No More Learning

92 (#108) #############################################

92
Lesser Caroline Poets
a
Winstanley was no critic and the age was the age of Butler and
Dryden ; but he is all the more valuable as witness to the opinion
of the average man.
If confirmation be wanted, it is hardly
necessary to go further than the fact that, of the half-score or dozen
editions which had appeared in the forty years or so before this
date, hardly one failed to be reprinted or revised, and some were
reissued many times over.
The work by which this reputation was obtained, even when
bolstered out with spurious additions, is not large; the certainly, or
probably, genuine part of it does not extend to more than two or
three thousand lines. But Cleiveland had a double, in fact a treble,
appeal. In the first place, a large proportion of his work was
'straight-from-the-shoulder' political satire, sure to be received
rapturously by those who agreed with it, and perforce interesting,
though unpleasantly interesting, to its victims. In the second, it was
couched in the very extravagance of the metaphysical fashion, yet
with an avoidance of the intolerable prolixity and promiscuousness,
or the sometimes merely foolish quaintness, of men like Benlowes.
In the third (though this is not likely to have been consciously
noticed), Cleiveland, evidently, is feeling for new melodies in verse;
he is not merely a master of the stopped antithetic couplet, but is
one of the earliest writers who shake off the literary timidity of
the Elizabethans and Jacobeans as to trisyllabic measures, and
boldly attempt anapaestic swing.
To appreciate Cleiveland's political pieces, it must be remem-
bered that, as has been pointed out elsewhere, there was not only
a deep though half unconscious thirst for the novel, but, also, a
similar nisus towards the newspaper. When, quite early in the
conflict, he lampooned the puritan objection to'&c,' in the oath of
1640, and when, shortly afterwards, he poured contempt on
Smectymnuus, he was simply a journalist of the acutest type in
verse-a poetical leader-writer. These things should be compared
with the prose writings, on the other side, of his senior at Christ's.
There is nothing to choose in bitterness; Cleiveland has the
advantage in point. But the shorter compass and less serious
form carry with them a danger which has weighed on all journalism
since. The packed allusion, and the rapid searching comment,
become almost unintelligible to any but contemporaries. Even
Cleiveland's most famous, and, on the whole, most successful, piece,
The Rebel Scot, requires more minute acquaintance with detail
than can be readily expected or found. The Mixed Assembly, a
piece of less than a hundred verses, would scarcely be overcom-
>


## p. 93 (#109) #############################################

Summary
93
mented on the margins of a hundred pages with a verse of text to
each. The force and fire are still admirable when realised; but
the smoke of the explosion has solidified itself, as it were, and
obscures both.
So, again, in non-political pieces, the same accretion of
allusive conceit besets the poetry. Men rejoiced, then, frankly and
sincerely, in such an image as this, that, when a bee crawls over
Fuscara's hand,
He tipples palmistry, and dines
On all her fortune-telling lines.
It can be rejoiced in still, but not by everybody. Yet it should
be impossible for anyone with some native alacrity of mind,
some literary sympathy and some acquired knowledge, not to
derive frequent enjoyment from Cleiveland, even in his altitudes
of conceit; and his verse is a real point de repère. In 1643, at
latest, we get from him such a couplet as this, which Dryden could
hardly have beaten forty years later still:
Such was the painters brief for Venus' face-
Item, an eye from Jane, a lip from Grace.
And, perhaps earlier, certainly not much later, in the semi-
serious Mark Antony and the avowed burlesque on this his own
piece, he attempts, and nearly achieves, anapaestic measure of a
kind hardly yet tried. A most imperfect poet he must be called ;
a poet of extraordinary gifts he should be allowed to be.
Sufficient stress has been laid on beauties, throughout this
chapter, to make it, though with some general reiteration, fair to
draw attention chiefly, in conclusion, to the warning which the
whole group more or less, and these last two members of it
especially, supply, and which makes the study of it almost indis-
pensable in order to a thorough comprehension of English litera-
ture. There are beauties in almost all these writers; charming
aud poignant beauty in some parts of some of them; and specially
characteristic beauty-beauty that you do not find in other periods ;
nor can it be denied that both their merits and their faults arose
from a striving after that daring and headstrong vein which had
made the fortune of the great Elizabethans. But there is one
power to whom, almost without exception, they neglected to pay
attention : and she avenges herself with prompt severity. Now
this power was criticism.
In some respects, they were very excusable. They could hardly
yet know that prose was a far more suitable medium for novel and


## p. 94 (#110) #############################################

94
Lesser Caroline Poets
romance writing than verse; the discovery was not fully made till
nearly a century after their time. But most of them, from
Chamberlayne downwards, might surely have known that, whether
you tell a story in verse or prose, you should tell it intelligibly and
clearly; with, at any rate, distinct sequence, if not with elaborate
plot; and in language arranged so as to convey thought, not to
conceal it. They were not to blame for adopting the overlapped
form of couplet : they were to blame for letting reasonable and
musical variety overflow into loquacious disorder. Although there
may be more difference of opinion here, they were not to blame
for adopting the ‘metaphysical' style, inasmuch as that style lends
itself to the sublimest poetic beauty ; but they were to blame for
neglecting to observe that, when it is not sublime, it is nearly
certain to be ridiculous. So, again, their practice of fantastically
cut and broken lyric, and their fingering of the common and
long measures, were wholly admirable things in themselves; but,
at the same time, they were apt to make their verse ‘not in-
evitable enough'-to multiply its examples in a mote-like and
unimportant fashion. To take the two capital examples just dwelt
upon : in another age, Benlowes would probably either not have
written at all or have been a religious and satiric poet of real im-
portance; while it may be taken as certain that Cleiveland's satiric, if
not his lyrical, powers would have been developed far more perfectly
if he had been born a generation or two generations later. And
those later generations, though they lost something that both
Benlowes and Cleiveland had fitfully, and that shows far better in
Chamberlayne and Stanley and Hall, benefited, both consciously
and unconsciously, by the faults of the school we have been
studying


