Chapter III (2)

This feeling, which is the motive of the publication, appears curiously in all the details of its arrangement. The order in which the poems are printed, within each division or class, is, as nearly as possible, the order in which they were written; the deviations being only such as proper editorial art required. To almost every juvenile piece, too, whether in English or in Latin, there is prefixed some indication of the exact date of its composition; and the title-page of the Latin Poems distinctly solicits attention to the fact that most of them were composed before the author was twenty. Even more remarkable than this care in the dating is the introduction into the volume of all the eulogiums which Milton had already received from private friends on account of the Poems, or of any portion of them. To the _Comus_ there is prefixed Henry Lawes's eulogistic Dedication of it, in the edition of 1637, to Viscount Brackley, and also Sir Henry Wotton's cordial letter to Milton, with its praise of the poem in that edition, when Milton was on the start for his continental tour in the spring of 1638. To the Latin Poems as a whole there is even a more formal vestibule of encomiums. First of all, there is a little preface by Milton in Latin apologizing to the reader for troubling him with them. "Though these following testimonies concerning the Author," he says, "were understood by himself to be pronounced not so much _about_ him as _over_ him, by way of subject or occasion-- it being the general habit of men of brilliant genius, if they are at the same time one's friends, to fashion their praises too eagerly rather by the standard of their own excellencies than by truth--yet he was unwilling that the singular goodwill of such persons towards him should remain unknown, and the rather because others advised him strongly to the step he is now taking. While therefore he puts from him with all his strength the imputation of desiring overpraise, and would rather not have attributed to him more than is due, he cannot deny but he considers the opinion of him meantime by wise and celebrated men a very high honour." Accordingly there here follow the encomiums of his various Italian friends, known to us long ago, and which had been carefully preserved by him till now among his papers--the Latin distich by the famous Marquis Manso of Naples; the outrageously complimentary Latin verses of the two Romans, Salzilli and Selvaggi; and the more interesting Italian ode of compliment and Latin Dedication by the two Florentines, Francini and Carlo Dati. (See Vol. I. pp. 732-4, 753-4, and 768.) One has to remember that the insertion of such commendatory verses in new volumes of poetry was a fashion of the day. But, besides, there was really the anxiety for "something green round the brow." In short, it is as if Milton said to his countrymen--"Here is plenty of greenery, and to spare, with florid stuff intermixed, of which I am rather ashamed: pick out as much or as little of it as you like; only, at this date in my life, to prevent mistake, let me have _some_ kind of garland."

The publisher, Humphrey Moseley, for one, was most willing to oblige Milton. Prefixed to the volume, on the blank space before the poems themselves begin, is this most interesting preface in Moseley's own name:--

"THE STATIONER TO THE READER.

"It is not any private respect of gain, gentle Reader--for the slightest Pamphlet is nowadays more vendible than the works of learnedest men--but it is the love I have to our own language, that hath made me diligent to collect and set forth such pieces, both in prose and verse, as may renew the wonted honour and esteem of our English tongue; and it's the worth of these both English and Latin Poems, not the flourish of any prefixed encomions, that can invite thee to buy them--though these are not without the highest commendations and applause of the learnedest Academicks, both domestick and foreign, and amongst those of our own country the unparalleled attestation of that renowned Provost of Eton, Sir Henry Wootton. I know not thy palate, how it relishes such dainties, nor how harmonious thy soul is: perhaps more trivial Airs may please thee better. But, howsoever thy opinion is spent upon these, that encouragement I have already received from the most ingenious men, in their clear and courteous entertainment of Mr. Waller's late choice pieces, hath once more made me adventure into the world, presenting it with these ever- green and not to be blasted laurels. The Author's more peculiar excellency in these studies was too well known to conceal his papers or to keep me from attempting to solicit them from him. Let the event guide itself which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser wrote; whose poems in these English ones are as rarely imitated as sweetly excelled. Reader, if thou art eagle-eyed to censure their worth, I am not fearful to expose them to thy exactest perusal.

"Thine to command, HUMPH. MOSELEY."

This is most creditable to Moseley, and confirms the impression of him which is to be derived from all the known facts of his publishing life. One notices, with real respect, his introductory statement about himself, that, in an age when only pamphlets were thought vendible, he was resolved, from his own liking for good literature, to keep to a finer line of business; one observes with interest the admission that it was Moseley who had solicited the copy from Milton, and not Milton who had offered the copy; and one is struck with the justness of taste shown in the hint that, however choice Mr. Waller's late Pieces might be, here was a poet of "more peculiar excellency." Above all, nothing could be critically truer than the assertion that since Spenser's death there had been no English poetry of Spenser's kind equal to that contained in this volume.

