time being about thirty-seven and hers about twenty-eight. A little more than two years after it is he, acting as the sonin-law and representative of the widowed Mrs. Ellen Jeffrey, that attests her consent to the marriage of her other and younger daughter, Margaret Jeffrey, with the well-to-do Essex widower, Mr. William Truelove; and after that marriage, if not before, the constant home of the widow, or her constant London home, is the house of her son-in-law Milton and her daughter Sarah in Bread Street.

The elder daughter of the widowed Mrs. Ellen Jeffrey proved a most suitable wife for the prosperous scrivener. The poet speaks of her as "a most excellent mother, and particularly known for her charities through the neighbourhood (matre probatissimâ et eleemosynis per viciniam potissimùm nota)." Though she was about nine years younger than her husband, he had the advantage of her in one respect. His sight, as Aubrey has told us, was so good that he could read without spectacles in extreme old age; but she "had very weak eyes, and used spectacles presently after she was thirty years old," i. e., if Aubrey is correct, within a year or two after her marriage.

To the worthy pair, thus wedded in or about 1600, there were born, in the course of the next fifteen years, six children in all, as follows:

1. A "chrisom child"-i. e. a child who died before it could be baptized 2-respecting whom there is this entry in the Register of Allhallows, Bread Street: "The 12th of May A 1601 was buried "a Crysome Child of Mr. John Mylton's of this parish, scrivenor."

2. Anne, the register of whose baptism has not been found, but who may be supposed to have been born between 1602 and 1607.

3. John, born Dec. 9, 1608, and baptized Dec. 20, as appears from the Allhallows Register: "The 20th daye of December 1608 was baptized John, the sonne of John Mylton, scrivenor."

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1 Defensio Secunda: Works, VI. 286. 2 "The 'chrisom ' was a white vesture "which in former times the priest used "to put upon the child at baptism. The "first Common Prayer Book of King "Edward orders that the woman shall "offer the chrisom when she comes to "be churched; but, if the child hap66 pened to die before her churching, she

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was excused from offering it, and it was customary to use it as the shroud "in which the child was buried." Properly, therefore, a "chrisom child" was one that died, after baptism, before the churching of the mother; but the term had come in practice to mean a child that died before baptism. (See Hook's Church Dictionary.)

4. Sarah, baptized at Allhallows July 15, 1612, and buried there Aug. 16 in the same year.

5. Tabitha, baptized in the same place Jan. 30, 1613–14, and buried elsewhere at the age of two years and six months.

6. Christopher, baptized at Allhallows Dec. 3, 1615.1

By the death of three of these children in infancy the family was reduced to three, a daughter Anne, the eldest, and two sons, John and Christopher. The poet, therefore, grew up with one sister and one brother, the sister several years older than himself, and the brother exactly seven years younger. The maternal grandmother, Mrs. Ellen Jeffrey, was probably residing in the house at the time of the poet's birth, and may have received him in her arms. The paternal grandfather, the Roman Catholic Richard Milton of Stanton St. John's, was probably dead before the birth of the poet. The stern old gentleman's Recusancy and its disagreeable pecuniary consequences to him must have been a topic of talk, if not of anxiety, for the scrivener and his wife through the whole of the second year of their married life; but we do not know whether the trouble had softened the old gentleman, or brought him to their door for refuge or reconciliation.

1 The date of Tabitha's death is from the Pedigree of Milton by Sir Charles Young, Garter King, prefixed to Pickering's edition of Milton's works.-Phillips makes an error in his account of

the number of the scrivener's children' He says "three he had and no more,' whereas there were six, of whom three died in infancy. It is possible there were others who also died early.

CHAPTER II.

THE SPREAD EAGLE, BREAD STREET, OLD LONDON.

In vain now will the enthusiast in Milton step out of the throng of Cheapside and walk down Bread Street to find remaining traces of the house where Milton was born. The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed this, with so many other of the antiquities of old London. Bread Street, indeed, stood almost exactly in the centre of the space over which the Fire extended. Nevertheless, as the city was rebuilt after the Fire with as strict attention to the old sites as the surveyor's art of that day could ensure, the present Bread Street occupies relatively the same position in the map of London as the old one did. Exactly where the present Bread Street strikes off from the present Cheapside did old Bread Street strike off from old Cheapside, and, but for the havoc made by recent improvements, with the same arrangement of streets right and left, north and south. If, therefore, nothing of the material fabric of the house where Milton was born, nor of the objects which once lay around it, now remains, at least the ghosts of the old tenements hang in the air, and may be discerned by the eye of vision.

