If I were to read a fragment from Tennyson in contrast with Cowley’s treatment of a similar theme I think you might wonder less why his reputation has suffered gradual eclipse. Shall we try? Cowley wrote a poem in memory of a dear friend, and I take one of the pleasantest of its verses:
Tennyson wrote of his dead friend, and here is a verse of it:
Can I be wrong in thinking that under the solemn lights of these stanzas the earlier poet’s verse grows dim?
Cowley was a good Kingsman; and in the days of the Commonwealth held position of secretary to the exiled Queen Henrietta, in Paris; he did, at one time, think of establishing himself in one of the American colonies; returned, however, to his old London haunts, and, wearying of the city, sought retirement at Chertsey, on the Thames’ banks (where his old house is still to be seen), and where he wrote, in graceful prose and cumbrous verse, on subjects related to country life—which he loved overmuch—and died there among his trees and the meadows.
Waller was both Kingsman and Republican—steering deftly between extremes, so as to keep himself and his estates free from harm. This will weaken your sympathy for him at once—as it should do. He lived in a grand way—affected the philosopher; was such a philosopher as quick-witted selfishness makes; yet he surely had wonderful aptitudes in dealing with language, and could make its harmonious numbers flow where and how he would. Waller has come to a casual literary importance in these days under the deft talking and writing of those dilettante critics who would make this author the pivot (as it were) on which British poesy swung away from the “hysterical riot of the Jacobeans” into measured and orderly classic cadence. It is a large influence to attribute to a single writer, though his grace and felicities go far to justify it. And it is further to be remembered that such critics are largely given to the discussion of technique only; they write as distinct art-masters; while we, who are taking our paths along English Letters for many other things besides art and rhythm, will, I trust, be pardoned for thinking that there is very little pith or weighty matter in this great master of the juggleries of sound.
Waller married early in life, but lost his wife while still very young; thenceforth, for many years—a gay and coquettish widower—he pursued the Lady Dorothy Sidney with a storm of love verses, of which the best (and it is really amazingly clever in its neatness and point) is this:
But neither this, nor a hundred others, brought the Lady Dorothy to terms: she married—like a wise woman—somebody else. And he? He went on singing as chirpingly as ever—sang till he was over eighty.
And now we come to a poet of a larger build—a weightier music—and of a more indomitable spirit; a poet who wooed the world with his songs; and the world has never said him “Nay.” I mean John Milton.[57]
He is the first great poet we have encountered, in respect to whom we can find in contemporary records full details of family, lodgement, and birth. A great many of these details have been swooped together in Dr. Masson’s recently completed Life and Times of Milton, which I would more earnestly commend to your reading were it not so utterly long—six fat volumes of big octavo—in the which the pith and kernel about Milton, the man, floats around like force meat-balls in a great sea of historic soup. Our poet was born in Bread Street, just out of Cheapside, in London, in the year 1608.
In Cheapside—it may be well to recall—stood the Mermaid Tavern; and it stood not more than half a block away from the corner where Milton’s father lived. And on that corner—who knows?—the boy, eight years old, or thereby, when Shakespeare died, may have lingered to see the stalwart Ben Jonson go tavern-ward for his cups, or may be, John Marston, or Dekker, or Philip Massinger—all these being comfortably inclined to taverns.
The father of this Bread Street lad was a scrivener by profession; that is, one who drafted legal papers; a well-to-do man as times went; able to give his boy some private schooling; proud of him, too; proud of his clear white and red face, and his curly auburn hair carefully parted—almost a girl’s face; so well-looking, indeed, that the father employed a good Dutch painter of those days to take his portrait; the portrait is still in existence—dating from 1618, when the poet was ten, showing him in a banded velvet doublet and a stiff vandyke collar, trimmed about with lace. In those times, or presently after, he used to go to St. Paul’s Grammar School; of which Lily, of Lily’s Latin Grammar, was the first master years before. It was only a little walk for him, through Cheapside, and then, perhaps, Paternoster Row—the school being under the shadow of that great cathedral, which was burned fifty years after. He studied hard there; studied at home, too; often, he says himself, when only fourteen, studying till twelve at night. He loved books, and he loved better to be foremost.