Another feature of the volume, for which Moseley, without doubt, is also responsible, is a prefixed portrait of the Author. There was then living in London a certain William Marshall, an engraver and sketcher of designs for books. He had been some fourteen or fifteen years in this employment; and among the many heads he had done, separately, or as frontispieces to books, ere those of Richard Brathwayte the Poet, Dr. Donne, Archbishop Abbot, Laud, and Dr. Daniel Featley. Very probably Moseley had already had dealings with Marshall, as he had certainly had with the more celebrated engraver Hollar, who had done a frontispiece for him for Howell's "Instructions for Foreign Travel." At all events, Hollar being now out of the way and in trouble (he and Inigo Jones were in the Marquis of Winchester's house at Basing when it was taken by Cromwell), it was Marshall that came in for most such pieces of engraving work as Moseley and other London publishers required. The connexion between him and Moseley became, indeed, a permanent one, so that Marshall is perhaps best remembered now by Horace Walpole's description of him as "the graver of heads for Moseley's books of poetry." If the first head he did for Moseley was this for the edition of Milton's Poems in 1645, it was an unlucky beginning of the connexion. It turned out, at all events, to be an unfortunate piece of work for Marshall's own memory with posterity:-- Moseley, we are to suppose, insisted on a portrait of Milton as a proper ornament to be prefixed to such a volume, chose Marshall to do it, and sent him to Milton. Now Milton, as we know, had some recollection of Marshall, and not a very respectful one. It was Marshall that had done not only Dr. Featley's portrait, but also the caricature of the different sorts of Anabaptists and Sectaries, including a river-scene with bathers of both sexes, which had been inserted in the Doctor's treatise entitled _The Dippers Dipt_. Milton, as we have seen (_antè_, p. 311), while administering punishment to Dr. Featley in his _Tetrachordon_ on account of a passage in this treatise, had not allowed the vulgarity of the engraving in Featley's book to escape. "For which I do not commend his _marshalling_" had been Milton's punning notice of it in a parenthesis of the punishment. When, therefore, Mr. Marshall came to Milton from Moseley, Milton must have remembered him as the caricaturist for Dr. Featley's book. Nevertheless, he seems to have given him every facility for the portrait wanted. Marshall's habit, in such cases, was to take a sketch from the life when he could get it, but to assist himself with whatever was at hand in the shape of a picture or former engraving. Milton, therefore, may have given him a sitting or two, but perhaps avoided unnecessary trouble by referring to that portrait of himself at the age of 21, now celebrated as "the Onslow Portrait," which then hung in some room in the house in Barbican. As the forthcoming volume consisted largely of Milton's juvenile Poems, an engraving from that portrait, touched up a little, would be the very thing. And so Marshall set to work. His dilatoriness over the plate may have been the cause of the unusual delay in the publication of the volume after it had been registered. In due time, however, the result was presented to Moseley and to Milton. And what a result! How they must have both stared! The general design of the plate was, indeed, pretty enough--an oval containing the portrait, with a background partly of curtain and low wall or window- sill, partly of an Arcadian scene of trees and meadow beyond, in which a shepherd is piping under one of the trees, and a shepherd and shepherdess are dancing; and then, outside the oval, in the four corners, the Muses Melpomene, Erato, Urania, and Clio, with their names. All this was passable; it was the portrait within the oval that gave the shock. The face is that of a grim, gaunt, stolid gentleman of middle age, looking like anybody or nobody, with long hair parted in the middle and falling down on both sides to the lace collar round the neck; one shoulder is cloaked, and the other shown tight in the buttoned tunic or coat; and the arms meet clumsily across the breast, the left arm uppermost. Round the oval was the legend, "_Joannis Miltoni Angli Effigies, anno ætatis vigess: pri. W. M. Sculp._"--i.e. "Portrait of John Milton, Englishman, in the 2lst year of his age: W. M. Sculp." The legend _said_ twenty-one years of age; the portrait _looked_ somewhere about fifty. What was to be done? What _ought_ to have been done was to cancel the plate and print the book without it. Perhaps not to vex Moseley, Milton did not insist on this, but allowed the engraving, just as it was, to be prefixed to the volume. But he took his revenge in one of the most malicious practical jokes ever perpetrated. "Mr. Marshall," he must have said to the unfortunate engraver, "here are a few lines of Greek which I should like to have carefully engraved on the plate under the portrait," at the same time handing him the following:--

[Greek: Amathei gegraphthai cheiri tænde men eikona
Phaiæs tach an, pras eidos autophues blepon.
Ton d'ektupoton ouk epignontes, philoi,
Gelate phaulou dusmimæma xographou.]

Away went Mr. Marshall, and duly, and with some pains, engraved these letters on the plate, utterly ignorant of their meaning. Accordingly, when the volume appeared (Jan. 2, 1645-6), purchasers of it did indeed find Marshall's portrait of Milton in it, but those among them who knew Greek could read, underneath it, inscribed by Marshall's own graving tool, this damning criticism of his handiwork:--

"That an unskilful hand had carved this print
You'd say at once, seeing the living face;
But, finding here no jot of me, my friends,
Laugh at the botching artist's mis-attempt."

