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To the novice, who is beginning to decipher the inner meaning of sermons in stones in which the ages have recorded, all unconsciously, the life and aspiration of the past, these words may sound harsh and fantastic.

With the memory of such rare geniuses as Michael Angelo and Wren, and their awe-inspiring cathedrals, built in the Renaissance forms, one may hesitate before completely accepting Ruskin's dictum. Ruskin himself has done homage to their genius and the greatness of their work. "There were of course," he says, "noble exceptions." Yet surely the devout Christian must feel under their glorious domes not so much like praying and reverencing his Maker as glorifying the work of men's hands. Under any dome and architectural reminder of Roman thought and life, whether it be Wren's mighty St. Paul's, or his small and exquisitely proportioned St. Stephen's, Wallbrook, almost in its shadow, the worshipper must feel something akin to Ruskin's sentiment. A meek and contrite heart feels alien and uncomforted amid its perfection.

But Ruskin's word chiefly concerns the more perfect Gothic of the Continent, and the manifestations there--worse than any in England--of riotous and insolent excess in its Renaissance work. The most ostentatious and offensive monument in Westminster Abbey, which is adorned with meaningless mouldings, artificial garlands, and cherubs weeping hypocritic tears, is not so odious as those which Venice, Rome, Antwerp, and a hundred other cities reared upon the Continent. Those tasteless, costly structures which modern Englishmen are but now learning to condemn illustrate completely the pride and arrogance of a world drunk with new wealth, in which fashion supplants beauty.

Yet to a large extent the England of the splendid Tudor period and the England of the Stuarts substituted for the beautiful and sincere forms of an earlier period a style of construction and decoration which showed distinct decadence. Witness the carvings in the chapel and dining-hall of the Charterhouse, new in Milton's boyhood, the carvings in the dining-halls of the different Inns of Court, and mural tablets everywhere with their obese cherubs and ghastly death's heads. In the quaint beam and plaster front of Staple's Inn on Holborn still remains the ancient type of domestic architecture which antedated and accompanied Milton's boyhood. Hundreds of such cosy, homelike residences with their ample windows of many leaded panes lined the city streets. The merchants who lived in them sold their wares in the shops beneath, and, if they were artificers, housed their apprentices within them. They were built solidly to last for centuries. Strong beams upheld the broad, low-studded ceilings. Capacious fireplaces opened into chimneys whose construction was often made a work of art. Around the house-door were carvings of saints or devils, of prophets, hobgoblins or grotesque dragons, of birds and bees, and any wild or lovely fancy that the craftsman loved to perpetuate in wood or stone. The home must be made beautiful as well as the sanctuary. In those days the mania of migration had not yet destroyed the permanence and sacredness of the homestead. Where the young man brought his bride, even in a city home, there he hoped to dwell and dandle his grandchildren upon his knee. It was Milton's fate to know many homes in London. Discoveries and travel of the Elizabethan period had broken many traditions of the past, and the old order in his day was yielding to the new. But half the architecture of two hundred years before him still remained, and all the traditions of the past were fresh. The dingy and mutilated relics of the time before the Tudors which, outside the Gothic churches, alone remain to us, reveal but little of what he saw.

Stow had then but just written his invaluable chronicles, and little antiquarian interest prevailed. For the first time in human history men sailed around the globe. New worlds were opening to men's visions. Not only dreams of wealth without labour, but golden actualities had dazzled the imagination of thousands. Drake and Hawkins, Frobisher and Raleigh were adding new lustre to an age hitherto unparalleled in prosperity and enterprise. Emerson's description of the Englishman as having a "telescopic appreciation of distant gain" was exemplified.

England was rich in poets, great even in Shakespeare's time. Of two hundred and forty who published verses, forty are remembered to-day. Yet of England's six million people, half could not read at all. Never was there among people of privilege such a proportion of accomplished men. Every man tried his hand at verses, and learned to sing a madrigal, and tinkle the accompaniment with his own fingers. Gentlemen travelled to Italy and brought back or made themselves translations of Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso. Not only learned ladies like Queen Elizabeth, who had had Roger Ascham for instructor, wrote Latin, but many others were accomplished in those severer studies which ladies in a later age neglected.