He turns his hand to poetry even then. Would you like to see a bit of what he wrote at fifteen? Well, here it is, in a scrap of psalmody:
It is not of the best, but I think will compare favorably with most that is written by young people of fifteen. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, whither he went shortly afterward—his father being hopeful that he would take orders in the Church—he was easily among the first; he wrote Latin hexameters, quarrelled with his tutor (notwithstanding his handsome face had given to him the mocking title of “The Lady”), had his season of rustication up in London, sees all that is doing in theatrics thereabout, but goes back to study more closely than ever.
The little Christmas song,
belongs to his Cambridge life; though his first public appearance as an author was in the “Ode to Shakespeare,” attaching with other and various commendatory verses to the second folio edition of that author’s dramas, published in the year 1632.
Milton was then twenty-four, had been six or seven at Cambridge; did not accept kindly his father’s notion of taking orders in the Church, but had exaggerated views of a grandiose life of study and literary work; in which views his father—sensible man that he was—did not share; but—kind man that he was—he did not strongly combat them. So we find father and son living together presently, some twenty miles away from London, in a little country hamlet called Horton, where the old gentleman had purchased a cottage for a final home when his London business was closed up.
Here, too, our young poet studies—not books only, borrowed where he can, and bought if he can; but studies also fields and trees and skies and rivers, and all the natural objects that are to take embalmment sooner or later in his finished verse. Here he wrote, almost within sight of Windsor towers, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” You know them; but they are always new and always fresh; freshest when you go out from London on a summer’s day to where the old tower of Horton Church still points the road, and trace there (if you can)
In reading such verse we do not know where to stop—at least, I do not. He writes, too, in that country quietude, within sight of Windsor forest, his charming “Lycidas,” one of the loveliest of memorial poems, and the “Comus,” which alone of all the masques of that time, and preceding times, has gone in its entirety into the body of living English literature.
In 1638, then thirty years old, equipped in all needed languages and scholarship, he goes for further study and observation to the Continent; he carries letters from Sir Henry Wotton; he sees the great Hugo Grotius at Paris; sees the sunny country of olives in Provence; sees the superb front of Genoa piling out from the blue waters of the Mediterranean; sees Galileo at Florence—the old philosopher too blind to study the face of the studious young Englishman that has come so far to greet him. He sees, too, what is best and bravest at Rome; among the rest St. Peter’s, just then brought to completion, and in the first freshness of its great tufa masonry. He is fêted by studious young Italians; has the freedom of the Accademia della Crusca; blazes out in love sonnets to some dark-eyed signorina of Bologna; returns by Venice, and by Geneva where he hobnobs with the Diodati friends of his old school-fellow, Charles Diodati; and comes home to England to find changes brewing—the Scotch marching over the border with battle-drums—the Long Parliament portending—Strafford and Laud in way of impeachment—his old father drawing near to his end—and bloody war tainting all the air.
The father’s fortune, never large, is found crippled at his death; and Milton, now thirty-two, must look out for his own earnings. He takes a house; first in Fleet Street, then near Aldersgate, with garden attached, where he has three or four pupils; his nephew Phillips[58] among them.
It was while living there that he brought back, one day, a bride—Mary Powell; she was a young maiden in her teens, daughter of a well-established loyalist family near to Oxford. The young bride is at the quiet student’s house in Aldersgate a month, perhaps two, when she goes down for a visit to her mother; she is to come back at Michaelmas; but Michaelmas comes, and she stays; Milton writes, and she stays; Milton writes again, and she stays; he sends a messenger—and she stays.
What is up, then, in this new household? Milton, the scholar and poet, is up, straightway, to a treatise on divorce, whereby he would make it easy to undo yokes where parties are unevenly yoked. There is much scriptural support and much shrewd reasoning brought by his acuteness to the overthrow of those rulings which the common-sense of mankind has established; even now those who contend for easy divorce get their best weapons out of this old Miltonian armory.