[Footnote: This was very savage in Milton; but really, as it turned out, it was a prudent precaution. For, till 1670, Marshall's botch prefixed to the Poems was the only published portrait of Milton-the only guide to any idea of his personal appearance for those, whether friends or foes, whether in Britain or abroad, who were not acquainted with himself. Especially among enemies on the Continent, as we shall find, both Marshall's portrait and Milton's sarcastic disavowal of it were eagerly scanned and interpreted for the worst. As late as 1655, Milton, in his _Pro se Defendio contra Alexandrum Morion_, had to refer to both portrait and disavowal as follows:--"Now I am a Narcissus with you, because I would not be the Cyclops you paint me from your sight of the most unlike portrait of me prefixed to my Poems. Really, if, in consequence of the persuasion and importunity of my publisher, I allowed myself to be clumsily engraved by an unskilful engraver, because there was not another in the city in that time of war, this argued rather my entire indifference in the affair than the too great care with which you upbraid me." The passage quite confirms the view taken in the text of the way in which the portrait came to be published. In justice to Marshall, it is right to say that he had done much better things, and did better things afterwards for Moseley, than this head of Milton. "Marshall," says Bliss (Wood's Ath. III. 518, Note), "though in general a coarse and hasty performer, is not to be despised, since his heads, though often very rough sketches, bear evident marks of authenticity and resemblance to the originals. The best head he ever engraved, in my opinion, is one of Dr. Donne when young." I can confirm this by saying that his head of Featley really gives one an idea of that obstinate and consequential old divine. I only wish he had done Milton half as well. About Marshall's engraving of Milton see Mr. J. F. Marsh's tract on the _Engraved and Pretended Portraits of Milton_ (Liverpool, 1860). Mr. Marsh thinks, with me, that Marshall based his engraving partly on the Onslow picture, and that that picture suggested the date, _ætat_. 21, so absurdly given to the engraving.]

TWO DIVORCE SONNETS, AND SONNET TO HENRY LAWES.

Moseley's precious little volume, with the engraver Marshall thus grimly immortalized in it, brings Milton to the beginning of 1646, or twelve months beyond his _Tetrachordon_ and _Colasterion_. His wife having been for some months back with him, for better or worse, in the house at Barbican, he had dropped the Divorce argument, or at least its public prosecution. That he did so with a certain reluctance, and in no spirit of recantation, appears from two of his Sonnets, which must have been written about the time of the publication of his volume of Poems (Oct. 1645--Jan. 1645-6), but which are not included in that volume, either because they were too late to come in their places after the Ten Sonnets contained in it, or because Milton thought it better not then to print them. "_On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises_" is the title given by Milton himself in MS. to the two Sonnets together; but they may have been written separately.

I.

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs,
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of Owls and Cuckoos, Asses, Apes, and Dogs;
As when those hinds that were transformed to frogs
Railed at Latona's twin-born progeny,
Which after held the sun and moon in fee.
But this is got by casting pearl to hogs,
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when Truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry Liberty;
For who loves that must first be wise and good:
But from that mark how far they rove we see,
For all this waste of wealth and loss of blood.

II.

A book was writ of late called _Tetrachordon_,
And woven close, both matter, form, and style;
The subject new. It walked the town a while
Numbering good intellects; now seldom pored on.
Cries the stall-reader "Bless us! what a word on
A title-page is this!" and some in file
Stand spelling false while one might walk to Mile-
End Green. Why is it harder, Sirs, than _Gordon_,
_Colkitto_, or _Macdonnell_, or _Galasp_?
Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek,
That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp.
Thy age, like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheke,
Hated not learning worse than toad or asp,
When thou taught'st Cambridge and King Edward Greek.

The second of these Sonnets is printed first in all the editions of Milton, but there is proof that it was written second. [Footnote: It stands first in the Second or 1673 Edition of Milton's Poems; but in the Cambridge MSS, it comes second in Milton's own hand.] And, while the two together form what may be called Milton's poetical farewell to the Divorce subject, the mood in the second, it may be noted, is more humorous than in the first. In the first Milton, still angry, clenches his fist in the face of his generation, as a generation of mere hogs and dogs, unable to appreciate any real form of the liberty for which they are howling and grunting; in the second the spleen is less, and he is content with a rigmarole of rhyme about the queer effects among the illiterate of the Greek title of his last Divorce Pamphlet. And here what is chiefly interesting in the rigmarole is the evidence that Milton had been recently attending to the news from Scotland. The "_Colkitto_, or _Macdonnell_, or _Galasp_" of the Sonnet is no other than our friend Alexander MacDonnell, _alias_ MacColkitto, _alias_ MacGillespie, Montrose's gigantic Major-general; and the "Gordon" is either Lord Aboyne, the eldest son of the Marquis of Huntly, who adhered to Montrose till Philiphaugh, or it is a general name for the many Gordons who were with him (see _antè_, pp. 348, 358, 367). The odd Scottish and Gaelic names had amused Milton's delicate ear; _Gordon_ rhymed aptly to _Tetrachordon_; and hence the notion of the Sonnet. [Footnote: Those annotators on Milton who have tried to identify _Galasp_ at all have supposed him to be the Mr. George Gillespie who was one of the Scottish Divines in the Westminster Assembly. There _may_ be a side-reference to him, for Milton must have heard much of him; but the primary reference is not to the Presbyterian minister, but to the huge Colonsay Highlander, recently heard of everywhere as Montrose's comrade in arms, and who was _Colkitto_, _MacDonnell_, and _Galasp_, all in one.]

