Death of Milton. 121 who had fought strenuously against them till the very last. For about two months he lay in hiding, till, in August 1660, the Act of Indemnity passed. He was then for some time in custody, but was soon released, at the intercession, according to an old tradition, of Sir William Davenant, for whom he had performed a similar good office during the Commonwealth. Now "in darkness and with dangers compassed round," Milton, after twenty years spent in the arid deserts of controversy, again girt his singing robes around him. A few old friends remained faithful to him, but his daughters, to whom he was a harsh parent, were undutiful, and his domestic infelicity for a time was great. Affairs were, however, put on a more comfortable footing by his marriage to Elizabeth Minshull, an excellent woman, who did her duty well to him and his daughters. In 1667 "Paradise Lost," begun in the year before the close of the Protectorate, was published. Four years later, in 1671, "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes" appeared. Busy to the last, he also published various minor prose works, a "Latin Accidence," a "History of Britain," a "Tract on True Religion," &c. The most important work of his later years, however, was his Latin "Treatise on Christian Doctrine," which is very valuable for the light which it throws on his theological opinions. After the manuscript of it had been lost for many years, it was at length found in an old brown paper parcel that had been lying in the State Paper Office since 1675; and its publication, along with an English translation, by Bishop Sumner in 1825, gave occasion to Macaulay's famous Edinburgh Review essay. On November 8th, 1674, Milton died. Four days later he was buried in the chancel of St. Giles, Cripplegate, attended to the grave by "all his learned and great friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the vulgar." His personal appearance is well known from his portraits. In his youth he was eminently beautiful, with something of feminine delicacy in his appearance; and even in his old age, when blind and careworn by many trials, his features retained a sort of greatness and nobleness. "His domestic habits, so far as they are known, were those of a severe student. He drank little strong drink of any kind, and fed without excess in quantity, and in his earlier years without delicacy of choice. In his youth he studied late at night, but afterwards changed his hours, and rested in bed from nine to four in the summer, and five in the winter. The course of his day was best known after he was blind. When he first rose, he read a chapter in the Hebrew Bible, and then studied till twelve; then took some exercise for an hour; then dined; then played on the organ, and sang, or heard another sing; then studied to six; then entertained his visitors till eight; then supped, and, after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water, went to bed."* The "Notes" of Richardson supply a graphic and touching picture of Milton in his closing years. "An aged clergyman of Dorsetshire,” he says, "found John Milton in a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow-chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale, but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalkstones. He used also to sit in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields in warm, sunny weather, and so, as well as in his house, received the visits of people of distinguished parts as well as quality." His character, after all deductions have been made, was a very noble one. Not amiable, irritable, exacting, vindictive, he was totally free from anything deserving the name of vice; conscientious, high-minded, dignified, courageous. "Paradise Lost," as originally published, consisted of ten books. For the manuscript Milton received £5; and it was arranged that he should receive £5 after each of the first four editions, which were to consist of 1300 copies each. In 1669 Milton gave the publisher, Simmons, a receipt for £5, so that he received for the first edition just £10. The second edition appeared in 1674. In it the two longest books of the first edition, Books VII. and X., were each divided into two, and some other trifling alterations were made. In 1678 the third edition appeared, for which, in 1680, Simmons paid Milton's Johnson. "Paradise Regained." 123 widow £5, and for £3 more purchased all interest in the copyright. All circumstances considered, the sale of the book was not bad, and Simmons must have made a tolerably good thing of his purchase. It would be presumption to attempt to criticise a work so great and so well known as "Paradise Lost." The most salient objections to its plan and execution are given in Johnson's unappreciative but very able criticism. Such trifling faults as he mentions are but as a feather in the balance when weighed against the wonderful majesty, the consummate art, the strength and dignity, of England's greatest epic. The theme of the poem is one so vast, so transcending human faculties, so full of difficulties, as to require a poet of Milton's massive genius to grapple with. It may be granted at once that "Paradise Lost" is overlaid with learning; that it is occasionally prolix; that it is sometimes even (as in the case of the war in heaven) grotesque; but no poem, taken as a whole, is so uniformly grand, or soars up into such splendid regions of eloquence. The verse, as in all poems of first-rate excellence, is an echo to the sense. "Perhaps no man," writes Dr. Guest, a great authority on such matters, "ever paid the same attention to the quality of his rhythm as Milton. What other poets effect as it were by chance, Milton achieved by the aid of science and art; he studied the aptness of his numbers, and diligently tutored an ear which nature had gifted with the most delicate sensibility. In the flow of his rhythm, in the quality of his letter sounds, in the disposition of his pauses, his verse almost ever fits the subject, and so insensibly does poetry blend with this the last beauty of exquisite versification-that the reader may sometimes doubt whether it be the thought itself, or merely the happiness of its expression, which is the source of a gratification so deeply felt." "Paradise Regained" had its origin in a suggestion of Ellwood the Quaker. Visiting Milton in 1665, the poet gave him the MS. of "Paradise Lost" to read. When it was returned, Milton asked, "How I liked it, and what I thought of it, which I modestly but freely told him; and, after some further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?' He made me no answer, but sat for some time in a muse; then brake off that discourse and fell upon another subject. After the sickness was over, and the city well cleansed, and become safely habitable again, he returned thither. And when, afterwards, I went to wait on him there, which I seldom failed of doing whenever my occasions drew me to London, he 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 [where Milton was staying while the plague raged at London], which before I had not thought of."" Milton's alleged preference of "Paradise Lost" to "Paradise Regained" is very often given as an example of the incorrect judgments which authors are apt to form of their own works. As a matter of fact, however, there is no evidence that he did so prefer it; the sole foundation for that statement being a remark of Philips's that "Paradise Regained" was generally thought to be much inferior to "Paradise Lost," though Milton could "not hear with patience any such thing when related to him." That it is greatly inferior is indisputable, though some passages, such as the description of Greece, are eminently beautiful. In majesty and sublimity it cannot be compared to "Paradise Lost." "Samson Agonistes " is one of Milton's most characteristic poems. The subject was one upon which his thoughts had long dwelt, but in his old age it came back to him with renewed intensity when his own lot seemed to have so many points in common with that of the ancient hero. Like Samson, he was blind; like Samson, he had fallen into the hands of the Philistines; like Samson, he was a Nazarite, shunning wine and strong drink; like Samson, he had incurred much misery by his marriage to a Philistine woman. The drama is formed upon Greek models, and imitates them in the strong simplicity of its style. It would be difficult to mention any equally great The "Metaphysical" Poets. 125 poem so bare of ornament, so ruthlessly stripped of conventional poetic phrases and imagery. One of the strangest and most undiscerning criticisms of Johnson on Milton is that on the Sonnets. "Of the best," he writes, "it can only be said that they are not bad; and perhaps only the eighth and twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender commendation." The fact is that they are among the finest sonnets in the language, unsurpassed in strength and dignity save by some of Wordsworth's. In Milton's hand, as Wordsworth says in his Sonnet on the Sonnet "The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew The rage for playing upon words and ideas which is found in many writers of the Elizabethan era, and most prominently in Lyly, culminated in the poets called the metaphysical school, a name which was given to them by Johnson, and which, though not very appropriate, has adhered to them. Of this school, of which Lyly was the true progenitor, the characteristics are pointed out by Johnson in a very masterly way. "The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables. "If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry regen mountıen, an imitative art, those writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature for life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect." Donne [1573-1631] Of the "metaphysical" school, John may be said to have been the founder. make fanciful similitudes, remote analogies, and verbal subtle |