## p. 95 (#111) #############################################

CHAPTER V
MILTON
>
THE ‘overdated ceremony,' as Milton himself might have called
it, of protesting that the best record of a great writer's life is in his
works can, at least, plead this in its favour, that it applies to hardly
any two persons in quite the same way. In Milton's case, especially,
its application has a peculiarity partaking of that strong separation
from ordinary folk which is one of the great Miltonic notes. We are
not, in his case, without a fairly large amount of positive biographical
information; and that information was worked up and supple-
mented by David Masson with heroic diligence, with lavish provision
of commentary and without that undue expatiation into ‘may-have-
beens' and 'probablys' and 'perhapses' which, despite the tempta-
tion to it which exists in some cases, is irritating to the critically
minded and dangerously misleading to the uncritical. But, in order
to understand the external information, we need unusually constant
and careful recurrence to the internal, and, on the other hand, we
are likely to misread not a little of the work if we do not know
the life. Nor is this double process one requiring mere care. The
ordinary conception of Milton, among people more than fairly
educated, may be fairly uniform and reasonably clear; but it does
not follow that it is either correct or complete. He may not so
absolutely 'evade our question' as does Shakespeare. The con-
tradictions or inconsistencies in him may not be trivial and exoteric
as in Bacon. But, like Dante, whom, of all other writers of the
highest class, he most resembles, Milton gives us his life and his
work, to explain each other, it may be, but offering not a few puzzles
and pitfalls in the course of the explanation. Although, therefore,
the immense mass of detail which has been accumulated about
Milton defies distillation and condensation in such a chapter as this,
it has been thought important to give all the principal points, while
excluding those proper to a full ‘life,' or a critical edition of the
works' in eactenso.


## p. 96 (#112) #############################################

96
Milton
The life itself was not extraordinarily eventful, but it was
unusually so when compared with the average lives of men of
letters; and, though the unusualness was partly due to the
times, it was largely increased by Milton's own attitude towards
those times, during the last forty years of his life. In the
circumstances of his birth and origin, he reflected the peculiar
ecclesiastical—which meant, also, the political-history of England
for the past three generations. He was born on 9 December 1608,
in the city of London, at The Spread Eagle, Bread street, Cheap-
side, where his father (and namesake) carried on the business of a
scrivener—that is to say, a lawyer of the inferior branch, who had
specially to do with the raising, lending and repayment of money
on landed or other security. The sign of the office or shop was
the crest of the family—an Oxfordshire one of the upper yeomanry;
and the reason of the elder John's taking to business was that
he had been disinherited by his father for abandoning Roman
Catholicism and conforming to the church of England. The poet's
younger brother Christopher reversed the process, became a judge
and a knight under James II and (probably on that account, for we
know very little else about him) has been generally spoken of in
a depreciatory manner by biographers and historians. But the
brothers seem always to have been on good terms. There was
also an elder sister, Anne, who married and became the mother
of John and Edward Phillips, both men of letters, in their way,
the latter our chief original source of information about his
uncle. Of the poet's mother, we hear but little, and it is by
inference rather than on direct evidence that her name is supposed
to have been Sarah Jeffrey or Jeffreys.
Milton's father, however, was not only a prosperous man of
business, but one of rather unusual culture. His son derived from
him his interest in music; and that the father was not indifferent
to poetry—perhaps not to romance—is evident from his connection
with a contemporary version of Guy of Warwick, which exists in
MS and to which he contributed a sonnet. He sent his son to
St Paul's school, giving him, also, a private tutor, Thomas Young,
who was a good scholar but an acrid presbyterian and, later, the
'ty' of Smectymnuus. And Milton seems to have had no objection
to being 'brought on' in the Blimberian sense—working by himself
when a boy of twelve, till the small hours. Although it is impossible
to deny the indebtedness of some of the good qualities of his work
to this 'overpressure, it must have had bad results in various
directions, moral and physical. And, though his blindness cannot


## p. 97 (#113) #############################################

Life at Cambridge
97
have been actually caused by this over-exertion of his eyes, it was
,
certainly not staved off by the process. For the time, however, all
went well. Alexander Gill, high master of St Paul's, was an excellent
teacher, and his son continued to be a great friend of Milton when
Gill went to Oxford and Milton to Cambridge. There, he was ad-
mitted at Christ's on 12 February 1625, when he had just entered
his seventeenth year; and he began to keep terms at Easter. His
college sojourn begins the Milton legend and controversy—tedious
and idle like all controversial legends and to be kept down as much
as possible. He certainly did not get on with his tutor Chappell,
and was sent away from college; though not technically 'sent
down' or rusticated, inasmuch as he did not lose a term. And his
transference to another tutor has been held (though the fact is
not quite conclusive) as proof that there were faults on both sides.
He himself admits 'indocility' and grumbles that he was not
allowed to choose his own studies. That he was unpopular with
his fellow undergraduates is not certain, though it is not im-
probable. The celebrated nickname "the lady of Christ's' admits
of—and has been fitted with—both interpretations—that of a
compliment to his beauty and that of a sneer at him as a
milksop. He certainly must have been as different as possible
from the 'Square-Cap' of his contemporary Cleiveland's lively
glorification of the graduates and undergraduates of Cambridge.
But he protested, later, that the Fellows treated him with more
than ordinary respect' and wished him to stay up at the end of his
seven years, when, in 1632, he took the M. A. degree. The upshot
of the whole seems to be that he was studious, reserved and not
quite like other people-once, at least, and, probably, more than
once, becoming definitely “refractory. ' He was always to be
studious, reserved and not like other people; and, in his nearly
seventy years, the times of truce were not very common and the
times of war very frequent.
It is impossible to say what he would have done if his father
had not been unusually, though by no means unwisely, indulgent,
and of means sufficient to exercise indulgence. That Milton could
work hard at mere routine when it suited him, the disastrous
secretaryship afterwards showed; but it is impossible to imagine
him in any ordinary profession. He had been destined of a child'
to the church. But, though there is no positive evidence of anti-
Anglican feeling in his work before Lycidas, and, though Lycidas
itself might have been written, in a quite possible construction, by
an orthodox and even high Anglican who was an ardent church
E. L. VII.
7
6
6
CH. V,


