This Walter Stonor—or “Water” as the inscription has it—squire of Wraysbury, was afterwards Lieutenant of the Tower of London, and was knighted in 1545. He died in 1550. Horton, beyond Wraysbury, and even more secluded, is at once a charming and an interesting place: a village made up of old mansions and old cottages, all scattered widely amid large grounds and pretty gardens. The church, too, is fine, chiefly of Norman and Early English work, with a tower built in chequers of flint and stone; a fine timber fifteenth-century north porch, and an exceptionally good and lavishly-enriched Norman doorway. Horton has a literary as well as a picturesque and an architectural interest, for it is closely associated with Milton, who resided here as a young man. Milton’s father had retired in his seventieth year, with a not inconsiderable fortune, derived from his business as a scrivener; that is to say, the profession of a public notary, to which was added the making of contracts and the negotiation of loans. He had left the cares and the money-making at Bread Street for the quiet joys of a country life, and had settled at Horton, a place perhaps even then not more remote from the world than now. Hither, on leaving Christ’s College, Cambridge, came his son, John, rather a disappointing son at this period, a son who had disregarded the dearest wish of his parents’ hearts, that he should enter the Church; and proposed, instead, to lead the intellectual life of study and meditation. We may quite easily suspect that this would seem, to the hard-headed man of business, used to placing money out to usury, and to naturally look in every direction for an increase, for some tangible result of pains taken and capital expended, a singularly barren prospect. It might even have appeared to him the ideal of a lazy, feckless disposition. But the ex-scrivener and his wife hid their disappointment as best they could, and suffered their son to take his own course. They were, after all, wealthy enough for him to do without a lucrative profession. Therefore, for a period of nearly six years—from July 1632 to April 1638, to be exact—the poet lived with his parents and his books at Horton, occupying the time from his twenty-fourth to his thirtieth year with study and music. Here he composed the companion-poems, _L’Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, a portion of a masque entitled _Arcades_, the complete masque of _Comus_, and _Lycidas_, a long, sweetly-sorrowing poem to the memory of a friend and fellow-colleger at Cambridge, one Edward King, who had lost his life by shipwreck in August 1637, on crossing to Ireland. In April 1637 his mother died. We may still see on the floor of the chancel in Horton church the plain blue stone slab simply inscribed: “Here lyeth the body of Sara Milton, the wife of John Milton, who died the 3rd of April 1637.” [Illustration: HORTON CHURCH.]