brey's “ exceeding fair” must mean a very delicate white and red. Then, he was called “ the lady" in his College - an epithet which implies that, with this unusually delicate complexion, the light brown hair falling to his ruff on both sides of his oval face, and his slender and elegant rather than massive or powerful form, there was a certain prevailing air of the feminine in his look. The feminine, however, was of that peculiar sort -- let connoisseurs determine what it is — which could consist with clear eyes of a dark gray and with a “ delicate and tunable voice,” that could be firm in the low tenor notes and carry tolerably sonorous matter. And, ladylike as he was, there was nothing effeminate in his demeanor. “ His deportment,” says Wood, “was affable, his gait erect and manly, bespeaking courage and undauntedness.” Here Wood apparently follows Milton's own account, where he tells us that in his youth he did not neglect “ daily practice” with his sword, and that he was not so “very slight” (“ exilis admodum”), but that “ armed with it, as he generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match for any one, even were he much the more robust, and of being perfectly at ease as to any injury that any one could offer him, man to man.” (“Eo accinctus, ut plerumque eram, cuivis vel multò robustiori exæquatum me putabam, securus quid mihi quis injuriæ, vir viro, inferre posset.") As to the peculiar blending that there was of the feminine and the manly in the appearance of the “ lady of Christ's,” we have some means of judging for ourselves in a yet extant portrait of him, taken (doubtless to please his father) while he was still a Cambridge student. There could scarcely be a finer picture of pure and ingenuous English youth; and, if Milton had the portrait beside him when, in later life, he had to allude, in reply to his opponents, to the delicate subject of his personal appearance, there must have been a touch of slyness in his statement, that " so far as he knew he had never been thought ugly by any one who had seen him.” In short, the tradition of his great personal beauty in youth requires no abatement." 1 This seems the place for an account of yond dispute. (1.) Aubrey mentions both as those portraits of Milton which belonged to well known to himself, and as being still in the period of his life embraced in the present the possession of Milton's widow in London, volume-i. e. portraits of him taken prior to after her husband's death. What he says 1640, when he was in his thirty-second year. of the boy-portrait we have already seen So far as I can ascertain, there were two, (pp. 42–43) Respecting the other, he says, and only two, original portraits of him be- “His widow has his picture, drawn, very well longing to this period - the one the portrait and like, when a Cambridge scholar; which of him (supposed to be by Jansen) when he ought to be engraven, for the pictures before was a boy of ten; the other a portrait of him his books are not at all like him:" and a lit(artist unknown) when he was a student at tle farther on in the MS. Aubrey writes, by Cambridge. The existence and the authen- way of memorandum for himself, these words, ticity of these two portraits are certified be- “ Write his name in red letters on his picture of Milton prior to 1640, and not being one of the two above mentioned, would require to have its authenticity sharply looked to. The question, therefore, is, Are these two indubitable portraits still extant? Respecting the first-the boy-portrait-there can be no doubt. I have already given full information (p. 43) respecting its history since it was in possession of Milton's widow; and, by the kindness of its proprietor, Mr. Disney, I have the satisfaction of giving in this volume a new engraving of it, taken from a photograph made for the purpose. Respecting the other portrait, the following information may be interesting. Vertue, whose veracity as an engraver was proverbial, and whose care to authenticate a suspicious picture of Milton put into his hands in 1721 we have already seen, did, ten years afterwards (1731), engrave a portrait of Milton as a young man - which portrait he had the pleasure of knowing to be one of the two that had been mentioned to him by the poet's daughter. It was then (1781) in the possession of the Right Honorable Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons, who had bought it from the executors of Milton's widow, after her death in 1727. "Joannes Milton, ætat. 21, ex picturâ archetypa quæ penes est præhonorabilem Arthurum Onslow, Armig. Vertue Sc. 1731," was the inscription on the quarto copy of the engraving; and there was also an octavo copy in the same year, with the inscription somewhat varied. There were repeated engravings of the same by Vertue in subsequent years, during Speaker Onslow's life - Vertue having apparently had a particular liking for the picture. Of some sixteen or eighteen engravings of Milton by Vertue (see Granger's Biog. Hist. and Bromley's Cat. of Brit. Port.), five or six are from this portrait; one of the last being that engraved for Newton's edition of Milton in 1747. The same "Onslow portrait," as it was called, was also engraved by Houbraken in 1741, by Cipriani in 1760, for Mr. Hollis (see Hollis's Memoirs), and by other artists; and, indeed, this is the foundation of all the common prints of Milton as a youth. The last engraving known to me as direct from the picture is not a very good one, published in 1794 by Boydell and Nicol, with this inscription, "John Milton, atat. 21, from the original picture in the possession of Lord Onslow, at Clandon in Surrey, purchased from the executor of Milton's widow by Arthur Onslow, Esq., Speaker of the House of Commons, as certified in his own handwriting on the back of the