## p. 98 (#114) #############################################

98
Milton
reformer, Milton's discipleship to Young and the Gills, his
difficulties with Chappell, who was a Laudian, and his whole sub-
sequent conduct and utterance, explain his abandonment of orders.
No (or only the slightest) obstacles were put in his way, and
no force was used to urge him out of it. His father had given up
business, and settled at Horton in the south of Bucks, less than
twenty miles from London, on the river Colne, within sight of
Windsor, and in a pretty, though not wildly romantic, neighbour-
hood. Here Milton lived, and read, and thought, and annotated,
and wrote, for five years, directing his attention chiefly to linguistic,
literary and historical study, but, at last, setting seriously to work
at poetry itself. Besides smaller pieces, Comus (1634) and Lycidas
(1637) certainly date from this time ; and the ingenious attempts
of Mrs Byse? can hardly be allowed to carry L'Allegro and Il
Penseroso on to the period that followed. In 1635, he was admitted
ad eundem as M. A. at Oxford.
Milton had thus twelve years-counting together his Cambridge
and his Horton sojourn-of literary concentration ; in the first
seven, he was somewhat, but probably not much, interfered with : in
the second five, he was completely undisturbed. It is quite clear
from various passages of his works and letters, earlier and later, that
these years were definitely and deliberately employed on 'getting his
wedding garment ready'-on preparing himself for the great career
in poetry upon which he actually entered in the last of these years,
but which was subsequently interrupted. In a sense, nothing could
be more fortunate. Solitude, and the power of working as one
pleases and when one pleases only, are among the greatest of intel-
lectual luxuries; they are, perhaps, more than luxuries-positive
necessities—to exceptional poetic temperaments. The moral effect
of both may be more disputable. It certainly did not, in Milton's
case, lead to dissipation, in any sense, even to that respectable but
deplorable and not uncommon form of literary dissipation which
consists in always beginning and never finishing. In such a tem-
perament as his, it may have fostered the peculiar arrogance—too
dignified and too well suited to the performance to offend, but only
not to be regretted by idle partisans—the morose determination to
be different, the singular want of adaptability in politics and social
matters generally, which has been admitted even by sympathisers
with his political and religious views.
But the elder John was for Thorough’in regard to his son's
education. He had given him the best English training of public
i See bibliograpby.
6


## p. 99 (#115) #############################################

Foreign Tour
99
school and university. He had allowed him a full lustrum of
private study to‘ripen the wine. ' He now completed the pro-
cess, at what must have been a very considerable expense, by
sending him to the continent-the recognised finishing of the time,
but usually open only to men of considerable station and means
like Evelyn, to those who had special professional training to
acquire like Browne, or to travellers on definite business like
Howell The father was not left alone : for, though his wife
died in April 1637, and his daughter had long been married,
Christopher and his wife established themselves at Horton.
Milton left home just a twelvemonth after his mother's death,
with good letters of introduction, including one from Sir Henry
Wotton. He travelled by Paris (where he met Grotius), Nice
and Genoa to Florence, where he spent August and September
1638, frequented the Florentine academies, and enjoyed, with what,
no doubt, was a perfectly genuine enjoyment, the curious manège
of learned and literary compliment and exercise which formed the
routine of those societies. We shall not understand Milton if we
do not realise his intense appreciation of form—an appreciation
which, in all non-ecclesiastical matters, was probably intensified
further by his violent rejection of ceremonial in religion. He
next spent another two months at Rome, made various friends,
heard and admired the famous singer Leonora Baroni, celebrated
another lady, who may have been real or not, aired his protestantism
with impunity and then went on to Naples. Here (through an
'eremite friar,' whose good offices, on this occasion, might have
saved a future association with “trumpery'), he made the ac-
quaintance of a very old and very distinguished nobleman of
letters, the marquis of Villa, Giovanni Baptista Manso. He did
not go further than Naples, though he had thought not only of
Sicily but of Greece. The reason he gave for relinquishing this
scheme was the threatening state of home politics and the im-
propriety of enjoying himself abroad while his countrymen were
striking for freedom.
It was inevitable that this deliverance, after Milton had
exhausted the vocabulary of personal vituperation and sarcasm
against his own antagonists, should be turned against himself.
The phrase 'what you say will be used against you ’ is not only a
decent police warning but a universal-and universally useless-
phylactery of life. But there was no hypocrisy in him; and
the saying is as illuminative as his appreciation of the Florentine
1 P. L. II, 474, 475.
7-2


## p. 100 (#116) ############################################

Іоо
Milton
academies. He did not hurry home, but repeated his two months'
sojourns at Rome and at Florence, meeting Galileo (with memorable
poetical results) at the latter place, and then travelling by Ferrara
and Venice to Geneva. Here, he was at home in faith, if an exile
in taste; here, he seems to have heard of the death of his friend
Charles Diodati, whose uncle was a minister there; here, he left one
of the most personal touches we have of him'; and here, or on the
way home, or after reaching it, he wrote Epitaphium Damonis.
He reached England in August 1639, being then in his thirty-first
year; and, at this point, the first period in his life and work closed.
The curtain, in fact, fell on more than an act: it practically closes
the first play of a trilogy, the second of which had hardly anything
to do with the first, though the third was to resume and com-
plete it.
The next twenty years saw the practical fulfilment of Milton's
unluckily worded resolve to break off his continental tour. He
was still not in a hurry, establishing himself first in lodgings, then
in a “pretty garden house' outside Aldersgate, with books to which
he had added largely in Italy. Here he took as pupils first his two
nephews, and then others. To his adoption of this occupation was,
in part, due the famous little letter or tractate Of Education : to
Master Samuel Hartlib. Another result seems to have been the
exercise of that 'overpressure' on his pupils which, in his own case,
had been largely voluntary. 'Can't you let him alone ? ' was a
counsel of perfection in this matter which Milton, like others,
never realised.
It is less inconceivable than it may seem to some that, circum-
stances aiding, Milton might have taken to teaching as a regular pro-
fession. For he liked domineering, and he was passionately fond of
study in almost any form. But deities other than Pallas found other
things for him to do. He struck, not as a soldier, but as a con-
troversialist, into the combat for which he had long been preparing,
with the treatise Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in
England, before much more than a year had passed since his return,
in 1641. It was in less than a year after the actual opening of the
struggle that he married. Of the series of pamphlets dealing with
matters ecclesiastical, political and conjugal which now began, notice
will be taken in the proper place : the marriage must come here.
In what has usually been written of this thrice unfortunate
6
1 His autograph in the album of a Neapolitan named Camillo Cerdogni—a refugee
in religion—with the addition of the last two lines of Comus and the Coelum non
animum of Horace.