A third Sonnet, written about the same time, shows even more distinctly the calming effect on Milton's mind produced by his changed mode of life in the house in Barbican, after his wife's return and the publication of his little Volume of Poems. It is the well-known Sonnet to his friend Henry Lawes, the musician.

So far as the two artists, William and Henry Lawes, concerned themselves in the politics of the time, they were, of course, Royalists. Officially attached to his Majesty's household and service, what else could they be? The elder of the two, indeed, William Lawes, had gone into the Royalist army, taken captain's rank there, and been slain quite recently at the siege of Chester (October 1645), much regretted by the King, who is said to have put on private mourning for him. Henry, the younger, and much the more celebrated as a composer, had remained in London, exercising his art as much as might be at such a time, and kept by it in acquaintance with many who, differing in other things, were at one in their love of music. Everybody liked and admired the gentle Harry Lawes, and he was welcome everywhere. But there was still no family with which he was on more intimate terms than with his old patrons of the accomplished Bridgewater group, and there can have been no house where his visits were more frequent than at their house in Barbican. True, the family was greatly reduced from what it had been in the old days of the _Arcades_ and _Comus_, when Lawes was teacher of music to its budding girls and boys, and the master and stage-director of their tasteful masques and private concerts. The Countess had been ten years dead; Lord Brackley, the heir of the house, and the elder of the boy-brothers in _Comus_, had wedded, in July 1642, when only nineteen years of age, the Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of the powerful Royalist Earl, afterwards Marquis and Duke, of Newcastle; and one or two of his sisters, unmarried in the _Comus_ year, had since found husbands. With the widower Earl, however, inhabiting now his town-house in Barbican, and visiting but seldom his country mansion at Ashridge, Herts, there still remained his youngest daughter, the Lady Alice of _Comus_, verging on her twenty-fifth year, and Mr. Thomas Egerton, the younger of the boy- brothers in _Comus_, now a youth of about twenty. Probably elder and married members of the family gave the Earl their occasional company; for he was now about sixty-five years of age, in an infirm state of health, sorely impoverished, and in the unfortunate condition of a Peer who would have been with the King if he could, and whom the King had expected to be with him, but who was obliged to plead his infirm health and his poverty for a kind of semi-submission to Parliament. He had reluctantly taken the Covenant (_antè_, pp. 39,40), and there are entries in the Lords Journals proving that his excuses for non-attendance in the House were barely allowed to pass. Music and books were among the invalid Earl's chief recreations; and some of his happiest moments in his old age may have been in listening to the Lady Alice, or another of his daughters, singing one of Lawes's songs, with Lawes, now the privileged artist- friend rather than the professional tutor, standing by or accompanying. What if it were the Lady Alice, and the song were that well-remembered one of _Comus_ which she had sung, when a young girl, eleven years before, in the Hall of Ludlow Castle, before the assembled guests of her father's Welsh Presidency, her proud mother then among the listeners,--

"Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv'st unseen
Within thy airy shell"?

If so, the sound of her voice might have almost reached Milton in _his_ house close by in the same street. At all events, here, in the street called Barbican, by a strange chance, were assembled, within a few yards of each other, at the very time when _Comus_ was first published by Milton himself, and acknowledged among his other poems, at least five of the persons chiefly concerned in the masque on its first production--the Earl in whose honour it had been composed; the Lady Alice, and Mr. Thomas Egerton, two of the chief actors: the musician Lawes, who had directed all, composed the music, and sustained the parts of Thyrsis and the Attendant Spirit in the, performance; and the poet who had written the words.

