JOHN MILTON.

MILTON'S life may be divided into three parts: (1) 1608-1639; (2) 1639-1660; (3) 1660-1672 (1) He was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, London, towards the close of the year 1608. Bread Street is close by Friday Street, in which was the Mermaid Tavern, where Shakspere and Jonson, and the other great wits of the day, used to meet together; so that Milton may be said to have been born within sound of their famous merriments. His father seems to have been a man of a grave earnest nature, of high views on the subject of education and of the end of life, of strong religious convictions, himself well educated and accomplished, being a skilful and eager musician. Of his mother little is known. In very many respects he inherited his father's character.

He was very carefully educated at home under a private tutor, Thomas Young (his initials form part of Smectymnuus), at St. Paul's School, at Christ's College, Cambridge, at home again (Horton, Buckinghamshire), and lastly by a tour upon the Continent (in France, Italy, and Switzerland). Thus his formal education lasted down to his thirty-first year. The great number of the years thus occupied is to be accounted for by the fact that after he had once chosen his vocation of poetry, which he appears to have done at an early age, it seemed both to him and to his father above all things important that he should earnestly prepare himself for it. This first period of his life, then, may be called the period of preparation. During it he did not attempt any great work; he only prepared himself to attempt one. At Christmas 1629 he wrote his Hymn on the Morning of the Nativity, his first considerable work; seven years afterwards he wrote Lycidas, his last considerable minor work; between these he wrote L'Allegro and Il Penseroso and Comus, besides some sonnets and other short pieces.

(2) It might seem that in 1639 Milton was at last ready to address himself to his great task: that "the mellowing year" (Lycid. 5) had come; or to use another phrase (see Sonnet On arriving to his Three-and-twentieth Year), that he was sufficiently "endued" with that "inward ripeness" after which he had so sincerely and ardently aspired; but he was now to be drawn away, perhaps for ever, from the object of his devotion. Poetry was to be abandoned for politics. Such was the condition of the times, that other services than those of a poet were required of him. He obeyed this call, and for more than twenty years he gave himself up to the urgent political and social questions of the day. He wrote on the Freedom of the Press, on Church Government, on Divorce, on Education, in defence of the English people when assailed by Saumase for the execution of their king. During all this period he wrote no poetr} except a few sonnets. Of these sonnets several deal with the same matters which form the subjects of his prose works; others give some insight into his social and personal life: the last one, written in 1658, reflects his profound grief for the loss of his second wife. By his first wife he had been made the father of three daughters. His incessant studiousness injured his sight, and at last produced blindness: the immediate cause of that affliction being his controversy with Saumase (see Sonnet to Cyriac Skinner on his Blindness).

(3) When the Republic fell and was superseded, Milton was no longer able to serve his country as a political writer, He could now once more, after an interval of some twenty-one

years, entertain and pursue the great idea of his life: he now set himself to compose his great epic poem. The subject which had once attracted him-King Arthur-now gave place to a strangely different one-the Fall of Man. That former subject was not consonant with Milton's nature, educed and developed as it had been during the Commonwealth days, nor with the circumstances amidst which he found himself and the spectacles he witnessed. It was not practical and real enough. In 1667 appeared Paradise Lost, in ten books. It was in that same year that Dryden brought out his Annus Mirabilis. Thus in that year the great poetic leader of the setting age and the leader of the rising age stood strikingly contrasted. Four years afterwards were published Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. In 1674 Milton passed away from the evil times and evil tongues upon which his life had fallen.

HYMN ON THE NATIVITY.

INTRODUCTION.

THIS hymn was written by Milton in the year 1629, when he was just twenty-one years of age. Hallam therefore is inaccurate in saying that we have nothing written by Milton earlier than his sonnet on "his being arrived to the age of twenty-three," which would be written in December 1631. The Hymn was written while he was yet an undergraduate. He gives some account of his writing it in one of his elegies-the sixth-which is a letter addressed to his friend Deodati-that same friend the news of whose death met him when he returned from his tour on the Continent, and whom he bewailed in his Epitaphium Damonis:

Which passage contains an excellent outline of the poem. Apparently he proposed to celebrate other great Christian events in a similar way. See the fragment on The Passion, and the ode on The Circumcision. With regard to the former he writes:-"This subject the author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished."

The metre of the introductory stanzas is that in which Spenser wrote his Four Hymns. It is a modification of the Italian eight-lined stanza, first made by Chaucer, who composed in it several of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer modified the Italian stanza by the omission of a line; Spenser in his Faerie Queene by the addition of one, that one of greater length than the others.

This hymn is the first considerable poem which Milton wrote.

6. 2. Wherein. We should rather say whereon. See Spenser's Prothal. 1. 119.