## p. 101 (#117) ############################################

The First Marriage
IOI
adventure-tragical in all its aspects if tragicomical in some
there has, perhaps, been a little unfairness to Milton : there has
certainly been much to his wife. The main lines of fact are re-
morselessly clear: the necessary elucidations of detail are almost
wholly wanting. In June 1643, John Milton married Mary Powell,
the eldest daughter of an Oxfordshire gentleman, whose family
were neighbours to the Miltons and who had had with them both
friendship and business relations. She was seventeen. He brought
her home in June; she went back, at her family's request, but with
his consent, in July, and refused to come to him at Michaelmas as
had been arranged. For two years, he saw nothing of her. These
are the bare facts, and almost all the facts certainly known, though
there are a few slight, and, in some cases, doubtful, addenda.
On such a brief, an advocate may say almost what he pleases.
What may fairly be said for and against Milton will come presently:
what has been said against his wife may almost rouse indignation
and certainly justify contempt. We have been told that she was
a 'dull and common girl,' of which there is just as much and just
as little evidence as that she was as wise as Diotima and as
queenly as Helen; that she had flirted with royalist officers from
Oxford (no evidence again); finally, that there is no evidence that
she was handsome. ' As for this last, from passage after passage in
the poems it is almost inconceivable that Milton should have been
attracted by any one who was not good-looking.
Whether, however, she was pretty, or whether she was plain, the
reasons of her leaving her husband are not hard to guess. For the
fact is that Milton's attitude to women is peculiar and not wholly
pleasant. It is not merely, as is often said, that he disdained them
and held the doctrine of their subjection—there's example for 't;'
as Malvolio says of the same subject in another connection. It is
not merely that he was unreasonable in his expectations of them
there's much more example for that. It is that, as was often the
case with him, he was utterly unpractical, and his theoretical
notions were a conglomerate and not a happy one. Mark
Pattison-an interesting witness, some of whose other expressions
have just been cited-chose Adam's ecstatic description of Eve to
Raphael as Milton's real mind on the subject. He forgot that we
must take with it the angel's prompt, severe and (if one may say
such things of angels) hopelessly coarse snub and rebuke. The
fact seems to be that Milton-as elsewhere, sharply opposed to
Shakespeare, and here almost as sharply opposed to Dante-blended
an excessive and eclectic draft on books and on fancy with an
.


## p. 102 (#118) ############################################

I02
Milton
insufficient experience of life. He accepted the common disdainful
estimate of the ancients; the very peculiar, but by no means
wholly disdainful, estimate of the Hebrews; and he tried to blend
both with something of the sensuous passion of the Middle Ages
and the renascence, stripping from this the transcendental element
which had been infused in the Middle Ages by Mariolatry and
chivalry, in the renascence by a sort of poetical convention.
An Aspasia-Hypatia-Lucretia-Griselda, with any naughtiness in
the first left out and certain points in Solomon's pattern woman
added, might have met Milton's views. But this blend has not
been commonly quoted in the marriage market. His friend
Marvell, in a passage of rare poetic beauty, described his love
as begotten by Despair upon Impossibility. Milton's seems to
have been begotten upon another kind of Impossibility by Un-
reasonable Expectation. The exact circumstances of his first
marriage we shall never know; those of his second take it out
of argument; his third seems to have been simply the investing
of a gouvernante with permanent rank extraordinary and pleni-
potentiary. But passage after passage in his works remains to
speak; and the terrible anecdote of his obliging his daughters,
and elaborately teaching them, to read to him languages which
they did not understand, remains for comment. The taste of the
seventeenth century in torture was not only, as was said of the
knowledge of Sam Weller in another matter, 'extensive and
peculiar,' but, as was said of the emperor Frederick II in the
same, 'humorous and lingering. ' But it rarely can have gone
further than this.
Once more, the remarkable blends of Milton's character which
are important to the comprehension of his work require notice.
His immediate conduct seems to have been perfectly correct-he
repeatedly solicited her to return, until (according to a perhaps not
quite trustworthy account) his requests were not only disregarded
but rejected with contempt! But, thenceforward, he allowed his
self-centredness, his curious anarchism and his entirely unpractical
temper to carry him off in a quite different direction. Indis-
solubility of marriage, except for positive unfaithfulness, was
inconvenient to John Milton; John Milton was not a person
? It may be observed that these overtures, if made, dispose almost finally of what
has been called by an advocate of Milton the horrible' suggestion, based on a written
date, that the first divorce pamphlet was actually composed before Mary left him. In
that case, he would have been an utter hypocrite in his requests to her to come
back; and it has been said that hypocrisy and Milton are simply two 'incompossible'
ideas, to use Sir W. Hamilton's useful word.
6


## p. 103 (#119) ############################################

The Divorce Tracts
103
to console himself illicitly; therefore, indissolubility of marriage
;
must go. The series of divorce pamphlets, accordingly, followed;
and, having proved to his own satisfaction that he was entitled
to marry again, he sought the hand of a certain Miss Davis,
whom some have identified (quite gratuitously) with the 'virtuous
young lady' of Sonnet IX. She, at any rate, had virtue and com-
mon sense enough to decline an arrangement of elective affinity.
In any one else than Milton, the proposal would have argued
little virtue; in any virtuous person, it could but argue no
common sense. And, indeed, the absence of that contemned
property is conspicuous everywhere in these unfortunate trans-
actions. Milton was not only in the straight vernacular) making
an utter fool of himself-aggravating the ridicule of a situation
the distress of which arises in part from the very fact that it
is ridiculous—but, just after he had come forward as a public
man, he was playing into the hands of his enemies, and
scandalising his friends. There was no point on which the
more moderate and clear-sighted of the puritan party can have
been more sensitive than this. The very word 'divorce'-thanks
to Henry VIII and some of the German reforming princes—made
the ears of better protestants burn; and, from the days of
the lampoons on Luther's marriage to those of the Family of
Love, licensed libertinage had been one of the reproaches most
constantly cast in the teeth of 'hot gospellers. ' Next to nothing
seems to be known of Miss Davis except that she had good looks
(as we could guess) and good wits (which is evident). But it was
certainly thanks to her, and to time's revenges, that the situation
(after Milton had made himself at once a stumbling-block and a
laughing-stock for two years) was at last saved, before anything
irreparable had happened. The ruin of the royal cause carried
the Powell family with it; and, with more common sense than
magnanimity, they resolved to throw themselves on Milton's mercy,
A sort of ambush was laid--and reason coincides with romance in
suggesting that the famous forgiveness scene of Paradise Lost had
been actually rehearsed on this occasion. At any rate, Milton
who, on his side, had very much more magnanimity than common
sense-took his wife back in the summer of 1645; and, when Oxford
fell, a year later, received her whole family into his new house in
Barbican. Of the rest, we know nothing except the birth of three
children-daughters—who appear later. At the birth of a fourth,
1 Miltonist' was actually used in print as a synonym for an opponent of the
sacredness of marriage.