When Lawes was in Barbican of an evening, it was but a step for him from the Earl's house to Milton's. And then would there not be more music, mingled with talk perhaps about the Bridgewater family, while Mrs. Milton sat by and listened? And would not the old Scrivener come down from his room to see Mr. Lawes, and bring out his choicest old music-books, and almost set aside his son in managing the visit for musical delight? So one fancies, and therefore keeps to the interrogative form as the safest; but the fancy here is really the most exact possible apprehension of the facts as they are on record. Lawes's friendship with Milton had been uninterrupted since 1634; but it so chances that the third point in Milton's life at which his intimacy with Lawes emerges into positive record is precisely the winter of 1645-6, when Milton was the Earl of Bridgewater's neighbour in Barbican, and his Volume of Poems was going through the press. Not only was there reprinted in this volume Lawes's Dedication of the _Comus_ in 1637, "To the Right Honourable John, Lord Brackley, son and heir-apparent to the Earl of Bridgewater;" but in the very title-page of the volume, as arranged by Moseley, Lawes's name is associated with Milton's. "_The Songs were set in musick by Mr. Henry Lawes, &c._," says the title-page; and this may mean that not only the songs in _Arcades_ and _Comus_, but other lyrical pieces in the volume, had been set to music by Lawes. If so, a good deal more of Lawes's music to Milton's words may have been in existence about 1645 than his settings of the five songs in _Comus_, which are all that have come down to us in his own hand. Songs of Milton set by Lawes may have been in circulation in MS. copies, and may have been as well known in musical families as the numerous songs by Carew, Herrick, Waller and others, which had been set by the same composer; and it may be to this that Moseley alludes by the prominent mention of Lawes in the title-page of the collected Poems. And, if Lawes had done so much for Milton's verse, it was fitting that Milton should make some return in kind. He had indeed introduced skilful compliments to Lawes personally in his _Comus_; but something more express might be now appropriate. Accordingly, on the 9th of February, 1645-6, or five weeks after the publication of the Poems, Milton wrote the following:--

"TO MY FRIEND MR. HENRY LAWES.

"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song
First taught our English music how to span
Words with just note and accent, not to scan
With Midas ears, committing short and long,
Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng,
With praise enough for Envy to look wan:
To after-age thou shalt be writ the man
That with smooth air could humour best our tongue.
Thou honour'st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing
To honour thee, the priest of Phoebus' quire,
That tun'st their happiest lines in hymn or story.
Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher
Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing,
Met in the milder shades of Purgatory."

The original draft of this Sonnet, entitled as above, and with the date "Feb. 9, 1645," attached, and a corrected transcript underneath, both in Milton's own hand, are in the Cambridge volume of Milton MSS. The Sonnet was prefixed by Lawes, with the same title, in 1648 to a publication of some of his own and his deceased brother's compositions, entitled _Choice Psalmes put into Musick for Three Voices_; but in the Second or 1673 Edition of Milton's Poems it reappeared with the title which it has retained in all subsequent editions: viz. "To Mr. Henry Lawes on his Airs." For biographical purposes it is well to remember the first title and the dating. The Sonnet is, in fact, a memorial of a time when Milton and Lawes must have been much together. [Footnote: The details about the state of the Bridge water family in the text are partly from Todd's Note prefixed to _Comus_ (Todd's Milton, ed. 1852, IV 38-44), partly from entries in the _Lords Journals_ already referred to in this volume. Todd has also (_ibid._ 45-54) an elaborate, though ill-digested, note on Lawes, with particulars of his continued connexion, to 1653 and beyond, with various members of the Bridgewater family. In the Stationers' Registers there is this entry:--"Nov. 16, 1647, Rich. Woodnoth entered for his copy under the hands of Mr. Downham and Mr. Bellamy, warden, a book called 'Compositions of Three Parts,' by Henry and William Lawes, servants to his Majesty." I suppose this was the book published in 1648 with the title "_Choice Psalmes_," &c.]

CONTINUED PRESBYTERIAN ATTACKS ON MILTON: HIS ANTI-PRESBYTERIAN SONNET OF REPLY.

Altogether it was beginning to be a more placid time with Milton. With his book out, his wife restored to him, the Divorce argument dropped, and his pupils to teach, he might look about him quietly on the state of public affairs, and expect what should be the next call on him. There did not seem to be any immediate call. In the month when his volume of Poems appeared Presbyterianism was at its fullest tide in Parliament; but in the succeeding months, what with the increase of Recruiters in the Commons, what with the tramp of Independency in the field growing louder and nearer as the New Model ended its work, he could see the political power of the Presbyterians gradually waning, until, in April 1646, when Cromwell reappeared in London, Anti-Toleration was abashed and the Westminster Assembly itself under control. The spectacle must have been quite to Milton's mind; but, as he had already expressed himself sufficiently on the main question between the Independents and the Presbyterians, and as nobody doubted on which side he was to be ranked, he was disposed to take his ease on this subject too, and to leave the issue to the Parliament and the Army. He was too marked a man, however, to be quite let alone. The Presbyterian writers, true to their policy of publicly naming all prominent heretics and sectaries, and painting their opinions in the most glaring colours, with a view to disgust people with the idea of a Toleration, could not part with Milton and his Divorce Doctrine. After he and his wife were in the Barbican house together, he was still pursued by the hue and cry. Here are two specimens:--