In 1605 the bills of mortality included the ninety-seven parishes within the walls, sixteen parishes without the walls, and six contiguous outparishes in Middlesex and Surrey. During Milton's lifetime, they included the city of Westminster and the parishes of Islington, Lambeth, Stepney, Newington, Hackney, and Redriff. Scarlet fever was formerly confounded with measles, and does not appear to be reported as a separate disease until 1703.

In 1682 Sir William Petty, speaking of the five plagues that had visited London in the preceding hundred years, remarks: "It is to be remembered the plagues of London do commonly kill one-fifth of the inhabitants, and are the chief impediment against the growth of the city."

In Milton's boyhood common folk were crowded into such narrow, wooden tenements as one may still see within the enclosure of St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate,--almost the only ones that still remain within the city. There were no sewers and no adequate pavement until 1616. House refuse was not infrequently thrown into the street, and sometimes upon the heads of passers-by, though ancient laws enjoined each man to keep the front of his house clean and to throw no refuse into the gutter. In short, ideas on sanitation in London were much like those in Havana before the summer of 1898.

It is difficult to obtain accurate statistics of the population of London, but Loftie estimates that in 1636 seven hundred thousand people lived "within its liberties."

Where now lofty, gray stone buildings of pretentious and nondescript architecture shelter banks and offices, gabled buildings with overlapping stories darkened the streets. The city was not dependent on the suburbs or upon other towns for aught but food and raw material. Wool and silk and linen, leather and all metals were wrought close to the shops where they were sold. The odours of glue and dyestuffs tainted the fresh air. The sound of tools and hammers, and of the simple looms and machinery of the day, worked by foot or hand power, were heard.

New objects of luxury began to be manufactured--fans, ladies' wigs, fine knives, pins, needles, earthen fire-pots, silk and crystal buttons, shoe-buckles, glassware, nails, and paper. New products from foreign lands were introduced and naturalised--among them, turkeys, hops, and apricots. Forks had not yet appeared as a necessary table furnishing. Kissing was a universal custom, and a guest kissed his hostess and all ladies present.

Though in the time of Milton's father the amenities of life had much increased, cruelty and severe punishments were more frequent than in an earlier age. Three-fourths of all the heretics burned at the stake in England suffered in those five years of the bloody queen who, with her Spanish husband at her court, ruled from 1553 to 1558 over unhappy England. Many a time must the boy Milton have heard blood-curdling tales from aged men of these ghastly days when Ridley, Cranmer, Hooper, and John Rogers withered in the flames. His own father may have seen the later martyrdoms of Roman Catholics in Elizabeth's reign, or of that Unitarian in 1585 who suffered at the stake for the denial of the divinity of Christ--a theological view with which Milton himself is shown to have had much sympathy.

The historian tells us of men boiled and women burned for poisoning; of ears nailed to the pillory and sliced off for libellous and incendiary language. We read of frightful floggings through the streets and of an enormous number of men hanged. Many rogues escaped punishment altogether, for, though punishment when it came was terrifically out of proportion to the offence, and in its publicity incited by suggestion to more crime, the law was often laxly administered.

All periods are more or less transitional, but the England into which Milton came in the first years of the seventeenth century was peculiarly in a state of transformation and unsettlement. As in the beginning of the twentieth century, men's minds were receiving radical, new impressions, and had not yet assimilated or comprehended them. The doctrines of religious and political freedom were the dreams of prophets, and were yet to be conceived a possibility by the masses, who through dumb centuries had toiled and laughed and wept, and then stretched themselves in mother earth and slept among their fathers. The tender, growing shoots which in the days of Wiclif had sprung from the seed, small as a mustard seed, which he had planted, had grown. Birds now lodged among its branches. The time was ripening when, with the axe and hammer of Milton and his mighty compeers, some of its timbers should help rear a new structure for church and state; and others should be driven deep under the foundations of the temple which men of English blood should in the future rear to democracy.

