stately Latin form of which we have already had examples. A certain German scholar, named Christopher Arnold, afterwards Professor of History at Nuremberg, had then been in London for some time on a visit of curiosity, taking notes of all that interested him there, and introducing himself to all sorts of notable persons. He had seen Selden, Usher, Meric Casaubon, Franciscus Junius, and one knows not how many others then living in London; and he had paid his respects in an especial manner to Mr. Milton in Whitehall,—interesting to him as that gentleman was not only from his official position as Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth, but also because he was the author of the Defensio Pro Populo Anglicano contra Salmasium, the fame of which had been ringing recently throughout the Continent. This amiable Christopher Arnold, having the usual propensity of enthusiasts of his type for the collection of autographs of the celebrities he met, carried about with him, it appears, an album for the reception of such things,—which album, after various fortunes, is now in the British Museum. Milton, among others, had obliged him; for there is still legible in the album Milton's rather elaborate inscription in it of the said date, 19th November 1651. It consists of a modified quotation, in Greek characters, of three words from the Biblical text, 2 Cor. xii. 9 (meaning "I am made perfect in weakness"), followed by four lines of very polite Latin compliment to Arnold, -these two portions of the inscription both, as I conceive, in the handwriting of some skilled penman in the Whitehall office to whom Milton had dictated them,-followed by a signature in Milton's own indubitable hand, thus : Joannes Miltonius. There is no sign of failing eyesight in this signature; and yet, when it was written, Milton's eyesight was failing rapidly. Within six months after it was written,—or before the middle of 1652, when Milton and his family had but recently removed from the official apartments in Whitehall to the new house in Petty France, Westminster, the evidence is that he was totally blind. The recollection of this fact, the fact that precisely in the year 1652, the forty-fourth year of Milton's age, he passed for ever out of the world of light into a world of absolute darkness, is of great importance in his biography. It sweeps away not a few absurd legends about him, and also not a few ingenious suppositions as to this or that in his life through the two-and-twenty years of it that were yet to come. Especially it disposes of a goodly number of professed and popularly accepted autographs of Milton. There may be still in existence here and there some genuine autographs of Milton after his blindness had begun, and therefore of as late a date as 1652; but the safe rule is at once to reject any professed autograph of his of later date than that, unless there is the most positive evidence that it actually came from his own pen. Authorised signatures of his, it is true, later than 1652, are not wanting, and are still to be looked at with interest. With but one exception, however, they are all, so far as I know, vicarious signatures,-signatures written for him, and by his direction, either by his amanuensis for the time being, or by some other chance substitute. This is the case even in legal documents of such a kind that one might have supposed signature of them with his own hand to be essential. For example, there is the famous contract with the printer Samuel Simmons, of date 27th April 1667, for the sale of the copyright of Paradise Lost. That document, now in the British Museum, was once the property of the banker-poet Samuel Rogers, and one of the most valued curiosities in his house in St. James's Place; and it is a strange indication of the lack of historical knowledge, or of acumen in applying the knowledge, that there may sometimes be even among men of the best literary culture, that Rogers and his guests seem never to have doubted, when they looked at the signature "John Milton" which accompanies Milton's seal at the foot of that document, that it was in Milton's own handwriting. Yet, most certainly, it is not in his handwriting, but was written for him by another, his finger perhaps touching the seal. It is a signature in a good clerkly hand; but other vicarious signatures of Milton's name in other legal documents are in different hands, some of them quite boyish in appearance. At present, as I have said, I know but of one exception to the rule that any professed signature of Milton of later date than 1652 is to be regarded either as spurious or as only vicarious. Till about twelve years ago I did not know even of this exception. About that time, how ever, the late Colonel Chester, who had already laid me under so many obligations, added to their number by sending me a tracing of Milton's signature to his application, on the 11th of February 1662-3, for a licence for his marriage with his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull. Colonel Chester had found the document in the Faculty Office, London. Here is a copy of the tracing : Folamin This is Milton's own hand in the eleventh year of his blindness, the fifty-fifth year of his age, when he was living in Jewin Street, and had advanced a good way in the dictation of his Paradise Lost. If the reader will turn to that page of our Introduction to Paradise Lost where there is a facsimile of the signature of Milton's name to the contract with the printer Simmons for the publication of the poem, he will be able to compare that with this, and to judge whether the hand that wrote this could possibly, four years later, have written that. Probably enough, the last thing now in the world written by Milton's own hand was that here copied. It is a most touching memento, and tells its own story. We see the blind man led into the office in Old London where marriage-allegations and applications for marriage-licences had to be made. We see him, after a quarter of an hour or so, seated or standing at a table or desk, where the document that has meanwhile been made out, containing his allegation and petition in due official form, is placed before him for his signature. A pen, evidently a bad and scratchy one, already dipped in the ink for him, is put into his hand; and, his fingers having been guided to the proper place, he begins to write. The initial / comes out largely and strongly, his old trick of the stroke across the middle of the letter, so characteristic of his signatures from first to last, not yet forgotten; but after that he is all at sea. He has lost all sense of the horizontal; and the slant downwards, begun even in the J, becomes more precipitate. The two next letters are blotched, and, in the last letter of his Christian name, such is the force of his hand, the pen gives way and splits. He manages the first four letters of his surname nevertheless, though with barely legible result, and without having attempted a recovery of the neat angular form of the capital M once customary with him; and it is only when he gets to the last two letters of all that, some one having steadied his hand, and perhaps put another pen into it, he has some quiet success in shaping an o and an n.1 1 The two graduation signatures and the last signature of all are from facsimiles made for my own use; the others are from Mr. Leigh Sotheby's splendid volume entitled Ramblings in the Elucidation of the Autograph of Milton. |