In recording the publication of “Paradise Lost” in 1667, we have passed over the interval of Milton’s life immediately subsequent to the completion of the poem in 1663. The first incident of any importance is his migration to Chalfont St. Giles, near Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, about July, 1665, to escape the plague then devastating London. Ell wood, whose family lived in the neighbourhood of Chalfont, had at his request taken for him “a pretty box” in that village; and we are, says Professor Masson, “to imagine Milton’s house in Artillery Walk shuttered up, and a coach and a large waggon brought to the door, and the blind man helped in, and the wife and the three daughters following, with a servant to look after the books and other things they have taken with them, and the whole party driven away towards Giles-Chalfont.” According to the same authority, Chalfont well deserves the name of Sleepy Hollow, lying at the bottom of a leafy dell. Milton’s cottage, alone of his residences, still exists, though divided into two tenements. It is a two-storey dwelling, with a garden, is built of brick, with wooden beams, musters nine rooms--though a question arises whether some of them ought not rather to be described as closets; the porch in which Milton may have breathed the summer air is gone, but the parlour retains the latticed casement at which he sat, though through it he could not see. His infirmity rendered the confined situation less of a drawback, and there are abundance of pleasant lanes, along which he could be conducted in his sightless strolls:--
“As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each new thing conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound.”
Milton was probably no stranger to the neighbourhood, having lived within thirteen miles of it when he dwelt at Horton. Ellwood could not welcome him on his arrival, being in prison on account of an affray at what should have been the paragon of decorous solemnities--a Quaker funeral. When released, about the end of August or the beginning of September, he waited upon Milton, who, “after some discourses, called for a manuscript of his; which he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me and read it at my leisure. When I set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled ‘Paradise Lost.’” Professor Masson justly remarks that Milton would not have trusted the worthy Quaker adolescent with the only copy of his epic; we may be sure, therefore, that other copies existed, and that the poem was at this date virtually completed and ready for press. When the manuscript was returned, Ellwood, after “modestly, but freely, imparting his judgment,” observed, “Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found? He made no answer, but sat some time in a muse; then brake off that discourse, and fell on another subject.” The plague was then at its height, and did not abate sufficiently for Milton to return to town with safety until about February in the following year, leaving, it has been asserted, a record of himself at Chalfont in the shape of a sonnet on the pestilence regarded as a judgment for the sins of the King, written with a diamond on a window-pane--as if the blind poet could write even with a pen! The verses, nevertheless, may not impossibly be genuine: they are almost too Miltonic for an imitator between 1665 and 1738, when they were first published.
The public calamity of 1666 affected Milton more nearly than that of 1665. The Great Fire came within a quarter of a mile of his house, and though he happily escaped the fate of Shirley, and did not make one of the helpless crowd of the homeless and destitute, his means were seriously abridged by the destruction of the house in Bread Street where he had first seen the light, and which he had retained through all the vicissitudes of his fortunes. He could not, probably, have published “Paradise Lost” without the co-operation of Samuel Symmons. Symmons’s endeavours to push the sale of the book make the bibliographical history of the first edition unusually interesting. There were at least nine different issues, as fresh batches were successively bound up, with frequent alterations of title-page as reasonable cause became apparent to the strategic Symmons. First Milton’s name is given in full, then he is reduced to initials, then restored; Symmons’s own name, at first suppressed, by and by appears; his agents are frequently changed; and the title is altered to suit the year of issue, that the book may seem a novelty. The most important of all these alterations is one in which the author must have actively participated--the introduction of the Argument which, a hundred and forty years afterwards, was to cause Harriet Martineau to take up “Paradise Lost” at the age of seven, and of the Note on the metre conveying “a reason of that which stumbled many, why this poem rimes not.” Partly, perhaps, by help of these devices, certainly without any aid from advertising or reviewing, the impression of thirteen hundred copies was disposed of within twenty months, as attested by Milton’s receipt for his second five pounds, April 26, 1669--two years, less one day, since the signature of the original contract. The first printed notice appeared after the edition had been entirely sold. It was by Milton’s nephew, Edward Phillips, and was contained in a little Latin essay appended to Buchlerus’s “Treasury of Poetical Phrases.”
