One of Milton's volunteer readers, and one to whom we owe the most
authentic account of him in his last years, was a young Quaker, named
Thomas Ellwood. Milton's Puritanism had been all his life slowly
gravitating in the direction of more and more liberty, and though he
would not attach himself to any sect, he must have felt in no remote
sympathy with men who repudiated state interference in religious
matters, and disdained ordinances. Some such sympathy with the pure
spirituality of the Quaker may have disposed Milton favourably
towards Ellwood. The acquaintance once begun, was cemented by mutual
advantage. Milton, besides securing an intelligent reader, had a
pleasure in teaching; and Ellwood, though the reverse of humble, was
teachable from desire to expand himself. Ellwood took a lodging near
the poet, and went to him every day, except "first-day," in the
afternoon, to read Latin to him.
Milton's frequent change of abode has been thought indicative of a
restless temperament, seeking escape from petty miseries by change of
scene. On emerging from hiding, or escaping from the serjeant-at-arms
in 1660, he lived or a short time in Holborn, near Red Lion Square.
From this he removed to Jewin Street, and moved again, on his
marriage, in 1662, to the house of Millington, the bookseller, who
was now beginning business, but who, before his death in 1704, had
accumulated the largest stock of second-hand books to be found in
London. His last remove was to a house in a newly-created row facing
the Artillery-ground, on the site of the west side of what is now
called Bunhill Row. This was his abode from his marriage till his
death, nearly twelve years, a longer stay than he had made in any
other residence. This is the house which, must be associated with the
poet of _Paradise Lost_, as it was here that the poem was in part
written, and wholly revised and finished. Bat the Bunhill Row house is
only producible "by the imagination; every trace of it has long
been swept away, though the name Milton Street, bestowed upon a
neighbouring street, preserves the remembrance of the poet's connexion
with the locality. Here "an ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire, Dr.
Wright, found John Milton in a small chamber, "hung with rusty green,
sitting in an elbow-chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale, but not
cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones." At
the door of this house, sitting in the sun, looking out upon the
Artillery-ground, "in a, grey coarse cloth coat," he would receive his
visitors. On colder days he would walk for hours--three or four hours
at a time. In his garden. A garden was a _sine qua non_, and he took
care to have one to every house he lived in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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