At last, one day in January, my Uncle Jones rode over to see us and threw down a thin pamphlet upon the table in the hall. He was old-gamester enough to cry: “Here’s a plain trump will take all your best coat-cards.” My father happened to be away on business at Thame, and besides Richard there was no other man present but only a little chuckling, plump-cheeked, slow-moving clergyman, named the Reverend Robert Pory, whom Richard had brought to the house. My Uncle declared this pamphlet to be angelically written, and read out extracts from it to us in his rolling voice. It was titled The Reason of Church Government Urged against Prelaty.
The author argued in favour of a Presbyterial discipline for the Church, like that in use among the Scots, and rejected the contention that Bishops alone kept the Church free of schism—that, forsooth, if they were put down, an innumerable of heretical and independent sects would follow. He wrote that if they did indeed keep away schism, it was by bringing a chill and numbing stupidity of soul upon the people, and that with as good a plea might the Dead Palsy boast to a man that it kept him from cramps, pains and wounds and from the troublesome feeling of cold and heat. He charged also that the Irish rebellion lay at the Bishops’ door, inasmuch as they had spiritually starved the native Irish, who had revenged upon English bodies the Bishops’ negligence of their souls.
“This style,” said Richard, when my Uncle had read out a page or two, “is choice and poetical, greatly above that used by other pamphleteers; so that the author seems like one who, though his proper art is that of a goldsmith or lapidary, has set himself to the task of forging brass field-pieces and cannot refrain from unnecessary chasing and embossing of the breech.”
“Nevertheless,” said my Uncle Jones, “the bullets fired from this ornamental brass piece strike to kill. Read and see what great holes he! knocks in the arguments of Bishop Andrewes and Archbishop Usher of Armagh. Whosoever dares to bandy argument with this young man—for a young man he here acknowledges himself—will find his proposition racquetted back into his face.”
Richard took up the book, read a little in it, and nodded sagely once or twice. Then he thanked my Uncle and undertook to peruse it that very night. But the Reverend Pory, catching with the tail of his eye the name upon the title-page, cried out: “Why, upon my soul, here’s a name that I know as well almost as my own. He and I were schoolfellows together at St. Paul’s School, and went thence together to Cambridge University, to Christ’s College, where we were chamber-fellows, and we passed in the Schools at one and the same time, and afterwards we came to Oxford University together to be incorporated and take our degrees there also. Since that time, our roads have divaricated. Ay, that will be the man, on a wager of twenty pounds to a cracked farthing—Mr. John Milton.”
My Uncle Jones was eager to learn all that the Reverend Pory could teach him concerning this Mr. Milton; but Mr. Pory was reluctant, declaring that he knew him too well. He said that to have been thrown for fifteen years into close companionship with another, from childhood upwards to young manhood, and never to have quarrelled with him and never to have conferred intimately or lovingly with him, and (when there was a parting of their ways) not to have grieved, nor to have written him a letter nor expected one from him, nor to have sought him out in his house in London (though it lay but four or five streets off from his own) and on meeting him in the street once by chance to have gone by with no better than a civil “good day”—all this, Mr. Pory said, argued such neutrality of affection, that he did not think it befitted him to speak at large upon the subject of Mr. Milton, though, for courtesy’s sake, he would answer any question that were put to him.
“Tell me first,” said my Uncle Jones, is he a man of the extraordinary erudition that he here professes, or does he use the bookish labours of another?”
Mr. Pory answered: “His nose was never out of a book, hardly, during the whole time of our acquaintance, unless he were at his music, or fencing, or disputing in the Schools. Even at seven years old he would always rather book it than whip a top or bowl or hoop along. At College he would lap up a whole library with as little ado as a cat laps up a great bowlful of milk—sip, sip, sip, sip, sip, sip—rustling the pages over regularly and without pause. Greek, Dutch, Spanish, Hebrew, French—it was all sweet milk to him.”