MILTON'S LIFE ON BREAD STREET

Directly under the shadow of St. Mary le Bow Church, and almost within bowshot of old St. Paul's, in a little court off Bread Street, three doors from Cheapside, John Milton, the son of John Milton, scrivener, was born, December 9th in 1608. The house was marked by the sign of a spread eagle, probably adopted from the armorial bearings of the family, which appear on the original agreement for the publication of "Paradise Lost." John Milton, scrivener, whose business was much like that of the modern attorney, was the son of a well-to-do Catholic yeoman of Oxfordshire, and is said to have studied for a time at Christ Church, Oxford. Certain it is that he turned Protestant, was cast off by his father, and in Elizabeth's reign settled in London; by 1600, when he married his wife Sarah, the worldly goods with which he her endowed in the church of All Hallows, Bread Street, included two houses on that street, besides others elsewhere.

We know little of Milton's mother, except that she was a woman of a warm heart and generous hand, and had weak eyes which compelled her to wear spectacles before she was thirty, while her husband read without them at the age of eighty-four. Three of their six little ones died in babyhood, but the little John's elder sister, Anne, and younger brother, Christopher, grew with him to middle life.

It was a musical household; an organ and other instruments were part of the possessions most highly prized in the Bread Street home. The little lad must have looked with pride at the gold chain and medal presented to his father by a Polish prince for a composition in forty parts which the former had written for him. Many chimes in country churches played the psalm tunes that he had harmonised. To this day a madrigal and other songs of his are known to music lovers. No wonder that the boy reared in this home was ever a lover of sweet sounds, and learned to evoke them with his own little fingers upon the organ keyboard.

The Bread Street of Milton's day, though swept over by the Great Fire, was not obliterated, and still covers its old site. Just at the head of it, on Cheapside, stood the "Standard in Cheap"--an ancient monument in hexagonal shape, with sculptures on each side, and on the top the figure of a man blowing a horn. Here Wat Tyler and Jack Cade had beheaded prisoners. A little west was the Gothic Cross in Cheap, one of the nine crosses erected in memory of Queen Eleanor, somewhat similar to the modern one at Charing Cross.

Only a few steps from his father's house the little John found himself in the thickest traffic and bustle of the city. Here were mercers' and goldsmiths' shops, and much coming and going of carts, and occasionally coaches, which, as the antiquarian Stow declared, "were running on wheels with many whose parents had been glad to go on foot," for coaches were but newly come into fashion. As the little lad stood at the street corner looking east and west along Cheapside,--the ancient market-place,--his eye fell on well-built houses three and four stories high; they were turned gable end to the street, were built of timber, brick, and plaster, and had projecting upper stories of woodwork. Stow describes a row built by Thomas Wood, goldsmith, of "fair large houses, for the most part possessed of mercers," and westward, beginning at Bread Street, "the most beautiful frame of fair houses and shops that be within the walls of London or elsewhere in England. It containeth in number ten fair dwelling-houses and fourteen shops, all in one frame, uniformly builded, four stories high, beautified toward the street with the goldsmiths' arms and the likeness of woodmen, in memory of his name, riding on monstrous beasts; all of which is cast in lead, richly painted over and gilt."

The modern visitor, as he turns from the jostling crowds of Cheapside into Bread Street, which is scarcely wider than a good sidewalk, will find no trace of aught that Milton saw. The present mercantile establishment, at numbers 58-63, that covers the site of his house, covers as well the whole Spread Eagle Court, in which it stood. It bears no inscription, but, if one enters, the courteous proprietor may conduct him to the second story where a bust of Milton is placed over the spot where he was born.

A little farther south, on the corner of Watling Street, is the site of All Hallows Church, where Milton was baptised, and which is marked by a gray stone bust of the poet and the inscription:

"MILTON BORN IN BREAD STREET 1608 BAPTISED IN CHURCH OF ALL HALLOWS WHICH STOOD HERE ANTE 1878."

The register of his baptism referred to him as "John, sonne of John Mylton, Scrivener."

Here the Milton family sat every Sunday and listened to the sermons of Reverend Richard Stocke, a zealous Puritan and most respected man, who is said to have had the gift of influencing young people.

Further south, on the same side as All Hallows, were "six almshouses builded for poor decayed brethren of the Salter's Company," and beyond this the church of St. Mildred, the Virgin. Upon crossing Basing Lane, Milton saw the most noted house upon the street, known as "Gerrard Hall." This was an antique structure "built upon arched vaults and with arched gates of stone brought from Caen in Normandy," as Stow relates. A giant is said to have lived here, and the large fir pole in the high hall, which reached to the roof, was said to have been his staff. Stow thought it worth while to measure it, and declares it was fifteen inches in circumference. Small boys in Bread Street may well have stood in awe of such a cane.

