age when he became one of the Scriveners' Company. The inference would seem to be that he had for a good many years previously been living in London or in Oxfordshire, in some other employment, and took to scrivenership so late for some special reasons. His marriage with Sarah Jeffrey (see Memoir, pp. 1-2) took place in 1600, exactly at the time of his beginning the new business.

The business of a scrivener in Old London was an important, and sometimes a lucrative, one. It consisted in the drawing up of wills, marriage settlements, and other deeds, the lending out of money for clients, and much else now done partly by attorneys and partly by law-stationers. The house of the new scrivener, John Milton, which was also his place of business, was the Spread Eagle in Bread Street, Cheapside, in the very heart of London. Though the Great Fire of 1666 swept away old Bread Street, the exact site of the house can yet be pointed out in the present Bread Street. There the scrivener married, and there his children were born. They were six in all; of whom only three survived to maturity: the eldest, a daughter Anne, afterwards Mrs. Phillips, and again, by a second marriage, Mrs. Agar ; John Milton, the poet, born Dec. 9, 1608; and Christopher Milton, afterwards Sir Christopher Milton and a judge, born Dec. 3, 1615. The household in Bread Street seems to have been a peculiarly peaceful and happy one, with a tone of pious Puritanism prevailing in it, but with the liberal cheerfulness belonging to prosperous circumstances and to ingenious and cultivated tastes. For one thing, music was perpetual in it. The scrivener was not only passionately fond of music, but even of such note himself as a musical composer that, apart altogether from the fame of his great son, some memory of him might have lingered among us to this day. Madrigals, songs, and psalm-tunes of his composition are to be seen yet in music-books published before his son was born, or while he was but in his boyhood, and not in mere inferior music-books, but in collections in which Morley, Wilbye, Bull, Dowland, Ellis Gibbons, Orlando Gibbons, and others of the best artists of the day, were his fellowcontributors. Thus in the Triumphes of Oriana, a collection of madrigals in honour of Queen Elizabeth, published in 1601, one of the pieces is John Milton's; in the Teares and Lamentations of a Sorrowfull Soule, a collection of sacred songs, edited in 1614 by Sir William Leighton, knight, three of the songs are to John Milton's music; and, in Ravenscroft's Whole Book of Psalmes, a compendium

But

There must have

of Church-music published in 1621, the two tunes called "Norwich " and "York" are of John Milton's composition. As York tune is a favourite to this day, there may be said to remain, through it, some direct thrill in the English air from the spirit of Milton's father. what music round about himself while he lived! been frequent musical evenings, with one or more musical acquaintances present, in the house in Bread Street; books of music and musical instruments were parts of its furniture; and the young poet was taught by his father both to sing and to play on the organ. But the scrivener's designs for his children went beyond their mere training in his own art. It was his care to give them the best education possible, and to grudge nothing of his means towards that end. From the first there is proof that his heart was bound up in his son John, and that he had conceived the highest expectations of what that son would turn out to be. A portrait of the poet, as a sweet, serious, round-headed boy, at the age of ten, still exists, which his father caused to be done by the foreign painter then most in fashion, and which hung on the wall of one of the rooms in the house in Bread Street. Both father and mother doted on the boy and were proud of his promise. And so, after the most careful tuition of the boy at home, by his Scottish preceptor Young (see ante, pp. 260-265), and his farther training by the two Gills at St. Paul's School, close to Bread Street (see ante, p. 2), he was sent to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1625; whither his younger brother, Christopher, followed him in Feb. 1630-31. The expense of maintaining two sons at Cambridge was considerable, and proves that the scrivener must have succeeded well in his business.