My Uncle Jones then asked: “Have you read any of his verses? He writes in the preface to the second part of this pamphlet that his mind has been hitherto wholly set upon solemn and wholesome poetry, and that he has long meditated a noble poem in the English tongue in celebration of this Island’s glory: intending perhaps to leave something so well written to aftertimes that they should not willingly let die. But he considers that in the present tribulation of our Church it would be cowardly and ungrateful not to rise up and plead the cause of God and the Church against insulting enemies. And that he will now leave the calm and pleasant solitariness in which he has versified, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes; and he undertakes that, when the voyage is over and our land freed again from ‘this impertinent yoke of Prelaty, under whose tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish,’ he will return again to converse with his Muse.”
“That is John Milton to a tittle,” said the Reverend Pory. “Nay, I have read but few of his verses. There were one or two Latin poems, I remember, which he published while he was at the University—a devout elegy miserably lamenting the death of Dr. Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, the same man indeed whose work he now disrespectfully confutes, and the other the death of Dr. Felton, Bishop of Ely, in which see lies Cambridge—for John was a valiant Prelatist in those days. Unless my memory deceives me, he wrote of them both as walking through the fields of Heaven in snow-white rochets and gilt sandals. Ay, also I remember another pretty set of verses upon the Gun-powder Plot, how Guy Fawkes and his fellow-conspirators were seduced by Satan himself to the abhorred condition of would-be regicides. It was enough to set a man’s bowels quaking to read John’s geographical report of the infernal regions where the plot was hatched. It had in it something of Guillaume du Bartas, I remember. Of his poems in English, I never saw but two, if I except some trifling pieces.”
“What were those?” asked my Uncle.
“The first, which he showed me himself,” said Mr. Pory, who spoke very slowly, “was an ‘Ode upon the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,’ and I believe that he looked that I should fall down upon my face with admiration at his condescension in letting me be the first to read it: for the ink was hardly dry upon the last verse. It was indeed very smoothly and ingeniously written: a variation, as I thought, upon a merry conceit of the Frenchman François Rabelais, who makes his heroic lumbering ogre weep tears as large as tennis-balls when he hears of the birth of Our Saviour. John had foraged through all the legends of antiquity, and the Hebrew Scriptures, to pull out great, gloomy gods to weep in a like manner; but their tears were no laughing matter to John as they had been to mad Rabelais. When I told him cheerfully and openly: ‘Why, John, you have made a very pretty and ingenious improvement upon Rabelais’ conceit of the tennis-balls,’ he was so wroth I feared he would make a tennis ball of me. Yet we were habituated not to quarrel, and I begged his pardon, saying that I had intended no offence and that I was no great judge of poems; he forgave me, but observed that ‘If Rabelais has sharked from me my own natural theme, using the advantage of his priority of birth, and sullied it with his filthy French additions, savouring of the jakes or bagnio, what is that to me? Rabelais is less than nothing and I detest him. Let me never hear more from you of Rabelais.’”
“And after that?” asked my Uncle Jones.
“Why, after that,” said the Reverend Pory, between a chuckle and a yawn: “after that, he huddled his verses away from me in his pocket or in drawers and could cast down his pen if ever I came into the room while he wrote them. However, there was another piece I saw, which was published about three years ago, in a book of Obsequies printed at the University Press. At Christ’s College in our time there was
one Ned King, whose father was a person of great consequence, being Secretary of State for Ireland during three reigns; and to Ned, by the King’s own mandate, was awarded a College Fellowship which fell vacant and which John had marked down as his own. It was a sore trial to John to see a youth five years younger than himself and his inferior in all studies and in all accomplishments but only tennis and horsemanship, seated above him at the Fellows’ table. I should not dare to allege that John Milton felt envy: one who considers himself, as he did, at least the equal of any man in the world (whether actually or potentially) cannot be stung with so ignoble a passion as envy. Yet it is soon espied where the thorn pricks. A College Fellowship to one of John’s spirit was but a trifle, a toy, a bauble: but that this toy was denied him which he had, in prospect, stretched out his proud hand to accept, was not to be tolerated. There was a very scurrilous lampoon, or Pasquinata, in Latin verse, written against Ned King, which was found pinned to the buttery door; it was so sharp and well-turned that its authorship was evident, and John won secret compliment upon it from some of the Fellows of the Country Party who loathed that Ned, though an affable and gracious lad, was foisted upon them by a Royal mandate.”
