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Lives of the English Poets : Waller, Milton, Cowley by Samuel Johnson
page 79 of 225 (35%)
looked like a house of the Muses only, though the accession of
scholars was not great. Possibly his having proceeded so far in the
education of youth may have been the occasion of his adversaries
calling him pedagogue and schoolmaster; whereas it is well known he
never set up for a public school, to teach all the young fry of a
parish, but only was willing to impart his learning and knowledge to
his relations, and the sons of gentlemen who were his intimate
friends, and that neither his writings nor his way of teaching
savoured in the least of pedantry."

Thus laboriously does his nephew extenuate what cannot be denied,
and what might be confessed without disgrace. Milton was not a man
who could become mean by a mean employment. This, however, his
warmest friends seem not to have found; they therefore shift and
palliate. He did not sell literature to all comers at an open shop;
he was a chamber-milliner, and measured his commodities only to his
friends.

Philips, evidently impatient of viewing him in this state of
degradation, tells us that it was not long continued; and, to raise
his character again, has a mind to invest him with military
splendour: "He is much mistaken," he says, "if there was not about
this time a design of making him an adjutant-general in Sir William
Waller's army. But the new-modelling of the army proved an
obstruction to the design." An event cannot be set at a much
greater distance than by having been only "designed, about some
time," if a man "be not much mistaken." Milton shall be a pedagogue
no longer; for, if Philips be not much mistaken, somebody at some
time designed him for a soldier.

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