_Mr. Baillie on Milton._--"Mr. Milton permits any man to put away his wife upon his mere pleasure without any fault, and without the cognisance of any judge," writes Baillie in the Table of Contents to the First Part of his _Dissuasive_, published in November 1645; and in the text of the work (p. 116) the statement is amplified as follows:--"Concerning Divorces, some of them [the Independents] go far beyond any of the Brownists; not to speak of Mr. Milton, who in a large treatise hath pleaded for a full liberty for any man to put away his wife, whenever he pleaseth, without any fault in her at all, but for any dislike or dyssympathy of humour. For I do not certainly know whether this man professeth Independency, albeit all the heretics here whereof ever I heard avow themselves Independents. Whatever therefore may be said of Mr. Milton, yet Mr. Gorting and his company were men of renown among the New English Independents before Mistress Hutchinson's disgrace; and all of them do maintain that it is lawful for every woman to desert her husband when he is not willing to follow her in her church-way." In other words, Baillie is not sure that it is fair to charge Milton's extreme opinion upon Independency as such, inasmuch as it may be the crotchet of a solitary heretic; but he is inclined to think that Milton _is_ an Independent, and he knows at least that Mr. Gorting and other Independents have broached a milder form of the same heresy. In his Notes (pp. 144,145) he quotes sentences to the amount of a page from Milton's _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_ to prove that he does not misrepresent him.--The "Gorting" here mentioned by Baillie is the "Samuel Gorton" who had been such a sore trouble to the New Englanders, and even to Roger Williams at Providence, by his anarchical opinions and conduct (Vol. II. 601). He had returned or been ejected from America, and was making himself notorious in London. "This I am assured of from various hands," wrote Edwards (_Gangr._ Part II. p. 144), "that Gorton is here in London, and hath been for the space of some months; and I am told also that he vents his opinions, and exercises in some of the meetings of the sectaries, as that he hath exercised lately at Lamb's Church, and is very great at one Sister Stagg's, exercising there too sometimes." This will explain Baillie's allusion to Gorton in connexion with Milton's Divorce Doctrine. Strange that Gorton should be cited as holding a _milder_ form of the heresy than Milton's!

_Mr. Edwards on Milton._--Of course, Milton got into the _Gangræna._ Everybody that deviated in anything, to the right or left, from the path of Presbyterian orthodoxy, got into that register of scandals; and we have already availed ourselves of information incidentally supplied in the Second and Third Parts of it as to the horror caused by Milton's Divorce Doctrine among the Presbyterians (_antè_, pp. 189-192). We have still to present, however, Edwards's direct notice of Milton in the First Part of his scandalous medley. It was published in January or February 1645-6; so that, at the very time when Milton's volume of Poems was out, and he was writing his Sonnet to Lawes, he found himself pilloried again in the new book which all London was reading greedily. A leading portion of the book, as we know (_antè_, pp. 143-5), consisted of a catalogue of 176 "Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies" that had been vented by divers Sectaries and were then distracting and corrupting the soul of England. Well, the 154th Error, Heresy, and Blasphemy in this catalogue is this:-- "That 'tis lawful for a man to put away his wife upon indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable; and for disproportion and deadness of spirit, or something distasteful and averse in the immutable bent of nature; and man, in regard of the freedom and eminency of his creation, is a law to himself in this matter, being head of the other sex, which was made for him; neither need he hear any judge therein above himself." To this summary by Edwards of Milton's Doctrine, partly in Milton's own words, the reference is appended in the margin: "_Vide Milton's Doctrine of Divorce._" (_Gangræna_, Part I. p. 29.) And so for the moment Edwards dismisses Milton, very much as Baillie had done, to return to him again in the Second and Third Parts of his _Gangræna_, as Baillie was to do in the Second Part of his _Dissuasive_.

Milton was provoked. It was not in his nature to let any attack upon him, from whatever quarter, pass without notice; and attacks by persons of such popular celebrity as Baillie and Edwards could hardly be ignored. But, as he had given up the public prosecution of the Divorce argument, his punishment for Edwards and Baillie came in a different form from that which he had administered in the _Tetrachordon_ and _Colasterion_ to Herbert Palmer, Dr. Featley, Mr. Caryl, Mr. Prynne, and the anonymous attorney. It came in verse, thus--

"ON THE FORCERS OF CONSCIENCE.

"Because you have thrown off your Prelate lord,
And with stiff vows renounced his Liturgy,
To seize the widowed whore Plurality
From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorred,
Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword
To force our consciences that Christ set free,
And ride us with a Classic Hierarchy,
Taught ye by mere _A. S._ and _Rutherford?_
Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul,
Must now be named and printed heretics
By _shallow Edwards_ and _Scotch What d'ye call._
But we do hope to find out all your tricks,
Your plots and packing, worse than those of Trent,
That so the Parliament
May, with their wholesome and preventive shears,
Clip your phylacteries, though baulk your ears,
And succour our just fears,
When they shall read this clearly in your charge--
New PRESBYTER is but old PRIEST writ large."

