A publisher was found, notwithstanding that Paul's, or as it now was, St. Paul's, Churchyard had ceased to exist, in Aldersgate, which lay outside the circuit of the conflagration. The agreement, still preserved in the National Museum, between the author, "John Milton, gent. of the one parte, and Samuel Symons, printer, of the other parte," is among the curiosities of our literary history. The curiosity consists not so much in the illustrious name appended (not in autograph) to the deed, as in the contrast between the present fame of the book, and the waste-paper price at which the copyright is being valued. The author received 57. down; was to receive a second 57. when the first edition should be sold; a third 51. when the second; a fourth 57. when the third edition should be gone. Milton lived to receive the second 5., and no more-10%. in all, for Paradise Lost. I cannot bring myself to join in the lamentations of the biographers over this bargain. Surely it is better so; better to know that the noblest monument of English letters had no money value, than to think of it as having been paid for at a pound the line. The agreement with Symons is dated 27th April, the entry in the register of Stationers' Hall is 20th August. It was, therefore, in the autumn of 1667 that Paradise Lost was in the hands of the public. We have no data for the time occupied in the composition of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. We have seen that the former poem was begun at Chalfont in 1665, and it may be conjecturally stated that Samson was finished before September, 1667. At any rate, both the poems were published together in the autumn of 1670. Milton had four years more of life granted him after this publication. But he wrote no more poetry. It was as if he had exhausted his strength in a last effort, in the Promethean agony of Samson, and knew that his hour of inspiration was passed away. But, like all men who have once tasted the joys and pangs of composition, he could not now do without its excitement. The occupation, and the indispensable solace of the last ten sad years, had been his poems. He would not write more verse, when the astrus was not on him, but he must write. He took up all the dropped threads of past years, ambitious plans formed in the fulness of vigour, and laid aside, but not abandoned. He was the very opposite of Shelley, who could never look at a piece of his own composition a second time, but when he had thrown it off at a heat, rushed into something else. Milton's adhesiveness was such that he could never give up a design once entered upon. In these four years, as if conscious that his time was now nearly out, he laboured to complete five such early undertakings. (1.) Of his Compendium of Theology I have already spoken. He was overtaken by death while preparing this for the press. (2.) His History of Britian must have cost him much labour, bestowed upon comparison of the conflicting authorities. It is the record of the studies he had made for his abandoned epic poem, and is evidence how much the subject occupied his mind. The History of Britain, 1670, had been preceded by (3) a Latin grammar, in 1669, and was followed by (4) a Logic on the method of Ramus, 1672. In 1673 he brought out a new edition of his early volume of Poems. In this volume he printed for the first time the sonnets, and other pieces, which had been written in the interval of twentyseven years since the date of his first edition. Not, indeed, all the sonnets which we now have. Four-in which Fairfax, Vane, Cromwell, and the Commonwealth are spoken of as Milton would speak of them-were necessarily kept back, and not put into print till 1694, by Phillips, at the end of his life of his uncle. In proportion to the trouble which Milton's words cost him, was his care in preserving them. His few Latin letters to his foreign friends are remarkably barren either of fact or sentiment. But Milton liked them well enough to have kept copies of them, and now allowed a publisher, Brabazon Aylmer, to issue them in print, adding to them, with a view to make out a volume, his college exercises, which he had also preserved. Among the papers which he left at his death, were the beginnings of two undertakings, either of them of overwhelming magnitude, which he did not live to complete. We have seen that he taught his pupils geography out of Davity, Description de l'Univers. He was not satisfied with this, or with any existing compendium. They were all dry; exact enough with their latitudes and longitudes, but omitted such uninteresting stuff as manners, government, religion, &c. Milton would essay a better system. All he had ever executed was Russia, taking the pains to turn over and extract for his purpose all the best travels in that country. This is the fragment which figures in his Works as a Brief History of Muscovia. The hackneyed metaphor of Pegasus harnessed to a luggage trolley will recur to us when we think of the author of L'Allegro setting himself to compile a Latin lexicon. If there is any literary drudgery more mechanical than another, it is generally supposed to be that of making a dictionary. Nor had he taken to this industry as a resource in age, when the genial flow of invention had dried up, and original composition had ceased to be in his power. The three folio volumes of MS. which Milton left were the work of his youth; it was a work which the loss of eyesight of necessity put an end to. It is not Milton only, but all students who read with an alert mind, reading to grow, and not to remember, who have felt the want of an occupation which shall fill those hours when mental vigilance is impossible, and vacuity unendurable. Index-making or cataloguing has been the resource of many in such hours. But it was not, I think, as a mere shifting of mental posture that Milton undertook to rewrite Robert Stephens; it was as part of his language training. Only by diligent practice and incessant exercise of attention and care, could Milton have educated his susceptibility to the specific power of words, to the nicety which he attained beyond any other of our poets. Part of this education is recorded in the seemingly withered leaves of his Latin Thesaurus, though the larger part must have been achieved, not by a reflective and critical collection of examples, but by a vital and impassioned reading. 