Whether the famous "Mermaid" Tavern was in Bread or Friday Street or between them seems doubtful, but Ben Jonson's lines plainly indicate Bread Street:

"At Bread-street's Mermaid having dined and merry, Proposed to go to Holborn in a wherry."

This portrait shows us a sweet-faced, sober little Puritan in short-cropped auburn hair, wearing a broad lace frill about his neck, and an elaborately braided jacket. This portrait is now in private hands, from whence it is to be hoped that it will some day find its way to the National Portrait Gallery, and be placed beside the striking and noble likeness of the poet in middle life.

The lines which were written beneath the first engraving of it may have been the poet's own:

"When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing; all my mind was set Serious to learn and know, and thence to do What might be public good; myself I thought Born to that end, born to promote all truth And righteous things."

Milton appears to have been very fond of his preceptor, a Scotch Puritan named Young. He seems to have well grounded the lad in Latin, aroused in him a love of poetry, and set him to making English and Latin verses. But the little John must go to school with other boys; and what more natural than that the famous St. Paul's School, within five minutes' walk, should have been selected?

When Milton went to school in 1620, St. Paul's Cathedral was become old and much in need of restoration. It had been built on the site of an older church and was in process of erection and alteration from about 1090 to 1512, when its new wooden steeple, covered with lead, was completed. Its cross was estimated later by Wren to have been at least 460 feet from the ground. This had disappeared in a fire in 1561, and none replaced it. What Milton saw was a huge edifice, chiefly Gothic, with a central tower about 260 feet high. The classical porch by Inigo Jones was not added, neither were certain buildings which abutted the nave torn down until after Milton's school-days were over. On the east end, next his schoolhouse, was a great window thirty-seven feet high, above which was a circular rose window. The choir stretched westward 224 feet, which, with the nave, made the entire length 580 feet. When Jones's portico was added, its whole length was 620 feet. The area which it covered was 82,000 feet, and it was by far the largest cathedral in all England. Upon the southwest corner was a tower once used as a prison, and also as a bell and clock tower. This was the real Lollards' tower, rather than the one at Lambeth which is so called. The northwest tower was likewise a prison. The nave was of transitional Norman design, of twelve bays in length, and with triforium and clerestory. For many decades a large part of the cathedral was desecrated by a throng of hucksters, idlers, and fops.

Ben Jonson makes constant allusion to "Paul's." Here he studied the extravagant costumes of the day. According to Dekker, the tailors frequented its aisles to catch the newest fashions: "If you determine to enter into a new suit, warn your tailor to attend you in Paul's, who with his hat in his hand, shall like a spy discover the stuff, colour, and fashion of any doublet or hose that dare be seen there; and stepping behind a pillar to fill his table-book with those notes, will presently send you into the world an accomplished man."

Bishop Earle, writing when Milton was twenty years of age, describes St. Paul's as follows: "It is a heap of stones and men with a vast confusion of languages; and were the steeple not sanctified, nothing liker Babel. The noise in it is like that of bees mixed of walking tongues and feet. It is the exchange of all discourse, and no business whatsoever but is here stirring and afoot. It is the market of young lecturers, whom you may cheapen here at all rates and sizes. All inventions are emptied here, and not few pockets. The best sign of a temple in it is that it is the thieves' sanctuary."

Well may John Milton senior have cautioned his young son not to tarry in "Duke Humphrey's Walk," as this scene of confusion was called, on his way home from school, though he may well have taken him to inspect the lofty tomb of Dean Colet or the monuments to John of Gaunt and Duke Humphrey and the shrine of St. Erkenwald, which was behind the high altar. As a man, in later years, Milton may have walked down from Aldersgate on a December in 1641 and attended the funeral of the great painter, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who for nine years had made his residence in England, and was buried here.

In a corner of the churchyard stood a covered pulpit surmounted by a cross, where in ancient times the folkmote of the citizens was held. For centuries before Milton, this was a famous spot for outdoor sermons and proclamations. Here the captured flags from the Armada had waved above the preacher. But in 1629, when Milton was in Cambridge, Oliver Cromwell, in his maiden speech in Parliament, declared that flat popery was being preached at Paul's Cross. When Cromwell's day of power was come, and the cathedral during the war was sometimes used to stable horses, Paul's Cross was swept away, and its leaden roof melted into bullets. Before that, in 1633, preaching had been removed from there into the choir.

