6

thing else. The Speaker cried, Sir, I call upon you again to consider of it.' Murray answered, Sir, when I have committed a crime, I kneel to God for pardon; but I know my own innocence, and cannot kneel to anybody else.' The Speaker ordered the sergeant to take him away and secure him. He was going to reply; the Speaker would not suffer him." The prisoner having been removed, a warm debate ensued, the Speaker telling them that if a party might behave thus with impunity there was an end of the dignity and power of the House. One member proposed that the refractory delinquent should be kept in Newgate without pen, ink, and paper; another hinted that it might be well to send him to the dungeon called Little Ease in the Tower; a third would have had an act of parliament passed for the special punishment of such audacious conduct. At last, after naming a Committee to consider the matter, the House adjourned at near two o'clock in the morning. This was on the 6th. Murray lay in Newgate till the 27th of April, when he was brought up by habeas corpus to the King's Bench; but, three of the Judges allowing the validity of a commitment by the House of Commons, he was remanded to prison. But the instant the parliament was prorogued, on the 25th of June, a number of his friends accompanied the two sheriffs to Newgate, and bringing him away conducted him in triumph to his own house. On the 20th of November, a few days after the parliament had re-assembled, it was again moved and carried after a long debate that Murray should still be brought to receive his sentence on his knees-Mr. Pelham, the prime minister, observing, that, if the House had not all the authority it wished, it ought at least to exert all it had. But a few days after, when the sergeant-at-arms was called in to make his report, he informed the House that the object of their vengeance had absconded. A reward of five hundred pounds was then voted for his apprehension; but he was never taken; the exaction of the ceremony of kneeling by the House was attended with considerable awkwardness from this time forward; and at length on the 16th of March, 1772, a standing order (so called with a double appropriateness) was made, that when any person was brought to the bar as a delinquent he should receive the judgment of the House standing. "The alteration made by that order," observes Hatsell, with becoming official solemnity, "was suggested by the humanity of the House."

THE best successor of Milton has described the character of the great poet's mind in one celebrated line :

:

"Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart."

It might at first seem, looking at the accuracy of this forcible image, that the name of Milton could not be properly associated with the state of society during the times in which he flourished. It is true that in the writings of Milton we have very few glimpses of the familiar life of his day; no set descriptions of scenes and characters; nothing that approaches in the slightest degree to the nature of anecdote; no playfulness, no humour. Wordsworth continues his apostrophe:

"Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea."

The sprightlier dramatists have the voices of

"Shallow rivers, by whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals."

It is pleasant to sit in the sunshine and listen to the bubbling of the runnel over its pebbly bottom: but the times of Milton were for the most part dark and stormy, and with them the voice of the sea was in harmony. We can learn, while listening to that voice, when there was calm and when there was tempest. But Milton was not only the great literary name of his period-he was a public man, living in the heart of the mightiest struggle betwixt two adverse principles that England ever encountered. Add to this he was essentially a Londoner. He was born in Bread Street; he died in Cripplegate. During a long life we may trace him, from St. Paul's School, through a succession of London residences which, taking their names with their ordinary associations, sound as little poetical as can well be imagined-St. Bride's Churchyard, Aldersgate Street, Barbican, Holborn, Petty France, Bartholomew Close, Jewin Street, Bunhill Fields. The houses which he inhabited have been swept away; their pleasant gardens are built

VOL. 11.

H

over.

But the name of Milton is inseparably connected with these prosaic realities. That name belongs especially to London.

The portrait at the head of this article represents the Milton of nineteen. He has himself left us a picture of his mind at this period. His first Latin elegy, addressed to Charles Deodati, is supposed by Warton to have been written about 1627. The writer was born in 1608. We shall transcribe a few passages from Cowper's translation of this elegy :

66

:

I well content, where Thames with influent tide

My native city laves, meantime reside:

Nor zeal nor duty now my steps impel

To reedy Cam, and my forbidden cell;

Nor aught of pleasure in those fields have I,
That, to the musing bard, all shade deny.
'T is time that I a pedant's threats disdain,
And fly from wrongs my soul will ne'er sustain.
If peaceful days in letter'd leisure spent,
Beneath my father's roof, be banishment,
Then call me banish'd; I will ne'er refuse
A name expressive of the lot I choose.
I would that, exil'd to the Pontic shore,
Rome's hapless bard had suffer'd nothing more;
He then had equall'd even Homer's lays,
And, Virgil! thou hadst won but second praise.
For here I woo the Muse, with no control;

For here my books-my life-absorb me whole."

His father's roof was in Bread Street, in the parish of Allhallows. The sign of the Spread Eagle, which hung over his father's door, was the armorial bearing of his family; but the sign indicated that the house was one of business, and the business of Milton's father was that of a scrivener. Here, in some retired back room, looking most probably into a pleasant little garden, was the youthful poet surrounded by his books, perfectly indifferent to the more profitable writing of bonds and agreements that was going forward in his father's office. It was Milton's happiness to possess a father who understood the genius of his son, and whose tastes were in unison with his own. In the young poet's beautiful verses, Ad Patrem, also translated by Cowper, he says,—

Of Milton's father Aubrey says, "He was an ingenious man, delighted in music, and composed many songs now in print, especially that of Oriana." The poet thus addresses his father in reference to the same accomplishment:

thyself

Art skilful to associate verse with airs
Harmonious, and to give the human voice
A thousand modulations, heir by right

Indisputable of Arion's fame.