“John Milton, in addition to other most elegant writings of his,
both in English and Latin, has recently published ‘Paradise Lost,’
a poem which, whether we regard the sublimity of the subject, or
the combined pleasantness and majesty of the style, or the
sublimity of the invention, or the beauty of its images and
descriptions of nature, will, if I mistake not, receive the name
of truly heroic, inasmuch as by the suffrages of many not
unqualified to judge, it is reputed to have reached the perfection
of this kind of poetry.”
The “many not unqualified” undoubtedly included the first critic of the age, Dryden. Lord Buckhurst is also named as an admirer--pleasing anecdotes respecting the practical expression of his admiration, and of Sir John Denham’s, seem apocryphal.
While “Paradise Lost” was thus slowly upbearing its author to the highest heaven of fame, Milton was achieving other titles to renown, one of which he deemed nothing inferior. We shall remember Ellwood’s hint that he might find something to say about Paradise Found, and the “muse” into which it cast him. When, says the Quaker, he waited upon Milton after the latter’s return to London, Milton “showed me his second poem, called ‘Paradise Regained,’ and in a pleasant tone said to me, ‘This is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont; which before I had not thought of.’” Ellwood does not tell us the date of this visit, and Phillips may be right in believing that “Paradise Regained” was entirely composed after the publication of “Paradise Lost”; but it seems unlikely that the conception should have slumbered so long in Milton’s mind, and the most probable date is between Michaelmas, 1665, and Lady-day, 1666. Phillips records that Milton could never hear with patience “Paradise Regained” “censured to be much inferior” to “Paradise Lost.” “The most judicious,” he adds, agreed with him, while allowing that “the subject might not afford such variety of invention,” which was probably all that the injudicious meant. There is no external evidence of the date of his next and last poem, “Samson Agonistes,” but its development of Miltonic mannerisms would incline us to assign it to the latest period possible. The poems were licensed by Milton’s old friend, Thomas Tomkyns, July 2, 1670, but did not appear until 1671. They were published in the same volume, but with distinct title-pages and paginations; the publisher was John Starkey; the printer an anonymous “J.M.,” who was far from equalling Symmons in elegance and correctness.
“Paradise Regained” is in one point of view the confutation of a celebrated but eccentric definition of poetry as a “criticism of life.” If this were true it would be a greater work than “Paradise Lost,” which must be violently strained to admit a definition not wholly inapplicable to the minor poem. If, again, Wordsworth and Coleridge are right in pronouncing “Paradise Regained” the most perfect of Milton’s works in point of execution, the proof is afforded that perfect execution is not the chief test of poetic excellence. Whatever these great men may have propounded in theory, it cannot be believed that they would not have rather written the first two books of “Paradise Lost” than ten such poems as “Paradise Regained,” and yet they affirm that Milton’s power is even more advantageously exhibited in the latter work than in the other. There can be no solution except that greatness in poetry depends mainly upon the subject, and that the subject of “Paradise Lost” is infinitely the finer. Perhaps this should not be. Perhaps to “the visual nerve purged with euphrasy and rue” the spectacle of the human soul successfully resisting supernatural temptation would be more impressive than the material sublimities of “Paradise Lost,” but ordinary vision sees otherwise. Satan “floating many a rood” on the sulphurous lake, or “up to the fiery concave towering high,” or confronting Death at the gate of Hell, kindles the imagination with quite other fire than the sage circumspection and the meek fortitude of the Son of God. “The reason,” says Blake, “why Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” The passages in “Paradise Regained” which most nearly approach the magnificence of “Paradise Lost,” are those least closely connected with the proper action of the poem, the episodes with which Milton’s consummate art and opulent fancy have veiled the bareness of his subject. The description of the Parthian military expedition; the picture, equally gorgeous and accurate, of the Roman Empire at the zenith of its greatness; the condensation into a single speech of all that has made Greece dear to humanity--these are the shining peaks of the regained “Paradise,” marvels of art and eloquence, yet, unlike “Paradise Lost,” beautiful rather than awful. The faults inherent in the theme cannot be imputed to the poet. No human skill could make the second Adam as great an object of sympathy as the first: it is enough, and it is wonderful, that spotless virtue should be so entirely exempt from formality and dulness. The baffled Satan, beaten at his own weapons, is necessarily a much less interesting personage than the heroic adventurer of “Paradise Lost.” Milton has done what can be done by softening Satan’s reprobate mood with exquisite strokes of pathos:--
“Though I have lost
Much lustre of my native brightness, lost
To be beloved of God, I have not lost
To love, at least contemplate and admire
What I see excellent in good or fair,
Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense.”