4. redemption: here in sense, as etymologically, = ransom.

6. our deadly forfeit should release = that he should remit, or rather cause to c

remitted, the penalty of death to which we were liable.

6. 6. deadly forfeit. Comp. "penal forfeit,” Samson Agonistes, 508, and Paradise Lost,

xi. 195-8:

66 or to warn

Us, haply too secure of our discharge

From penalty, because from death released
Some days."

See Measure for Measure, V. i. 525:

"Thy slanders I forgive, and therewithal

Remit thy other forfeits."

release is etymologically a modified form of relax, coming to us through the French; = let go, quit, remit. See Deut. xv. 2: "Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it." Comp. Esther ii. 18: "He made a release to the provinces, and gave gifts, according to the state of the king."

7. with. Not the Lat. cum, but rather apud, or inter. Comp. Dryden :

"Immortal powers the term of Conscience know,

But Interest is her name with men below.'

8. unsufferable. The old usage preferred the English prefix. So unpossible (Ascham, &c.), unproperlie (Ascham), unhospitable (Shakspere), unvulnerable (ib.), uncessant (Milton), &c. &c. In Paradise Lost, x. 256, occurs "unagreeable."

10. wont. See note on Prothal. 1. 139.

11. the midst rather "in the midst " than "the midmost one.' [What part of speech is midst in Paradise Lost, v. 164-5?—

"On earth join, all ye creatures, to extol

Him first, him last, him midst, and without end."]

'The midst " is very common in older English as a substantive. On the "vulgarisms" in our midst, in your midst, see Marsh's English Language, Ed. Smith.

14. darksom. Some is a favourite adjectival termination in older English, = Early English sum, German sam. Thus, we find laboursome, gaysome, ugsome, bigsome, longsome, toothsome, &c. &c. See Trench's English Past and Present. In Paradise Lost, vii. 355, Milton uses unlightsome. This some is radically identical with the adjective same. with us must not be taken in close connexion with the verb, but rather with the

object. [What does with mean here ?]

15. vein. See Paradise Lost, vi. 628.

16. afford. Afford is commonly used in Elizab. English for to give, present, without any reference such as it now has to the means of the giver. Paradise Lost, iv. 46:

"What could be less than to afford him praise, &c. ?"

The

Ib. x. 271; Samson Agonistes, 910 and 1,109; Winter's Tale, IV. iv. 16; Henry VIII. I. iv. 17. But it sometimes seems to have that reference, as in Paradise Lost, v. 316, &c. stem is said to be the Latin forum.

19. while = during which time.

When at which time. In modern English we very commonly use when where while would be more exact, and where while would have been used by our forefathers: e.g. in 1. 30.

20. took. So Il Penseroso, 91: forsook, &c.

21. spangled, &c. is here an adjective, from the substantive spangle, rather than the participle of the verb spangle.

7. 23. See Paradise Regained, i. 249-54.

Wisards. -Ard had originally an intensive force, as in sweethard (corrupted into sweetheart), drunkard, coward, braggart, laggard, &c. It appears in some person-names,

as Leonard, Bernard, Everard. It seems to have been very commonly appended to nouns of a contemptuous and depreciatory meaning. Most of the words ending in it that now survive are of this sort. Add to those already mentioned bastard, sluggard, dotard; Trench mentions others now obsolete (English Past and Present). In our text wisards perhaps means nothing more than the Wise Men, without anything of the later sense of magicians attached to it, although in the Middle Ages the three Eastern kings were undoubtedly regarded as "wizards" in the modern sense of the word, and that with all reverence. In Comus, 571, the modern sense appears, and so ib. 872. In Lycid. 55 the word is applied to the personified river Dee. Spenser calls the ancient philosophers "antique wizards" (Faerie Queene, IV. xii. 2). 7. 24. prevent. See Psalms cxix. cxlvii. &c. &c. See Trench's Select Gloss. " prevenient," Paradise Lost, xi. 3; "prevention," ib. vi. 129.

27. the angel quire. See ll. 85-140; Paradise Regained, i. 242–5.

Conip

28. See Isaiah vi. 6, 7. He has the same allusion in his Reason of Church Government. 29. born is dissyllabic here.

31. all. See Prothal. 1. 56.

32. to him is to be taken in connexion with in awe, rather than with had dofft.

41. pollute is the Latin participle pollutus, with its termination Anglicized.
blame. Comp. Macbeth, IV. iii. 122-5:

"I

Unspeak mine own detraction; here abjure
The taints and blames I laid upon myself
For strangers to my nature."

42. maiden white. Comp. maiden sword (1 Henry IV. V. iv. 134); maiden walls (Henry V. V. ii. 449); maiden flowers (Henry VIII. IV. ii. 169).

