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MIL too, was of this profession. The disinherited but well educated son of the under-ranger, whose first step in life had evinced such integrity and high principle, as well as so much decision of character, prospered as was to have been expected, and acquired in time, Aubrey informs us, "a plentiful estate." Everything, indeed, that has been recorded of his after life bespeaks his easy circumstances, and, we may add, also the liberal way in which he lived, and his generous expenditure of the sufficient means with which heaven had blessed him. He retained in his new social position the refined tastes of his early culture. He was something of a poet, and as a musical composer ranked among the most eminent of his day. Evidently there was the germ in him of much both of the moral and of the intellectual nature of his son; and from first to last, throughout the whole space of nearly forty years that they were permitted to spend together, he seems to have seen in that son another and brighter self, who, it might be hoped, would do more than make up to him for the way in which his own academical career had been cut short. If we suppose his conversion to protestantism to have taken place when he was about one or two and twenty, he would have some fourteen or fifteen years to establish himself in his profession before he married, probably about the year 1600. As we know only the family name of his mother, who was a Haughton by birth, although she was a Mrs. Jeffrey, widow, when his father married her, so it is only the christian name of his wife that is certainly known; but there is every reason to believe that she was a Sarah Bradshaw. The modern accounts that would have her to have been a Jefferys, or Haughton, or Caston, seem to have none of them anything to rest upon. She brought her husband six sons and daughters, but only three of them grew up:—Anne, the second born, who in 1624 became the wife of Edward Philips of the crown office in chancery; John, who was next to her; and Christopher, who came last of all, in 1615, and who, having been bred to the law, took the opposite side to his brother in the contest between the crown and the parliament, at length professed himself a papist, and was eventually made a justice of the common pleas and knighted by James II., but was superseded on account of his age and infirmities some months before the Revolution. Milton describes his mother in the "Defensio Secunda" as a most excellent woman, and particularly known for her charities in the neighbourhood. But it may have been from her that he inherited that weakness of constitution which, as he tells us, showed itself in frequent headaches from his twelfth year, as well as the dimness of eyesight which he himself ascribes to his habit of sitting up at his studies when young usually till midnight, and which ended in total blindness. "She had very weak eyes," Aubrey records, "and used spectacles presently after she was thirty years old," whereas her husband's sight was so good that "he read without spectacles at eighty-four." A curious relation of parallelism or conversity may be traced in some things between the early biography of Milton and that of another of our poets. Pope, who may be regarded as the head of the school which is the most opposite or unlike to his. Pope, whose birth dates exactly eighty years after that of Milton, was also London-born, and his father likewise had been disinherited for changing his religion, only that it was not from Romanism to protestantism, but the other way. He too after this made a good fortune in business. So again in Pope's case it seems to have been his mother that had the good constitution, and his father the bad one. The poet expressly attributes his personal deformity, which made his life a long disease, to the latter, who managed, nevertheless, to attain the age of seventy-five; but his wife lived to that of ninety-three, notwithstanding a liability to headaches which her son speaks of having derived from her. Milton is supposed to have been born when his father was about forty-four; Pope was born when his was forty-six. Pope was an only child; Milton may be fairly presumed to have all along held almost the place of an only son in his father's hopes, if not also in his heart. Both were miracles of precocity; and each, remarkably enough, seems to have had in his father, making his prosperous way through life along a path far enough, apparently, from any high region of the intellectual, not only one who made the training of his son in literature a first object, but an encourager, and even to some extent a director, in the employment of that special talent with which both were so largely endowed by nature. At a very early age Pope used to be set by his father to make English verses, and when they did not satisfy him the old linen-merchant would say, "These are not good rhymes," and send him back to new-turn them. Even in the method of their education there was something of the same spirit, though the form was different. Both, at least after they had been fairly introduced to books, were very much left to themselves, and allowed to take their own course without either direction, advice, or any other kind of interference—undoubtedly the wisest and best plan that could have been followed with minds such as theirs. The results, indeed, were very different in the two cases; but, if Milton became the most learned of poets, Pope too had quite enough of learning for his own purpose. They differed in that matter as the mind and the poetry of the one differed from those of the other in their entire nature. Yet in some things they might perhaps have been more like one another, if they had had the same opportunities and the same cultivation. Milton's father made him a proficient in music, and Pope, in another age, grew up without acquiring any musical science; but he had the natural gift of so melodious a voice that his friends used to call him the little nightingale. Milton's voice was also remarkable for its sweetness. Finally, both Milton and Pope had the rare and great happiness—as Göthe and Brougham have had in our own day—of seeing the afternoon and evening of one parent's life made bright and proud by their renown. As Milton's father died in 1647 in his son's house in London, so Pope's mother closed her eyes in 1733 in her son's house in Twickenham. The parent and the son had been little separated through life in either case.

The earliest express notice we have of young Milton is a memorandum of Aubrey's to the effect that in 1619, when he was ten years old, he had his picture taken and was already a poet, or at least a writer of verse. The portrait, dated 1618, still exists, an oil-painting believed to be by Cornelius Jansen, who had then just come over from his native Amsterdam, and, having established himself in Blackfriars, immediately found as much employment as he could take in painting portraits at five broad pieces a head. Of his earliest education Milton himself says in one of his tracts ("The Reason of Church Government," published in 1641):—"I had, from my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father (whom God recompense) been exercised to the tongues and some sciences, as my age would suffer, by sundry masters and teachers, both at home and at the schools." One of his tutors at this time, commemorated by his illustrious pupil in a Latin elegiac poem addressed to him some years afterwards under the name of Thomas Junius, was Thomas Young, a native of Perthshire, and an alumnus of the university of St. Andrews, who in the latter part of his life was well known as a puritan divine. But before 1620 the boy had commenced his public education by being sent to the neighbouring school of St. Paul's, then as still one of the most distinguished of the London seminaries, and here he remained till he went to college in 1625. He was admitted a pensioner (the rank commonly assumed by the sons of gentlemen) of Christ's college, Cambridge, on the 12th of February in that year. He has himself preserved and printed metrical versions of two of the psalms (the 114th and 136th), which he states were done by him at fifteen years old. These are the earliest specimens of his poetry that we have, and the second in particular may be regarded as giving some promise of what he was to become. His Cambridge life extends to July, 1632, when he left with his degree of M.A. The record of his seven years' course at the university consists almost exclusively of the succession of his compositions in Latin and English verse; but these show better than any thing else could do both his progress in poetic skill and his general growth of mind. Among them are his fine poem, the first in which his genius shines unmistakably forth, "On the Death of a Fair Infant" (said to have been his sister's child), assigned by himself to his seventeenth year; his Latin elegies on the bishops of Winchester (Andrews) and Ely (Felton), both of the same date: a Latin poem on the Gunpowder Plot, dated 1626; several Latin elegiac epistles to his old master Young, his former schoolfellow Charles Diodati, and others, in 1627 and subsequent years; his College Vacation Exercise, containing the remarkable address to his native language, in his nineteenth year; his great "Hymn on the Nativity," composed in 1629; his "Ode on the Circumcision," and the pieces entitled "The Passion," "On Time," "At a Solemn Music," all ascribed, as well as the epitaph on Shakspeare, to the following year; his epitaphs on Hobson the university carrier and on the Marchioness of Winchester, in 1631; and, finally, in 1632, his sonnet on having completed his twenty-third year. It has been conjectured that the course of Milton's college life did not run quite smooth