BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. JOHN MILTON was born in the heart of London, December 9, 1608. His father was born very near the time of Shakespeare's birth, and was a student at Oxford in his youth. It was while he was a student that England was wavering between Catholicism and Protestantism. The poet's grandfather held to the old order, and when his son was found leaning toward the new he disinherited him, and left him to his own devices. Thereupon the student went up to London, and shortly established himself as a scrivener, a term applied to men at that time who were copyists of legal docaments, law stationers, and draftsmen also of legal papers. Milton the scrivener prospered, married, and had three children who lived, a daughter and two sons, John Milton being younger than his sister and seven years older than his brother. Thus the poet came of a father who sympathized with the new order of things, and who was a contemporary of Shakespeare. Shakespeare died when Milton was eight years old, but Milton was nearly thirty when Ben Jonson, who was more widely known than Shakespeare in his day, died, and he was eigh teen years old when Bacon died. Milton's youth therefore was contemporaneous with the closing years of the august period of English dramatic poetry, and the glory of the spacious days of the great Queen Elizabeth was still within the near memory of men. He grew up also in a time when there were mutterings centre. of the rising storm which was to shake England to its He must have heard much in his boyhood of the attempt made by King James to marry his son to a Spanish princess, an heir to the throne of Protestant England, and a daughter of the house which was the stanch defender of the Pope, and the great rival and enemy of England in the days of Elizabeth. He must have been aware also of the widening breach between King and Parliament. He was seventeen years old when Charles I. ascended the throne. When this took place, Milton had just been entered at Christ's College, Cambridge. His schooldays had been spent in London at St. Paul's school, and he has himself recorded his devotion to books. "My father," he writes, " destined me while yet a little boy for the study of humane letters, which I seized with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight; which, indeed, was the first cause of injury to my eyes, to whose natural weakness there were also added frequent headaches. All which not retarding my impetuosity in learning, he caused me to be daily instructed both at the grammar-school and under other masters at home; and then, when I had acquired various tongues and also some not insignificant taste for the sweetness of philosophy, he sent me to Cambridge, one of our two national universities." The great studies in which Milton was nurtured were Latin and Greek. The latter had been generally studied in school only for a generation or So. It was a new study, very much as science is a new study now. Hebrew also was taught, and MilMoreover by his father's advice he ton studied it. |