Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/30

 xxii THE LIFE OF MILTON

1645, Milton got together the poems which he had written up to that time, and gave them for publication to Humphrey Moseley, a printer of disinterested enthu- siasm for pure literature, to whom seventeenth-century poetry stands much indebted. It was high time that such a collection should be made. In his pamphlets Milton had made more than one reference to his vocation as poet, to the work which he hoped to accomplish, and which his nation " would not willingly let die." Such words had begun to fall upon incredulous ears, for with the exception of an un- signed edition of Comus published by Lawes, the Cambridge memorial volume containing Lycidas, and a stray piece or two in the miscellanies, none of Milton's poems were in print. The motto which he chose for the volume,

" Baccare frontem Ciagite, ne vati noceat mala lingua f uturo,' '

(Wreathe his brow with laurel, and let no grudging tongue harm the future poet), gracefully combined modesty of claim for his present performance with a proud confidence in what was to come. As frontispiece to this famous edition of 1645 there is prefixed a portrait of the author, a spiritless and bungled engraving, as " grim, lowering, and bitter " as good Bishop Hall could have desired. When the picture was shown to Milton by the engraver, one Marshall, he made no objection to it, but gravely wrote out a Greek motto to be added beneath, which the luckless artist as gravely copied on his plate, innocent of the fact that he was handing down to posterity a biting lampoon upon his own handiwork. It was a clever practical joke, and reminds us of a remark of Dryden's, years after, that Milton's manner of pronouncing the letter r, the " dog-letter," betrayed a " satiric wit." The cleverness of the joke makes ill amends for its saturninity. The poet had moved many leagues from the golden clime of his birth before he permitted himself that diversion. To be sure, he had moved under bitter stress ; some of the sweet saps of his youthful nature may well have been turned to satiric acids.

It is pleasant, after this, to read the sonnet to Henry Lawes, written after Mil- ton was installed with his wife and pupils in a large house which he had taken in the Barbican ; for the placid and gracious lines show returning calmness of spirit. The halcyon season, however, when the friends might please themselves with " im- mortal notes and Tuscan air," was short. Soon the surrender of Oxford drove the Powells in a body from Forest Hill to the house in the Barbican. The birth of a daughter, Anne, who was from the first " a kind of cripple," added to the disturbed condition of the household. The departure of the Powell family was followed by the death of Milton's father, and the poet, wearied out with the strain of the past months, resolved to give up teaching and remove to a smaller house in High Hoi- born, near Lincoln's Inn Fields.

His inheritance from his father had now placed him in easy financial circum- stances, and the triumph of the Independent party had left his mind comparatively free. Why did he not turn now to that great task of poetic creation of which he had thought so long, and for which, as his preserved notebooks show, he had al- ready made exhaustive study ? It is impossible to say. Perhaps, in spite of the

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