## p. 104 (#120) ############################################

104
Milton
in 1652, Mary died, not yet twenty-seven. Otherwise, there is no
record of her married life. Milton is not in the least likely to
have visited her early fractiousness by any petty persecution : he
is as little likely to have ‘killed her with kindness. ' The whole
thing was a mistake--a common one, no doubt; but, somehow,
the pity of it remains rather specially.
What Milton thought or felt on the death of his first wife we
have no means of knowing. He did not write a sonnet on it, as
he did on that of his second ; and, so far as memory serves, there
is not any passage in his entire work which can be taken as even
glancing at it.
But the year in which it occurred was a black
one for him in another way. He had now, for a full decade,
occupied himself in violent and constant pamphleteering, writing
nothing else but a few sonnets and some psalm-paraphrases. He
had, indeed, published his early Poems in 1645, but he had added
nothing to them; and, in 1649, he had undertaken the duties of
Latin secretary to the new parliamentary committee for foreign
affairs with a salary of £288. 138. 6d. , worth between three and
four times the amount today. We know a little of his private
affairs during this decade, besides the marriage troubles. His
wife's father had died in 1646, and a complicated series of trans-
actions in relation to the marriage settlements, and to old loans,
left Milton in possession of property at Wheatley, between Oxford
and Thame, worth, with charges off it, perhaps £50 a year. His
own father died shortly afterwards; and, late in 1647, Milton gave
up his pupils and moved to Holborn, with Lincoln's inn fields
behind him. On his appointment, he had, for a time (some two
years), rooms at Whitehall; but, in 1651, he moved to 'Petty
France'-later, York street. The house, till some thirty years
ago, was well known, and, after his time, it belonged to Bentham
and was occupied by Hazlitt.
Although Milton's regular official duties of translation and
writing seem to have been rather multifarious than hard, they
were, in themselves, not good for a man with very weak eyesight;
and his unfortunate aptitude for pamphleteering marked him out
for overtime work, which was still worse. The last stroke was
believed by himself, as a famous boast records, to have been
given by his reply to Salmasius's Defensio Regia (see post). This
appeared in the spring of 1651, and, a year later, he was totally
blind. No scientific account of the case exists.
The personal calamity could hardly have been severer; but, as
regards the poet, not the man, it was, perhaps, rather a gain than a


## p. 105 (#121) ############################################

Life during the Commonwealth
105
loss, though it required outward circumstances of a different kind
to replace Milton in his true office. His blindness does not seem
to have been regarded as a disablement from his official employ-
ment, though it led to the appointment of coadjutors and a division
a
of salary; and it was not till later that he engaged in the last
and most discreditable of his angry and undignified controversies.
Those with Ussher and Hall had, at least, the excuse, in matter if
not in manner, of religious convictions; the divorce tracts, of
intense personal interest; Eikonoklastes, of political consistency ;
and Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, of the same, and of official
commission. No one of these excuses really applies to the supple-
mentary wrangle with Alexander Morus or Moir. This Franco-Scot
had published and prefaced a strong royalist declamation, Regii
Sanguinis Clamor, directed against regicides in general and Milton
in particular, and written, but not signed, by Peter du Moulin.
Milton cooked his spleen for two whole years, rummaged the
continent for scandal against Morus, refused to believe the latter's
true assertion that he was only the editor of the book and, in
May 1654, published a Defensio Secunda which is simply a long,
clumsy, would-be satiric invective against his enemy.
Of his private life during this time, we again know very little.
His nephews, like ‘nine tenths of the people of England,' turned
royalists, and wrote light and ungodly literature. He seems to have
had a fair number of friends—though they hardly included any
men of literary distinction except Marvell, all such, as a rule,
being in the opposite camp. D'Avenant may have been another
exception, if the agreeable, but not quite proved, legend that each
protected the other in turn be true; and, as Dryden's relatives,
the Pickerings, were close friends of Cromwell, the younger poet's
acquaintance with the elder may have begun before the restora-
tion. He married a second time on 12 November 1656. His
wife, daughter of a captain Woodcock, was named Catherine, and
lived but fifteen months after the marriage, dying (as the twenty-
third sonnet records pathetically) in childbirth on 10 February
1657/8. The child was another daughter, but survived her mother
only a few weeks. Attention has often been drawn to the ‘veiled
face' of the sonnet as implying that Milton had never seen this
wife. It should, however, be remembered, that the Alcestis parallel
almost requires the veil. We know nothing more of Catherine
Milton, but our state of knowledge might be more ungracious.
Except for the sonnets, of which this appears to be the last,
Milton was still 'miching' from poetry and indulging no muse:


## p. 106 (#122) ############################################

106
Milton
a
for the inspirers of his pamphlets were furies rather than muses.
But he was to be brought back to the latter by major force.
Characteristically, as always, but in a fashion so extreme that
it would seem as if some 'dim suffusion' had come upon his mental,
as well as upon his bodily, sight, he not only would not accept, but
would not believe in, the restoration. In the last twelvemonth
or so of the commonwealth, he addressed two of his stately
academic harangues to parliament, on toleration and the pay-
ment of ministers. He wrote, in the late autumn of 1659 and
later, though he did not publish, A Letter to a Friend and another
to Monck (which he did publish), gravely ignoring every symptom of
contemporary feeling, and gravely prescribing the very doses with
which the patient was nauseated. And, on the eve of the restora-
tion itself, in February 1660, he issued, and would have reissued
(had not the king been actually restored), The Ready and Easy
Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, which he supplemented
by some hectoring notes in his old style on a sermon by Matthew
Griffiths, formerly chaplain to Charles I, with the obvious text
'Fear God and the king. '
Such extravagant insensibility to the signs of the times, in
such a time as the mid-seventeenth century, and in the case of a
person of Milton's antecedents, could, ordinarily, have had but one
awakening. How Milton escaped this has been accounted for in
different ways. Intercession of Marvell or of D'Avenant or of others
is one; insignificance is another—though the latter explanation
cannot be said to fit in very well with the assertions of Milton's
continental renown as a defender of regicide, nor with the fact that
all the more prominent cavaliers had been exiles on the continent.
The soundest explanation is that given by no friend of the restora-
tion—that the restoration was not bloodthirsty. Milton did
not, indeed, escape quite scotfree. He left his house and lay hid for
three months till the Act of Oblivion. His books, or some of them,
were, indeed, burnt by the hangman; and, exactly on what charge
is unknown, in the early winter he was in the custody of the sergeant-
at-arms. It is characteristic again, no doubt, that he exacted a
reduction of the fees (as exorbitant) on his liberation (15 December)
by an order of the House.
The rest of his life is infinitely important to literature ; less so to
biography. His circumstances necessarily became straitened. His
office, of course, went; and the story that he was offered continuance
of it and urged by his wife to accept the offer is absurd, for he
had no wife till 1663. He lost £2000, which he had lent to the repub-
-