Of the architecture of the bishop's palace, which stood at the northeast of the cathedral, we know nothing, but we know that it existed in Milton's school-days. Adjoining the palace was a "Haw," or small enclosure surrounded by a cloister, filled with tombs, and upon the walls was a grisly picture of the Dance of Death. Death was represented by a skeleton, who led the Pope, and emperor, and a procession of men of all conditions. In brief, the little "Haw" was a small edition of the Pisan Campo Santo.

"He generally sat up half the night as well in voluntary improvements of his own choice as the exact perfecting of his school exercises; so that at the age of fifteen he was full ripe for academical training." During these years the boy probably learned French and Italian, as well as made a beginning in Hebrew.

It was in his last year at school that he paraphrased the ninety-fourth Psalm, beginning:

"When the blest seed of Terah's faithful son After long toil their liberty had won, And passed from Pharian fields to Canaan's land Led by the strength of the Almighty's hand, Jehovah's wonders were in Israel shown, His praise and glory were in Israel known."

Likewise Psalm one hundred and thirty-six, beginning:

"Let us with a gladsome mind Praise the Lord, for he is kind: For his mercies aye endure, Ever faithful, ever sure."

The present St. Paul's School is now splendidly housed in a great establishment in Hammersmith. But Milton's school and the one which arose on its ashes after the Great Fire are remembered by the following inscription: "On this site, A. D. 1512 to A. D. 1884, stood St. Paul's School, founded by Dr. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's." From the studio of Mr. Hamo Thornycroft at Kensington, whence came the heroic figures of Cromwell at Westminster and King Alfred at Winchester, St. Paul's School is to receive a noble statue of the great scholar.

MILTON AT CAMBRIDGE

The schoolmate whom Milton most loved was a physician's son, Charles Diodati, almost exactly his own age, who went to Cambridge a little in advance of him.

After his sister, who was then eighteen years old, had been wooed and won by Mr. Philips, and had made the first break in the home on Spread Eagle Court, Milton, now sixteen years old, followed his friend to Cambridge. Doubtless he rode on the coach, which every week the hale old stage-coach driver--Hobson--drove from the Bull's Inn on Bishopsgate Street. A well-to-do man was this worthy, who, in spite of eighty winters, still cracked his whip behind his span, and kept forty horses in his livery stable. Milton took a great fancy to him. He soon learned, as did every young gentleman intent on hiring a nag, that "Hobson's choice" meant taking the horse that stood nearest the stable door. Hobson is said to have been the first man in England to let out hackney-coaches. The modern visitor to the university town finds the old carrier honoured by a memorial; for he became a public benefactor, and among many generous gifts bequeathed a sum that to this day provides for a fine conduit and for the runnels of sparkling water that flow along the streets and around the town.

It was these men, with Shepard, Saltonstall, and a score more of Oxford and Cambridge men, who were the spiritual fathers of Samuel Adams, Warren, Otis, Hancock; of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Channing, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks; of Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, and Hawthorne; of Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner; of Motley, Bancroft, Prescott, and John Fiske. The Cambridge that Milton knew was the mother and the grandmother of the founders of states and of the architects of national constitutions and ideals.

Though most of the New England Puritan leaders came from Cambridge, Oxford furnished several of the great Puritans who remained at home--Pym, Vane, John Eliot, and Hampden.

It is estimated that nearly one hundred university men, between 1630 and 1647, left their comfortable homes and the allurements that Oxford, Cambridge, and the picturesque England of their time presented, to undergo the hardships of pioneers in the raw colony upon Massachusetts Bay. Of these, two-thirds came from Cambridge, a particularly large proportion from Emmanuel College. Of the forty or fifty Cambridge or Oxford men who were in Massachusetts in 1639, one-half were within five miles of Boston or Cambridge. It was this element of culture and character that determined the history of New England, and forced its stony soil to bring forth such a crop of men in the ages that were to come as made New England, in the words of Maurice, "the realisation in plain prose of the dreams which haunted Milton his whole life long."

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