The Poetical Works of John Milton

THE Introductions to the Poems individually in these volumes contain necessarily a considerable quantity of biographical matter. All that is needed here, therefore, by way of general memoir, is a map or chronology of the life as a whole. It chances that a very sure Topography of the life may be combined with such a Chronology.

BREAD STREET, CHEAPSIDE, OLD LONDON.

1608-1625: ætat. 1—17.

Born in Bread Street, Cheapside, on Friday, December 9, 1608, in a house known as "The Spread Eagle," and baptized in Allhallows Church in the same street on the 20th of the same December, Milton was for the first sixteen years of his life a denizen of the very heart of Old London.

His father, John Milton, originally from Oxfordshire, was a prosperous London scrivener, and owner of the Spread Eagle, which served him both as residence and as place of business. See more about him in the Introduction to the Latin poem Ad Patrem. As to the name of Milton's mother there was till recently some uncertainty. One tradition called her Sarah Bradshaw, and another called her Sarah Caston; and yet in the register of Allhallows Parish, Bread Street, there is this distinct record: "The xxiind daye of February, A°. 1610 [1610-11], was buried in this parishe Mrs. Ellen Jefferys, the mother of Mr. John Mylton's wyffe of this parishe." This Mrs. Ellen Jefferys, who seems thus to have lived with the scrivener and his wife till two years after the birth of her grandchild, the future poet, is ascertained to have been the widow of a Paul Jeffrey or Jeffreys, of an Essex family, who had died before 1583,

VOL. I

after having been for some time Citizen and Merchant Taylor of London, and an inhabitant of St. Swithin's Parish in that city. She had another daughter, Margaret Jeffrey or Jeffreys, who was married in 1602, at the age of twenty, to a "William Truelove, gentleman, of the parish of Hatfield Peverell, in the county of Essex, widower," afterwards designated as "of Blakenham upon the Hill, Co. Suffolk," and heard of as owning various properties in Essex and Herts. At the time of that marriage the widow's consent to it was signified through her son-in-law, the bride's brother-in-law, John Milton, of Allhallows, Bread Street.1 From this circumstance, and from other evidence, no doubt is now left that the maiden name of Milton's mother was Sarah Jeffrey. She had been married to the scrivener in 1600, the very year when he set up in business, her age being then about twenty-eight years, while his was about thirty-seven.

At the death of the widowed grandmother Jeffrey in February 1610-11, the Bread Street household consisted of the scrivener, his wife, and two children,-Anne and John. Three children were subsequently born; of whom only one, Christopher, seven years younger than John, outlived infancy. Anne, John, and Christopher, therefore, are to be remembered, and in that order, as the surviving children.

The first sixteen years of Milton's life were the last sixteen of the reign of James I. Amid the events of those sixteen years, and the growing discontent of the mass of the English people with the rule of James and his minister Buckingham, Milton passed his boyhood. He was most carefully educated, on the principles of a pious Puritan household of superior means and tastes, the head of which was himself distinguished as a musical composer. To be remembered, as having shared with this excellent father the honour of Milton's early education, are the Scottish preacher Thomas Young, who was his first domestic tutor, and the two Alexander Gills, father and son, who were respectively head-master and under-master of St. Paul's

1 With the exception of the burial-entry of Mrs. Ellen Jefferys in the register of Allhallows, the documents that have yielded the above particulars of Milton's maternal pedigree were discovered by the research of the late Colonel J. L. Chester, a distinguished American antiquary and genealogist, long resident in London, of whose indefatigable and altogether extraordinary labours in the exploration of English family-history the best-known published specimen is his annotated volume of Westminster Abbey Registers (1876).

School, close to Bread Street. At this public school Milton was for some years a day-scholar; and here he first became acquainted with the young half-Italian Charles Diodati, his friendship with whom he has made touchingly and everlastingly memorable in his Letters, and in his Latin Elegia Prima, Elegia Sexta, and Epitaphium Damonis. He was still, it seems, a scholar at St. Paul's when his sister Anne Milton, who was a year or two older than himself, married (1624) a Mr. Edward Phillips, from Shrewsbury, second clerk in the important Government office called the Crown Office in Chancery. As the married couple took up their residence in the Strand, near Charing Cross, Milton and his younger brother Christopher were then the only children left in the paternal home.

From his childhood Milton was not only a ceaseless student and insatiable reader, but also a writer of verses. The earliest preserved specimens of his muse, however, belong to the year 1624, his last year at St. Paul's School. They are

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If we deduct the two Psalm-paraphrases, which belong to the last year of the reign of James I., Milton's literary life may be said to begin exactly with the reign of Charles I.

That king succeeded his father on the 27th of March 1625. Six weeks before that event, i.e. February 12, 1624-5, Milton, at the age of sixteen years and two months, had been entered in the grade of a "Lesser Pensioner" on the books of Christ's College, Cambridge; and his matriculation in the Register of the University is dated April 9, 1625, when Charles had been on the throne a fortnight. From that time to July 1632, or for a period of more than seven years, Milton resided habitually in Cambridge, though with frequent visits, in the College vacations, to his father's house in London and to other places. The rooms he occupied in Christ's College are still pointed

out.

When Milton was at Cambridge, the total number of persons on the books of all the sixteen colleges of the University was about 2900.

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