man wrought,
Nigh river's mouth, or foreland, where the wind
Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail.

There is nothing here that is not within the reach of any inland reader,
but Milton's choice of nautical similitudes may serve to remind us how
much of the interest of Old London centred round its port. Here were to
be heard those tales of far-sought adventure and peril which gave even to
the boisterous life of Elizabethan London an air of triviality and
security. Hereby came in "the variety of fashions and foreign stuffs,"
which Fynes Moryson, writing in Milton's childhood, compares to the stars
of heaven and the sands of the sea for number. All sorts of characters,
nationalities, and costumes were daily to be seen in Paul's Walk,
adjoining Milton's school. One sort interests us pre-eminently. "In the
general pride of England," says Fynes Moryson, "there is no fit
difference made of degrees; for very Bankrupts, Players, and Cutpurses go
apparelled like gentlemen." Shakespeare was alive during the first seven
years of Milton's life, and was no doubt sometimes a visitor to the
Mermaid, a stone's throw from the scrivener's house. Perhaps his cloak
brushed the child Milton in the street. Milton was born in the golden age
of the drama, and a score of masterpieces were put upon the London stage
while he was in his cradle. But the golden age passed rapidly; the
quality of the drama degenerated and the opposition to it grew strong
before he was of years to attend a play. Perhaps he never saw a play by
the masters during his boyhood, and his visits

to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native woodnotes wild,

were either excursions of the imagination or belong to his later
occasional sojourns in London. In his _Eikonoklastes_ he quotes certain
lines from _Richard III._, and here and there in his prose, as well as in
his verse, there are possibly some faint reminiscences of Shakespearian
phrases. So, for instance, in _The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_,
he seems to echo a famous speech of Macbeth, while he claims that his
remedy of free divorce "hath the virtue to soften and dispel rooted and
knotty sorrows, and without enchantment." But these are doubtless the
memories of reading. In the _Apology for Smectymnuus_, when he has to
reply to the charge that he "haunted playhouses" during his college days,
he retorts the