Meantime the poet went on teaching, I suspect rapping his boys over the knuckles in these days for slight cause. But what does it all mean? It means incongruity; not the first case, nor will it be the last. He—abstracted, austere, bookish, with his head in the clouds; she—with her head in ribbons, and possibly loving orderly housewifery:[59] intellectual affinities and sympathies are certainly missing.
Fancy the poet just launched into the moulding of such verse as this:
when a servant gives sharp rat-tat at the door, “Please, sir, missus says, ‘Dinner’s waiting!’” But the poet sweeps on—
And there is another rat-tat!—“Please, sir, missus says, ‘Dinner is all getting cold.’” Still the poet ranges in fairyland—
And now, maybe, it is the pretty mistress who comes with a bounce—“Mr. Milton, are you ever coming?”—and a quick bang of the door, which is a way some excellent petulant young women have of—not breaking the commandments.
There is a little prosaic half-line in the “Paradise Lost” (I don’t think it was ever quoted before), which in this connection seems to me to have a very pathetic twang in it; ’tis about Paradise and its charms—
However, it happens that through the advocacy of friends on both sides this great family breach is healed, or seems to be; and two years after, Milton and his recreant, penitent, and restored wife are living again together; lived together till her death; and she became the mother of his three daughters: Anne, who was crippled, never even learned to write, and used to be occupied with her needle; Mary, who was his amanuensis and reader most times, and Deborah, the youngest, who came to perform similar offices for him afterward.
Meantime the Royalist cause had suffered everywhere. The Powells (his wife’s family having come to disaster) did—with more or less children—go to live with Milton. Whether the presence of the mother-in-law mended the poet’s domesticity I doubt; doubt, indeed, if ever there was absolute harmony there.
On the year of the battle of Naseby appeared Milton’s first unpretending booklet of poems,[60] containing with others, those already named, and not before printed. Earlier, however, in the lifetime of the poet had begun the issue of those thunderbolts of pamphlets which he wrote on church discipline, education, on the liberty of unlicensed printing, and many another topic—cumbrous with great trails of intricate sentences, wondrous word-heaps, sparkling with learning, flaming with anger—with convolutions like a serpent’s, and as biting as serpents.
A show is kept up of his school-keeping, but with doubtful success; for in 1647 we learn that “he left his great house in Barbican, and betook himself to a smaller in High Holborn, among those that open back into Lincoln’s Inn Fields;” but there is no poem-making of importance (save one or two wondrous Sonnets) now, or again, until he is virtually an old man.
Meantime the tide of war is flowing back and forth over England and engrossing all hopes and fears. The poor King is one while a captive of the Scots, and again a captive of the Parliamentary forces, and is hustled from palace to castle. What shall be done with the royal prisoner? There are thousands who have fought against him who would have been most glad of his escape; but there are others—weary of his doublings—who have vowed that this son of Baal shall go to his doom and bite the dust.
Finally, and quickly too (for events move with railroad speed), his trial comes—the trial of a King. A strange event for these English, who have venerated and feared and idolized so many kings and queens of so many royal lines. How the Royalist verse-makers must have fumed and raved! Milton, then just turned of forty, was, as I have said, living near High Holborn; the King was eight years his senior—was in custody at St. James’s, a short way above Piccadilly. He brought to the trial all his kingly dignity, and wore it unflinchingly—refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the Parliament, cuddling always obstinately that poor figment of the divine right of kings—which even then Milton, down in his Holborn garden, was sharpening his pen to undermine and destroy.