These words, though spoken with a deceitful intention, express a truth. Milton’s Satan is a long way from Goethe’s Mephistopheles. Profound, too, is the pathos of--
“I would be at the worst, worst is my best,
My harbour, and my ultimate repose.”
The general sobriety of the style of “Paradise Regained” is a fertile theme for the critics. It is, indeed, carried to the verge of baldness; frigidity, used by Pattison, is too strong a word. This does not seem to be any token of a decay of poetical power. As writers advance in life their characteristics usually grow upon them, and develop into mannerisms. In “Paradise Regained,” and yet more markedly in “Samson Agonistes,” Milton seems to have prided himself on showing how independent he could be of the ordinary poetical stock-in-trade. Except in his splendid episodical descriptions he seeks to impress by the massy substance of his verse. It is a great proof of the essentially poetical quality of his mind that though he thus often becomes jejune, he is never prosaic. He is ever unmistakably the poet, even when his beauties are rather those of the orator or the moralist. The following sound remark, for instance, would not have been poetry in Pope; it is poetry in Milton:--
“Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior
(And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains?
Deep versed in books and shallow in himself.”
Perhaps, too, the sparse flowers of pure poetry are more exquisite from their contrast with the general austerity:--
“The field, all iron, cast a gleaming brown.”
“Morning fair
Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray.”
Poetic magic these, and Milton is still Milton.
“I have lately read his Samson, which has more of the antique spirit than any production of any other modern poet. He is very great.” Thus Goethe to Eckermann, in his old age. The period of life is noticeable, for “Samson Agonistes” is an old man’s poem as respects author and reader alike. There is much to repel, little to attract a young reader; no wonder that Macaulay, fresh from college, put it so far below “Comus,” to which the more mature taste is disposed to equal it. It is related to the earlier work as sculpture is to painting, but sculpture of the severest school, all sinewy strength; studious, above all, of impressive truth. “Beyond these an ancient fisherman and a rock are fashioned, a rugged rock, whereon with might and main the old man drags a great net from his cast, as one that labours stoutly. Thou wouldest say that he is fishing with all the might of his limbs, so big the sinews swell all about his neck, grey-haired though he is, but his strength is as the strength of youth.” Behold here the Milton of “Samson Agonistes,” a work whose beauty is of metal rather than of marble, hard, bright, and receptive of an ineffaceable die. The great fault is the frequent harshness of the style, principally in the choruses, where some strophes are almost uncouth. In the blank verse speeches perfect grace is often united to perfect dignity: as in the farewell of Dalila:--
“Fame if not double-faced is double-mouthed,
And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds;
On both his wings, one black, the other white,
Bears greatest names in his wild aery flights.
My name perhaps among the circumcised,
In Dan, in Judah, and the bordering tribes,
To all posterity may stand defamed,
With malediction mentioned, and the blot
Of falsehood most unconjugal traduced.
But in my country where I most desire,
In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath,
I shall be named among the famousest
Of women, sung at solemn festivals,
Living and dead recorded, who to save
Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose
Above the faith of wedlock-bands; my tomb
With odours visited and annual flowers.”
The scheme of “Samson Agonistes” is that of the Greek drama, the only one appropriate to an action of such extreme simplicity, admitting so few personages, and these only as foils to the hero. It is, but for its Miltonisms of style and autobiographic and political allusion, just such a drama as Sophocles or Euripides would have written on the subject, and has all that depth of patriotic and religious sentiment which made the Greek drama so inexpressibly significant to Greeks. Consummate art is shown in the invention of the Philistine giant, Harapha, who not only enriches the meagre action, and brings out strong features in the character of Samson, but also prepares the reader for the catastrophe. We must say reader, for though the drama might conceivably be acted with effect on a Court or University stage, the real living theatre has been no place for it since the days of Greece. Milton confesses as much when in his preface he assails “the poet’s error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people.” In his view tragedy should be eclectic; in Shakespeare’s it should be all embracing. Shelley, perhaps, judged more rightly than either when he said: “The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in ‘King Lear,’ universal, ideal, and sublime.” On the whole, “Samson Agonistes” is a noble example of a style which we may hope will in no generation be entirely lacking to our literature, but which must always be exotic, from its want of harmony with the more essential characteristics of our tumultous, undisciplined, irrepressible national life.
