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He grew up with a sister some years older than himself, and with a brother seven years younger. The home of this family during Milton's early years was in the heart of the city—Bread Street being a street branching off from Cheapside. The house was distinguished from the rest by the sign of the Spread Eagle placed upon it—such signs being to houses in that day, especially to houses of any kind of business—what numbers are at present. Of the Bread Street of Milton's youth not a vestige remains; it was swept away by the great fire in 1666. But the new houses were built upon the old sites, so that the street is perpetuated. As we pass along, it is left to the imagination to displace all the visible erections, and to recall the lofty buildings of wood and plaster, carved and colored in quaint fashions, and projecting storey above storey, until small space, perhaps, is left for a strip of blue or misty sky to be seen above. Citizens, as a rule, then lived in the city. The lower parts of those somewhat heavy and gloomy but picturesque structures were assigned to business; the upper floors were the homes of the citizen families, even in the case, for the greater part, of the most wealthy.

Young Milton would know Bread Street as it was, the "Cheap" as it was. He would make his excursions through Paternoster Row, long before the booksellers had dropped, one by one, from their old quarters in St. Paul's Churchyard, into that tunnel of a thoroughfare, and were to make make it memorable as the mart of publishers. St. Paul's itself, too—the old Gothic building, we mean, large enough to have enclosed the present within its walls, and with room to spare—must soon have become familiar to the future poet. He must often have trod its promenade along its great centre, where crowds of well-dressed idlers might be daily seen, whose noise and buzz, as they walked and talked, gave the place the air of an exchange more than of a place for religious worship; serving as an outlet for news and gossip of all sorts, as newspapers did not then exist to be the carriers of such wares.

Of his father, Milton says—and with a pride which is to his own honor—that "he was a man of the highest integrity." Later he writes: "I had, from my early years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father—whom God recompense—been exercised to the tongues, and some sciences, as my age would suffer, by sundry masters and teachers, both at home and at the schools."

And, later still, he says: "My faiher destined me, while yet a little child, for the study of humane letters. Both at the grammar school and at home he caused me to be instructed daily." We know also, from other sources, that the elder Milton must have been a man of considerable culture, and that he was not only fond of music, but excelled as a composer. Lines harmonized by his skill still hold a place in our English psalmody; and one of them might be heard in his time as a lullaby on the lips of almost every nurse. Aubrey describes him as "an ingeniose man;" and his grandson, Philips, records of him, that while assiduous in business, he was not so wedded to it as to have denied himself intervals of relaxation and self-improvement. He lived to see a green old age, being eighty-four years of age when he died. Concerning the partner of the good man's pilgrimage, Milton writes, that "She was a most excellent mother, and known by her charities in the neighbourhood."

\ Defensio ecunda.

The minister of the parish in which Bread Street was included, was a man of some mark among the Puritan clergy; and the home of the Miltons was pervaded by a picty of that graver type. We have no reason to suppose, however, that the religious training to which Milton was subject, was ever felt by him as irksome or unreasonable. The serious and religious spirt which was to become so conspicuous in him in later life, seems to have been characteristic of him from his earlier years. But his Puritanism through life, and in the home, we doubt not, in which he imbibed it, was not of a narrow and repulsive cast. He always were his hair long, and, so far, might be classed with the Cavaliers rather than with the Roundheads. He grew up a reader of Shake-speece, and of all the good poetry accessible to him in his own or in other languages. He was a Puritan in so far as Puritanism meant piety and freedom, and no further.

We have abundant evidence that Milton's capacity began to develop itself very early. We know that when not more than ten years of age the family had come to look upon him as a wonderfully gifted boy, and were astonished as they read the verses even then composed by him. In that religious age, nothing could be more natural than that in the purpose of such parents, such a child should have been dedicated to the Church. Milton himself relates that such was their intention concerning him, and that his own early inclinations tended that way. It was with this view, no doubt, that he was sent to St. Paul's Grammar School, then a flourishing foundation, and not more than five minutes' walk from his home.

Milton was about ten years of age when this transition from home tuition to the training of a public school took place The spirit in which he prosecuted his studies in his schoolboy days he has himself described. Speaking of the "humane letters" to the culture of which his father had separated him, he says, "Which I seized with such eagerness, that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight; which, indeed, was the first cause of injury to my eyes, to whose natural weakness there was also added frequent headaches. All which not retarding my impetuosity in learning, he caused me to be daily instructed, both at the grammar school and under other masters at home; and then when I had acquired various tongues and also some not insignificant taste for the sweetness of philosophy, he sent me to Cambridge." Aubrey and Philips both attest this much concerning him, and Wood adopts their statements. So Milton passed from boyhood to youth, and he has borne grateful testimony to the breadth and liberality of the encouragements given to his pursuits by his father as he grew in years. The following is translated from a Latin poem addressed to his father:- "When, at your expense, I had obtained access to the eloquence of the tongue of Romulus, and to the delights of Latinm, and the great words becoming the mouth of Jove, uttered by the magniloquent Greeks, you then advised me to add the flowers which are the pride of Gaul, and the speech which the new Italian, attesting the barbarian inroads by his diction, pours forth from his degenerate mouth, and the mysteries which are spoken by the prophet of Palestine." Happy the youth who had a father to whom it became him to make such acknowledgments, and who had a home to look back upon so full of grateful memories!

In his school experiences, also, Milton appears to have been, upon the whole, fortunate. Mr. Gill, the head-master of St. Paul's in his time, was a man competent in most respects to his vocation, and he had a son with him as an assistant during a part of Milton's schoolboy days, with whom the young poet formed a rather strong friendship. Young Gill, indeed, was hardly the man

¹ Reasons of Church Government, book ii.

^\ Defensio Secunda.

The tunes known as Norwich and York, Masson's Life of Milton. The fact that Milton when writing to his father, on plans under consideration between them, should have sent his thoughts to him in the form of an extended piece in Latin verse is evidence enough that the scrivener must have been a scholarly person. (See Ad Patrem, Poemata.)

¹ Defensio Secunda.

² Ad Patrem. Masson's Milton, p. 67.