MILTON, THE LONDONER.

THE best successor of Milton has described the character of the great poet's mind in one celebrated line:--

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.'

It might at first seem, looking at the accuracy of this forcible image, that the name of Milton could not be properly associated with the state of society during the times in which he flourished. It is true that in the writings of Milton we have very few glimpses of the familiar life of his day; no set descriptions of scenes and characters: nothing that approaches in the slightest degree to the nature of anecdote; no playfulness, no humour. Words worth continues his apostrophe:

:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea.'

The sprightlier dramatists have the voices of

'Shallow rivers, by whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.'

It is pleasant to sit in the sunshine and listen to the bubbling of the runnel over its pebbly bottom: but the times of Milton were for the most part dark and stormy, and with them the voice of the sea was in harmony. We can learn, while listening to that voice, when there was calm and when there was tempest. But Milton was not only the great literary name of his period--he was a public man, living in the heart of the mightiest struggle betwixt two adverse principles that England ever encountered. Add to this he was essentially a Londoner. He was born in Bread Street; he died in Cripplegate. During a long life we may trace him, from St. Paul's School, through a succession of London residences which, taking their names with their ordinary associations, sound as little poetical as can well be imagined-St. Bride's Churchyard, Aldersgate Street, Barbican, Holborn, Petty France, Bartholomew Close, Jewin Street, Bunhill Fields. The houses which he inhabited have been swept away; their pleasant gardens are built over. But the name of Milton is inseparably connected with these prosaic realities. That name belongs especially to London.

The Milton of nineteen has himself left us a picture of his mind at this period. His first Latin elegy, addressed to Charles Deodati, is supposed by Warton to have been written about 1627. The writer was born in 1608. We shall transcribe a few passages from Cowper's translation of this elegy:'I well content, where Thames with influent tide

My native city laves, meantime reside:
Nor zeal nor duty now my steps impel

To reedy Cam, and my forbidden cell;
Nor aught of pleasure in those fields have I,
That, to the musing bard, all shade deny.
"T is time that I a pedant's threats disdain,
And fly from wrongs my soul will ne'er sustain.
If peaceful days in letter'd leisure spent,
Beneath my father's roof, be banishment,

Then call me banish'd; I will ne'er refuse
A name expressive of the lot I choose.

I would that, exiled to the Pontic shore,
Rome's hapless bard had suffered nothing more;
He then had equall'd even Homer's lays,
And, Virgil! thou hadst won but second praise.
For here I woo the Muse, with no control;

For here my books-my life-absorb me whole.'

His father's roof was in Bread Street, in the parish of Allhallows. The sign of the Spread Eagle, which hung over his father's door, was the armorial bearing of his family; but the sign indicated that the house was one of business, and the business of Milton's father was that of a scrivener. Here, in some retired back room, looking most probably into a pleasant little garden, was the youthful poet surrounded by his books, perfectly indifferent to the more profitable writing of bonds and agreements that was going forward in his father's office. It was Milton's happiness to possess a father who understood the genius of his son, and whose tastes were in unison with his own. In the young poet's beautiful verses, Ad Patrem, also translated by Cowper, he says,

thou never bad'st me tread

The beaten path, and broad, that leads right on
To opulence, nor didst condemn thy son

To the insipid clamours of the bar,

The laws voluminous, and ill observ'd.'

Of Milton's father, Aubrey says, 'He was an ingenious man, delighted in music, and composed many songs now in print, especially that of Oriana.' The poet thus addresses his father in reference to the same accomplishment:

thyself

Art skilful to associate verse with airs
Harmonious, and to give the human voice
A thousand modulations, heir by right

Indisputable of Arion's fame.

Now say, what wonder is it, if a son
Of thine delight in verse; if, so conjoin'd
In close affinity, we sympathise

In social arts and kindred studies sweet?'

There was poetry then, and poetical associations, within Milton's home in the close city. Nor were poetical influiences wanting without. The early writings of Milton teem with the romantic associations of his youth, and they have the character of the age sensibly impressed upon them. In the epistle to Deodati we have an ample description of that love of the drama, whether comedy or tragedy, which he subsequently connected with the pursuits of his mirthful and his contemplative man. To the student of nineteen,

The grave or gay colloquial scene recruits

My spirits spent in learning's long pursuits.'

His descriptions of the comic characters in which he delights. appear rather to be drawn from Terence than from Jonson or Fletcher. But in tragedy he pretty clearly points at Shakspere's Romeo' and at Hamlet.' 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' were probably written some four or five years after this epistle, when Milton's father had retired to Horton, and his son's visits to London were occasional. But the well-trod stage' is still present to his thoughts. There is a remarkable peculiarity in all Milton's early poetry which is an example of the impressibility of his imagination under local circumstances. He is the poet, at one and the same time, of the city and of the country. In the epistle to Deodati he displays this mixed affection for the poetical of art and of nature:

Nor always city-pent, or pent at home,

I dwell; but, when spring calls me forth to roam,
Expatiate in our proud suburban shades

Of branching elm, that never sun pervades.'

But London is thus addressed :

Oh city, founded by Dardanian hands,

Whose towering front the circling realms commands,
Too blest abode! no loveliness we see

In all the earth, but it abounds in thee.'

Every reader is familiar with the exquisite rural pictures of L'Allegro;' but the scenery, without the slightest

difficulty, may be placed in the immediate suburban shades which he has described in the epistle. It is scarcely necessary to remove them even as far as the valley of the Colne. The transition is immediate from the hedge-row elms, the russet lawns, the upland hamlets, and the nut-brown ale, to

'Tower'd cities please us then,

And the busy hum of men,

Where throngs of knights and barons bold
In weeds of peace high triumphs hold,
With store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence, and judge the prize
Of wit, or arms, while both contend
To win her grace, whom all commend.
There let Hymen oft appear

In saffron robe, with taper clear,
And pomp and feast and revelry,
With mask and antique pageantry,—
Such sights as youthful poets dream
Ou summer-eves by haunted stream.
Then to the well-trod stage anon,' &c.

So, in Il Penseroso,' there is a similar transition from the evensong of the nightingale, and the sullen roar of the faroff curfew, to

'The bellman's drowsy charm

To bless the doors from nightly harm.'

And there, in like manner, we turn from

'Arched walks of twilight groves

And shadows brown,'

to

the high embowed roof

With antic pillars massy proof,

And storied windows richly dight,

Casting a dim religious light.'

6

'No man,' says Thomas Warton, was ever so disqualified to turn Puritan as Milton.' In these his early poems, ac cording to this elegant critic, his expressed love of choral church music, of Gothic cloisters, of the painted windows