That the scrivener's business had been a flourishing one is farther proved by the fact that he was able to retire from it, in whole or in part, in or about 1632, when he was close on his seventieth year, to a country - house at Horton, which he either took then, or had already been in possession of for some time. Thither, in that year, his son, having completed his seven years at the University and taken his M.A. degree, went to reside with him. So far all his highest hopes of that son had been fulfilled. He was then twenty-three years of age; and what youth comparable to him had the University sent out,—of such fair grace of form, of such genius and accomplishments, of character so manly and noble? A second portrait of Milton, done in the time of his Cambridge studentship, when he was about twenty

one years of age, attests the continued pride in him of his father and mother. Only one thing a little troubled the elderly people, and particularly the father. This son of theirs, whom they had destined for the Church, had abjured that destination of himself as against his conscience; the profession of the Law, thought of for a moment, had also been set aside; and here he was back on their hands, with no clear line of life before him, such as other young men of his age had, but buried in books and lost in poetry. Some remonstrances to this effect may have been expressed by the father; but, if so, they must have been in the mildest and most hesitating terms (for Milton, I fancy, had learnt to be master and more in his father's house). Or, without any such remonstrances, Milton may have divined what was passing in the minds of his parents and in their colloquies concerning him. And so, some time in 1632 or 1633, but most probably in 1633, on some occasion when the subject had been broached, or when it was strong in Milton's musings, he writes the poem Ad Patrem. The scrivener had had a pretty good education himself, and could perhaps make out a bit of Latin at any time, if you did not hurry him. This, at any rate, is pretty much the substance of what he had to read :

TO MY FATHER.

Now through my breast I should wish that all the Pierian streamlets
Windingly trickled their ways, and that through my mouth there were rolling
Whole and in flood the river let loose from the double-topped mountain,

So that my bold-winged Muse, forgetting her trivial ditties,
Fitly might rise to the theme of the honours due to a parent.
Howsoe'er it may please thee, this poem, my excellent father,
Tasks her small utmost to-day; nor, verily, know we at present

Any requital from us of a kind or a form that can better

Answer the gifts thou hast given, though the largest requital could never
Answer the gifts thou hast given, nor could any gratitude rendered

Only in empty words come up to the great obligation.

Such as they are, this page exhibits all my resources;

All the wealth I possess I have here told out upon paper,

All a nothing save what the golden Clio has given me,
What my dreams have produced in the secret cave of my slumbers,
What the bay-tree shades in the sacred Parnassian thicket.

Nay, nor do thou despise this god-given Art of the Poet,
Surest sign that there is of the seeds of the heavenly within us,
Man's ethereal birth and the source of the soul we call human,
Keeping some sparkles still of the holy Promethean torch-flame.
Poesy charms the powers above, and is able to summon

Hell's dread depths into tumult, and bind the spirits abysmal,
Even the sternest ghosts, with fetters of triple endurance.
How but by Poesy pierce they to facts in the far-lying future,
Phoebus's prophet-maids, and the pale-faced shuddering Sibyls?
Poems attend the solemnest act of the priest at the altars,
Whether he fells the bull while the gilded horns are in motion,
Or when he studies the secrets the smoking flesh can discover,
Figures of fated events inscribed on the quivering entrails.
Ay, and we ourselves, when again in our native Olympus
Leisures eternal are ours in that large life of the restful,
Crowns of gold on our heads, shall walk the celestial temples,
Fitting those poems of joy to the dulcet throb of the harp-strings
Whereto the stars of both hemispheres ever shall sound the responses.
That same spirit of fire that wheels the sphery rotation
Dashes a song even now through all the sidereal mazes,
Music more than man's and poem that cannot be uttered,
Red Ophiuchus the while restraining the hiss of his venom,
Fierce Orion so mild that he slackens his radiant sword-belt,
Moorish Atlas himself not feeling his starry burthen.
Poems were wont to grace the banquets of kings in the days when
Luxury yet was unknown and all our measureless riot

Merely in things to eat, and the wine on the tables was scanty.
Then, by custom, the bard, in his seat in the festive assembly,
Garlanded round his flowing locks with leaves from the beech-tree,

Sang the deeds of heroes and feats of noble example,

Sang of Chaos old and the wide world's early foundations,

Gods when they crept all-fours and grew lusty on chestnuts and acorns, Unsought yet the bolt that lay in the bowels of Ætna.