## p. 107 (#123) ############################################

Old Age and Death 107
lican government; something more in forfeited property which he
had bought; and a considerable sum by malversation. The great
fire destroyed his father's house in Bread street. But it does
not appear that he was ever in positive discomfort ; and, at his
death, he left what would be equal to about £5000 today. His third
marriage, just referred to, was with Elizabeth Minshull, a young
woman of twenty-four, and a relation of his friend and doctor, Paget.
Most of the stories of his life date from these days, as is natural,
seeing that they were the days of the Paradises and of Samson.
Those as to his harshness to his daughters, and their undutiful-
ness to him, are not improbable, but rather contradictory to one
another, and, quite obviously, what would have been told whether
true or not. There is not much more consistency or certainty in
those about his third wife—though it is generally agreed that he
had no fault to find with her. As to residences, he moved from
place to place, till he settled in Artillery row on the way to Bunhill
fields, where he lived for the last twelve years of his life. His
dress, hours, ways of occupying his sightless day, diet, partiality for
tobacco and abstinence from total abstinence as regards wine, have
been recorded with the strenuous inertia of persons such as Aubrey
and Phillips. Like other people, he left London in the plague
year, going to his old county of Bucks, but to Chalfont St Giles,
not Horton. He had no lack of friends and visitors-Marvell; the
quaker Ellwood, who flattered himself that he had suggested
Paradise Regained; Dryden, of whom he seems to have spoken
with his usual disdainfulness, but who always spoke nobly of him.
Nor does he seem ever to have quarrelled with his brother, or with
his nephews, however much their principles differed from his own.
In 1669, any domestic dissensions which may have prevailed
were terminated by the daughters going out to apprenticeship or
superior service. But, in his later years, he suffered more and more
from gout, and he died of it on 8 November 1674. He was buried
in St Giles's, Cripplegate, the resting place of his father.
His widow died at Nantwich in 1727, more than half a century
after Milton. Her youngest step-daughter, Deborah, died in the
same year. She had married a silk-weaver, Abraham Clarke, and
had many children, of whom two lived, and themselves left issue.
So far as is known, the last direct descendant of Milton was
Elizabeth Foster or Clarke, Deborah's youngest daughter, who
died in 1754, and whose seven children had all died young. Anne
Milton, the poet's eldest daughter, had married, but died in child-
birth. Mary, the second, died unmarried within the seventeenth


## p. 108 (#124) ############################################

108
Milton
century. His brother, Sir Christopher, did not continue the name
beyond another generation ; but there are living representatives
of the family on the female side, deriving from the elder Anne
Milton, the poet's sister, especially by her second marriage with
a man named Agar.
It must not be supposed, from anything that has been said, that
Milton's temperament was essentially or uniformly morose. His
youngest daughter Deborah-an unexceptionable witness, what-
ever tales are true-described him as excellent company, especially
with young people. His very asceticism has been much exaggerated.
One anecdote speaks of his special gratitude to his last wife for
providing 'such dishes as pleased him'; and, while the Lawrence
sonnet cannot be interpreted in any sense but that of cheerful
enjoyment of festivity, the common limitation of 'spare to inter-
pose’ is almost certainly wrong, while the other interpretation is
supported by the companion piece to Cyriack Skinner. The personal
beauty of his youth naturally yielded to age and gout; but he
seems always, despite his blindness, to have been careful of his
dress and appearance. His delight in gardens was life-long, even
when he could not appreciate their trimness. He was a smoker-
the austerest puritan had no objection to the Indian weed-and a
wine drinker, though a moderate one. Ştudy, in spite of fate and
of the harm it had done him, he never abandoned. He was as
little of a Nazarite as of a Stylites, and not more of either than of
the kind of bacchanalian-amorist poet whom he despised. In fact,
if it were not for the testimony of the works, it would not be quite
irrational to reject most of this gossip about him; and, as it is,
reason, no less than charity, may reject a good deal of it. Nothing
but amiable paralogism can give Milton an amiable character,
inasmuch as the intensity of his convictions, and the peculiar com-
plexion of these, almost necessitated a certain asperity. But the
other testimony which the works bear makes unamiableness a very
minor matter.
Nor was this other testimony rejected. It is so easy to get
a falsehood into currency, and so hard to stop it by nailing to any
counter, that most people still talk about the unworthy reception
of Paradise Lost-the £15 of which Milton only received £10;
the coming of Addison to the rescue some fifty years afterwards;
and the rest of it. It must be sufficient here to say that 1300 copies of
this long poem, in a most unfashionable style and on a subject
which the profane would probably shun altogether and the pious
would probably think unsuitable for poetry, were sold in eighteen


## p. 109 (#125) ############################################

Growth of Reputation 109
ance.
6
months ; that, apparently, at least 3000 were sold in ten years;
that six editions appeared before the close of the century and
nine before Addison wrote. Turning from statistics to belles
lettres, Dryden, the greatest by an infinite distance of the younger
generation of men of letters, did it the heartiest justice from the
first and always. Roscommon, who died in 1685, had praised and
imitated it. Samuel Woodford, the paraphrast of the Psalms and
Canticles, had criticised its versification very soon after its appear-
And though, even after blank verse had recovered the
stage from intrusive heroics, the extension of its use was slow,
that use came in gradually before Addison took up the matter at
all; and the style was regularly called 'the manner of Milton. '
Piety, good taste and, perhaps, a slight fellow feeling in Whiggery,
no doubt induced Addison to stamp Milton's passport with the
visé of a criticism which retained its importance throughout the
eighteenth century. But that passport, from the first, had been
recognised by all whose opinion was of value and even, in a
vague way, by the general. A considerable commentary had been
appended to the sixth edition by Patrick Hume, in 1695; fifty
years later, Lauder's calumnies and forgeries, curious, and not
quite intelligible (for it was impossible that they should survive
examination), started afresh the commentatorial zeal which had
been displayed, not according to knowledge, by Bentley, and, not
altogether according to wits, by bishop Newton. There was, and
still is, plenty of room for comment, inasmuch as Milton could
only seem 'not a learned man' to one who, like Mark Pattison,
took his standard of learning from the Casaubons. But such a
calculus stands outside pure poetical-critical appreciation. This
has never failed Milton, and can never fail him. If the spirit
of poetry is not in him, it is nowhere.
It did not, however, show itself prodigialiter. The parallel
contrast between the precocity of Cowley and the comparatively
slow development of Milton, but a few years earlier, must have
often suggested itself; but it may be doubted whether it has much
real validity as anything more than accident. Indeed, the lesson
of another pair of contemporaries—Shelley and Keats-practically
denies it any. The carefully dated primitiae~'at fifteen yeers
old,''Anno aetatis 17,' 'Anno A etatis 19'-exhibited nothing that
almost any good versifier of that fertile time might not have
written. Of the two boyish Psalm-paraphrases, 114 has abso-
lutely nothing distinctive; the other, a good metre, but nothing
more. The poem entitled On the Death of a fair Infant


