became affectionate, and Milton, writing to him afterwards from college, addressed him as almost a second father.

Milton was ten years old when there came to London a young Dutch painter, Cornelius Jansen, who settled in Blackfriars and took portraits at five broad pieces a head. Milton the father, proud of his elder son, had young John Milton's portrait painted by Cornelius Jansen, and it still remains.

About two years after the painting of the portrait, Milton was sent in his twelfth year to St. Paul's School, where the headmaster was Dr. Alexander Gill the elder, who had a son of his, Alexander Gill the younger, to assist him. Young Alexander Gill had a rough temper, as incidents of his own life show, and those were days of much severity in teaching. But here again there sprang up an affectionate relation between Milton and his teacher. The boy wrote verses; he has allowed us to see no more than a few attempts at versifying psalms, and wisely destroyed all other of his schoolboy rhymes. Alexander Gill the younger was, possibly, the best writer of Latin and Greek verse in his time. Here was a ground of fellowship; and we afterwards find Milton at college asked his opinion of verses sent to him by his old teacher at St. Paul's.

Such errors rise in

The austerity of Milton is a vulgar error. clouds from the dry dust of traditional opinion, are much blown to and fro, and get into our eyes and partly blind us, till we wipe them out. In Milton's case it was party feeling that obscured the truth in the first instance, and with other men that is a frequent cause of great misunderstanding. It is not easy to know the truth even about a living man whose life is involved in controversies that excite strong feeling. Milton was not austere. In the height of the excitement caused by the chief controversy of the Commonwealth, when Milton had addressed to Europe his Latin Defence of the English People, and a Dutch scholar wanted to know something about a man whose name was new to him, the information gathered put in the forefront of Milton's character that he was "mitis, comes "—gentle, companionable. Those were the only qualities expressly named; the rest of his merits were contained in an etcetera, "multisque aliis præditus virtutibus endowed with many other virtues. So wrote Isaac Voss to

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