45. cease. Here causal. Comp. "shrink," inf. 1. 203; Lycid. 133. So Bacon: "You may sooner by imagination quicken or slack a motion than raise or cease it.' Ascham's Schoolmaster:

Comp. also

"Therefore, my heart, cease sighes and sobbes, cease sorowes seede to sow." 48. The turning sphear. Comp. Paradise Lost, iii. 416:

"Thus they in heaven above the starry sphere," &c.

In the Ptolemaic System the earth was the centre round which the heavens, with their stars, revolved. Sphere here means this great revolving framework.

On the words orb, sphere, globe, ball, see Smith's Marsh's Lectures on the English

Language.
49. harbinger. Comp. German herberger. See Paradise Regained, i. 71:

"Before him a great prophet to proclaim

His coming is sent harbinger," &c.

See also Midsummer Night's Dream, III. ii. 380; Comedy of Errors, III. ii. 12; Macbeth, I. iv. 46; and V. vi. 10; Hamlet, I. i. 122. Hawkins' Life of Bishop Ken: "On the removal of the court to pass the summer at Winchester, Bishop Ken's house, which he held in the right of his prebend, was marked by the harbinger for the use of Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn," &c. (Apuả Halliwell.)

For the form of the word, as messenger from message, scavenger from scavage, porringer from porridge, so herbinger from harb'rage; see Wedgewood. In the Ayenbite of Inwit there is the form herberyeres for innkeepers, harbourers. In Chaucer's Man of Lawes Tale herbergeour harbinger:

=

"The fame anon throughout the toun is born,

How Alla King shal com on pilgrimage,

By herbergeours that wenten him beforn," &c.

For harbourage, see King John, II. i. 234. "ourself, our ships." Harbour radically 7. 50. See Collins' Ode to Peace:

In Pericles, I. iv. 100, "harbourage" is asked for a shelter for a host.

"O thou, who bad'st thy turtles bear
Swift from his grasp thy golden hair,

And sought'st thy native skies;

When War, by vultures drawn from far,
To Britain bent his iron car,

And bade his storms arise," &c.

produces with a stroke, i.e. instantaneously. So Dryden :

"Take my Caduceus :

With this th' infernal ghosts I can command,

And strike a terror through the Stygian strand."

So Richard III. V. iii. ; 1 Henry VI. II. iii. Such, no doubt, is the force of the word here. Otherwise, one might comp. the Lat. fœdus ferire, &c.

About the time of the birth of Christ the Temple of Janus was shut; i.e. there was peace in the Roman empire. See Merivale's Romans under the Empire, iii. 401, smaller Ed.

8. 56. the hooked chariot = covinus, variously described or referred to as falcifer, falcatus, rostratus. Comp. Spenser's Faerie Queene, V. viii. 28. It is said to have been a Keltic invention. The Romans adopted it, with certain natural changes, for their domestic use. Their covinus seems to have resembled our cabriolet. See Martial's enthusiastic apostrophe to it (xii. 24), &c. It is curious that so many Roman carriage-names are Keltic. Essedum, petorritum, rheda, are all so.

58. Comp. in Ovid's adjuration to Peace (Fast. i. 716): "And let the wild trumpet sound no signal-blast save for the festal train."

59. awfull. So Richard II. III. iii. 76. It has its more usual sense in Taming of the Shrew, V. ii. 108; 2 Henry VI. V. i. 98, &c. Awless, in King John (I. i. 266), may have either an active or a passive meaning.

60. sovran. Old French, souverain. Our erroneous modern spelling has probably arisen from the popular tendency to force strange word-forms into, or at least into some proximity to, familiar ones. Comp. beaf-eater, sparrow-grass, sweetheart, island, Charles' Wain, lanthorn, emerods, colleague, could, gooseberry, liquorice, frontispiece, shamefaced, Jerusalem artichoke, cray-fish, country-danse, Bag-o'-nails (as an inn name), Goat and Compasses (ditto), Bull and Mouth (ditto), loadstone, Billy Ruffian (as a ship's name), &c.

64. whist hushed. So Spenser's Faerie Queene, VII. vii. 59.

I. ii. 77-82:

"Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands;

Courtsied when you have and kissed,

The wild waves whist,

Foot it featly here and there;

And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear."

See Tempest,

where Johnson takes whist to be a verb = are silent; but it is probably a participle, as in our text, the phrase the wild waves whist standing in an adverbial relation to the predicate, just as thus done the tales in L'Allegro, l. 115. No doubt the word is originally a sort of interjection commanding silence. Comp. the Latin st, Italian zitto, French chut.

So our