Richard asked: “How was this lampoon an obsequy?”
“Nay,” said Mr. Pory, “you must hear me out. The obsequy was written in English. For though Ned was a nimble tennis-player and a gallant huntsman, yet he had never learned to swim; and in a voyage to Dublin as he sailed upon a calm sea, not above a bowshot from the Welsh coast, his ship struck against a rock and for want of a boat down he went with her, calmly kneeling in prayer upon the deck. Then because he had been esteemed an ornament to our University, there was a book made of verses composed in his memory, in the Latin, Greek and English tongues, by a dozen or twenty poets of Cambridge. John Milton contributed an elegy in English, which brought up the rear of the obsequious procession. That I thought a very smooth and elegant piece, likewise, and John had so far forgiven poor Ned King for the crime of climbing into his chair before him and drinking off his claret, that he lamented him in verse no less gravely and sorrowfully than if he had been his brother—or one of the aforesaid two bishops—and strewed his laureate hearse with all manner of sweet flowers bound in mellifluous posies. Nevertheless, unless I misjudge him, he had not yet forgiven King Charles for that unlucky mandate—nay, I mean not to charge John with disloyalty or treason, but that a King should have the power to interfere with the College’s choice of Fellows and intrude his own candidate, this he resented strangely.”
“I confess I am with Mr. Milton in this resentment,” cried my Uncle Jones.
So encouraged, the Reverend Pory continued in his leisurely manner: “John’s animosity towards the Bishops I think I understand well enough. Our tutor, when we first came to the College, was Mr. William Chappell: he fell out with John, whom he called a proud rebel because John justified, by quotation, a false quantity that Mr. Chappell thought to have found in a Latin verse of his. To this name of ‘proud rebel’ John returned no answer but ‘ha, ha!’ spoken very mirthlessly and sarcastically. Then Mr. Chappell caught up a ferrule, with which he used to beat the younger scholars; and he would have thrashed John soundly (though this was against the laws of the College, John being adult, past breeching) but that John wrested it from him after a stroke or two—”
Here he broke off, a little abashed, having let his tongue run on further than he had intended, yet chuckling still to himself. My brother Richard encouraged him to proceed with: “Nay, Sir, you tell your tale impartially, and make all as plain as the hand of a clock. Come, what happened next?”
“Well,” said Mr. Pory, “John was sent away from the College for awhile, for Mr. Chappell refused to continue as his tutor, and without one John could not remain within the gates. However, he did not lose a term; another tutor was presently found for him, one Mr. Tovey, with whom he agreed better. Then Archbishop Laud chose Mr. Chappell to be Provost of Trinity College in Dublin, and made him Bishop of Ross—who became, as you know, the Archbishop’s chief instrument in enforcing uniformity upon the Irish Church. This appointment, I believe, snatched from John all the former respect and awe in which he had held Prelaty; and into the same verses upon Ned King, whom he celebrated as ‘Lycidas,’ there sneaked, somewhat unseasonably, a few well-disguised scorns against the Bishops who mishandled their pastoral staffs and were unfaithful to their flocks. For he suspected that the Bishop of Ross had been instrumental in procuring the aforesaid Fellowship for poor Ned.”
My Uncle Jones durst reprove Mr. Pory for uncharitably representing this John Milton as swayed by mean motives; but he protested that he had meant nothing amiss and that the story was forced from him by my brother Richard. Richard laughed at them both, and said he hoped that the pamphlet which my Uncle had confidently recommended as angelical were not in truth penned by a spiteful imp thirsting for revenge against a tutor who had taken a stick to his shoulders.