Milton, we are to suppose, having already written two Divorce Sonnets, did not care to write a third, but preferred to punish Edwards and Baillie in a general Anti-Presbyterian Sonnet. It turned out, however, not a Sonnet proper, but a _Sonetto con coda_, as the Italians call it, or "Sonnet with a tail"--the Anti-Presbyterian rhythm prolonging itself beyond the fourteen lines that would have completed the normal Sonnet, and demanding the scorpion addition of six lines more. Into this peculiar "tailed Sonnet" Milton condenses metrically all the rage against Presbytery, the Westminster Assembly, and the Anti-Tolerationists, which had already broken forth at large in his later prose pamphlets. The piece is unusually full of historical allusions. It breathes throughout his acquired hatred of the Presbyterians for their opposition to Liberty of Conscience, and their determination that the "Classic Hierarchy," or system of Presbyterian _classes_ which they were establishing in England, should be as compulsory on all as the Prelacy they had thrown off; and there is a palpable side-hit at the recent acquisition by some of the leading Presbyterian Divines in the Assembly of University posts and the like in addition to their previous livings, notwithstanding their outcries against Pluralities in the time of Episcopacy. In this side-hit not a few known Divines are slashed; and among them, I fear, Milton's old tutor Thomas Young, now Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, as well as Vicar of Stowmarket. But the open personal references are four. The "A. S." selected as one prominent expounder of Presbytery is the Scotchman, Dr. Adam Steuart, who, under his initials "A. S.," had been one of the first to rush into print in behalf of strict Presbytery and Anti- Toleration against the _Apologetical Narrative_ of the Independents of the Assembly, and who had been replied to by John Good win, but had since gone into Holland (_antè_, p. 25). The "Rutherford" coupled with him is the celebrated Scottish divine, and Commissioner to the Assembly, Samuel Rutherford, who had set forth several expositions of strict Scottish Presbytery for the enlightenment of the English. "Shallow Edwards" is obvious enough: he is Mr. Edwards of the _Gangræna_, once far from a nobody in London, but who will now, through Milton's mention of him, be "Shallow Edwards" to the world's end. In Milton's draft of the Sonnet he was "hair-brained Edwards;" but "hair-brained" was erased, and "shallow" substituted. The "Scotch What d'ye call" has cost the commentators more trouble. Most of them have identified him with George Gillespie, whom they also, though erroneously, suppose to be the "Galasp" of one of the Divorce Sonnets. There can be little doubt now, I think, that I have detected the real "What d'ye call" in Gillespie's fellow- Commissioner from Scotland, our good friend Baillie, whose _Dissuasive_, with its reference to Milton as one of the heretics of the time, had just preceded Edwards's _Gangræna_. I am sorry for this, but it cannot be helped. There was, I ought to add, in the original draft of the Sonnet, a fifth personal allusion, which Milton saw fit, on second thoughts, to omit. Line 17, which now stands "_Clip your phylacteries, though baulk your ears_" (_i.e._" though pass over your ears and leave them undipped"), was originally "_Crop ye as close as marginal P--'s ears_." As Milton had already, in his _Colasterion_, said enough about Prynne and the heavy margins of his many pamphlets, and as the circumstances in which Prynne had lost his ears made the subject hardly a proper one for a public joke, it was but good taste in Milton to make the change.

It is from internal evidence that I assign this famous Anti-Presbyterian outburst of Milton to some early month of the year 1646. [Footnote: The lines were first published in the Second or 1673 Edition of Milton's Poems, and not there among the Sonnets, but as a piece apart, with the title, since always given to it, _On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament_. The draft of it among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge has the simpler title _On the Forcers of Conscience_. This draft, however, is not in Milton's own hand, but is a transcript by an amanuensis. Hence we have not the means of determining the date so exactly as if Milton's own draft had been preserved. I am pretty confident that the date cannot be later than 1646, and I fancy copies may have been in private circulation in that year.] It fits in exactly with the state of public affairs and of Milton himself at that time; all the motives to it, public and private, were in existence by the March of that year; and it is difficult to suppose that the composition was of much later date. Or, if it was a little later, the lines fairly represent Milton's feeling at the time to which I assign them. In March, April, and May, 1646, Milton was one of those Englishmen who had done for ever with Presbyterianism, who rejoiced over the curb imposed at length upon the Westminster Assembly by the Independents and Erastians of the Parliament, and who longed to see that conclave dismissed, and the Scots sent packing home.

SURRENDER OF OXFORD: CONDITION OF THE POWELL FAMILY.