In one point of view, however, “Samson Agonistes” deserves to be esteemed a national poem, pregnant with a deeper allusiveness than has always been recognized. Samson’s impersonation of the author himself can escape no one. Old, blind, captive, helpless, mocked, decried, miserable in the failure of all his ideals, upheld only by faith and his own unconquerable spirit, Milton is the counterpart of his hero. Particular references to the circumstances of his life are not wanting: his bitter self-condemnation for having chosen his first wife in the camp of the enemy, and his surprise that near the close of an austere life he should be afflicted by the malady appointed to chastise intemperance. But, as in the Hebrew prophets Israel sometimes denotes a person, sometimes a nation, Samson seems no less the representative of the English people in the age of Charles the Second. His heaviest burden is his remorse, a remorse which could not weigh on Milton:--
“I do acknowledge and confess
That I this honour, I this pomp have brought
To Dagon, and advanced his praises high
Among the heathen round; to God have brought
Dishonour, obloquy, and oped the mouths
Of idolists and atheists; have brought scandal
To Israel, diffidence of God, and doubt
In feeble hearts, propense enough before
To waver, to fall off, and join with idols;
Which is my chief affliction, shame, and sorrow,
The anguish of my soul, that suffers not
My eye to harbour sleep, or thoughts to rest.”
Milton might reproach himself for having taken a Philistine wife, but not with having suffered her to shear him. But the same could not be said of the English nation, which had in his view most foully apostatized from its pure creed, and most perfidiously betrayed the high commission it had received from Heaven. “This extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed, to fall back, or rather to creep back, so poorly as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship! To be ourselves the slanderers of our own just and religious deeds! To verify all the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies, who will now think they wisely discerned and justly censured us and all our actions as rash, rebellious, hypocritical, and impious!” These things, which Milton refused to contemplate as possible when he wrote his “Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth,” had actually come to pass. The English nation is to him the enslaved and erring Samson--a Samson, however, yet to burst his bonds, and bring down ruin upon Philistia. “Samson Agonistes” is thus a prophetic drama, the English counterpart of the world-drama of “Prometheus Bound.”
Goethe says that our final impression of any one is derived from the last circumstances in which we have beheld him. Let us, therefore, endeavour to behold Milton as he appeared about the time of the publication of his last poems, to which period of his life the descriptions we possess seem to apply. Richardson heard of his sitting habitually “in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather to enjoy the fresh air”--a suggestive picture. What thoughts must have been travelling through his mind, undisturbed by external things! How many of the passers knew that they flitted past the greatest glory of the age of Newton, Locke, and Wren? For one who would reverence the author of “Paradise Lost,” there were probably twenty who would have been ready with a curse for the apologist of the killing of the King. In-doors he was seen by Dr. Wright, in Richardson’s time an aged clergyman in Dorsetshire, who found him up one pair of stairs, in a room hung with rusty green “sitting in an elbow chair, black clothes, and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones.” Gout was the enemy of Milton’s latter days; we have seen that he had begun to suffer from it before he wrote “Samson Agonistes.” Without it, he said, he could find blindness tolerable. Yet even in the fit he would be cheerful, and would sing. It is grievous to write that, about 1670, the departure of his daughters promoted the comfort of his household. They were sent out to learn embroidery as a means of future support--a proper step in itself, and one which would appear to have entailed considerable expense upon Milton. But they might perfectly well have remained inmates of the family, and the inference is that domestic discord had at length grown unbearable to all. Friends, or at least visitors, were, on the other hand, more numerous than of late years. The most interesting were the “subtle, cunning, and reserved” Earl of Anglesey, who must have “coveted Milton’s society and converse” very much if, as Phillips reports, he often came all the way to Bunhill Fields to enjoy it; and Dryden, whose generous admiration does not seem to have been affected by Milton’s over-hasty sentence upon him as “a good rhymester, but no poet.” One of Dryden’s visits is famous in literary history, when he came with the modest request that Milton would let him turn his epic into an opera. “Aye,” responded Milton, equal to the occasion, “tag my verses if you will”--to tag being to put a shining metal point--compared in Milton’s fancy to a rhyme--at the end of a lace or cord. Dryden took him at his word, and in due time “Paradise Lost” had become an opera under the title of “The State of Innocence and Fall of Man,” which may also be interpreted as referring to the condition of the poem before Dryden laid hands upon it and afterwards. It is a puzzling performance altogether; one sees not any more than Sir Walter Scott could see how a drama requiring paradisiacal costume could have been acted even in the age of Nell Gwyn; and yet it is even more unlikely that Dryden should have written a play not intended for the stage. The same contradiction prevails in the piece itself; it would not be unfair to call it the most absurd burlesque ever written without burlesque intention; and yet it displays such intellectual resources, such vigour, bustle, adroitness, and bright impudence, that admiration almost counterweighs derision. Dryden could not have made such an exhibition of Milton and himself twenty years afterwards, when he said that, much as he had always admired Milton, he felt that he had not admired him half enough. The reverence which he felt even in 1674 for “one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced,” contrasts finely with the ordinary Restoration estimate of Milton conveyed in the complimentary verses by Lee, prefixed to “The State of Innocence”:--
“To the dead bard your fame a little owes,
For Milton did the wealthy mine disclose,
And rudely cast what you could well dispose.