I had myself kept silence during this narration, being busied with my needle by the fire. Now I laid it down and, begging pardon for my interruption, took up the cudgels on Mr. Milton’s behalf, for I misliked Richard’s derisions and laughter. I said that I could not regard the alleged motive as mean: for if a man has experience of a particular injustice, he naturally and rightly moralizes upon it, not confusing the instrument of injustice with the authority that wields it. Let a great number of men be abused or robbed by twenty or thirty several bishops, and the moral conclusion that each man fastens upon, namely that Prelaty is an ill form of government, is in a fair way to substantiation when their complaints are compared and added together; and if the abuses of Prelaty had been few or none, the general complaint against Bishops would never have been framed so blackly as now on all sides. “I have nothing against Bishops myself,” said I, “nor against His Majesty; yet if a bishop came into this hall and began finding fault with my needlework and testily pricking and cutting me with my scissors; or if by Royal mandate my little sister Betty were preferred to me at the dinner table and given the chair nearest to the fire, which is mine—why, then, I should doubtless incline to Mr. Milton’s opinion. Nobody can judge a case but from his own experience.”
The Reverend Pory thanked me for my speech and presently began praising to my Uncle Jones Mr. Milton’s lively humour in disputation. “I heard him at his best,” he said, “in a gaudy, or festival, which was held in the Hall of the College, when he was in his twentieth year, and they elected him ‘Father’ or President of the day. He led the philosophical dispute, speaking on the theme ‘That sportive exercises on occasion consort well with the study of Philosophy.’ I must first tell you this: he was so fair and pale of countenance and delicate of hand; and so curious in his apparel, wearing new-fashioned gowns of primrose colour or sky-blue, albeit with hanging sleeves, and silk stockings of rose or crimson (against the laws of the College); and he loved his own long tresses so well—which (while he studied) he was for ever slowly combing with an ivory comb, using first the right hand and then the left—that they nicknamed him ‘The Lady of Christ’s.’ This jest he now caught up and threw back again in their faces, asking how a Lady could become a Father? For, said he, the sage Greeks held that a woman remained always true to her sex, unless a god violated her, when the touch of his divinity made a man of her; and a man likewise remained true to his sex, unless he had the misfortune to kill a snake which (according to the Greeks again) is a spell that changes a man into a woman for a space of years, as once happened to the poet Tiresias….”
When he had uttered the word “Tiresias” I did not allow him to proceed, but begged him to tell me the colour of this John Milton’s hair—was it a light auburn?—were his eyes a dark grey?—were his nose and chin long?—did he pronounce his r’s very hard?
“Why, that is Mr. Milton! How are you acquainted with him?”
“I am not acquainted with him,” said I, smiling at him. “You may believe, if you wish, that I deduced the corporeal man from your acc
ount of his actions.” At this I took my leave, allowing them to make what they could of the mystery.
The next that I heard of Mr. Milton was that there was published a confutation of a former pamphlet by him. This confutation was written by Bishop Hall of Exeter, then a prisoner in the Tower, with the help of his son. The two struck lustily together in unison, like smiths who beat upon the same piece of iron lying on their anvil; and they gave Mr. Milton the name of a “scurrilous, grim, lowering, bitter Fool” and “carping poetaster” and alleged that he had been “vomited out from Cambridge University into a suburb-sink of London which, since his coming up, had groaned under two evils—him and the Plague”; and asserted that he spent his days between the playhouse and the brothel. The authors also charged (but immediately after withdrew the charge as uncharitable) that it was from disappointed ambition, from knowing that his own head would never fit a mitre, that Mr. Milton assailed the Bishops; and that he wrote his profane and beggarly pamphlets in the hope of winning the heart of a rich anti-prelatic widow.
My brother Richard said that this warfare of words pleased him as well as any play; but that if either party thought to heal the wounds of the Church by plasters of this sort, it was a most unskilful surgery. He told me: “Yet, I warrant, your Mr. Milton will rise again from the rushes where this buffet has laid him and at the next bout cast both the Bishop and his son out at the window.”
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