CHAPTER VIII. MILTON'S LIFE AND SECRETARYSHIP FROM DEC. 1651 TO APRIL 1653. LETTER TO HERMANN MYLIUS: REMOVAL OF MILTON AND HIS FAMILY, IN DEC. 1651, FROM WHITEHALL TO MILTON'S OF SECRETARYSHIP AND TRANSFERENCE PART OF THE DUTY TO THURLOE: LETTER TO THE GREEK LEONARD PHILARAS: NO APPEARANCE YET OF SALMASIUS HIMSELF IN REPLY TO MILTON: PUBLICATION AT THE HAGUE OF THE REGII SANGUINIS CLAMOR: ACCOUNT OF THAT INVECTIVE AGAINST MILTON, WITH SPECIMENS: ALEXANDER MORUS REPUTED TO BE THE AUTHOR: ANTECEDENTS OF MORUS: HIS CONNEXION WITH SALMASIUS: SCANDAL ABOUT MORUS: GOSSIP ON THE SUBJECT FROM THE VOSSIUS-HEINSIUS CORRESPONDENCE: THE PRINTER ADRIAN ULAC AND HIS OVERTURES TO MILTON : DEATH OF MILTON'S WIFE: LETTER TO RICHARD HEATH: JOHN PHILLIPS'S RESPONSIO AD APOLOGIAM ANONYMI CUJUSDAM IN BEHALF OF HIS UNCLE: ACCOUNT OF THE PAMPHLET: MORE GOSSIP ABOUT SALMASIUS, MORUS, AND MILTON, FROM THE VOSSIUS-HEINSIUS CORRESPONDENCE: HEINSIUS IN ITALY: ANDREW MARVELL AND HIS FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH MILTON: LETTER FROM MILTON TO BRADSHAW, RECOMMENDING MARVELL FOR THE ASSISTANT LATIN SECRETARYSHIP: FAILURE OF THE PROPOSAL: INVENTORY OF MILTON'S LATIN STATE LETTERS CONTINUED (NOS. XX-XL): CORRESPONDENCE WITH ANDREW SANDELANDS IN SCOTLAND. Ar the date at which we left Milton (Dec. 1651) he was still in those official lodgings in the Scotland Yard end of Whitehall which he had entered in Nov. 1649, and in which the Council of State had continued him, in spite of attempts that had been made to remove him. The business of his peculiar Secretaryship was becoming decidedly more onerous in consequence of the increase of the foreign correspondence of the Commonwealth, and he was surrounded by foreigners who had occasion to see him officially, or who liked to cultivate the acquaintance of the man who had beaten Salmasius. The following letter of Milton's, printed among his Epistole Familiares, and which we translate from the Latin, will enable us to resume the thread of his life from that point : TO HERMANN MYLIUS, Agent for the Count of Oldenburg. "Before I reply, most noble Hermann, to your letter to me of the 17th of December, I must first of all, lest you should perchance consider me the person responsible for so long a silence, explain why I did not reply sooner. Understand then that a first cause of delay was, what is now almost a perpetual enemy of mine, bad health; next, on account of my health, there was a sudden and unavoidable removal to another house, and I had begun the same, as it chanced, on the very day on which your letter was brought me; finally, in truth, I was ashamed at then having nothing to report on your business that I thought would be agreeable to you. For, when, the day after, I met Mr. Frost accidentally, and carefully enquired of him whether any answer was yet under resolution for you (for, in my invalid state, I was often myself absent from the Council), he told me, and with some concern, that nothing was yet under resolution, and that he was having no success in his efforts to expedite the affair. I thought it better, therefore, to be silent for a time than to write at once what I knew would be annoying to you, and this in the expectation of afterwards being able to write, with full satisfaction, what I wanted to write and you so much desired. To-day, as I hope, I have brought things to a conclusion; for, after I had in the Council once and again reminded the President of your business, he reported it immediately, and with such effect that to-morrow is appointed for the consideration of an answer to be given to you as speedily as possible. I thought that, if I were the first, as was my purpose, to give you this information, you would be greatly pleased and it would also be a sign of my regard for you. Westminster . . . .” The HERMANN MYLIUS here addressed was that envoy to the Commonwealth from the German Count of Oldenburg of whom we have already twice had a glimpse. Though he had been in London as early as August 1651, when Christopher Arnold was so much with him and was perhaps indebted to him for his introduction to Milton, his letters of credence, as we have seen (ante p. 379), had not been presented to the Parliament till October 15. The business on which he had come, and which had been referred, in the usual form, to the Council of State, had reappeared in the House, we may now add, on the authority of the Commons