picture; W. N. Gardiner, Sculpt," (Speaker Onslow had died 1768, and his son had succeeded to the title of Lord Onslow 1776-raised to that of Earl 1801). The picture, I have been informed, is not in the possession of the present Earl of Onslow; nor, while I write this note, have I been able to ascertain where it is. It, doubtless, exists, however; and whoever has it ought to attach to it the above facts in its pedigree, to prevent mistake. Possibly Aubrey's intended authentication in "red letters" may be on the pic In this "beautiful and well-proportioned body," to use Aubrey's words, there lodged " a harmonical and ingeniose soul." In describing that "soul" more minutely, I may be allowed to proceed in a somewhat gradual manner. I may be allowed also to avail myself, as I proceed, of such words of my own in a previous essay on the same subject, as appear to me still to express the truth. with his widow to preserve." (2.) The engraver Vertue, being engaged, in the year 1721, in engraving, for the first time, a head of Milton (of whom afterwards he executed so many engravings), was very anxious to know that the picture which had been put into his hands to be engraved, was an authentic likeness. For this purpose he saw the poet's youngest and only surviving daughter, Deborah Clarke, then living in Spitalfields. His account of the interview remains in a letter, dated August 12, 1721, addressed to Mr. Charles Christian, and now in the British Museum (Add. MS. 5016 * fo. 71). He says, "Pray inform my Lord Harley that I have on Thursday last seen the daughter of Milton the poet. I carried with me two or three different prints of Milton's picture, which she immediately knew to be like her father [these seem to have been prints after Faithorne's picture of him in later life], and told me her mother-in-law, living in Cheshire, had two pictures of him, one when he was a school-boy, and the other when he was above twenty. She knows of no other picture of him, because she was several years in Ireland, both before and after his death. I showed her the painting I have to engrave, which she believes not to be her father's picture, it being of a brown complexion, and black hair and curled locks. On the contrary, he was of a fair complexion, a little red in his cheeks, and light brown, lank hair." Vertue then continues: "I desire you would acquaint Mr. Prior I was so unfortunate to wait upon him on Thursday morning last, after he was gone out of town. It was this intent, to inquire of him if he remembers a picture of Milton in the late Lord Dorset's collection, as I am told this was; or, if he can inform me how I shall inquire or know the truth of this affair, I should be much obliged to him, being very willing to have all certainty on that account before I begin to engrave the plate, that it may be the more satisfactory to the public as well as myself." (3.) As regards these two portraits mentioned by Aubrey and by Deborah Clarke, we know farther that they were in the possession of Milton's widow at Nantwich, Cheshire, at her death in 1727; for, in the inventory of her effects, one of the entries includes "Mr. Milton's pictures." These two portraits, therefore, are the only two belonging to the earlier part of Milton's life, the authenticity of which seems positively guaranteed. There may have been others; but any portrait claiming to be a portrait "Fes "The prevailing tone, the characteristic mood and disposition of Milton's mind, even in his early youth, consisted," I have said, "in a deep and habitual seriousness." I used, and I now use, the word in no special or restricted sense. The seriousness of which I speak was a constitutional seriousness, ratified and nourished by rational reflection, rather than the assumed temper of a sect. From his childhood we see this seriousness in Milton, this tendency to the grave and earnest in his views of things. It continues with him as he grows up. It shows itself at the University, in an unusual/ studiousness and perseverance in the graver occupations of the place. It shows itself in an abstinence from many of those jocosities and frivolities which, even in his own judgment, were innocent enough, and quite permissible to those who cared for them. tivities and jests in which I acknowledge my faculty to be very slight," are his own words on the subject. His pleasure in such pastimes was small; and, when he did good-humoredly throw himself into them, it was with an apology for being out of his element. But still more distinctly was the same seriousness of disposition shown in his notion as to where innocence in such things ended. In the nickname of "the lady," as applied to Milton by his Collegefellows, we see, from his own interpretation of it, not only an allusion to his personal appearance, but also a charge of prudery. It was as if they called him "the maid." He himself understands it so; and there are passages in some of his subsequent writings, in which he seems to regard it as due to himself, and as necessary to a proper appreciation of his whole career, that such references to the innocence of his youth should be interpreted quite literally. So far, there can be no doubt that the example of Milton contradicts much that is commonly advanced by way of a theory of the poetical character. "Poets and artists," I have said, "are and ought to be distinguished, it is generally held, by a predominance ture; which would be an additional circumstance of interest. For the present volume the choice was one of Vertue's engravings made between 1731 and 1756; Cipriani's of 1760; or Gardiner's of 1794. In every respect Vertue's are superior to the others; and I have selected as the best of Vertue's that of 1731. 1 Essay on "Milton's Youth," in "Essays, Biographical and Critical, chiefly on English Poets," 1856. |