threshold of the Spread-Eagle in Bread-street; and let the roar of Cheapside and the surrounding city be muffled in the distance.

It is a warm and happy home. Peace, comfort, and industry reign within it. During the day the scrivener is busy with his apprentices and clients; but in the evening the family are gathered together the father on one side, the mother on the other, the eldest girl and her brother John seated near, and little Kit lying on the hearth. A grave Puritanic piety was then the order in the households of most of the respectable citizens of London; and in John Milton's house there was more than usual of the accompanying affection for Puritanic habits and modes of thought. Religious reading and devout exercises would be part of the regular life of the family. And thus a disposition towards the serious, a regard for religion as the chief concern in life, and a dutiful love of the parents who so taught him, would be cultivated in Milton from his earliest years. Happy child to have such parents; happy parents to have such a child!

But the scrivener, though a serious man, was also a man of liberal culture. "He was an ingeniose man," says Aubrey; and Philips, who could recollect him personally, says that while prudent in business, "he did not so far quit his generous and ingenious inclinations as to make himself wholly a slave to the world." His acquaintance with literature was that of a man who had been some time at college. But his special faculty was music. It is possible that, on being cast off by his father, he had thought of music as a profession. At all events, after he had settled as a scrivener, he had such a passion for the art as to acquire a reputation in it above that of an ordinary amateur. Thus, in a collection of madrigals which was published in 1601, and long afterwards retained its celebrity, he is found associated, as a contributor, with twenty-one of the first English composers then living. The volume consists of twenty-five madrigals, entitled The Triumphes of Oriana, each composed for five or six voices, but all originally intended to be sung at one entertainment, in compliment to Queen Elizabeth and perhaps in her presence. "Oriana" was one of the Arcadian court-names for the aged virgin, and the notion of getting up the madrigals had originated with the Earl of Nottingham. Thomas Morley, whose compositions are still in repute, edited the collection; and, among the contributors are Ellis Gibbons, John Wilbye, Thomas Weelks, and John Bennet. Milton's madrigal is the eighteenth in the series; and its admission proves that he was at that time seven years before his son was born-well known in musical circles. Nor had he since then forsworn his favorite art. An organ and other

instruments were part of the furniture in the house in Bread-street; and much of his spare time was given to musical study. Not to speak of compositions of his not now to be recovered-among which, according to Aubrey and Philips, the most notable was an "In Nomine, in forty parts," presented by him to a Polish prince, and acknowledged by the gift of a gold chain and medal-we trace his hand here and there in the preserved music of the time. In the Teares and Lamentations of a Sorrowfull Soule-published in 1614 by Sir William Leighton Knight, one of His Majesty's Honorable Band of Gentlemen Pensioners, and consisting of dolorous sacred songs, both words and music, after a fashion then much in vogue-Milton appears along with Byrd, Bull, Dowland, Orlando Gibbons, Wilbye, Ford, and other "famous artists," as the editor styles them, "of that sublime profession." Three of the "Lamentations" are to Milton's music. Again, in Thomas Ravenscroft's compendium of Church-music published in 1621 under the title of The Whole Book of Psalmes, with the Hymns Evangelicall and Songs Spiritual, composed into four parts by sundry authors to such severall tunes as have beene and are usually sung in England, Scotland, Wales, Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands, Milton's name figures along with those of other masters, living and dead, including Tallis, Dowland, Morley, Bennet, and Ravenscroft himself. The airs in this collection harmonized by Milton, are the two known in books of psalmody as Norwich and York tunes; and of the whole Hundred and Fifty Psalms printed in the old collection after the version of Sternhold and Hopkins, Ravenscroft has fitted six — viz., Psalms V., XXVII., LV., LXVI., CII., and CXXXVIII.-to the tunes so harmonized. From that time forward we are to fancy that frequently, when the above psalms were sung in churches in London or elsewhere, it was to music composed by the father of the poet Milton. Norwich and York are still familiar tunes. "The tenor part of York tune," according to Sir John Hawkins, was so well known in his days, "that within memory half the nurses in England were used to sing it by way of lullaby," and the chimes of many country churches had "played it six or eight times in fourand-twenty hours, from time immemorial." And so, apart from all that he has given us through his son, there yet rests in the air of Britain, capable of being set loose wherever church-bells send their chimes over English earth, or voices are raised in sacred concert round an English or Scottish fireside, some portion of the soul of that admirable man, and his love of sweet sounds.

That his father was a man so gifted was very material to Milton. Afterwards, in his own scheme of an improved education for chil

dren, he gave a high place to music. The intervals of more severe labor, he said, might "both with profit and delight be taken up in recreating and composing their travailed spirits with the solemn and divine harmonies of music, heard or learnt - either while the skilful organist plies his grave and fancied descant in lofty fugues, or the whole symphony with artful and unimaginable touches adorn and grace the well-studied chords of some choice composer; sometimes the lute or soft organ-stop waiting on elegant voices, either to religious, martial, or civil ditties, which, if wise men and prophets be not extremely out, have a great power over dispositions and manners to smooth and make them gentle.". Of this kind of education Milton had the full advantage. Often must he, as a child, have bent over his father while composing, or listened to him as he played. Not unfrequently of an evening, if one or two of his father's musical acquaintances dropt in, there would be voices enough in the Spread-Eagle for a little household concert. Then might

the well-printed and well kept set of the Orianas be brought out; and, each one present taking a suitable part, the child might hear, and always with fresh delight, his father's own madrigal:

Fair Oriana, in the morn,

Before the day was born,

With velvet steps on ground,

Which made nor print nor sound,

Would see her nymphs abed,

What lives those ladies led:

The roses blushing said,

"O, stay, thou shepherd-maid;"

And, on a sudden, all

They rose and heard her call.

