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of Florence. Though he tells us himself that "he received the intelligence while he was abroad," his biographers assure us that he did not hear of it till his

return.

Milton was now arrived at the close of his thirty-first year; the allowance made him by his father placed him at least in independent circumstances; nature had not qualified him to take an active part in public affairs, for his delight was in the studious shade of retirement; but still, to live entirely to himself in literary selfishness would in his eyes have been a gross dereliction of duty. "Things," says he,† "being in such a disturbed and fluctuating state, I looked about to see if I could get any place that would hold myself and my books, and so I took a house of sufficient size in the city; and there, with no small delight, I resumed my intermitted studies; cheerfully leaving the event of public affairs, first to God, and then to those to whom the people had committed that task." We may here observe, that the house of which he speaks was not his first residence in London after his return from the Continent. His nephew informs us, that he took apartments (probably the whole upper part of the house) in the house of one Russell, a tailor, in St. Bride's churchyard, Fleet-street. As his sister, Mrs. Phillips, had married a second time, and perhaps was not in very affluent circumstances, he kindly undertook to relieve her of the burden of her younger son John, then a smart clever boy of nine years of age, taking him "to his own charge and care," as his other

* 'Thyrsis, animi causa profectus peregre, de obitu Damonis nuncium accepit. Demum postea reversus, et rem ita esse comperto, se suamque solitudinem hoc carmine deplorat."-Argum. Epit. Damonis. Defensio Secunda.

nephew expresses it, that is, keeping and educating him at his own expense.

He did not remain long in these lodgings, for finding them too confined, or more probably being, as we shall see, urged by his friends to extend his sphere of usefulness, he left them some time early in 1640, and took what was called a garden-house,-i. e. a house standing detached in an enclosed garden, of which there were many such at that time in London. It stood at the end of an entry in Aldersgate-street, "and therefore," says Phillips, "the fitter for his turn by the reason of the privacy, besides that there were few streets in London more free from noise than that."* Here his elder nephew Edward Phillips was, he tells us, "put to board with him ;" and, in addition to his nephews, he was induced to receive a few more pupils, the sons of his intimate friends, for whom we are to suppose he was liberally remunerated. We are not informed of the number or the names of these, but the number of course could not have been large.

His course of education was a very extensive one, by far too much so for the ordinary order of minds. But it was also, in our opinion, an erroneous one; as, by putting authors of an inferior order into the hands of youth, the opportunity of forming a pure and correct taste was lost, and by giving the preference to works of science, the culture of the imagination, which is such a source of pure happiness at all periods of life, was nearly altogether neglected. Where a poet was the teacher,

* Mr. Hunter (Milton, p. 26) having given the names of those who lived in the same street, among whom was Milton's old master Dr. Gill and Sir Thomas Cecil, observes that "Milton's house was situated in what, in modern phrase, would be called a genteel part of the town."

one might have expected that Homer, Virgil, "the lofty grave tragedians," Horace, and Ovid, would have stood in the foremost rank: But no; their names do not even occur in the list of authors given by Phillips, as those read by himself and his fellow-pupils under the eye of the author of Comus. These were (credite posteri !), in Latin, the four Scriptores Rei Rustica, Cato, Varro, Palladius, and Columella; great part of Pliny's Natural History, the medical work of Celsus, Vitruvius, and the Stratagems of Frontinus: to these prose works were added the philosophic poets Lucretius and Manilius. Such was the Latin course; the Greek was, from its very nature, somewhat better. It consisted of Hesiod (probably only the Works and Days), Aratus, Dionysius' Periegesis, Oppian, Quintus Smyrnæus, and Apollonius Rhodius in poetry; while the prose course contained Plutarch's Placita Philosophorum and On the Education of Children, Xenophon's Cyropædia and Anabasis, Elian's Tactics, and the Stratagems of Polyænus. Surely a more preposterous selection never was made! Some of these works even must have been unintelligible to master and pupils alike; such, for example, were the agricultural writers, which can only be understood by one who has a practical acquaintance with agriculture. It seems strange, by the way, that Virgil's Georgics should not have been included in the course. But in it, with one or two exceptions, there is no poet much above mediocrity, and not a single orator or historian.

But this by no means completed the course. Milton taught his pupils the Hebrew language, and its kindred dialects the Chaldee and the Syriac, so far as to "go through the Pentateuch, and gain an entrance into the

Targum," and they read some chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel in Syriac. He also instructed them in mathematics and astronomy,-the latter, we fear, on the Ptolemaic system.* It must be mentioned to his praise, that he did not neglect the modern languages, for he gave them instructions in both French and Italian; yet here too he adopted the same perverse course, for the book which he read with them in Italian was the Florentine History of Giovanni Villani, and, in French, a great part of Pierre Davitz, the famous geographer of France in his time. A very laudable portion of his course must not be omitted. Every Sunday his pupils read a chapter of the New Testament in Greek, which he then expounded to them; a less useful part was their writing, from his dictation, a portion of a system of divinity which he had compiled from the writings of Fagius and other theologians.

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In his treatment of his pupils, Aubrey says, "As he was severe on one hand, so he was most familiar and free in his conversation to those whom he must serve in the way of education;" an account likely enough to be the truth. He set them an example of hard labour and spare diet; but once in every three or four weeks he used to relax and give himself a day of indulgence with some young gentlemen of his acquaintance, "the chief of whom were Mr. Alphry and Mr. Miller, the beaux of those times, but nothing near so bad as those nowadays," writes Phillips after the Revolution; "with these gentlemen he made so far free with his body as now and then to keep a gaudy day."

* The works named by Phillips are: "Uestitius his Arithmetic, Riff's Geometry, Pitiscus his Trigonometry, and Johannes De Sacro Bosco De Sphæra."

It has never seemed to enter into the mind of any of Milton's biographers to inquire how he, a single young man, could have kept house with such a number of pupils. Neither Phillips nor Aubrey gives a hint on the subject; but the most probable and rational supposition would be, that he had engaged some pious and respectable matron to act as his housekeeper and manager, and relieve him from domestic cares.*

Johnson, who omits no occasion of showing his hostility to Milton, who differed so very widely from him in religion and politics, and whose views in both, if not more correct and practical, were as much more elevated as those of a great poet should be over those of a mere 'moralist,―sneeringly inquires, what man of eminent knowledge and talents proceeded from "this wonderworking academy." As this objection goes on the theory of man's being the mere creature of education, it is a sufficient reply to observe, that such is not the case, that doctrina sed vim promovet insitam is the truth, and that if nature has not given the original powers, no-teacher can bring them into existence. We have however no reason to suppose that Milton's pupils were not superior to what they would have been, if educated at one of the great public schools. Phillips very candidly and justly observes: "If his pupils had received [i. e. had been capable of receiving] his documents with the same acuteness of wit and apprehension, the same industry, alacrity, and thirst after knowledge, as the instructor was

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* This view appears to be confirmed by a record in the Exchequer (quoted by Mr. Hunter, p. 25) of the names, etc., of the inhabitants of the ward of Aldersgate, in 1641, in which occurs Jo. Milton, Gent., Jane Yates his servant," and she is the only servant whose name is mentioned, perhaps as being of a higher order.

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