## p. 110 (#126) ############################################

IIO
Milton
(his little niece) can bear its two years further weight for age ;
but there is, perhaps, only one line-
Or that crown'd Matron sage white-robed Truth-
which one would pronounce distinctly Miltonic, and even this is
not exclusively so. At a Vacation Exercise-yet another two
years younger or older-makes, perhaps, a slight further advance
in more than metre (this will be dealt with separately). But it is
only in the summoning of the rivers at the close that approach
to individuality is suggested, and, even then, there is a strong
suggestion of Spenser.
But if Milton obeyed a common, though not quite universal, law
in treading the mere high-road for some time, a parting of the ways
came in the most striking fashion with On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity, composed in the year of his majority. Most striking-for
the opening stanzas of the proem, though much finer than anything
he had done, were still not quite Milton. Not merely Spenser, but
the greater Davies, either Fletcher, several other poets actually or
nearly contemporary, might have written them. The Hymn itself,
in its very first lines, not merely in metre but in diction, in arrange-
ment, in quality of phrase and thought alike, strikes a new note-
almost a new gamut of notes. The peculiar stateliness which
redeems even conceit from frivolity or frigidity; the unique
combination of mass and weight with easy flow; the largeness of
conception, imagery, scene; above all, perhaps, the inimitable
stamp of phrase and style-attained, chiefly, by cunning (selection
and collocation of epithet-give the true Milton. "Gaudy' is not
an out-of-the-way word, and it may have been suggested to him by
the fine Marlowesque line of Henry VI-
6
-
The gaudy, blabbing and remorseful day,
or by fifty other passages. But, placed exactly where it is in the
first stanza, it colours, values, composes the whole. The greater
beauties of the piece that follow—the 'reign of peace'; the music
of the spheres; the silencing of the oracles ; and the flight of the
dethroned idols—are well known. The piece gives us all its
author's poetry in nuce-his union of majesty and grace, his
unique and all-compelling style, his command of 'solemn music'
such as had never before been known.
We cannot, of course, go through all the minor poems in
detail ; but The Passion or, rather, the note at its fragmentary
close, deserves notice because it completes the testimony of The


## p. 111 (#127) ############################################

The Early Poems
III
Nativity. That showed us the poet : this shows us the critic
whom, as has been well remarked, every great poet must contain.
*This Subject the Author, finding to be above the years he had
when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left
it unfinished. ' There have not been many poets who would have
been 'nothing satisfied with such lines as
He sov'ran Priest stooping his regall head
.
His starry front low-rooft beneath the skies;
or, best of all,
See see the Chariot, and those rushing wheels,
That whir”d the Prophet up at Chebar flood.
But Milton felt this dissatisfaction: and Milton was right. His
hand was still uncertain. It had slipped from the helm as he
burst into the hitherto silent sea of the style of the Nativity,
and he had drifted into mere respectable Fletcherian pastiche with
some better touches. And he knew this : as, doubtless, he had
known the other. There could be no doubt about him after the
acquisition and demonstration of the double knowledge.
The recognition of this is the most important thing in the study
of the first stage of Milton's poetical career. It was a few years
before the executive mastery rendered the critical control regulative
rather than prohibitive or suspensory; but very few. The famous
Shakespeare lines are probably a little, and even not a very little,
earlier than the date of the second folio, in which they appeared,
and, if not perfect intrinsically, are admirable as from a young
disciple to a dead master. The Hobson pieces, though quite out
of Milton's line and much less well done in their own than they
would have been by Cleiveland or John Hall, are, at least, curious.
An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester is a notable study
for the verse of L'Allegro; and its companion Arcades, of which
more presently, is a more notable study for Comus. A hint from
Peele not the last—and a suggestion from Shakespeare, matter
nothing : Milton was to be always a literary poet. These things
mark the full initiation, the final winning of the spurs.
From L'Allegro itself to Samson Agonistes, we have to do
with the adept and the knight. The comparative valuation of the
various poems of these forty years may be left to others, for it
depends partly upon personal preferences, partly upon considera-
tions of scale and subject and other things that can never be


## p. 112 (#128) ############################################

II 2
Milton
년
​e
brought to a satisfactory common denominator of criticism. But
the positive quality of poetry is in and over them all, from first to
last, unmistakable by those who have been born or taught to
recognise it. And it is this positive quality, in its various in-
lividual manifestations, and in its relations to the general history
and development of English poetry at large, that we have now to
disengage and study in chronological order, only neglecting this
latter in the case of the Sonnets, so as to group them together, as
is usually done, in what is the actual place of most of them—the
gap between Lycidas and Paradise Lost.
The twin studies of cheerfulness and melancholy will, of course,
come first, for it is impossible to admit the ingenious attempt
(above referred to) to postdate them. Their extraordinary
felicity has not met any important gainsayings. That some of the
details are not quite accurate, as natural history, would matter
extremely little in any case, and has even a certain interest in
connection with the peculiarity (to be noticed later) of Milton's
poetic painting. Another interesting point is the skill with which
the full or shortened octosyllabic couplet, with iambic or trochaic
cadence at pleasure, is handled. This famous old measure, handed
down from The Owl and the Nightingale, if not earlier, had been
fingered into new beauty by Shakespeare and others in the last
years of the sixteenth century and had been specially cultivated
by Fletcher, Browne, Wither and others in the earlier seventeenth.
Its capabilities have never been so perfectly and variously shown as
in these two charming poems, which are also, as it were, diploma-
pieces, exhibiting Milton's almost unsurpassable combination of
bookishness and natural imagination, the art of phrase which still
has all the gracefulness of youth, the power over imagery and
association, the whole suffused with a temper which is soft even
when sad, and which never jars or thorn-crackles even at its most
mirthful.
When the beautiful fragment Arcades (to return to it for
a special purpose) was written is not known; it must have
come before Comus, but may be of any year between 1630 and
1634. It was addressed to Alice, countess dowager of Derby-
the same lady who, as lady Strange (she was by birth lady Alice
Spencer) had been the recipient of Spenser's Teares of the
Muses forty years before, and who, after the death of her first
husband (Strange, it must be remembered, was then the second
title of the earls of Derby), had married lord keeper Egerton,
afterward lord chancellor viscount Brackley. The masque was


