equal to Vandyck in all except freedom of hand and grace," — he soon had as much work as he could do, in painting portraits at five broad pieces a head. He painted usually on small panel with black draperies. Among his works that survive are several portraits of James I. and his children, and not a few of noblemen and ladies of the Courts of James and Charles I. But one of his first works in England, if the connoisseurs are right in pronouncing it his, was a portrait of the scrivener's son of Bread-street, painted in 1618. The portrait still exists, conveying a far more life-like image of little Johnny Milton, as he used to look in his neat lace frill and with his black braided dress fitting close around his little chest and arms, than any of the ideal portraits of the poetic child. The face is, indeed, that of as nice a boy as one would wish to see.

The head, from the hair being cut close all round it (and here the reader must supplement what hardly appears in the engraving and imagine the hair a light quburn, and the complexion a delicate pink or clear white and red), has a look of fine solidity, very different from those fantastic representations, all aërial and wind-blown, offered as the heads of embryo-poets. In fact, the portrait is that of a very grave and intelligent little Puritan boy with auburn hair. The prevailing expression in the face is a lovable seriousness; and, in looking at it, one can well fancy that those lines from “ Paradise Regained,” which the first engraver ventured to inscribe under the portrait, were really written by the poet with some reference to his own recollections of himself as a child :

“When I was yet a child, no childish play

To me was pleasing; all my mind was set
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do
What might be public good: myself I thought
Born to that end, born to promote all truth
And righteous things."

Writing in 1641, while his father was still alive, Milton describes his early scholastic education in these words : — “I had, from my first

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 the schools." And again, in another publication after his father was dead :-“My father destined me, while yet a little child, for the study of humane letters. . . Both at the grammar-school and under other masters at home he caused me to be instructed daily.”? These sentences describe summarily the whole of Milton's literary education prior to his seventeenth year, when he went to the University; and it is not so easy to distribute the process into its separate parts.

Immediately after the statement, “ Anno Domini 1619, he was ten years old, as by his picture; and was then a poet," Aubrey adds, “ His schoolmaster then was a Puritan in Essex who cut his hair short.”3 This would seem to imply that the schoolmaster lived in Essex, and that the boy was sent to him there. . Except from Aubrey, however, we hear nothing of such a schoolmaster in Essex. The only teacher of Milton of whom we have a distinct account from himself as one of his masters before he went to a regular grammar-school, or who taught him privately while he was attending such a school, was a different person. This was Thomas Young, afterwards a Puritan minister, not in Essex but in Suffolk, and well known in his later life as a prominent divine of the Puritan party. Respecting the earlier life of this not uninteresting man I have been able to recover a few particulars.

He was a Scotchman by birth. In one of his subsequent publications, at a time when it was not convenient for a Puritan minister of Suffolk to announce his name in full, he signed himself “ Theophilus Philo-Kuriaces, Loncardiensis," which may be translated “Theophilus Kirklover, native of Loncardy.” The disguise was effectual enough, for it might have puzzled his readers to find where Loncardy was. There is, however, a place of that name in Britain - Loncardy, more frequently written Loncarty, or Luncarty, in Perthshire. The place is celebrated in Scottish history, as the scene of a great battle early in the eleventh century between the Scots and the Danes. According to the legend, the Danes were conquering and the Scots were flying, when a husbandman named Hay and his two sons, who were ploughing in a field near, rallied their countrymen by drawing their ploughs and other implements across the narrow passage where the fugitives were thickest, at the same time cheering and thrashing them back to renew the fight. The Scots, thus rallied, gained the battle; Scotland was freed from the Danes; and the peasant Hay and his sons were ennobled by king Kenneth, had lands given them, and became the progenitors of the noble family of Errol and the other Scotch Hays. In the place made famous by their exploits there was settled, I find, in the year 1612, as parson of the parish of Loncardy, but doing duty also in the adjoining parishes of Pitcairne and Redgorton, a Mr. William Young,. whom I take to have been the father or brother of our Thomas Young. At all events Thomas Young was born at Loncardy, in 1587 or 1588. He was sent thence to the University of St. Andrew's, where his name is found among the matriculations at St. Leonard's College in 1602. After completing his education in Arts there, and probably also becoming a licentiate of the Scottish Kirk, he migrated into England in quest of occupation — about the very time, it would seem, when the efforts of king James to establish Episcopacy in Scotland were causing commotion among the Scottish Kirkmen. He settled in or near London, and appears to have supported himself partly by assisting Puritan ministers, and partly by teaching. It is not unlikely that he is the “ Mr. Young" mentioned with other persons, afterwards of note in the English Church, who had at one time or another been pulpit-assistants of Mr. Gataker of Rotherhithe. If so, his introduction to Mr. Stocke would have been easy. Certain it is that, by some means or other, he was introduced to Mr. Stocke's parishioner, the scrivener of Bread-street, and employed to teach his son. By the chances of the time, and the search after a livelihood, it had fallen to a wandering Scot from Loncardy, bred to hardy literature amid the seabreezes of St. Andrew's, to be the domestic preceptor of the future English poet! He seems to have been already a married man. It is probable, therefore, that he did not reside with his pupil, but only visited him daily.