Now say, what wonder is it, if a son

Of thine delight in verse; if, so conjoin'd
In close affinity, we sympathize

In social arts and kindred studies sweet?"

There was poetry then, and poetical associations, within Milton's home in the close city. Nor were poetical influences wanting without. The early writings of Milton teem with the romantic associations of his youth, and they have the character of the age sensibly impressed upon them. In the epistle to Deodati we have an ample description of that love of the drama, whether comedy or tragedy, which he subsequently connected with the pursuits of his mirthful and his contemplative man. To the student of nineteen.

"The grave or gay colloquial scene recruits

My spirits spent in learning's long pursuits."

His descriptions of the comic characters in which he delights appear rather to be drawn from Terence than from Jonson or Fletcher. But in tragedy he pretty clearly points at Shakspere's 'Romeo' and at 'Hamlet.' 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' were probably written some four or five years after this epistle, when Milton's father had retired to Horton, and his son's visits to London were occasional. But "the well-trod stage" is still present to his thoughts. There is a remarkable peculiarity in all Milton's early poetry which is an example of the impressibility of his imagination under local circumstances. He is the poet, at one and the same time, of the city and of the country. In the epistle to Deodati he displays this mixed affection for the poetical of art and of nature :—

"Nor always city-pent, or pent at home,

I dwell; but, when spring calls me forth to roam,
Expatiate in our proud suburban shades

Of branching elm, that never sun pervades."

But London is thus addressed :

"Oh city, founded by Dardanian hands,

Whose towering front the circling realms commands,

Too blest abode! no loveliness we see

In all the earth, but it abounds in thee."

Every reader is familiar with the exquisite rural pictures of 'L'Allegro;' but the scenery, without the slightest difficulty, may be placed in the immediate "suburban shades" which he has described in the epistle. It is scarcely necessary to remove them even as far as the valley of the Colne. The transition is immediate from the hedge-row elms, the russet lawns, the upland hamlets, and the nut-brown ale, to

"Tower'd cities please us then,

And the busy hum of men,

Where throngs of knights and barons bold

In weeds of peace high triumphs hold,

With store of ladies, whose bright eyes

Rain influence, and judge the prize
Of wit, or arms, while both contend

To win her grace, whom all commend.

There let Hymen oft appear
In saffron robe, with taper clear,
And pomp and feast and revelry,
With mask and antique pageantry,—-
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer-eves by haunted stream.
Then to the well-trod stage anon," &c.

So, in Il Penseroso,' there is a similar transition from the even-song of the nightingale, and the sullen roar of the far-off curfew, to

"The bellman's drowsy charm

To bless the doors from nightly harm."

And there, in like manner, we turn from

to

"Arched walks of twilight groves

And shadows brown,"

the high embowed roof

With antic pillars massy proof,

And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light."

"No man," says Thomas Warton, was ever so disqualified to turn Puritan as Milton." In these his early poems, according to this elegant critic, his expressed love of choral church music, of Gothic cloisters, of the painted windows and vaulted aisles of a venerable cathedral, of tilts and tournaments, of masques and pageantries, is wholly repugnant to the anti-poetical principles which he afterwards adopted. We doubt exceedingly whether Milton can be held to have turned Puritan to the extent in which Warton accepts the term. Milton was a republican in politics, and an asserter of liberty of conscience, independent of Church government, in religion. But the constitution of his mind was utterly opposed to the reception of such extreme notions of moral fitness as determined the character of a Puritan. There has been something of exaggeration and mistake in this matter. For example Warton, in a note on that passage in the epistle to Deodati in which Milton is supposed to allude to Shakspere's tragedies, says, "His warmest poetical predilections were at last totally obliterated by civil and religious enthusiasm. Seduced by the gentle eloquence of fanaticism, he listened no longer to the wild and native wood-notes of Fancy's sweetest child.' In his Iconoclastes' he censures King Charles for studying one, whom we well know was the closet-companion of his solitudes, William Shakespeare.' This remonstrance, which not only resulted from his abhorrence of a king, but from his disapprobation of plays, would have come with propriety from Prynne or Hugh Peters. Nor did he now perceive that what was here spoken in contempt conferred the highest compliment on the elegance of Charles's private character." Mr. Waldron had the merit of pointing out, some forty or fifty years ago, that the passage in the Iconoclastes' to which Warton alludes gives not the slightest evidence of Milton's listening no longer to "Fancy's sweetest child," nor of reproaching Charles for having made Shakspere the "closet-companion of his solitudes." Milton is arguing—with the want of charity certainly which belongs to an advocate-that "the deepest policy of a tyrant hath been ever to counterfeit religious ;" and, applying this to the devotion of the Icon Basilike,' he thus proceeds: The poets also, and some English, have been in this point so mindful of decorum as to put never more pious words in the mouth of any person than of a tyrant. I shall not instance an abstruse author, wherein the King may be less conversant, but one whom we well know was the closet-companion of his solitudes, William Shakespeare, who introduces the person of Richard III. speaking in as high a strain of piety and mortification as is uttered in any passage in this book" (the Icon Basilike'). He then quotes a speech of Shakspere's