take time for even a short stop in this vicinity, it would probably be
for the credit of saying that we walked over Hounslow Heath intact in
purse and person. The gentlemen of the road live only in the classic
pages of Ainsworth, Reynolds and, if we may include Sam Weller in such
worshipful company, that bard of "the bold Tur_pin_." Another class
of highwaymen had long before them been also attracted by the fine
manoeuvring facilities of the heath, beginning with the army of the
Cæsars and ending with that of James II. Jonathan Wild and his merry
men were saints to Kirke and his lambs.

Hurrying on, we skirt one of Pope's outlying manors, in his time the
seat of his friend Bathurst and the haunt of Addison, Prior, Congreve
and Gay, and leave southward, toward the Thames, Horton, the cradle of
Milton. A marble in its ivy-grown church is inscribed to the memory
of his mother, _ob_. 1637. At Horton were composed, or inspired,
_Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus_ and others of his nominally
minor but really sweetest and most enjoyable poems. In this retirement
the Muse paid him her earliest visits, before he had thrown himself
away on politics or Canaanitish mythology. Peeping in upon his
handsome young face in its golden setting of blonde curls,

Through the sweetbrier or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine,

she wooed him to better work than reporting the debates of the
archangels or calling the roll of Tophet. Had he confined himself to
this tenderer field, the world would have been the gainer. He might
not have "made the word Miltonic mean sublime," but we can spare a
little of the sublime to get some more of the beautiful.