Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/27

 MILTON'S RETURN TO ENGLAND xix

his two nephews, John and Edward Phillips, but later more pupils were added, in- cluding some of eminent family ; nor does the pamphlet war into which he soon plunged appear to have interrupted the daily routine of pedagogy. A mere ruin- ous waste of time, we are tempted with Pattison to declare. To see the author of Lycidas putting by his lyre in order to seize the sword of controversy is endurable, but to see him in the schoolroom, pottering over Frontinus's Stratagems and the egregious poet Manilius, without the excuse of pecuniary necessity, begets in us nothing but impatience. The explanation of his action, however, is tolerably obvious. During the ten years between his return to England and his appointment as Latin Secretary to Cromwell's government, Milton was in a state of extraordinary nervous unrest. He had put poetry behind him to embark in a " troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes," but the part which he found to play in the struggle during these years was not eminent enough to satisfy his haughty and exigent nature, thus divorced from its natural consolation. The five pamphlets which during 1641-43 he launched against the Episcopal scheme of church government, influential as they undoubtedly were, and crowded with passages of lofty eloquence which made amends for their lack of a convincing logic, could not offer nepenthe for the rest- lessness bred of a great task deferred. In such a state of mind, mere busyness is seized upon as a form of self-justification, and incidentally serves as an excellent steadier of the nerves. Minor motives also, in Milton's case, doubtless entered in. That he had a speculative interest in the problems of teaching is attested by his Tractate on Education, with its scheme of training so curiously compounded of practical common-sense and impossible idealism. One may suspect, too, that the attitude of the teacher had, even in this small and concrete form, an attraction for one whose most splendid mental gesture was never quite free from a hint of dogmatism.

Milton's pamphlets on the church question had got him roundly abused by the adherents of Bishop Hall and the extreme prelatical party. The good bishop calls him, among other complimentary things, a " scurrilous Mime, a personated, and, as himself thinks, a grim, lowering, and bitter Fool," and describes the terse fa- miliar Anglo-Saxon with which Milton gave idiomatic flavor to his thunderous periods, as language fit only for fish-wives. These are merely the humors of sev- enteenth - century controversy ; his enemies were soon to have more formidable weapons put into their hands.

Edward Phillips informs us that his uncle left home suddenly in May, 1643, without stating the object of his journey, and returned a month later with a young wife and a train of bridal guests. The solemn house in Aldersgate Street was filled with merry-making for a time ; then the bride's friends departed, and Milton was left with his seventeen-year old wife to discover at leisure that he had made a monstrous blunder. Mary Powell was the daughter of a Cavalier Squire holding the seat of Forest Hill, near Oxford, a gentleman of some social pretension, though burdened with debts and a large family. A considerable portion of this debt had long been held against him by the Miltons, father and son. Whether

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