Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 18th century
[21] Thomas Newton, Bishop of Bristol, thus writes in his life of
Milton, prefixed to his edition of ‘Paradise Lost,’ London, 1749: ‘His
body was decently interred near that of his father (who had died very
aged about the year 1647) in the chancel of the church of St. Giles,
Cripplegate; and all his great and learned friends in London, not
without a friendly concourse of the common people, paid their last
respects in attending it to the grave. Mr. Fenton, in his short but
elegant account of the life of Milton, speaking of our author’s having
no monument, says that “he desired a friend to inquire at St. Giles’s
Church, where the sexton showed him a small monument, which he said was
supposed to be Milton’s; but the inscription had never been legible
since he was employed in that office, which he has possessed about
forty years. This sure could never have happened in so short a space
of time, unless the epitaph had been industriously erased; and that
supposition, says Mr. Fenton, carries with it so much inhumanity that
I think we ought to believe it was not erected to his memory.” It is
evident that it was not erected to his memory, and that the sexton was
mistaken. For Mr. Toland, in his account of the life of Milton, says
that he was buried in the chancel of St. Giles’s Church, “where the
piety of his admirers will shortly erect a monument becoming his worth,
and the encouragement of letters in King William’s reign.” This plainly
implies that no monument was erected to him at that time, and this was
written in 1698, and Mr. Fenton’s account was first published, I think,
in 1725; so that not above twenty-seven years intervened from the one
account to the other; and consequently the sexton, who it is said was
possessed of his office about forty years, must have been mistaken, and
the monument must have been designed for some other person, and not for
Milton.’
[22] Between the creditable trades of pawnbroker and dram-seller there
is a strict alliance. As Hogarth observes, the money lent by Mr. Gripe
is immediately conveyed to the shop of Mr. Killman, who, in return for
the produce of rags, distributes poison under the specious name of
cordials. See Hogarth’s celebrated print called Gin Lane.
[23] Probably in the month of September, as the entry of his baptism
in the registry of the chapelry of Middlesmoor, in Netherdale, says
‘Eugenius Aram, son of Peter Aram, baptized the 2nd of October.’
[24] Though no warrants were issued against them, Aram was arrested
for debt, in order to keep him; yet he immediately discharged this
debt--not only so, he paid off a mortgage on his property at Bondgate.
Suspicious facts, considering he was, notably, a poor man.
[25] Finding.
[26] The esne was a man of the servile class, a poor mercenary, serving
for hire, or for his land, but was not of so low a rank as the other
classes.
[27] An Act relative to German and Swiss redemptioners.
[28] Bedlam was then in Moorfields.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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