He roughly drew, on an old-fashioned ground,
A chaos, for no perfect world was found,
Till through the heap your mighty genius shined;
He was the golden ore, which you refined.”
These later years also produced several little publications of Milton’s own, mostly of manuscripts long lying by him, now slightly revised and fitted for the press. Such were his miniature Latin grammar, published in 1669; and his “Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio; or The Method of Ramus,” 1672. The first is insignificant; and the second even Professor Masson pronounces, “as a digest of logic, disorderly and unedifying.” Both apparently belong to his school-keeping days: the little tract, “Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration,” (1673) is, on the other hand, contemporary with a period of great public excitement, when Parliament (March, 1673) compelled the king to revoke his edict of toleration autocratically promulgated in the preceding year, and to assent to a severe Test Act against Roman Catholics. The good sense and good nature which inclined Charles to toleration were unfortunately alloyed with less creditable motives. Protestants justly suspected him of insidiously aiming at the re-establishment of Roman Catholicism, and even the persecuted Nonconformists patriotically joined with High Churchmen to adjourn their own deliverance until the country should be safe from the common enemy. The wisdom and necessity of this course were abundantly evinced under the next reign, and while we must regret that Milton contributed his superfluous aid to restrictions only defensible on the ground of expediency, we must admit that he could not well avoid making Roman Catholics an exception to the broad tolerance he claims for all denominations of Protestants. And, after all, has not the Roman Catholic Church’s notion of tolerance always been that which Macaulay imputes to Southey, that everybody should tolerate her, and that she should tolerate nobody?
A more important work, though scarcely worthy of Milton’s industry, was his “History of Britain” (1670). This was a comparatively early labour, four of the six books having been written before he entered upon the Latin Secretaryship, and two under the Commonwealth. From its own point of view, this is a meritorious performance, making no pretensions to the character of a philosophical history, but a clear, easy narrative, sometimes interrupted by sententious disquisition, of transactions down to the Conquest. Like Grote, though not precisely for the same reason, Milton hands down picturesque legendary matter as he finds it, and it is to those who would see English history in its romantic aspect that, in these days of exact research, his work is chiefly to be recommended. It is also memorable for what he never saw himself, the engraved portrait, after Faithorne’s crayon sketch.
“No one,” says Professor Masson,
“can desire a more impressive and
authentic portrait of Milton in his later life. The face is such
as has been given to no other human being; it was and is uniquely
Milton’s. Underneath the broad forehead and arched temples there
are the great rings of eye-socket, with the blind, unblemished
eyes in them, drawn straight upon you by your voice, and
speculating who and what you are; there is a severe composure in
the beautiful oval of the whole countenance, disturbed only by the
singular pouting of the rich mouth; and the entire expression is
that of English intrepidity mixed with unutterable sorrow.”
