Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 1 (of 2)Howitt, William
History
Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Howitt, William
Literary landmarks -- Great Britain; Poets, English -- Homes and haunts
Warton has said that he composed some of his later productions there. It
would be just the retreat for such purposes, when he required close and
unbroken retirement from the excitements and personal interruptions of
town. Mr. Richards, a sub-commissioner under a recent commission of the
reign of George III., gave Mr. Todd this intelligence: "Milton married a
daughter of Justice Powell, of Sandhurst, in the vicinity of Oxford, and
lived in a house at Forest Hill, about three miles from Sandhurst, where
the late laureate Warton told me Milton wrote a great part of his
Paradise Lost. Warton found a number of papers of Milton's own writing
in that house, and also many of Justice Powell's, which the late Mr.
Crewe, father to the late Viscountess Falmouth, permitted him to take,
and make what use of them he thought proper. The late Mr. Mickle
translated part of Camoens' Luciad in the same house, he being, at the
time I visited him, a lodger in that house. Mr. Mickle married the
daughter of Mr. Tomkins, a farmer, the tenant to Mr. Crewe. The time I
allude to of visiting my worthy friend Mickle was in 1772 and 1773; and
my conversations had with Mr. Warton and Mr. Crewe were from 1781 to
1786."
Having now clearly settled the fact that Forest Hill, near Shotover, was
a residence of Milton, and probably through a course of nine years, at
various times, and the scene of some of those great literary and
political works on which he was arduously engaged during those years;
and that while his birth-place in Bread-street, and his parental home at
Horton, were both destroyed, this has been nearly so, we will now notice
a little more closely the condition of his home during those nine years
of his first marriage. That marriage appears to have been a great
mistake; to have destroyed to a great degree his domestic comfort, and
to have occasioned the world to entertain a very unfavorable idea of
Milton's disposition. The facts, drawn from his various biographers, are
briefly these.
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