The sentence was death—a sentence that gave pause to many. Fairfax, and others such, would have declared against it; even crop-eared Prynne, who had suffered so much for his truculent Puritanism, protested against it; two-thirds of the population of England would have done the same; but London and England and the army were all in the grip of an iron man whose name was Cromwell. Time sped; the King had only two days to live; his son Charles was over seas, never believing such catastrophe could happen; only two royal children—a princess of thirteen and a boy of eight—came to say adieu to the royal prisoner. “He sat with them some time at the window, taking them on his knees, and kissing them, and talking with them of their duty to their mother, and to their elder brother, the Prince of Wales.” He carried his habitual dignity and calmness with him on the very morning, going between files of soldiers through St. James’s Park—pointing out a tree which his brother Henry had planted—and on, across to Whitehall, where had come off many a gay, rollicking masque of Ben Jonson’s, in presence of his father, James I. He was led through the window of the banqueting-hall—the guides show it now—where he had danced many a night, and so to the scaffold, just without the window, whence he could see up and down the vast court of Whitehall, from gate to gate,[61] paved with a great throng of heads. Even then and there rested on him the same kingly composure; the fine oval face, pale but unmoved; the peaked beard carefully trimmed, as you see it in the well-known pictures by Vandyke, at Windsor or at Blenheim.
He has a word with old Bishop Juxon, who totters beside him; a few words for others who are within hearing; examines the block, the axe; gives some brief cautions to the executioner; then, laying down his head, lifts his own hand for signal, and with a crunching thud of sound it is over.
And poet Milton—has he shown any relenting? Not one whit; he is austere among the most austere; in this very week he is engaged upon his defence of regicide, with its stinging, biting sentences. He is a friend and party to the new Commonwealth; two months only after the execution of the King, he is appointed Secretary to the State Council, and under it is conducting the Latin correspondence. He demolishes, by order of the same Council, the Eikon Basilike (supposed in that day to be the king’s work) with his fierce onslaught of the Eikonoklastes. His words are bitter as gall; he even alludes, in no amiable tone—with acrid emphasis, indeed—to the absurd rumor, current with some, that the King, through his confidential instrument, Buckingham, had poisoned his own father.
He is further appointed to the answering of Salmasius,[62] an answer with which all Europe presently rings. It was in these days, and with such work crowding him, that his vision fails; and to these days, doubtless belongs that noble sonnet on his blindness, which is worth our staying for, here and now:
Wonderful, is it not, that such a sonnet—so full of rare eloquence and rare philosophy—so full of all that most hallows our infirm humanity could be written by one—pouring out his execrations on the head of Salmasius—at strife in his own household—at strife (as we shall find) with his own daughters? Wonderful, is it not, that Carlyle could write as he did about the heroism of the humblest as well as bravest, and yet grow into a rage—over his wife’s shoulders and at her cost—with a rooster crowing in his neighbor’s yard? Ah, well, the perfect ones have not yet come upon our earth, whatever perfect poems they may write.
But at last comes a new turn of the wheel to English fortunes. Cromwell is dead; the Commonwealth is ended; all London is throwing its cap in the air over the restoration of Charles II. Poor blind Milton[63] is in hiding and in peril. His name is down among those accessory to the murder of the King. The ear-cropped Prynne—who is now in Parliament, and who hates Milton as Milton scorned Prynne—is very likely hounding on those who would bring the great poet to judgment. ’Tis long matter of doubt. Past his house near Red Lion Square the howling mob drag the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton, and hang them in their dead ghastliness.
Milton, however, makes lucky escape, with only a short term of prison; but for some time thereafter he was in fear of assassination. Such a rollicking daredevil, as Scott in his story of Woodstock, has painted for us in Roger Wildrake (of whom there were many afloat in those times) would have liked no better fun than to run his rapier through such a man as John Milton; and in those days he would have been pardoned for it.
That capital story of Woodstock one should read when they are upon these times of the Commonwealth. There are, indeed, anachronisms in it; kings escaping too early or too late, or dying a little out of time to accommodate the exigencies of the plot; but the characterization is marvellously spirited; and you see the rakehelly cavaliers, and the fine old king-ridden knights, and the sour-mouthed Independents, and the glare and fumes and madness of the civil war, as you find them in few history pages.