## p. 113 (#129) ############################################

Arcades and Comus
113
6
performed at Harefield in Middlesex, not far from Horton, and
it is supposed, though not known, that the music was by Milton's
friend Lawes. Fragment as the libretto is, the songs, especially
the second, 'On the smooth enamelled green' are perfection; and
the decasyllabic couplets of the Genius's speech have deep interest
as being Milton's most considerable serious attempt in this form.
He takes, as was natural, the enjambed variety, but care-
fully avoids the breathless overlapping of his seniors Browne
and Marmion and Chalkhill and his younger contemporary
Chamberlayne.
The connection of Comus with Arcades is so close in all ways
that it is scarcely improper to regard it as deliberate. The earl of
Bridgewater, for whom it was written, was lady Derby's stepson
through her second husband, and his wife was her daughter by her
first. He was president of Wales, and, in virtue of his office,
lived at Ludlow castle, where Comus was acted. His daughter
Alice, who acted the Lady, must have been named after her
double grandmother. Lawes here certainly wrote the music,
and he acted the Attendant Spirit. As for the story, it was
partly supplied (beyond all question) by Peele's Old Wives Tale,
largely supplemented from Milton's classical and modern reading
(especially the Comus of the Dutchman Puteanus (1608)) and his
own imagination ; partly derived, at least according to tradition,
from an actual adventure of lady Alice and her two brothers.
But it has not always been sufficiently noticed that the whole, as
it were, is a filling up of Arcades—the Genius of the Wood
dividing himself into good and evil parts as Thyrsis and Comus,
the merely accidental songs being adapted and multiplied to suit
the action, and that action itself being devised, in full colour
and body, to take the place of a mere occasional situation, like that
of the earlier piece.
The amplification was more than justified, and in a surprisingly
large number of ways. The actual dramatic effect of the piece is
not great; and, on the other side, it has been pronounced too
much of a fully equipped drama to be a masque. But, putting
questions of words and names apart, it is a most admirable poem ;
and there have even not been wanting those who put it, for length
and poetic quality combined, first of all its author's works, while
admitting the superiority of Lycidas in the latter respect and the
three great later pieces in the first. One special point of interest is
that Milton here discards for his “tragedy, as Sir Henry Wotton
called it (i. e. the body of his dialogue), the couplet which he had
8
E L, VII.
CH. V.


## p. 114 (#130) ############################################

I14
Milton
used in Arcades, and adopts blank verse; while the rest of the
piece is in octosyllabic couplet or lyrical measures which are
almost an improvement on L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Arcades
itself. Something more will be said of the form later : the sub-
stance is amply worthy of it and, like it, duplex in character—an
ethical height and weight which the poet had never reached before
being matched with unimpaired grace in the lighter parts. It
would be difficult to find a poem where profit and delight are
more perfectly blended.
In Lycidas, the delight reaches an even higher pitch. For
once, there is no need to quarrel even with such an apparent
hyperbole as Pattison’s ‘high-water mark of English poetry'-
especially as high-water mark is not a thing that can only once be
reached. The circumstances, form and character of this exquisite
poem have been the subject of a great deal of writing. It formed
part of a collection of epicedes on Edward King, a slightly younger
contemporary of Milton at Christ's, who had become fellow and
tutor, and had intended to take orders, but was drowned on a
voyage to Ireland in the summer of 1637. Milton's contribution
is signed 'J. M. ' only. The general scheme is that of a classical
pastoral elegy; the verse form is a very peculiar, in fact, up to its
date, unique, arrangement of stanzas and lines of unequal length,
for the most part irregularly, and not entirely, rimed, but termi-
nating in a regular octave. To what extent the poem expresses
personal sorrow has been largely, but very unnecessarily, ques-
tioned; as an elegy, it has, poetically speaking, no superior even
in a language which contains the various laments on Sidney
before, and Adonais and Thyrsis after. The whole poem is a
tissue of splendid passages, not unconnected, but sewn cunningly
together rather than woven in one piece as regards subject. One,
however, of these passages contains, for the first time, a note
'prophesying war. ' Up to this date, Milton's verse, though
abstaining alike from the passionately amorist tone of contempo-
rary profane lyric, and from the almost erotically mystical tone of
contemporary sacred poetry, had contained nothing polemical;
and, even in the frequent eulogies of chastity in Comus, nothing
positively austere. Here, St Peter, coming among other symboli-
cal figures to bewail the dead, is made to deliver a tremendous
denunciation of what Milton later directly entitled 'the corrupt
clergy' of the time, and a prophecy of their ruin. The strict
pro-
priety of this has been questioned, even by some who agree with
Milton's views on the subject: the force and fire of the expression


## p. 115 (#131) ############################################

Sonnets
115
>
(not injured by a little obscurity, wbich, perhaps, was a necessary
precaution) may be admitted by the most thorough admirer of
Laud. And all the rest (except from the point of view of an objection
to pedantry which is itself ultra-pedantic) is absolutely proof
against criticism. There cannot be better verse than Lycidas.
The few, but extremely interesting, Sonnets derive their interest
from various sources. Except the earliest two, and the batch of
Italian pieces which follows, they bridge the interval between
Milton's first poetical period and his last—dotting the twenty
dark years with spots of light. It is true that the evil spirit of the
prose pamphlets retains some influence here, that his footing is
seen in the Tetrachordon sonnets, in the tail-sonnet (twenty lines,
the fifteenth and eighteenth of six syllables only) On the new
forcers of Conscience and, to some, though less, extent, in the
political sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell and Vane. It is true, also,
that one (xiv) On the Religious Memory of Mrs Catherine Thomson
is the most commonplace thing that Milton ever wrote. But, even
were the best and the most of them less good, they would be
interesting as resuming (with little following for more than another
century) the Elizabethan practice of this great form, and as
bringing it nearer to the commoner Italian model. Individually
and intrinsically, they do not need any allowance. Wordsworth’s
hackneyed praise is not very specially applicable to most of them;
and Johnson's contempt was contempt of the form itself, no doubt
slightly accentuated by dislike of the author. Taken dispassion-
ately, Milton's sonnets are examples, curiously various considering
their small number, at once of the adaptability of the kind to
'occasional purposes, and of the absence of any necessity that
this adaptability should be abused, as Wordsworth himself
certainly abused it, and as lesser men have abused it still more.
Nowhere, moreover, and this is natural, is the poet's tendency to
be autobiographical shown in a more interesting way. The pretty
overture to the nightingale not only shows the true Miltonic style
very early, but gives us a Miltonic person who might have developed
very differently. The other side--the side which did develop
appears in the three and twentieth year' (vii), and at once fore-
tells the compensations for the loss of the less austere personage.