328 Mev. F. D. Maurice, [Jan. 30, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, January 30. 



William Pole, Esq. M. A. F.R.S. Treasurer and Vice-President, 

 in the Chair. 



Rev. F. D. Maurice, M.A. M.R.I. 

 Milton considered as a Schoolmaster. 



Milton was an actual schoolmaster : his letter to Mr. Hartlib, 

 explains his idea of education. In the year 1639, after his return 

 from Italy, he took a house in St. Bride's Churchyard ; after- 

 wards one in Aldersgate Street, for the instruction, first, of his two 

 nephews, and then of the children of some of his friends. Accord- 

 ing to Dr. Johnson, several of Milton's biographers have shown a 

 desire to shrink from this passage of his life altogether, and have 

 wished to represent his teaching as gratuitous. Johnson himself, 

 while he ridicules this folly, sneers at Milton for returning to Eng- 

 land, because his countrymen were engaged (as he thought) in a 

 struggle for liberty, and then vapouring away his patriotism in a 

 private boarding-school. 



The earliest biographer of Milton, Edward Phillips, his nephew 

 and pupil, is not open to the charge of regarding this occupation of 

 Milton as a disgrace, or of hinting that he undertook it without 

 remuneration. The others had probably had a notion that Aiders- 

 gate Street was not the place for a poet to dwell in, and that his 

 work ought to be of a specially etherial kind. But Chaucer was 

 Comptroller of Petty Customs, in the port of London ; Spenser 

 was born in East Smithfield, and died, it is to be feared, "for lack 

 of bread," in King Street, Westminster ; Shakespeare was busy at 

 the Globe Theatre during the most important years of his life ; 

 and Milton himself was not only born at the Spread Eagle, in 

 Bread Street, not only received his education at St. Paul's School, 

 but had evidently a lingering love for London, whenever for a short 

 time he was separated from it. There is clear evidence that he 

 preferred the Thames to the Cam. Even in the genial years that 

 he passed at his father's house in Horton, when he was writing 

 " L' Allegro," " II Penseroso," " Comus," " Lycidas," he was still 

 paying frequent visits to London, that he might perfect himself in 

 his father's favourite study of music, and in the mathematics. And 