66 Milton's complaint was what the profession of that day called gout. "He would be very cheerful even in his gout fits, and sing," says Aubrey. This gout returned again and again, and by these repeated attacks wore out his resisting power. He died of the gout struck in,” on Sunday, 8th November, 1674, and was buried, near his father, in the chancel of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. The funeral was attended, Toland says, "by all his learned and great friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the vulgar." The disgusting profanation of the leaden coffin, and dispersion of the poet's bones by the parochial authorities, during the repair of the church in August, 1790, has been denied, but it is to be feared that the fact is too true. CHAPTER XIII. PARADISE LOST-PARADISE REGAINED-SAMSON AGONISTES. "MANY men of forty," it has been said, "are dead poets ; " and it might seem that Milton, Latin secretary, and party pamphleteer, had died to poetry about the fatal age. In 1645 when he made a gathering of his early pieces for the volume published by Humphry Moseley, he wanted three years of forty. That volume contained, besides other things, Comus, Lycidas, L'Allgero, and II Penseroso; then, when produced, as they remain to this day, the finest flower of English poesy. But, though thus like a wary husbandman, garnering his sheaves in presence of the threatening storm, Milton had no intention of bidding farewell to poetry. the contrary, he regarded this volume only as first-fruits, an earnest of greater things to come. On The ruling idea of Milton's life, and the key to his mental history, is his resolve to produce a great poem. Not that the aspiration in itself is singular, for it is probably shared by every young poet in his turn. As every clever school-boy is destined by himself or his friends to become Lord Chancellor, and every private in the French army carries in his haversack the baton of a marshal, so it is a necessary ingredient of the dream on Parnassus, that it should embody itself in a form of surpassing brilliance. What distinguishes Milton from the crowd of young ambition, "audax juventa," is the constancy of resolve. He not only nourished through manhood the dream of youth, keeping under the importunate instincts which carry off most ambitions in middle life into the pursuit of place, profit, honour-the thorns which spring up and smother the wheat-but carried out his dream in its integrity in old age. He formed himself for this achievement, and for no other. Study at home, travel abroad, the arena of political controversy, the public service, the practice of the domestic virtues, were so many parts of the schooling which was to make a poet. The reader who has traced with me thus far the course of Milton's mental development will perhaps be ready to believe that this idea had taken entire possession of his mind from a very early The earliest written record of it is of date 1632, in Sonnet II. This was written as early as the poet's twenty-third year; and in these lines the resolve is uttered, not as then just conceived, age. but as one long brooded upon, and its non-fulfilment matter of selfreproach. If this sonnet stood alone, its relevance to a poetical, or even a literary performance, might be doubtful. But at the time of its composition it is enclosed in a letter to an unnamed friend, who seems to have been expressing his surprise that the Cambridge B. A was not settling himself, now that his education was complete, to a profession. Milton's apologetic letter is extant, and was printed by Birch in 1738. It intimates that Milton did not consider his education, for the purposes he had in view, as anything like complete. It is not "the endless delight of speculation," but "a religious advisement how best to undergo; not taking thought of being late, so it give advantage to be more fit." He repudiates the love of learning for its own sake; knowledge is not an end, it is only equipment for performance. There is here no specific engagement as to the nature of the performance. But what it is to be, is suggested by the enclosure of the "Patriarchian stanza (i. e., the sonnet). This notion that his life was, like Samuel's, a dedicated life, dedicated to a service which required a long probation, recurs again more than once in his writings. It is emphatically repeated, in 1641, in a passage of the pamphlet No. 4: "None hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit none shall—that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and full license will extend. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader that for some_few years yet I may go on trust with him towards the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the life of whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs. Till which in some measure be compassed, at mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation, from as many as are not loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges I can give them." In 1638, at the age of nine and twenty Milton has already determined that this lifework shall be a poem, an epic poem, and that its subject shall probably be the Arthurian legend. "Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, "May I find such a friend . . . when, if ever, I shall revive in song our native princes, and among them Arthur moving to the fray even in the nether world, and when I will, if only God's Spirit aid me, break the Saxon bands before our Britons' prowess." |