Till lately more remained. Describing Bread Street as it was in 1720, or more than fifty years after the Fire, Strype1 enumerates several courts in it, and among these one called Black Spread Eagle Court. It was the first court on the left, as you went from Cheapside. He describes it as "small, but with a free-stone pavement, and having a very good house at the upper end." The information is repeated in the last edition of his work in 1754; and in the map of Bread Street Ward in that edition "Black Spread

1 Strype's Stow: 1720.

Eagle Court" is very distinctly marked. There can be no doubt that this Black Spread Eagle Court commemorated the house which had been occupied by Milton's father. We know, from Aubrey, that the house had acquired celebrity as the poet's birthplace while he was yet alive, and that foreigners used to go and see it to the very year of the Fire; and it is not likely that, when Bread Street was rebuilt, the honour of the name was transferred to a wrong spot.

It

The court itself remained within very recent memory, and I have visited it often. It was, as I have said, the first on the left hand as one went from Cheapside, and was at the depth of three houses back from that thoroughfare. no longer, however, bore the name "Black Spread Eagle Court," nor any other, the warehousing firms that occupied it not finding any name necessary to ensure the safe delivery of their goods and letters. The old name probably fell out of use soon after 1766, when the house-signs were taken down over London, and houses began to be designated by numbers. There is no court at all there now, but only the business premises of Messrs. Copestake and Co., with the site of the old court absorbed in them where they front the street. Walk down Bread Street, therefore, on the left hand, from Cheapside; stop at those premises, and realize the fact that they have devoured and incorporated an anonymous little court which many persons remember and which had been Strype's "Black Spread Eagle Court" of 1720 and 1754; then again demolish in imagination that little "Black Spread Eagle Court," and rear in its room an edifice chiefly of wood and plaster; finally, fancy that house with its gable end to the street, ranging with others of similar form and materials on one side, and facing others of similar form and materials opposite: and, when you have done all this, you have the old Spread Eagle in which Milton was born as vividly before you as it is ever likely to be.1

1 The premises of Messrs. Copestake and Co. range from No. 57 to No. 63 of the present Bread Street, and it is perhaps No. 61 that marks most exactly the site of the old Milton house and shop. This particular property in Bread

Street is held under lease from the Merchant Taylors' Company, and is supposed to have been gifted to the company by the will of a John Tressawell, dated 1st March 1518-19. See the details at p. 284 of Memorials of the

The house, as we have said, was as much in the heart of the London of that day as the present houses on the same site are in the heart of the London of this. The only difference is that, whereas the population of London is now counted by millions, it consisted then perhaps of not more than 200,000 souls. The future poet, therefore, was not only a Londoner, like his predecessors Chaucer and Spenser, but a Londoner of the innermost circle, a child of the very heart of Cockaigne. Bow Church stood at the back of the Spread Eagle, and so close that, had the famous bells fallen, they might have crushed the infant in his cradle. This circumstance and its implications are to be distinctly conceived. A great part of the education of every child consists of those impressions, visual and other, which the senses of the little being are taking in busily, though unconsciously, amid the scenes of their first exercise; and, though all sorts of men are born in all sorts of places, poets in towns and prosaic men amid fields and woody solitudes, yet much of the original capital with which all men trade intellectually through life consists of that mass of miscellaneous fact and imagery which they have acquired imperceptibly by the observations of their early years. If, then, though it is beyond our meagre science to determine how much of the form of Shakespeare's genius depended on his having been born and bred amid the circumstances of a Warwickshire town, we still follow the boy in his wanderings by the banks of the Avon, hardly less is it necessary to remember that England's next great poet was born in the middle of old London, and that the sights and sounds amid which his childhood was nurtured were those of crowded street-life.

Bread Street, like its modern successor, stretched southward from Cheapside, in the direction of the river, athwart old Watling Street and a dense maze of other streets that has been abolished by the present spacious Cannon Street

Guild of Merchant Taylors by the Master of the Company for the year 1873-4 (Charles Matthew Clode).

1 In 1603 the population of London

was estimated at little over 150,000; which I suspect was under the truth. See Cunningham's Handbook of London, p. xxiv.