Milton, meanwhile, in his quiet home again, revolves his old project of a great sacred poem. He taxes every visitor who can, to read to him in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch. His bookly appetite is omnivorous. His daughters have large share of this toil. Poor girls, they have been little taught, and not wisely. They read what they read only by rote, and count it severe task-work. Their mother is long since dead, and a second wife, who lived only for a short time, dead too. We know very little of that second wife; but she is embalmed forever in a sonnet, from which I steal this fragment:—
The Miltonian reading and the work goes on, but affection, I fear, does not dominate the household; the daughters overtasked, with few indulgences, make little rebellions; and the blind, exacting old man is as unforgiving as the law. Americans should take occasion to see the great picture by Munkacsy, in the Lenox Gallery, New York, of Milton dictating Paradise Lost; it is in itself a poem; a dim Puritan interior; light coming through a latticed window and striking on the pale, something cadaverous face of the old poet, who sits braced in his great armchair, with lips set together, and the daughters, in awed attention, listening or seeming to listen.
I am sorry there is so large room to doubt of the intellectual and affectionate sympathy existing between them; nevertheless—that it did not is soberly true; his own harsh speeches, which are of record, show it; their petulant innuendoes, which are also of record, show it.
Into this clouded household—over which love does not brood so fondly as we would choose to think—there comes sometimes, with helpfulness and sympathy, a certain Andrew Marvell, who had been sometime assistant to Milton in his official duties, and who takes his turn at the readings, and sees only the higher and better lights that shine there; and he had written sweet poems of his own, (to which I shall return) that have kept his name alive, and that will keep it alive, I think, forever.
There comes also into this home, in these days, very much to the surprise and angerment of the three daughters, a third wife to the old poet, after some incredibly short courtship.[64] She is only seven years the senior of the daughter Anne; but she seems to have been a sensible young person, not bookishly given, and looking after the household, while Anne and Mary and Deborah still wait, after a fashion, upon the student-wants of the poet. In fits of high abstraction he is now bringing the “Paradise” to a close—not knowing, or not caring, maybe, for the little bickerings which rise and rage and die away in the one-sided home.
I cannot stay to characterize his great poem; nor is there need; immortal in more senses than one; humanity counts for little in it; one pair of human creatures only, and these looked at, as it were, through the big end of the telescope; with gigantic, Godlike figures around one, or colossal demons prone on fiery floods. It is not a child’s book; to place it in schools as a parsing-book is an atrocity that I hope is ended. Not, I think, till we have had some fifty years to view the everlasting fight between good and evil in this world, can we see in proper perspective the vaster battle which, under Milton’s imagination, was pictured in Paradise between the same foes. Years only can so widen one’s horizon as to give room for the reverberations of that mighty combat of the powers of light and darkness.
We talk of the organ-music of Milton. The term has its special significance; it gives hint of that large quality which opens heavenly spaces with its billows of sound; which translates us; which gives us a lookout from supreme heights, and so lifts one to the level of his “Argument.” There is large learning in his great poem—weighty and recondite; but this spoils no music; great, cumbrous names catch sonorous vibrations under his modulating touch, and colossal shields and spears clash together like cymbals. The whole burden of his knowledges—Pagan, Christian, or Hebraic, lift up and sink away upon the undulations of his sublime verse, as heavy-laden ships rise and fall upon some great ground-swell making in from outer seas.
A bookish color is pervading; if he does not steal flowers from books, he does what is better—he shows the fruit of them. There are stories of his debt to Cædmon, and still more authentic, of his debt to the Dutch poet Vondel,[65] and the old Provençal Bishop of Vienne,[66] who as early as the beginning of the sixth century wrote on kindred themes. There is hardly room for doubt that Milton not only knew, but literally translated some of the old Bishop’s fine Latin lines, and put to his larger usage some of his epithets.