That the Scots should be sent packing home, but that they should leave the King behind them in English custody, was the result for which all the Independents were anxious. Through May and June 1646, it was for Milton, among the rest, to watch the progress of the negotiations with the Scots at Newcastle round the person of the King, and at the same time to observe the surrender of one after another of the few remaining Royalist garrisons, including the great Royalist capital of Oxford. The siege of this city by Fairfax, begun May 1, a week after the King had left it, and continued for seven or eight weeks with the help of Cromwell and Skippon, must have been a matter of considerable personal interest to Milton, and of more interest to his wife. She was now in a state of health requiring as much freedom from anxiety as possible; but, while the siege was going on, there was good reason for anxiety in the fact that her father and mother, with the rest of her family, or some of them, were in the besieged city and undergoing its dangers. They had taken refuge there on the approach of the Parliamentarian troops into Oxfordshire, leaving their house at Forest-hill to take its chance. What might that chance be, and what worse chances might come of the siege itself? It was a relief when the news came of the actual surrender of the city (June 24), on terms exceedingly liberal to the garrison, the citizens, and all the resident Royalists. The terms, indeed, were thought far too liberal by the Presbyterians. "The scurvy base propositions which Cromwell has given to the Malignants at Oxford has offended many," writes Baillie, June 26; [Footnote: Baillie, II. 376] the reason for the offence being that it was but too clear that the Independents had been in haste to obtain Oxford on any terms whatever, in order that the army might be free to act, if necessary, against the Scots in the north. Anyhow the surrender had taken place. The Princes Rupert and Maurice had left the city with a retinue and promise of liberty to go abroad; the garrison, to the number of 7,000 men, had marched out honourably, with arms and baggage; security for the property of the citizens and the colleges had been guaranteed; and all the miscellaneous crowd of Royalists of various ranks that had been cooped up so long in Oxford were at liberty to disperse themselves on certain stipulated conditions. To one of the Articles of the Treaty of Surrender I must ask special attention, as it came to be of much domestic consequence to Milton in future years:--

"XI. That all lords, gentlemen, clergymen, officers, soldiers, and all other persons in Oxford, or comprised in this capitulation, who have estates real or personal under or liable to sequestrations according to the Ordinance of Parliament, and shall desire to compound for them (except persons by name excepted by Ordinance of Parliament from pardon), shall at any time within six months after the rendering of the garrison of Oxford be admitted to compound for their estates; which composition shall not exceed two years' revenue for estates of inheritance, and for estates for lives, years, and other real and personal estates, shall not exceed the proportion aforesaid for inheritances, according to the value of them: And that all persons aforesaid whose dwelling-houses are sequestered (except before-excepted) may after the rendering of the garrison repair to them, and there abide, convenient time being allowed to such as are placed there under the sequestrations for their removal. And it is agreed that all the profits and revenues arising out of their estates after the day of entering their names as Compounders shall remain in the hands of the tenants or occupiers, to be answered to the Compounders when they have perfected their agreements for their compositions; And that they shall have liberty, and the General's pass and protection, for their peaceable repair to and abode at their several houses or friends, and to go to London to attend their compositions, or elsewhere upon their necessary occasions, with freedom of their persons from oaths, engagements, and molestations during the space of six months, and after so long as they prosecute their compositions without wilful default or neglect on their part, except an engagement by promise not to bear arms against the Parliament, nor wilfully to do any act prejudicial to their [Parliament's] affairs so long as they remain in their quarters. And it is further agreed that, from and after their compositions made, they shall be forthwith restored to and enjoy their estates, and all other immunities, as other subjects, together with the rents and profits, from the time of entering their names, discharged from sequestrations, and from fifths and twentieth parts, and other payments and impositions, except such as shall be general and common to them with others." [Footnote: Whitlocke (ed. 1853), II. 38; also in Rushworth, VI. 282, 283.]

Some hundreds of persons in Oxford at the time of its surrender must have had their movements for the next few months determined by this article. Among these was Milton's father-in-law, Mr. Richard Powell.

The view we arrived at as to the condition of the Powell family before the Civil War was (Vol. II. p. 499) that they were then "an Oxfordshire family of good standing, keeping up appearances with the neighbour- gentry, and probably more than solvent if all their property had been put against their debts, but still rather deeply in debt, and their property heavily mortgaged." During the war, we have now to record, on the faith of a statement afterwards made by Mr. Powell himself, the losses of the family in one way or another had amounted to at least 3,000_l_. Remembering this heavy item, I will try to present in figures the state of Mr. Powell's affairs while he was shut up in Oxford:--

I. PROPERTY.

1. Lease, till 1672, of the Forest-hill mansion and £ estate, worth about . . . . . . . . 270 a year. 2. Furniture, household-stuff, and corn in the Forest- hill mansion and appurtenances, valued at . 500 3. Wood and timber stacked about the Forest-hill premises, worth . . . . . . . . . 400 4. Property in land and cottages at Wheatley, valued at . . . . . . . . . . . 40 a year. 5. Debts owing to Mr. Powell . . . . . . . . 100

II. DEBTS AND OBLIGATIONS.

1. Due to Mr. John Milton, by recognisance since
1627, as unpaid part of an original debt of
£500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
2. Promised to the said Mr. Milton, when he married
Mr. Powell's eldest daughter, a
marriage portion of. . . . . . . . . 1,000
3. Due to Mr. Edward Ashworth, or his representatives,
in redemption of a mortgage on the
Wheatley property since 1631, a capital sum
(besides arrears of interest) of . . . . 400
4. Due to Sir Robert Pye, in redemption of a mortgage
on the Forest-hill mansion and property
since 1640, a capital sum (besides arrears of
interest) of . . . . . . . . . . . 1,400
5. Other debts, as estimated by Mr. Powell . . . 1,200