had very weak eyes, and used spectacles presently after she was thirty years old.” The poet speaks of her, as "a most excellent mother, and particularly known for her charities in the neighborhood (matre probatissimâ et eleemosynis per viciniam potissimum notâ.)”

To the worthy pair, thus wedded in or about 1600, there were born, in the course of the next fifteen years, six children, as follows:

1. A “chrisom child”-i.e. a child who died before it could be baptized,” – respecting whom there is this entry in the Register of Allhallows, Bread-Street: “ The 12 of May A° 1601 was buried a Crysome Child of Mr. John Mylton's of this parish, scrivenor.” 3

2. Anne, the register of whose baptism has not been found, but who may be supposed to have been born between 1602 and 1607.

3. John, born Dec. 9, 1608, and baptized Dec. 20, as appears from the Allhallows Register : “ The 20th daye of December 1608 was baptized John, the sonne of John Mylton, scrivenor.”

4. Sarah, baptized at Allhallows July 15, 1612, and buried there Aug. 16 in the same year.

5. Tabitha, baptized in the same place Jan. 30, 1613—14, and buried elsewhere at the age of two years and six months.

6. Christopher, baptized at Allhallows Dec. 3, 1615.4

By the death of three of these children in infancy the family of the scrivener and his wife was reduced to three a daughter Anne, the eldest, and two sons, John and Christopher. The poet, therefore, grew up with one sister and one brother; the sister several years older than himself, and the brother exactly seven years younger.

CHAPTER II.

THE SPREAD-EAGLE, BREAD-STREET, OLD LONDON.

1608-1620.

In vain now will the enthusiast in Milton step out of the throng of Cheapside and walk down Bread-street, to find remaining traces of the house where Milton was born. The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed this with so many other of the antiquities of old London. Bread-street, indeed, stands almost exactly in the centre of the space over which the Fire extended. Nevertheless, as the city was rebuilt after the Fire with as strict attention to the old sites as the surveyor's art of that day could ensure the present Bread-street occupies relatively the same position in the map of London as the old one did. Exactly where the present Bread-street strikes off from the present Cheapside did old Bread-street strike off from old Cheapside; and, allowing for recent improvements, with the same arrangement of streets right and left, north and south. If, therefore, nothing of the material fabric of the house where Milton was born, nor of the objects which once lay around it in that spot, now remains, at least the ghosts of the old tenements still hang in the air, and may be discerned by the eye of vision.

Till lately, more remained. Describing Bread-street as it was in 1720, or more than fifty years after the Fire, Strypel enumerates several courts in it, and among these, one called “ Black SpreadEagle Court.” It was the first court on the left, going from Cheapside. He describes it as "small, but with a free-stone pavement, and having a very good house at the upper end." The information is repeated in the last edition of his work in 1754; and in the map of Bread-street Ward in that edition, “Black Spread Eagle Court” is very distinctly marked. There can be no doubt that this “Black Spread-Eagle Court.” was a commemoration of the house which had been occupied by Milton's father. We know, from Aubrey, that the house had acquired celebrity as the poet's birth-place while he was yet alive, and that foreigners used to go and see it up to the very year of the Fire; and it is not likely that, when Bread-street was re-built, the honor of the name was transferred to another spot.

The court itself remains — the first on the left hand going from Cheapside, and at the depth of three houses back from that thoroughfare. It no longer, however, bears any name — neither “Black Spread-Eagle Court” nor any other; the warehousing firms who occupy it not finding any such name necessary to ensure the safe delivery of their goods and letters. The name probably fell out of use soon after 1766, when the house-signs were taken down over London, and houses began to be designated by numbers. Walk down Bread-street, therefore, on the left hand from Cheapside; single out the now anonymous little court which lies at the depth of three houses from that thoroughfare; realize that as having been Strype's “ Black Spread-Eagle Court” of 1720 and 1754; and then again demolish in imagination this little “ Black SpreadEagle Court,” and rear in its room an edifice chiefly of wood and plaster; finally, fancy this house with its gable end to the street, ranging with others of similar form and materials on one side, and facing others of similar form and materials opposite; and you have the old Spread-Eagle in which Milton was born as vividly before you as it is ever likely to be!

