Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/17



are aided in the study of Milton's life by the sharpness of line which separates the three main epochs of his history: his life of student ease, during which he was preparing himself with consecration for his poetic vocation; his life of public service, when he put behind him his poetic ambitions and threw himself with fanatical ardor into the struggle for liberty; and his old age, when, blind and discredited, he sat down amid the wreck of everything for which he had given his best twenty years, to write the poem which from early youth he had felt it his mission to leave to the nation.

Milton's youth was singularly sweet and sheltered. He was born in London on the 9th of December, 1608, the son of John Milton, a scrivener or solicitor doing business at the sign of the Spread Eagle in Bread Street. It is worth noting that for two generations at least the Miltons had exhibited intense partisanship in the religious disputes which agitated the nation. Richard Milton, the poet's grandfather, had been a stubborn Catholic recusant under Elizabeth, and John Milton, the poet's father, had broken with his family in order to join the Puritans. The Puritanism of the home in Bread Street was not, however, of an ascetic or unlovely type. The father was an accomplished musician, of some note as a composer, and could even on occasion try his hand at poetry. This mellow atmosphere of taste and cultivation, spiritualized by a sincere piety, united with larger circumstances to enrich life for the young poet. We must remember that in Milton's childhood Shakespeare was still alive, that at the Mermaid Tavern, probably in the very street where the scrivener's house stood, Ben Jonson held his "merry meetings," and that most of the stalwart figures which had made the reign of the Virgin Queen illustrious were still to be seen about the streets of London. There was as yet hardly a hint of the passing away of those " spacious times," of the spirit of romance and adventure, which had filled Elizabethan England. His nature, therefore, was in no danger of being starved at the outset, as it must have been if his birth had fallen a few decades farther on in the struggle between the old and the new, when Puritanism had narrowed and hardened itself in order to project itself more forcibly against its enemies.

Yet perhaps it is not fanciful to see an adumbration of the new spirit soon to darken over England, in the unchildlike devotion with which the boy Milton gave himself to his studies. First under a private tutor, one Thomas Young, a Presby-