Milton’s care to set his house in order extended to his poetical writings. In 1673 the poems published in 1645, both English and Latin, appeared in a second edition, disclosing novas frondes in one or two of Milton’s earliest unprinted poems, and such of the sonnets as political considerations did not exclude; and non sua poma in the Tractate of Education, curiously grafted on at the end. An even more important publication was the second edition of “Paradise Lost” (1674) with the original ten books for the first time divided into twelve as we now have them. Nor did this exhaust the list of Milton’s literary undertakings. He was desirous of giving to the world his correspondence when Latin Secretary, and the “Treatise on Christian Doctrine” which had employed so much of his thoughts at various periods of his life. The Government, though allowing the publication of his familiar Latin correspondence (1674), would not tolerate the letters he had written as secretary to the Commonwealth, and the “Treatise on Christian Doctrine” was still less likely to propitiate the licenser. Holland was in that day the one secure asylum of free thought, and thither, in 1675, the year following Milton’s death, the manuscripts were taken or sent by Daniel Skinner, a nephew of Cyriack’s, to Daniel Elzevir, who agreed to publish them. Before publication could take place, however, a clandestine but correct edition of the State letters appeared in London, probably by the agency of Edward Phillips. Skinner, in his vexation, appealed to the authorities to suppress this edition: they took the hint, and suppressed his instead. Elzevir delivered up the manuscripts, which the Secretary of State pigeon-holed until their existence was forgotten. At last, in 1823, Mr. Robert Lemon, rummaging in the State Paper Office, came upon the identical parcel addressed by Elzevir to Daniel Skinner’s father which contained his son’s transcript of the State Letters and the “Treatise on Christian Doctrine.” Times had changed, and the heretical work was edited and translated by George the Fourth’s favourite chaplain, and published at his Majesty’s expense.
The “Treatise on Christian Doctrine” is by far the most remarkable of all Milton’s later prose publications, and would have exerted a great influence on opinion if it had appeared when the author designed. Milton’s name would have been a tower of strength to the liberal eighteenth-century clergy inside and outside the Establishment. It should indeed have been sufficiently manifest that “Paradise Lost” could not have been written by a Trinitarian or a Calvinist; but theological partisanship is even slower than secular partisanship to see what it does not choose to see; and Milton’s Arianism was not generally admitted until it was here avouched under his own hand. The general principle of the book is undoubting reliance on the authority of Scripture, with which such an acquaintance is manifested as could only have been gained by years of intense study. It is true that the doctrine of the inward light as the interpreter of Scripture is asserted with equal conviction; but practically this illumination seems seldom to have guided Milton to any sense but the most obvious. Hence, with the intrepid consistency that belongs to him, he is not only an Arian, but a tolerator of polygamy, finding that practice nowhere condemned in Scripture, but even recommended by respectable examples; an Anthropomorphist, who takes the ascription of human passion to the Deity in the sense certainly intended by those who made it; a believer in the materiality and natural mortality of the soul, and in the suspension of consciousness between death and the resurrection. Where less fettered by the literal Word he thinks boldly; unable to conceive creation out of nothing, he regards all existence as an emanation from the Deity, thus entitling himself to the designation of Pantheist. He reiterates his doctrine of divorce; and is as strong an Anti-Sabbatarian as Luther himself. On the Atonement and Original Sin, however, he is entirely Evangelical; and he commends public worship so long as it is not made a substitute for spiritual religion. Liturgies are evil, and tithes abominable. His exposition of social duty tempers Puritan strictness with Cavalier high-breeding, and the urbanity of a man of the world. Of his motives for publication and method of composition he says:--
“It is with a friendly and benignant feeling towards mankind that
I give as wide a circulation as possible to what I esteem my best
and richest possession.... And whereas the greater part of those
who have written most largely on these subjects have been wont to
fill whole pages with explanations of their own opinions,
thrusting into the margin the texts in support of their doctrines,
I have chosen, on the contrary, to fill my pages even to
redundance with quotations from Scripture, so that as little space
as possible might be left for my own words, even when they arise
from the context of revelation itself.”
There is consequently little scope for eloquence in a treatise consisting to so large an extent of quotations; but it is pervaded by a moral sublimity, more easily felt than expressed. Particular opinions will be diversely judged; but if anything could increase our reverence for Milton it would be that his last years should have been devoted to a labour so manifestly inspired by disinterested benevolence and hazardous love of truth.
His life’s work was now finished, and finished with entire success as far as depended upon his own will and power. He had left nothing unwritten, nothing undone, nor was he ignorant what manner of monument he had raised for himself, It was only the condition of the State that afflicted him, and this, looking forward, he saw in more gloomy colours than it appears to us who look back. Had he attained his father’s age his apprehensions would have been dispelled by the Revolution: but he had evidently for some time past been older in constitution than in years. In July, 1674, he was anticipating death; but about the middle of October, “he was very merry and seemed to be in good health of body.” Early in November “the gout struck in,” and he died on November 8th, late at night, “with so little pain that the time of his expiring was not perceived by those in the room.” On November 12th, “all his learned and great friends in London, 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.” In 1864, the church was restored in honour of the great enemy of religious establishments. “The animosities die, but the humanities live for ever.”
