X.

MILTON CONSIDERED AS A SCHOOLMASTER.1

I PROPOSE to speak this evening of Milton as an actual schoolmaster, as well as of his letter to Mr. Hartlib, in which he expounds his idea of education. The subjects are distinct, though no person who really appreciates Milton would wish to separate them.

Edward Phillips, his nephew and pupil, tells us that soon after his return from Italy he took him a lodging in St. Bride's Churchyard, when he first undertook the education and instruction of his sister's two sons, the younger whereof had been wholly committed to his charge and care. He made no long stay in these lodgings; the necessity of having a place to dispose his books in and other goods fit for the furnishing of a good handsome house, hastening him to take one. And accordingly a pretty garden-house he took in Aldersgate Street, and therefore the fitter for his turn by the reason of the privacy, besides that there are few streets in London more free from noise than that."

1

1 Delivered at the Royal Institution, January 1857.

x.] MILTON CONSIDERED AS A SCHOOLMASTER. 269

Dr. Johnson says, that all the biographers of Milton shrink from this passage in his life, or try to explain it away. The remark evidently does not apply to Phillips. He observes indeed that "Milton never set up for a public school to teach all the fry of the parish, but only was willing to impart his learning and knowledge to relations and the sons of gentlemen that were his intimate friends." But he does not even hint that he regarded this occupation as discreditable, or pretend that Milton undertook it gratuitously. Later writers whom Johnson had read may have taken up either of these opinions. If they did, no one could rebuke them with greater justice or better grace than himself. Probably they had formed some notion of a poet which made them anxious to associate him with mountains and streams, rather than with the streets of a city; or they had thought that he ought not to engage in any work that was likely to be attended with more trouble than reputation, or to earn his bread by anything except the pen, or the patronage of great men.

Johnson could refute every one of these notions from his own experience. Fleet Street was his proper home; he had been a schoolmaster; he knew how much labour and what little honour, sometimes how little bread, might come to those who were working with the pen. He had treated the patronage of great men with disdain. Moreover, he knew how few of the great poets of England had been nursed in these quiet retreats, or engaged in those celestial occupa

tions which these fantastical admirers had imagined for them.

Geoffrey Chaucer was probably born in London. He was Comptroller of the Petty Customs in the port of London. He fell into disgrace with the Court by the part he took in the election of a Lord Mayor. We have reason to remember these facts; for if we owe "the Testament of Love" and the "Legend of Fair Women" to the knowledge which he acquired in Courts, or while on foreign embassies, we should never, I conceive, have had the "Canterbury Tales," but for the acquaintance with homely English life which he learned as a London citizen. Edmund Spenser, again, was born in East Smithfield; and there is the sad-I fear not disproved-tradition, that he died for lack of bread in King Street, Westminster.

Shakespeare's earliest years might be passed in one of the counties of England-a county, by the way, singularly flat and dull—from which he might gather some hints for the forest of Arden, but which gave him no glimpse of hills or of sea. But all his manhood was spent in London, where he was busy amidst stagelamps and with stage accounts, and was learning in Blackfriars and Eastcheap to understand princes and carriers, Romans and English, better than they were ever understood.

Milton's ties to London, to the vulgarest parts of its city, are still closer. His birthplace was Bread Street. The Spread Eagle, which was the sign that his father, the scrivener, dwelt there, was the sign also that that

father belonged to a worthy family, and reminded the boy that he had cause to honour him for having lost his inheritance. There the worthy tradesman worked hard and successfully, that his children might have no worse an education than he had in his younger days at Christ Church; there he imparted, to one of them at least, his passion for music, and his knowledge of it. There Milton may have learnt still more precious lessons from a mother known through all that neighbourhood for her charities. It was a step from that street to St. Paul's School, where he began, at ten years old, to purchase future blindness by intense. study.

There were no doubt three breaks in his London life. One was passed at Cambridge. It must have affected his after-thoughts in many ways-none more than those which had reference to education. But assuredly the Cam never became in his mind a rival of the Thames. There are painful passages in an epistle to Charles Diodati about its reeds and its naked fields, in which there are no shades, and its unsuitableness for worshippers of the Muses, which one tries to forget and to balance against others, but which prove very decisively that a university which is exceedingly sacred to many of us, and which on the whole has paid him a very hearty reverence, was not dear to him, either during the years which he passed at it, or even in retrospection.

It must have been quite otherwise with his father's house at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. The five genial years which produced "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso,"

"Comus," "The Arcades," "Lycidas," must have been full of all rich impressions from the sights and sounds of nature, such as were certainly not to be found or created in Bread Street. The wonderful assemblage of clear, bright, joyful images at the beginning of "L'Allegro" would be proof enough that knowledge was at no entrance there shut out from the poet, that light and life were streaming into him at every pore. And there, also, he made acquaintance not only with the lark and the sweetbriar and the eglantine; he not only listened

"How the hounds and horn

Cheerly rouse the slumb'ring morn,
From the side of some hoar hill,

Through the high wood echoing shrill;"

but he became acquainted with Ludlow Castle, connected with the actual inhabitants of it his pure and beautiful visions of the lady who resisted the enchanter, of her brothers, and the attendant spirit. Still, even in this period, which is so especially devoted to the country and country pleasures, we hear, in his second defence, of his paying visits to London that he might buy books, and perfect himself in music and mathematics. And there are indications, I think, in all the poems of this time that he expected to find himself again in his old haunts amidst hard work, and that the "fresh woods and pastures new," of which he speaks in "Lycidas," might be far more tangled and far less green pastures than those which he had lately visited.

His visit to Italy was indeed the immediate occasion