Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/342

Rh 324 MILTON MILTON, JOHN (1608-1674), was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, London, on the 9th of December 1603. His father, known as Mr John Milton of Bread Street, scrivener, was himself an interesting man. He was a native of Oxfordshire, having been born there in or about 1563, the son of a Ilichard Milton, yeoman of Stanton-St-John s, of whom there are traces as one of the sturdiest adherents to the old Roman Catholic religion that had been left in his district. The son, however, had turned Protestant, and, having been cast off on that account, had come to London, apparently about the year 1586, to push his fortune. I laving received a good education, and having good abilities, especially in music, he may have lived for some time by musical teaching and practice. Not till 1595, at all events, when he was long past the usual age of apprenticeship, do we hear of his preparation for the profession of a scrivener; and not till February 1599-1600, when he was about thirty- seven years of age, did he enter the profession as a qualified member of the Scriveners Company. It was then that he set up his &quot;house and shop&quot; in Bread Street, and began, like other scriveners, his lawyerly business of drawing up wills, marriage-settlements, and the like, with such related business as that of receiving money from clients for invest ment and lending it out to the best advantage. It was at the same time that he married. Till recently there has been the most extraordinary uncertainty as to the maiden name of his wife, the mother of the poet. It has been now ascertained, however, that she was a Sarah Jeffrey, one of the two orphan daughters of a Paul Jeffrey, of St Swithin s, London, &quot; citizen and merchant-taylor,&quot; originally from Essex, Avho had died before 1583. At the date of her marriage she was about twenty-eight years of age. Her widowed mother, Mrs Ellen Jeffrey, came to reside in the house in Bread Street, and died there in February 1610-11. Before this death of the maternal grandmother, three children had been born to the scrivener and his wife, of whom only two survived, the future poet, and an elder sister, called Anne. Of three more children, born subse quently, only one survived, Christopher, the youngest of the family, born December 3, 1615. The first sixteen years of Milton s life, coinciding exactly with the last sixteen of the reign of James I., associate themselves with the house in Bread Street, and with the surroundings of that house in Old London. His father, while prospering in business, continued to be known as a man of &quot; ingeniose &quot; tastes, and even acquired some dis tinction in the London musical world of that time by his occasional contributions to important musical publications. Music was thus a part of the poet s domestic education from his infancy. Whatever else could be added was added without stint. Again and again Milton speaks with gratitude and affection of the ungrudging pains bestowed by his father on his early education. &quot;Both at the grammar school and also under other masters at home,&quot; is the statement in one passage, &quot; he caused me to be instructed daily.&quot; This brings us to about the year 1619, when Milton was ten years of age. At that time his domestic tutor was Thomas Young, a Scotsman from Perth shire, and graduate of the university of St Andrews, after wards a man of no small distinction among the English Puritan clergy, but then only curate or assistant to some parish clergyman in or near London, and eking out his livelihood by private teaching. Young s tutorship lasted till 1622, when he was drawn abroad by an offer of the pastorship or chaplaincy to the congregation of English merchants in Hamburg. Already, however, for a year or two, his tutorship had been only supplementary to the education which the boy was receiving by daily attendance at St Paul s public school, close to Bread Street. The headmaster of tin; school was Mr Alexander Gill, an elderly Oxford divine, of high reputation for scholarship and teaching ability. Under him, as usher or second master, was his son, Alexander Gill the younger, also an Oxford graduate of scholarly reputation, but of blustering character. Milton s acquaintanceship with this younger Gill, begun at St Paul s school, led to subsequent friendship and corre spondence. Far more affectionate and intimate was the friendship formed by Milton at St Paul s with a certain young Charles Diodati, his schoolfellow there, the son of a naturalized Italian physician, Dr Theodore Diodati, who had settled in London in good medical practice, and was much respected, both on his own account, and as being the brother of the famous Protestant divine, Jean or Giovanni Diodati of Geneva. Young Diodati, who was destined for his father s profession, left the school for Oxford University early in 1623; but Milton remained till the end of 1624. A family incident of that year was the marriage of his elder sister, Anne, with Edward Phillips, a clerk in the Government office called the Crown Office in Chancery. Milton had then all but completed his sixteenth year, and was as scholarly, as accomplished, and as handsome a youth as St Paul s school had sent forth. We learn from himself that his exercises &quot;in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter,&quot; had begun to attract attention even in his boyhood. This implies that he must have had a stock of attempts in English and Latin by him of earlier date than 1624. Of these the only specimens that now remain are his Paraphrase on Psalm CXIV. and his Paraphrase on Psalm C XXXV I. On February 12, 1624-25, Milton, at the ago of sixteen years and two months, was entered as a student of Christ s College, Cambridge, in the grade of a &quot; Lesser Pensioner.&quot; His matriculation entry in the books of the university is two months later, April 9, 1625. Between these two dates James I. had died, and had been succeeded by Charles I. Cambridge University was then in the full flush of its prosperity on that old system of university education which combined Latin and Greek studies with plentiful drill and disputation in the scholastic logic and philosophy, but with little of physical science, and next to no mathe matics. There were sixteen colleges in all, dividing among them a total of about 2900 members of the university. Christ s College, to which Milton belonged, ranked about third in the university in respect of numbers, counting about 265 members on its books. The master was Dr Thomas Bainbrigge ; and among the thirteen fellows were Mr Joseph Meade, still remembered as a commentator on the Apocalypse, and Mr William Chappell, afterwards an Irish bishop. It was under Chappell s tutorship that Milton was placed when he first entered the college. At least three students who entered Christ s after Milton, but during his residence, deserve mention. One was Edward King, a youth of Irish birth and high Irish connexions, who entered in 1626, at the age of fourteen; another was John Cleveland, afterwards known as royalist and satirist, who entered in 1627; and the third Avas Henry More, sub sequently famous as the Cambridge Platonist, who entered in 1631, just before Milton left. Milton s own brother, Christopher, joined him in the college in February 1630- 31, at the age of fifteen. Milton s academic course lasted seven years and five months, or from February 1624-25 to July 1632, bringing him from his seventeenth year to his twenty-fourth. Tho first four years were his time of undergraduateship. It was in the second of these, the year 1626, that then; occurred that quarrel between him and his tutor, Mr Chappell, which Dr Johnson, making the most of a lax tradition from Aubrey, magnified into the supposition that Milton may have been one of the last students in either of the English universities that suffered the indignity of