Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/41

 MILTON'S LAST YEARS, 1666-1674 xxxiii

spirit of an age of fiery baptism, the time-serving spirit of an age of pleasure. There is a half-humorous recognition of the gulf set between them in Milton's " Yes, you may tag my verses," with which he granted his visitor's request, a reply which does not gain in urbanity when contrasted with Dryden's generous and whole-souled praise of the poem he was called upon to travesty.

We get from the painter Richardson some vivid glimpses of Milton in old age. He speaks of him being led about the streets, clad in cold weather in a gray cam- blet coat, and wearing no sword, though " 't was his custom not long before to wear one, with a small silver hilt." And again, " I have heard that he used to sit in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house, near Bunhill Fields, without Moor- gate, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air, and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts, as well as quality ; and very lately I had the good fortune to have another picture of him from an aged clergy- man in Dorsetshire. He found him in a small house, he thinks but one room on a floor. In that, up one pair of stairs, which was hung with a rusty green, he found John Milton, sitting in an elbow chair ; black clothes, and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones." The Faithorne portrait, engraved in 1670, shows a face deeply seamed with lines of thought and of pain, eyes unblemished, but full of the disappointed query of blind- ness, hair flat over the brows and falling slightly waved to the shoulders, and a mouth of singular richness, which seems still to crave life, the one lingering fea- ture of the youthful mask.

Rising at four o'clock in summer and five in winter, hearing a chapter of the Bible in Hebrew read to him before breakfast, passing the day in work, with music and a little walk for diversion, and ending with a supper " of olives or some light tiling," a pipe and a glass of water, he lived placidly the meagre days left to him. Shortly before his death, being at dinner with his young wife, and finding a favorite dish prepared for him, he cried out, " God have mercy, Betty, I see thou wilt perform according to thy promise in providing me such dishes as I think fit whilst I live ; and when I die, thou knowest that I have left thee all." The nun- cupative will thus made was contested at law by his daughters, and broken. He died on the eighth of November, 1674, " with so little pain that the time of his ex- piring was not perceived by those in the room." " All his learned and great friends in London," says Toland, " not without a concourse of the vulgar, accompanied his body to the church of St. Giles, near Cripplegate, where he was buried in the chancel."

Many circumstances have combined to falsify for the modern mind the outlines of Milton's character. The theme most closely linked with his name as a poet has thrown about him a traditional reverence which has obscured his human lineaments. The political passions of his day are many of them still, under changed names, potent enough to distort his figure according to the direction of our approach. Added to these difficulties is the more essential one, that the harmony which he forced upon his character was made up of a hundred dissonances. He added

�� �