Then sang those shepherds and nymphs of Diana, "Long live fair Oriana, long live fair Oriana."

They can remember little how a child is affected who do not see how from the words, as well as from the music of this song, a sense of fantastic grace would sink into the mind of the boy-how Oriana and her nymphs and a little Arcadian grass-plat would be before him, and a chorus of shepherds would be seen singing at the close, and yet, somehow or other, it was all about Queen Elizabeth! And so, if, instead of the book of Madrigals, it was the thin large volume of Sir William Leighton's "Tears and Lamentations" that furnished the song of the evening. Then, if one of his father's contributions were selected, the words might be,

"O, had I wings, like to a dove,

Then should I from these troubles fly;

To wilderness I would remove,

To spend my life and there to die."

How, as he listened, the lonely dove would be seen winging through the air, and the wilderness, its destination, would be fancied as a great desolate place, somewhere about Moorfields! Nor would the opening words of the 27th Psalm, doubtless often sung in the family to York tune, be without a deeper significance:

"The Lord is both my health and light;

Shall man make me dismayed?

Sith God doth give me strength and might,

Why should I be afraid?

While that my foes with all their strength

Begin with me to brawl,

And think to eat me up at length,

Themselves have caught the fall."

Joining with his young voice in these exercises of the family, the boy became a singer almost as soon as he could speak. We see him going to the organ for his own amusement, picking out little melodies by the ear, and stretching his tiny fingers in search of pleasing chords. According to Aubrey, his father taught him music, and made him an accomplished organist.

But, in the most musical household, music fills up but part of the domestic evening; and sometimes it would not be musical friends, but acquaintances of more general tastes that would step in to spend an hour or two in the Spread-Eagle.

For example, the minister of the parish of Allhallows, Breadstreet, at that time was the Rev. Richard Stocke. A Yorkshireman by birth, and educated at Cambridge, he had been settled in the ministry in London ever since 1594, and in the church in Breadstreet since March 1610. A "constant, judicious, and religious preacher," a "zealous Puritan," and the most intimate friend of that great light among the Puritans, the Rev. Mr. Thomas Gataker, minister of Rotherhithe, there was no man in London more respected than Mr. Stocke. "No minister in England," says Fuller, "had his pulpit supplied by fewer strangers;" and there were young men, afterwards high in the church, who made a point of never

1 Fuller's Worthies, under Yorkshire: Wood's Fasti under the year 1595; alɛo Gataker's Funeral Sermon on Stocke, published 1627.

missing one of his sermons. As he was peculiarly strict in his notions of Sabbath observance, some of the city companies, who had their halls in his neighborhood, actually altered their feast-days from Mondays to Tuesdays, in deference to his advice, that there might be the less risk of infringing on the day of rest by the necessary preparations. Once, in the early period of his ministry, having been appointed to preach the open-air sermon at St. Paul's Cross, he had spoken rather freely of the inequality of rates in the city; and, as this was thought injudicious, he had been called a "greenhead" for his pains. He had not forgotten this; and long after, having to preach a public sermon before the Lord Mayor, he reverted to the old topic, saying that "a grayhead could now repeat what a greenhead had said before." But his delight was in his own parish, where the fruits of his labors, "in converting many and confirming more in religion," were abundantly seen. It was "more comfortable for him," he used to say, "to win one of his own parishioners than twenty others." In one part of a pastor's dutythat of interesting the young- he was believed to have a peculiar faculty. Little wonder, then, that the merchants and others who were his parishioners all but adored him, and that, when he died in 1626, a number of them subscribed for a monument to be erected to his memory in Allhallows Church. The inscription on his monument was partly in Latin and partly in English; and here, the better to characterize him and his congregation, are the English

verses:

"Thy lifelesse Trunke, (O Reverend Stocke,)

Like Aaron's rod sprouts out again,

And, after two full winters past,

Yields blossomes and ripe fruite amaine.

'For why? This work of piety,

Performed by some of thy flocke

To thy dead corpse and sacred urne,

Is but the fruit of this old Stocke."1

One of the scrivener's co-parishioners, and his very near neighbor, was Humphrey Lownes, a printer and publisher, residing at the sign of the Star in Bread-street-hill- one of a family then and since well known in the bibliopolic world, and himself a man of ingenuity and worth. It has been usual with Milton's biographers to state it as an ascertained fact that this Humphrey Lownes was an acquaintance of

1 Description of Old Allhallows Church in Strype's Stow, edit. 1720, vol. I. p. 200. 2 Nichols's Literary Anecdotes.