Isaak Walton.-Isaak Walton (1593-1683) is one of the best remembered of the many seventeenth century writers who took refuge from the troubled spirit of their age, in the celebration of simple country pleasures. He was a London linen-draper, who spent his working days in measuring cloth and serving his customers over the shop counter; but who passed his holidays in quite another fashion, roaming with fishing-rod and basket along the banks of streams, and gazing with unspoiled eyes at the unspoiled peace and gayety of nature. His "Complete Angler" was printed in 1653, amid the fierce political and religious agitations of the Commonwealth; but a sweeter or more untroubled book has never been written. It is one of the most endeared of English classics, and will be read with delight when a thousand more imposing works have been forgotten.

V. JOHN MILTON (1608-1674)

Introduction. In the great struggle between the king and parliament, between the old order and the new in government, religion, and social life, the poets ranged themselves almost to a man on the side of the king. But the greatest of all, and next to Shakespeare the mightiest spirit in the history of the English imagination, was a Puritan. In John Milton the passion for liberty and the spiritual earnestness which were at the heart of Puritanism, found themselves for once united with the poet's passion for beauty and the great artist's power of expression. The result of this fusion was a character and an achievement which, whether we regard Milton as poet or as patriot, must compel the wondering veneration of men.

Milton's Youth.-John Milton was born December 9, 1608, in Bread Street, London. His father was a scrivener (notary public), who had embraced the Puritan faith. During Milton's boyhood, England was still Elizabethan; geniality and charm of life had not yet given place to that gloomy harshness which Puritanism afterward took on. Milton was taught music, and was allowed to range at will through the English poets; among these Spenser, the poet of pure beauty, exercised

His

over him a spell which was to leave its traces upon all the work of his early manhood. He entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in his sixteenth year. He had already determined to be a poet, and that too in no ordinary sense. mind was fixed on lofty themes, and he believed that such themes could be fitly treated only by one who had led a lofty and austere life. The magnificent ode, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," which deals with the signs and portents filling the world at the Saviour's birth, was written at twentyone. It showed clearly that another mighty poet had been given to England.

Milton's Residence at Horton.-Two years later Milton left Cambridge and went to Horton, a little village west of London, whither his father had retired to spend his declining days. Here, in a beautiful country of woods, meadows and brimming streams, the young poet spent five quiet years. To the outward view he was all but idle, merely "turning over the Greek and Latin classics" in a long holiday. Really he was hard at work, preparing himself by meditation, by communion with nature and with the lofty spirits of the past, for some achievement in poetry which (to use his own words) England "would not willingly let die." The chief immediate result was the descriptive poem in two parts, "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," the masque Comus and the elegy "Lycidas.'

Milton's Public Career and Prose Writings.-The twenty years of Milton's public life were preceded by a period of travel abroad (1638-1639), chiefly in Italy. Here he met Galileo, was entertained by the Italian literary academies, and pondered much upon a projected epic poem on the subject of King Arthur's wars, a subject suggested to him by the epics of Tasso and Ariosto. His return was hastened by news of King Charles's expedition against the Scots, a step whose seriousness Milton well knew. Once back in London, he was drawn into a pamphlet war on the question of church government. Then followed his marriage to Mary Powell, the daughter of a cavalier squire. The marriage was ill-starred. After his wife's temporary desertion of him Milton published several pamphlets on divorce.

These were received with astonishment and execration by his countrymen, who did not see that Milton was only bringing to bear, upon one issue of domestic life, that free spirit of question everywhere spreading change through the social fabric of England. Milton's revolutionary spirit next led him to attack the censorship of the press. The time-honored institution of the censorship he saw to be an intolerable hinderance to freedom of thought; and in a pamphlet entitled Areopagitica, the greatest of his prose writings, he launched against it all the thunders and lightnings of his magnificent rhetoric. On the execution of the king (1649) Milton was the first to lift up his voice, amid the hush and awe of consternation, in defence of the deed. His pamphlet "On the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was of such timely service to the Commonwealth party that he was offered the position of Latin secretary to Cromwell's government, his duties being to indite correspondence with foreign powers, and to reply to attacks by foreign pamphleteers. In the midst of a controversy of this sort his eyes failed, and ir a short time he was totally blind. He continued his duties. with the help of an amanuensis, until he was dismissed in 1658 by General Monk, who was already plotting to restore Charles's son to the throne, as King Charles II. On the king's return in 1660, Milton was forced to go into hiding, and he barely escaped paying with his life for his fearless support of the Commonwealth party.

Milton's Return to his Poetic Mission.-During the long period of his public career, from 1642 to 1658, Milton wrote no poetry except a few sonnets. These are sixteen in number. Some of them, such as the famous sonnet on the massacre of the Piedmontese Protestants by the Catholic soldiery, deal with public affairs. Others are personal. Among these last the finest are two upon his own blindness, and one upon the memory of his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, who had died in the first year of their marriage.

Except for these brief returns to his poetic mission, Milton had hidden "that one talent which is death to hide." But he had more than once turned aside, in his pamphlets, to throw out a proud hint concerning the work laid upon him

by the great Task-master, of adding something majestic and memorable to the treasury of English verse. Ever since his college days he had looked forward to this work, considering many subjects in turn. By 1642 he had virtually decided upon the subject of the Fall of Adam. During the sixteen years between 1642 and his dismissal from the Latin secretaryship, amid all the "noises and hoarse disputes" of the time, this subject lay in his mind, gradually gathering to itself the riches of long study and reflection. When at last his duty as a patriot was done, he turned at once to his deferred task. Forced to seek shelter from the storm of the royalist reaction, he carried with him into his hiding place the opening book of Paradise Lost, begun two years earlier. The poem was finished by 1665, and was published by an obscure printer in 1667.

In 1671, four years after the publication of Paradise Lost, appeared Milton's third volume of verse. (The college and Horton poems had been published in 1645.) It consisted of Paradise Regained, a supplement to Paradise Lost; and of Samson Agonistes, a drama in the Greek manner, on an Old Testament subject which Milton had thought of treating nearly thirty years before.

Milton's Last Years.-Milton lived for three years after the publication of his last poems. Much of his patrimony had disappeared in the readjustments of the Restoration, and in the great London fire of 1666; but he was still able to live in modest comfort. The painter Richardson gives us a glimpse of the poet during his last years, as he was led about the streets clad "in a gray camblet coat," or as he sat at the door of his house, near Bunhill Fields, to receive visitors. "Lately," continues Richardson, "I had the good fortune to have another picture of him from an aged clergyman in Dor setshire. In a small house, up one pair of stairs which was hung with rusty green, he found John Milton, sitting in an elbow chair; black clothes, and neat enough; pale but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty and with chalkstones." The picture makes us realize how far Milton had traveled from the world of his youth. In making himself over from Elizabethan to Cromwellian he had suffered much