This house, as we have said, was as much in the heart of the London of that day as the houses in the same site are in the heart of the London of this. The only difference is that, whereas the population of London now exceeds two millions, it was then perhaps not more than 200,000 souls. The future poet, then, was not only a Londoner, like his predecessors Chaucer and Spencer, but a Londoner of the innermost circle, a child of the very heart of Cockaigne. Bow Church stood at the back of Spread-Eagle, and so close that, had the famous bells fallen, they might have crushed the infant in his cradle. This circumstance is to be distinctly conceived. A great part of the education of every child consists of those impressions, visual and other, which the senses of the little being are taking in busily though unconsciously amid the scenes of their first exercise; and though all sorts of men are born in all sorts of places - poets in towns, and prosaic men amid fields and woody solitudes - yet, consistently with this, it is also true that much of the original capital on which all men trade intellectually through life consists of that mass of miscellaneous fact and imagery which they have acquired imperceptibly by the observations of their early

years. If then, though it is above our meagre science to say how much of the form of Shakspeare's genius depended on his having been born and bred amid the circumstances of a Warwickshire village, we still follow the boy in his wanderings by the banks of the Avon, hardly the less is it necessary to remember that England's next great poet was born in the middle of old London, and that the sights and sounds amid which his childhood was nurtured were those of crowded street-life.

Bread-street, like its modern successor, stretched southward from Cheapside, athwart Watling-street, in the direction of the river. “So called," says Stow, "of bread anciently sold there," it was, in Milton's childhood, one of the most respectable streets in the city, “wholly inhabited by rich merchants," who had their shops below and their dwelling-houses above, and with two parish churches in it, and “divers fair inns for good receipt of carriers and other travellers, Going down from his father's house on the same side and passing the neighbors' houses, the boy would come first to the Star Inn with its court. Passing it and another row of merchants' shops and houses beyond it, he would cross Watling-street, inhabited by “wealthy drapers, retailers of woollen cloth, both broad and narrow, of all sorts, more than any one in the city.”2 On the opposite corner of Watling-street stood the parish church of Allhallows, where he sat every Sunday with his father and mother, and where he had been christened. Continuing the walk on the same side, and passing Salters' Hall, an old foundation of “six almshouses builded for poor decayed brethren of the Salters' Company," he would come upon the second parish-church in the street, that of Saint Mildred the Virgin. A little farther on after crossing Basing-lane, he would come upon the greatest curiosity in the whole street the famous Gerrard's Hall. “ On the south side of Basinglane,” says Stow, “is one great house of old time builded upon arched vaults, and with arched gates of stone brought from Caen in Normandy. The same is now a common hostrey for receipt of travellers, commonly and corruptly called Gerrard's Hall, of a giant said to have dwelled there. In the high-roofed hall of this house sometime stood a large fir-pole, which reached to the roof thereof and was said to be one of the staves that Gerrard the giant used in the wars to run withal. There stood also a ladder of the same length, which, as they say, served to ascend to the top of the staff: Of later years this hall is altered in building, and divers rooms are made in it. Notwithstanding, the pole is removed to one corner of the hall, and the ladder hanged broken upon a wall in the

yard. The hosteler of that house said to me the pole lacked half a foot of forty in length; I measured the compass thereof and found it fifteen inches." Stow's own researches enabled him to inform the hosteler that the Hall was properly not "Gerrard's Hall," but “Gisor's Hall,” so called from a wealthy London family, its original owners, who had dwelt there in the reigns of Henry III. and Edward I. For this information he got no thanks; and the story of Gerrard the Giant remained one of the popular myths of Breadstreet. Beyond Gerrard's Hall, there was little to be seen on that side of Bread-street; and, unless the boy continued his walk towards Thames-street and the river, he might return home by the other side of the street, seeing such other objects as the Three Cups Inn, and the Bread-street compter or prison.

There were, however, other objects of interest, either in Breadstreet or so close to it as to be accessible from it. One was the Mermaid Tavern, famous as the resort of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and the other literary celebrities of those days.

“What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life; then, when there hath been thrown
Wit able enough to justify the town
For three days past — wit that might warrant be
For the whole city to talk foolishly
Till that were cancell'd; and, when that was gone,
We left an air behind us, which alone
Was able to make the two next companies
Right witty, though but downright fools.” 3

The date of the merry meetings thus alluded to, with such a sense of after-relish, by one who so often figured in them, corres