328 MILTON Much -forgotten of me ; or else your Latian music Changed for the British war-screech ! What then ? For one to do all things, One to hope all things, fits not ! Prize sufficiently ample Mine, and distinction great (unheard-of ever thereafter Though I should be and inglorious all through the world of the stranger), If but the yellow-haired Ouse shall read me, the drinker of Alan, Huinber, which whirls as it flows, and Trent s whole valley of orchards, Thames, my own Thames, above all, and Tamar s western waters, Tawny with ores, and where the white waves swinge the far Orkneys. " Interpreted prosaically, this means that Milton was meditating an epic of which King Arthur was to be the central figure, but which should include somehow the whole cycle of British and Arthurian legend, and that not only was this epic to be in English, but he had resolved that all his poetry for the future should be in the same tongue. Not long after Milton s return the house at Horton ceased to be the family home. Christopher Milton and his wife went to reside at Reading, taking the old gentleman with them, while Milton himself preferred London. He had first taken lodgings in St Bride s Churchyard, at the foot of Fleet Street ; but, after a while, probably early in 1640, he removed to a "pretty garden house " of his own, at the end of an entry, in the part of Aldersgate Street which lies immediately on the city side of what is now Maidenhead Court. His sister, whose first husband had died in 1631, had married a Mr Thomas Agar, his successor in the Crown Office; and it was arranged that her two sons by her first husband should be educated by their uncle. John Phillips, the younger of them, only nine years old, had boarded with him in the St Bride s Churchyard lodgings ; and, after the removal to Aldersgate Street, the other brother, Edward Phillips, only a year older, became his boarder also. Gradually a few other boys, the sons of well-to-do personal friends, joined the two Phillipses, whether as boarders or for daily lessons, so that the house in Aldersgate Street became a small private school. The drudgery of teaching seems always to have been liked by Milton. What meanwhile of the great Arthurian epic 1 ? That project, we find, had been given up, and Milton s mind was roving among many other subjects, and balancing their capabilities. How he wavered between Biblical subjects and heroic subjects from British history, and how many of each kind suggested themselves to him, one learns from a list in his own handwriting among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge. It contains jottings of no fewer than fifty-three subjects from the Old Testament, eight from the Gospels, thirty-three from British and English history before the Conquest, and five from Scottish history. It is curious that all or most of them are headed or described as subjects for "tragedies," as if the epic form had now been abandoned for the dramatic. It is more interesting still to observe which of the subjects fascinated Milton most. Though several of them are sketched pretty fully, not one is sketched at such length and so particularly as Paradise Lost. It is the first subject on the list, and there are four separate drafts of a possible tragedy under that title, two of them merely enumerating the dramatis persons^, but the last two indicating the plot and the division into acts. Thus, in 1640, twenty-seven years before Paradise Lost was given to the world, he had put down the name on paper, and had committed himself to the theme. To these poetic dreamings and schemings there was to be a long interruption. The Scottish National Covenant had led to extraordinary results. Not only were Charles and Laud checkmated in their design of converting the mild Episcopal system which King James had established in Scotland into a high Laudian prelacy ; but, in a General Assembly held at Glasgow in the end of 1638, Episcopacy had been utterly abolished in Scotland, and the old Presbyterian system of Knox and Melville revived. To avenge this, and restore the Scottish bishops, Charles had marched to the Border with an English army ; but, met there by the Covenanting army under General Alexander Leslie, he had not deemed it prudent to risk a battle, and had yielded to a negotiation conceding to the Scots all their demands. This " First Bishops War," as it came to be called, was begun and concluded while Milton was abroad. About the time of his return, how ever, Charles had again broken with the Scots. Milton had been watching the course of affairs since then with close and eager interest. He had seen and partaken in the sympathetic stir in favour of the Scots which ran through the popular and Puritan mind of England. He had welcomed the practical proof of this sympathy given in that English parliament of April 1640, called " The Short Parliament," which Charles, in his straits for supplies against the Scots, had reluctantly summoned at last, but was obliged to dismiss as unmanageable. Charles had, never theless, with money raised somehow, entered on the "Second Bishops War." This time the result was momentous indeed. The Scots, not waiting to be attacked in their own country, took the aggressive, and invaded England. In August 1640, after one small engagement with a portion of Charles s army, they were in possession of Newcastle and of all the northern English counties. The English then had their opportunity. A treaty with the Scots was begun, which the English Puritans, who regarded their presence in England as the very blessing they had been praying for, were in no haste to finish ; and, on the 3d of November 1640, there met that parliament which was to be famous in English history, and in the history of the world, as " The Long Parliament." Of the first proceedings of this parliament, including the trial and execution of Strafford, the impeachment and imprisonment of Laud and others, and the break-down of the system of Thorough by miscellaneous reforms and by guarantees for parliamentary liberty, Milton was only a spectator. It was when the church question emerged distinctly as the question paramount, and there had arisen divisions on that question among those who had been practically unanimous in matters of civil reform, that he plunged in as an active adviser. There were three parties on the church question. There was a high-church party, contending for Episcopacy by divine right, and for the maintenance of English Episcopacy very much as it was ; there was a middle party, defending Episcopacy on grounds of usage and expediency, but desiring to see the powers of bishops greatly curtailed, and a limited Episcopacy, with councils of presbyters round each bishop, substituted for the existing high Episcopacy ; and there was the root-and- branch party, as it called itself, desiring the entire abolition of Episcopacy and the reconstruction of the English Church on something like the Scottish Presbyterian model. Since the opening of the parliament there had been a storm of pamphlets crossing one another in the air from these three parties. The chief manifesto of the high-church party was a pamphlet by Joseph Hall, bishop of Exeter, entitled Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament. In answer to Hall, and in representation of the views of the root-and-branch party, there had stepped forth, in March 1640-41, five leading Puritan parish ministers, the initials of whose names, clubbed together on the title-page of their joint production, made the uncouth word " Smectymnuus." These were Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen,
and William Spurstow. The Thomas Young whose name