Journals, on the 26th of November, on report from the Council through Lord Commissioner Whitlocke, and it had been referred back to the Council. Five days afterwards the new Council of State for the Fourth Year of the Commonwealth came into office, so that it was on this Council of the Fourth Year that the business caine to depend. What was the business? Briefly, it was that the Count of Oldenburg wanted to be on good terms with the English Commonwealth, and had sent Mylius to solicit for him a kind of commercial treaty or alliance. The business, it appears, had been put off by the Council, and Mylius had been growing impatient. Hence, either because he was leaving town on some little excursion, or because some other reason made communication by letter convenient at the time, he had written to Mr. Secretary Milton, as his private friend, begging him to do what he could. Milton had received the letter on the 17th of December, or a day or two after; but, for the reasons he mentions, he had not favoured Mylius with a reply till The date is blank in the reply itself, but will be fixed presently. We have quoted the Letter at this point because it fixes a date more important than that of its own dispatch. On the 17th of December, 1651, it seems, Milton, on account of his constant ill-health, was in the act of removing from his Scotland Yard apartments to another residence, hastily taken. That it was in Westminster we infer from his letter to Mylius; but we have other means of knowing much more about it. Phillips, who mentions the removal from Scotland Yard, dating it vaguely in 1652, and professing uncertainty whether the change was for reasons of health only, or for others as well, describes the new house as "a pretty garden-house, in "Petty France in Westminster, next door to the Lord Scuda"more's, and opening into St. James's Park." The house still exists, and is, I believe, the only one of Milton's various London residences now left. Whoever chooses to seek out the present house known as No. 19, York Street, Westminster, may behold in that tenement the actual house in which Milton wrote the foregoing letter to Mylius, and which he and his were to inhabit for the next eight years. But what a difference between its present look and environment and its old look and environment as suggested by Phillips's description! What is now "York Street, Westminster," in dim commemoration of the fact that his grace, John Sharp, Archbishop of York, had his town-house thereabouts in the beginning of the last century, is a mean and dingy street of closely-packed houses and small shops, parallel indeed to the fine "Bird-Cage Walk" on the south side of St. James's Park, but separated from the Park and the very sight of its grass and trees by clumps of intervening buildings. No. 19 in that street, with a squalid shop in its lower part, and a recess on one side of it used for stacking wood, is of even less inviting aspect from the street than some of its neighbours. The frontage to the street, which is oldish, but with signs of modern doing up, is narrow. If you enter (which you do by a small door and passage at the side of the shop), you have to grope up a dark staircase to the rooms that were once all Milton's, but are now let out among various tenants. As the tradition of Milton still survives in the house, a little enquiry at one or two shabby doors on the staircase, to be followed by a shilling or so, will admit you to as many of the rooms as you want to see. The larger ones on the first floor are not so bad; and it will occur to you, as you survey them, that what are now the back-rooms of the whole house may have been even pleasant and elegant in the old times when the house had a garden of its own behind it, and that garden opened directly into the Park. If you then descend, in quest of traces of this garden and its access to the Park, you will find only a small stone-flagged bit of yard, and a high wall, with vast building beyond, blocking off all view of what must have been the rest of the stretch of the garden. The more antique character of the brick house, however, as seen from this flagged yard at the back, suggests distinctly that its aspect from the Park, and the approach to it from the Park, were once more important than its present York Street frontage; and, with this impression in one's mind, and remembering that the whole skirt of the Park by Bird-Cage Walk, now |