MILTON
From a miniature by Faithorne, painted in 1667]

IV

JOHN MILTON

In 1623, when Milton was a boy of fifteen, John Heminge and Henry
Condell, "only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow
alive as was our Shakspere," had given to the world the folio edition
of Shakspere's works, very anxious that the said folio might commend
itself to "the most noble and incomparable pair of brethern," William,
Earl of this, and Philip, Earl of that, and exceedingly unconscious
that, next to the production of the works themselves, they were doing
the most important thing done, or likely to be done, in the literary
history of the world. Milton read Shakspere, and in the lines which he
wrote upon him in 1630, there seems to be the due throb of
transcendent admiration....

As Shakspere is the supreme name in this order of poets, the men of
sympathy and of humor, Milton stands first in that other great order
which is too didactic for humor, and of which Schiller is the best
recent representative. He was called the lady of his college not only
for his beautiful face, but because of the vestal purity and austerity
of his virtue. The men of the former class are intuitive, passionate,
impulsive; not steadily conscious of their powers; fitful,
unsystematic. Their love is ecstasy; their errors are the intoxication
of joy; their sorrows are the pangs of death....

Milton, the poet of Puritanism, stands out in bold contrast to these
imperfect characters. From his infancy there was nothing unregulated
in his life. His father, clearly a superior man, of keen
Protestantism, successful in business, well skilled in music, soon
perceived that one of the race of immortals had been born in his
house. He began, apparently with the conscious and delighted assent of
his son, to give the young Apollo such an education as Plato might
have prescribed. An eminently good education it proved to be; only not
so good, with a view to the production of a world-poet, as that which
nature, jealous of the Platos and pedagogues, and apt to tumble them
and their grammatical appurtenances out of the window when she has one
of her miraculous children in hand, had provided for that Stratford
lad who came to London broken in character and probably almost broken
in heart, some forty years earlier, to be a hanger-on of the theaters
and to mount the intellectual throne of the world. No deer-stealing
expeditions late o' nights when the moon silv