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Milton’s resources had been greatly impaired in his latter years by losses, and the expense of providing for his daughters. He nevertheless left, exclusive of household goods, about £900, which, by a nuncupative will made in July, 1674, he had wholly bequeathed to his wife. His daughters, he told his brother Christopher (now a Roman Catholic, and on the road to become one of James the Second’s judges, but always on friendly terms with John), had been undutiful, and he thought that he had done enough for them. They naturally thought otherwise, and threatened litigation. The interrogatories administered on this occasion afford the best clue to the condition of Milton’s affairs and household. At length the dispute was compromised, the nuncupative will, a kind of document always regarded with suspicion, was given up, and the widow received two-thirds of the estate instead of the whole, probably the fairest settlement that could have been arrived at. After residing some years in London she retired to Nantwich in her native county, where divers glimpses reveal her as leading the decent existence of a poor but comfortable gentlewoman as late as August or September, 1727. The inventory of her effects, amounting to £38 8s. 4d., is preserved, and includes: “Mr. Milton’s pictures and coat of arms, valued at ten guineas;” and “two Books of Paradise,” valued at ten shillings. Of the daughters, Anne married “a master-builder,” and died in childbirth some time before 1678; Mary was dead when Phillips wrote in 1694; and Deborah survived until August 24, 1727, dying within a few days of her stepmother. She had married Abraham Clarke, a weaver and mercer in Dublin, who took refuge in England during the Irish troubles under James the Second, and carried on his business in Spitalfields. She had several children by him, one of whom lived to receive, in 1750, the proceeds of a theatrical benefit promoted by Bishop Newton and Samuel Johnson. Deborah herself was brought into notice by Addison, and was visited by Professor Ward of Gresham College, who found her “bearing the inconveniences of a low fortune with decency and prudence.” Her last days were made comfortable by the generosity of Princess Caroline and others: it is more pleasant still to know that her affection for her father had revived. When shown Faithorne’s crayon portrait (not the one engraved in Milton’s lifetime, but one exceedingly like it) she exclaimed, “in a transport, ‘‘Tis my dear father, I see him, ‘tis him!’ and then she put her hands to several parts of her face, ‘‘Tis the very man, here! here!’”
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Milton’s character is one of the things which “securus judicat orbis terrarum.” On one point only there seems to us, as we have frequently implied, to be room for modification. In the popular conception of Milton the poet and the man are imperfectly combined. We allow his greatness as a poet, but deny him the poetical temperament which alone could have enabled him to attain it. He is looked upon as a great, good, reverend, austere, not very amiable, and not very sensitive man. The author and the book are thus set at variance, and the attempt to conceive the character as a whole results in confusion and inconsistency. To us, on the contrary, Milton, with all his strength of will and regularity of life, seems as perfect a representative as any of his compeers of the sensitiveness and impulsive passion of the poetical temperament. We appeal to his remarkable dependence upon external prompting for his compositions; to the rapidity of his work under excitement, and his long intervals of unproductiveness; to the heat and fury of his polemics; to the simplicity with which, fortunately for us, he inscribes small particulars of his own life side by side with weightiest utterances on Church and State; to the amazing precipitancy of his marriage and its rupture; to his sudden pliability upon appeal to his generosity; to his romantic self-sacrifice when his country demanded his eyes from him; above all, to his splendid ideals of regenerated human life, such as poets alone either conceive or realize. To overlook all this is to affirm that Milton wrote great poetry without being truly a poet. One more remark may be added, though not required by thinking readers. We must beware of confounding the essential with the accidental Milton--the pure vital spirit with the casual vesture of the creeds and circumstances of the era in which it became clothed with mortality:--
“They are still immortal
Who, through birth’s orient portal
And death’s dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
Clothe their unceasing flight
In the brief dust and light
Gathered around their chariots as they go.
New shapes they still may weave,
New gods, new laws, receive.”
If we knew for certain which of the many causes that have enlisted noble minds in our age would array Milton’s spirit “in brief dust and light,” supposing it returned to earth in this nineteenth century, we should know which was the noblest of them all, but we should be as far as ever from knowing a final and stereotyped Milton.
THE END.