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spirit of an age of fiery baptism, the time-serving spirit of There is a half-humorous recognition of the gulf set betw "Yes, you may tag my verses," with which he granted

a reply which does not gain in urbanity when contrasted

and whole-souled praise of the poem he was called upon to trave

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We get from the painter Richardson some vivid glimpses of Milton in He speaks of him being led about the streets, clad in cold weather in a gray camblet coat, and wearing no sword, though "'t was his custom not long before to wear one, with a small silver hilt." And again, "I have heard that he used to sit in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house, near Bunhill Fields, without Moorgate, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air, and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts, as well as quality; and very lately I had the good fortune to have another picture of him from an aged clergyman in Dorsetshire. He found him in a small house, he thinks but one room on a floor. In that, up one pair of stairs, which was hung with a rusty green, he found John Milton, sitting in an elbow chair; black clothes, and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk- stones." The Faithorne portrait, engraved in 1670, shows a face deeply seamed with lines of thought and of pain, eyes unblemished, but full of the disappointed query of blindness, hair flat over the brows and falling slightly waved to the shoulders, and a mouth of singular richness, which seems still to crave life, — the one lingering feature of the youthful mask.

Rising at four o'clock in summer and five in winter, hearing a chapter of the Bible in Hebrew read to him before breakfast, passing the day in work, with music and a little walk for diversion, and ending with a supper "of olives or some light thing," a pipe and a glass of water, he lived placidly the meagre days left to him. Shortly before his death, being at dinner with his young wife, and finding a favorite dish prepared for him, he cried out, "God have mercy, Betty, I see thou wilt perform according to thy promise in providing me such dishes as I think fit whilst I live; and when I die, thou knowest that I have left thee all." The nuncupative will thus made was contested at law by his daughters, and broken. He died on the eighth of November, 1674, "with so little pain that the time of his expiring was not perceived by those in the room." "All his learned and great friends in London," says Toland, "not without a concourse of the vulgar, accompanied his body to the church of St. Giles, near Cripplegate, where he was buried in the chancel."

Many circumstances have combined to falsify for the modern mind the outlines of Milton's character. The theme most closely linked with his name as a poet has thrown about him a traditional reverence which has obscured his human lineaments. The political passions of his day are many of them still, under changed names, potent enough to distort his figure according to the direction of our approach. Added to these difficulties is the more essential one, that the harmony which he forced upon his character was made up of a hundred dissonances. He added

phor complexity of the poet the complexities of the theologian, the theorist, and a publicist. He was compelled to make himself over from Elizabethan to Cromellian, not quietly and by slow processes, but in the centre of clashing forces. This slight sketch can at best have pointed out only the most salient material necessary to judgment of a character so variously endowed and acted upon. It will have accomplished its end if it has dissatisfied the reader with a conventional opinion.

As for his poetry, Milton must be thought of first and last as a master stylist. Keats is more poignant, Shakespeare more various, Coleridge more magical; but nobody who has written in English has had at his command the same unfailing majesty of utterance. His is the organ voice of England. The figure suggests, too, the defect of his qualities. His voice is always his own; he has none of the ventriloquism of the dramatic poets, none of the thaumaturgy by which they obscure themselves in their subject. Milton is always Miltonic, always lofty and grave, whether the subject sinks or rises. Through him we come nearest to that union of measure and might which is peculiar to the master poets of antiquity, and it is through a study of him that the defects of taste incident upon our modern systems of education can be most surely made good.

W. V. M.

PART FIRST

ENGLISH POEMS

POEMS WRITTEN AT SCHOOL AND AT

COLLEGE

1624-1632

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