From Young's subsequent career, and from the unusually affectionate manner in which Milton afterwards speaks of him, it is clear that, however his gait and accent may have at first astonished Mrs. Milton, he was a man of many good qualities. The poet, writing to him a few years after he had ceased to be his pupil, speaks of the “incredible and singular gratitude he owed him on account of the services he had done him," and calls God to witness that he reverenced him as a father. And, again, more floridly in a Latin elegy, in words which may be translated thus :

“Dearer he to me than thou, most learned of the Greeks (Socrates), to Cliniades (Alcibiades), who was the descendant of Telamon; and than the great Stagirite to his generous pupil (Alexander the Great) whom the loving Chaonis bore to Libyan Jove. Such as Amyntorides (Phænix) and the Philyreian hero (Chiron) were to the king of the Myrmidones (Achilles, the pupil, according to the legend, of Phænix and Chiron), such is he also to me. First, under his guidance, I explored the recesses of the Muses, and beheld the sacred green spots of the cleft summit of Parnassus, and quaffed the Pierian cups, and, Clio favoring me, thrice sprinkled my joyful mouth with Castalian wine.

The meaning of which, in more literal prose, is that Young grounded his pupil well in Latin, gave him perhaps also a little Greek, and at the same time awoke in him a feeling for poetry, and set him upon the making of English and Latin verses.

How long Young's preceptorship lasted cannot be determined with precision. It certainly closed about 1622, when Young left England at the age of thirty-five, and became pastor of the congregation of English merchants settled in Hamburg. But, if Young continued to teach Milton till the time of his departure for Hamburg, then, during the latter part, at least, of his engagement, he was not Milton's sole teacher. From the first it had been the intention of Milton's father to send his son to one of the public schools in town, and before 1620 this intention had been carried into effect.

London was at that time by no means ill provided with schools. Besides various schools of minor note, there were some distinguished as classical seminaries. Notable among these was St. Paul's School in St. Paul's Churchyard, a successor of the old Cathedral School of St. Paul's, which had existed in the same place from time immemorial. Not less celebrated was Westminster School, founded anew by Elizabeth in continuation of an older monastic school which had existed in Catholic times. Ben Jonson, George Herbert, and Giles Fletcher, all then alive, had been educated at this school; and the great Camden, after serving in it as under-master, had held the office of head-master since 1592. Then there was St. Anthony's free school in Threadneedle street, where Sir Thomas More and Archbishop Whitgift had been educated once so flourishing that, at the public debates in logic and grammar between the different schools of the city, St. Anthony's scholars generally carried off the palm. In particular there was a feud on this score between the St. Paul's boys and the St. Anthony's boys - the St. Paul's boys nicknaming their rivals “ Anthony's pigs," in allusion to the pig which was generally represented as following this Saint in his pictures; and the St. Anthony's boys somewhat feebly retaliating by calling the St. Paul's boys "Paul's pigeons” in allusion to the pigeons that used to hover about the Cathedral.? Though the nicknames survived, the feud was now little more than a tradition - St. Anthony's school having come sorely down in the world, while the pigeons of Paul's fluttered higher than ever. A more formidable rival in the city now to St. Paul's was the freeschool of the Merchant Tailors' Company, founded in 1561. Finally, besides these public day schools, there were schools of note kept by