Must we not admit that—in the light of such developments—when the Puritan poet boasts of discoursing on
that it is due to a little lurking stimulant of that Original Sin which put bitterness into his Salmasian papers, and an ugly arrogance into his domestic discipline? But, after all, he was every way greater than his forerunners, and can afford to admit Cædmon and Vondel and Avitus, and all other claimants, as supporting columns in the underlying crypt upon which was builded the great temple of his song.
The home of Milton in these latter days of his life was often changed. Now, it was Holborn again; then Jewin Street; then Bunhill Row; and—one while—for a year or more, when the great plague of 1665 desolated the city, he fled before it to the little village of Chalfont, some twenty miles distant from London on the Aylesbury road. There the cottage[67] may still be seen in which he lived, and the garden in which he walked—but never saw. There, too, is the latticed window looking on the garden, at which he sat hour by hour, with the summer winds blowing on him from over honeysuckle beds, while he brooded, with sightless eyes turned to the sky, upon the mysteries of fate and foreknowledge.
A young Quaker, Ellwood, perhaps his dearest friend, comes to see him there, to read to him and to give a helping hand to the old man’s study; his daughters, too, are at their helpful service; grateful, maybe, that even the desolation of the plague has given a short relief from the dingy house in the town and its treadmill labors, and put the joy of blooming flowers and of singing birds into their withered hearts.
The year after, which finds them in Bunhill Row again, brings that great London fire which the Monument now commemorates; they passing three days and nights upon the edge of that huge tempest of flame and smoke which devoured nearly two-thirds of London; the old poet hearing the din and roar and crackle, and feeling upon his forehead the waves of fierce heat and the showers of cinders—a scene and an experience which might have given, perhaps, other color to his pictures of Pandemonium, if his great poem had not been just now, in these fateful years, completed—completed and bargained for; £20 were to be paid for it conditionally,[68] in four payments of £5 each, at a day when London had been decimated by the plague, and half the city was a waste of ruin and ashes. And to give an added tint of blackness to the picture, we have to fancy his three daughters leaving him, as they did, tired of tasks, tired of wrangling. Anne, the infirm one, who neither read nor wrote, and Mary, so overworked, and Deborah, the youngest (latterly being very helpful)—all desert him. They never return. “Undutiful daughters,” he says to Ellwood; but I think he does not soften toward them, even when gone. Poor, stern, old man! He would have cut them off by will from their small shares of inheritance in his estate; but the courts wisely overruled this. Anne, strangely enough, married—dying shortly after; Mary died years later, a spinster; and Deborah, who became Mrs. Clark, had some notice, thirty years later, when it was discovered that a quiet woman of that name was Milton’s daughter. But she seems to have been of a stolid make; no poetry, no high sense of dignity belonging to her; a woman like ten thousand, whose descendants are now said (doubtfully) to be living somewhere in India.
But Milton wrought on; his wife Betty, of whom he spoke more affectionately than ever once of his daughters, humored his poor fagged appetites of the table. Paradise Regained was in hand; and later the “Samson Agonistes.” His habits were regular; up at five o’clock; a chapter of the Hebrew Bible read to him by his daughter Mary—what time she stayed; an early breakfast, and quiet lonely contemplation after it (his nephew tells us) till seven. Then work came, putting Quaker Ellwood to helpful service, or whoever happened in, and could fathom the reading—this lasting till mid-day dinner; afterward a walk in his garden (when he had one) for two hours, in his old gray suit, in which many a time passers-by saw him sitting at his door. There was singing in later afternoon, when there was a voice to sing for him; and instrumental music, when his, or a friendly hand touched the old organ. After supper, a pipe and a glass of water; always persistently temperate; and then, night and rest.
He attended no church in his later years, finding none in absolute agreement with his beliefs; sympathizing with the Quakers to a certain degree, with the orthodox Independents too; but flaming up at any procrustean laws for faith; never giving over a certain tender love, I think, for the organ-music and storied splendors of the Anglican Church; but with a wild, broad freedom of thought chafing at any ecclesiastic law made by man, that galled him or checked his longings. His clear, clean intellect—not without its satiric jostlings and wrestlings—its petulancies and caprices—sought and maintained, independently, its own relation with God and the mysterious future.
