Читать книгу Eighteenth Century Waifs - John Ashton - Страница 10

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‘Me too, perchance, in future days,

The sculptured stone shall show,

With Paphian myrtle or with bays

Parnassian on my brow.

But I, or ere that season come,

Escaped from every care,

Shall reach my refuge in the tomb,

And sleep securely there.’16

So sang, in Roman tone and style,

The youthful bard, ere long

Ordain’d to grace his native isle

With her sublimest song.

Who then but must conceive disdain,

Hearing the deed unblest,

Of wretches who have dared profane

His dread sepulchral rest?

Ill fare the hands that heaved the stones

Where Milton’s ashes lay,

That trembled not to grasp his bones

And steal his dust away!

O ill-requited bard! neglect

Thy living worth repaid,

And blind idolatrous respect

As much affronts thee dead.

Leigh Hunt possessed a lock of Milton’s hair which had been given to him by a physician—and over which he went into such rhapsodies that he composed no less than three sonnets addressed to the donor—which may be found in his ‘Foliage,’ ed. 1818, pp. 131, 132, 133. The following is the best:—

TO———— MD.,

On his giving me a lock of Milton’s hair.

It lies before me there, and my own breath

Stirs its thin outer threads, as though beside

The living head I stood in honoured pride,

Talking of lovely things that conquered death.

Perhaps he pressed it once, or underneath

Ran his fine fingers, when he leant, blank-eyed,

And saw, in fancy, Adam and his bride

With their heaped locks, or his own Delphic wreath.

There seems a love in hair, though it be dead.

It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread

Of our frail plant—a blossom from the tree

Surviving the proud trunk;—as if it said,

Patience and Gentleness is Power. In me

Behold affectionate eternity.

How were these personal relics obtained? By rifling his tomb. Shakespeare solemnly cursed anyone who should dare to meddle with his dead body, and his remains are believed to be intact.

‘Good friend, for Jesus’ sake, forbear

To dig the dust inclosed here:

Blest be the man who spares these stones,

And cursed be he who moves my bones.’

But Milton laid no such interdict upon his poor dead body—and it was not very long after his burial, which took place in 1674, that the stone which covered it, and indicated his resting-place, was removed, as Aubrey tells us in his ‘Lives’ (vol. iii, p. 450). ‘His stone is now removed. About two years since (1681) the two steppes to the communion-table were raysed, Ighesse, Jo. Speed,17 and he lie together.’ And so it came to pass that, in the church of St. Giles’, Cripplegate, where he was buried, there was no memorial of the place where he was laid, nor, indeed, anything to mark the fact of his burial in that church until, in 1793, Samuel Whitbread set up a fine marble bust of the poet, by Bacon, with an inscription giving the dates of his birth and death, and recording the fact that his father was also interred there.

It is probable that Mr. Whitbread was moved thereto by the alleged desecration of Milton’s tomb in 1790, of which there is a good account written by Philip Neve, of Furnival’s Inn, which is entitled, ‘A Narrative of the Disinterment of Milton’s coffin, in the Parish-Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, on Wednesday, August 4th, 1790; and the Treatment of the Corpse during that and the following day.’

As this narrative is not long, I propose to give it in its entirety, because to condense it would be to spoil it, and, by giving it in extenso, the reader will be better able to judge whether it was really Milton’s body which was exhumed.