What, in fine, is the use of the voice's mere modulation,

Severed from words and sense and the craft of articulate numbers?

Such song suits a woodland dance, but hardly an Orpheus,
Who, when he stopped the rivers and added ears to the oak-trees,
Did it by poem, not lute, and the phantom forms that were round him
Moved to tears by his singing: 'twas Poesy earned him such honours.
Do not thou, I beseech, persist in contemning the Muses,
Thinking them vain and poor, thyself the while to their bounty
Owing thy skill in composing thousands of sounds to the verses
Matching them best, and thy cunning to vary the voice of the singer
Thousands of trilling ways, acknowledged heir of Arion.
Why shouldst thou wonder now if so it has chanced that a poet
Comes to be son of thine, and if, joined in such loving relation,
Each of us follows an art that is kin to the art of the other?
Phoebus himself, proposing a twin bequest of his nature,
Gifted one half to me, with the other gifted my parent,

So that, father and son, we hold the god wholly between us.
Nay, but, pretend as thou mayest to hate the delicate Muses,
Lo! my proofs that thou dost not. Father, thy bidding was never

Given me to go the broad way that leads to the market of lucre,
Down where the hope shines sure of gold to be got in abundance;
Nor dost thou force to the Laws and the lore of the rights of the nation
Sorely ill-kept, nor doom my ears to the babble of asses;

Rather, desiring to see my mind grow richer by culture,
Far from the city's noise, and here in the depths of retirement
Left at my own sweet will amid Heliconian pleasures,
Lettest me walk all day as Apollo's bosom-companion.
Needless here to mention the common kindness parental;
Greater things claim record. At thy cost, worthiest father,

When I had mastered fully the tongue of the Romans, and tasted

Latin delights enough, and the speech for which Jove's mouth was moulded,
That grand speech of the Greeks which served for their great elocution,
Thou 'twas advised the vaunted flowers of Gaul in addition,

Thereto the language in which the new and fallen Italian
Opens his lips with sounds that attest the Barbarian inroads,
Yea, and the mystic strains which the Palestine prophet delivers.
Further, whatever the heaven contains, and under the heaven
Mother Earth herself, and the air betwixt earth and the heaven,
Whatso the wave overlaps, and the sea's ever-moveable marble,
Thou giv'st me means for knowing, thou, if the knowledge shall please me.
Science, her cloud removed, now offers herself to my gazes,
Nakedly bending her full-seen face to the print of my kisses,
Be it I will not fly her, nor count her favours a trouble.

Go and gather wealth, what madman thou art that preferrest
Austria's treasures ancestral and all the Peruvian kingdoms !
What could a father more have bestowed on a son, were he even
Jove himself, and had given his universe, heaven excepted?
Nothing nobler the gift, its safety presumed, which the Sun-God
Gave to his boy when he trusted the world's great light to his guidance,
Trusted the gleaming car and the reins of the radiant horses,
Trusted the spiky tiar which pulsates the rings of the day-beams.
Therefore shall I, however low in the regiment of learning,
Sit even now 'mid victorious wreaths of ivy and laurel,
Now obscure no more nor mixed with the herd of the lazy,
Eyes profane forbidden from every sight of my footsteps.
Anxious cares begone, and begone all quarrels and wranglings,
Envy's sharp-beaked face with eyes askew at the corners ;
Savage Calumny stretch not her snaky mouth to annoy me!
Me, ye disgusting pack, your efforts avail not to injure ;

Your jurisdiction I scorn, and, secure in the guard of my conscience,
Henceforth shall walk erect away from your viperous insults.

So, my father dear, since the perfect sum of your merits

Baffles equal return, and your kindness all real repayment,

Be the mere record enough, and the fact that my grateful remembrance
Treasures the itemed account of debt and will keep it for ever.

Ye too, my youthful verses, my pastime and play for the present,