Our amiable Dr. Channing, with excellent data before him, demonstrated his good Unitarian faith; but though Milton might have approved his nice reasonings, I doubt if he would have gone to church with him. He loved liberty; he could not travel well in double harness, not even in his household or with the elders. His exalted range of vision made light of the little aids and lorgnettes which the conventional teachers held out to him. Creeds and dogmas and vestments and canons, and all humanly consecrated helps, were but Jack-o’-lanterns to him, who was swathed all about with the glowing clouds of glory that rolled in upon his soul from the infinite depths.
In the year 1674—he being then sixty-five years old—on a Sunday, late at night, he died; and with so little pain that those who were with him did not know when the end came. He was buried—not in the great cemetery of Bunhill Fields, close by his house—but beside his father, in the old parish church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where he had been used to go as a boy, and where he had been used to hear the old burial Office for the Dead—now intoned over his grave—“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” There was no need for the monument erected to him there in recent years. His poems make a monument that is read of all the world, and will be read in all times of the world.
As we launched upon the days of Charles I., in our last talk, we had somewhat to say of the King’s advisers, lay and ecclesiastic; we came to quick sense of the war-clouds, fast gathering, through which Jeremy Taylor shot his flashes of pious eloquence; we heard a strain of Suckling’s verse, to which might have been added other, and may be better, from such Royalist singers as Carew or Lovelace;[69] but we cannot swoop all the birds into our net. We had glimpse of the crop-eared Prynne of the Histriomastix; and from Cowley, that sincere friend of both King and Queen in the days of their misfortunes, we plucked some “Poetical Blossoms;” also a charming “Rose,” from the orderly parterres of that great gardener, and pompous, time-serving man, Edmund Waller.
Then came Milton with the fairy melodies, always sweet, of “Comus”—the cantankerous pamphleteering—the soured home-life—the bloody thrusts at the image of the King, and the grander flight of his diviner music into the courts of Paradise.
Some fourteen years or so before the death of Milton, the restoration of Charles II. had come about. He had drifted back upon the traces of the stout Oliver Cromwell, and of the feebler Richard Cromwell, on a great tide of British enthusiasm. Independents, Presbyterians, Church of England men, and Papists were all by the ears; and it did seem to many among the shrewdest of even the Puritan workers that some balance-wheel (of whatever metal), though weighted with royal traditions and hereditary privileges, might keep the governmental machinery to the steady working of old days.
So the Second Charles had come back, with a great throwing up of caps all through the London streets; Presbyterians giving him welcome because he was sure to snub the Independents; the Independents giving him welcome because he was sure to snub the Presbyterians; the Church of England men giving him welcome because he was sure to snub both (as he did); and finally, the Papists giving him high welcome because all other ways their hopes were lean and few.
You know, or should know, what manner of man he was: accomplished—in his way; an expert swordsman; an easy talker—capable of setting a tableful of gentlemen in a roar; telling stories inimitably, and a great many of them; full of grimaces that would have made his fortune on the stage; saying sweetest things, and meaning the worst things; a daredevil who feared neither God nor man; generous, too—most of all in his cups; and liberal—with other people’s money; hating business with all his soul; loving pleasure with all his heart; ready always to do kindness that cost him nothing; laughing at all Puritans and purity; yet winning the maudlin affection of a great many people, and the respect of none.
Notwithstanding all this, the country gentlemen of England, of good blood, who had sniffed scornfully at the scent of the beer-vats which hung about the name of Cromwell, welcomed this clever, swarthy, black-haired, dissolute Prince, who had a pedigree which ran back on the father’s side to the royal Bruce of Scotland, and on the mother’s side to the great Clovis, and to the greater Charlemagne.
You will find a good glimpse of this scion of royalty in Scott’s story of Peveril of the Peak. The novel is by no means one of the great romancer’s best; but it is well worth reading for the clear and vivid idea it will give one of the social clashings between the reserves of old Puritanism and the incontinencies of new monarchism; you will find in it an excellent sample of the gruff, stalwart Cromwellian; and another of the hot-tempered, swearing cavalier; and still others of the mincing, scheming, gambling, roystering crew which overran all the purlieus of the court of Charles. Buckingham was there—that second Villiers,[70] of whom I had somewhat to say when the elder Buckingham came up for mention in the days of Charles I.; this younger Villiers running before the elder in all accomplishments and all villainies; courtly; of noble bearing; with daintiest of speeches; a pattern of manly graces; capable of a tender French song, with all his tones in exultant accord with best of court singers, and of a comedy that drew all the play-goers of London to the “Rehearsal;” capable too, of the wickedest of plots and of the foulest of lies. And yet this Buckingham was one of the best accredited advisers of the Crown.
To the same court belonged Rochester,[71] his great, fine wig covering a great, fine brain; he writing harmonious verses about—“Nothing”—or worse than nothing; and at the last wheedling Bishop Burnet into the belief that he had changed his courses, and that if he might rise from that ugly deathbed where the good-natured, pompous bishop sought him, he would be enrolled among the moralists. I think it was lucky that he died with such good impulse flashing at the top of his badnesses.
Dorset belonged to this court, with his pretty verselets, and Sedley and Etherege; also the Portsmouth and Lady Castelmaine, and the rest of those venturesome ladies who show their colors of cheek and bosom, even now, in the well-handled paintings of Sir Peter Lely. When you go to Hampton Court you can see these fair and frail beauties by the dozen on the walls of the King William room. Sir Peter Lely[72] was a rare painter, belonging to these times; a great favorite of Charles; and he loved such subjects for his brush; he drew the delicatest hands that were ever put on canvas—too delicate and too small, unfortunately, to cover the undress of his figures.
But, at the worst, England was not altogether a Pandemonium in those days following upon the Restoration. I think, perhaps, the majority of historians and commentators are disposed to over-color the orgies; it is so easy to make prodigious effects with strong sulphurous tints and blazing vermilions. Certain it is that Taine, in writing of these times, has put an almost malignant touch into his story, blinking the fact that the trail which shows most of corrupting phosphorescence came over the Channel with the new King; forgetting that French breeding was at the bottom of the new tastes, and that French gold made the blazonry of the chariots in which the Jezebels rode on their triumphal way through London to—perdition.
Then, again, English vice is more outspoken and less secretive than that of the over-Channel neighbors. It is now, and has always been true, that when his Satanic majesty takes possession of a man (or a woman), he can cover himself in sweeter and more impenetrable disguise under the pretty perukes and charming millinery of French art than in a homely British body, out of which the demon horns stick stark through all the wigs and cosmetics that art can put upon a man.
It is worth while for us to remember that in this London, when the elegant Duke of Rochester was beating time with his jewelled hand to a French gallop, Richard Baxter’s[73] ever-living Saints’ Rest was an accredited book, giving consolation to many a poor soul wrestling with the fears of death and of future judgment. It was published, indeed, somewhat earlier; but its author was still wakeful and earnest; and many a time his thin, stooping figure might be seen threading a way through the street crowds to his chapel in Southwark, where delighted listeners came to hear him, almost upon the very spot where Shakespeare, eighty years before, had played in the Globe Theatre.
The eloquent Tillotson, too, in these times—more liberal than Baxter or Doddridge—was writing upon The Wisdom of Being Religious and the right Rule of Faith, and by his catholicity and clear-headedness winning such favor and renown as to bring him later to the see of Canterbury.
I would have you keep in mind, too, that John Milton was still alive—his “Samson Agonistes” not being published until Charles II. had been some twelve years upon the throne—and in quiet seclusion was cultivating and cherishing that serene philosophy which glows along the closing line of his greatest sonnet,