out from his wife's canvas
with the grace and tenderness of a portrait by Vandyck. She dwells on
the personal beauty which distinguished his youth, on "his teeth even
and white as the purest ivory," "his hair of brown, very thick-set in
his youth, softer than the finest silk, curling with loose great rings
at the ends." Serious as was his temper in graver matters, the young
squire of Owthorpe was fond of hawking, and piqued himself on his skill
in dancing and fence. His artistic taste showed itself in a critical
love of "paintings, sculpture, and all liberal arts," as well as in the
pleasure he took in his gardens, "in the improvement of his grounds, in
planting groves and walks and forest-trees." If he was "diligent in his
examination of the Scriptures," "he had a great love for music and often
diverted himself with a viol, on which he played masterly."

[Sidenote: Milton.]

The strength however of the religious movement lay rather among the
middle and professional classes than among the gentry; and it is in a
Puritan of this class that we find the fullest and noblest expression of
the new influence which was leavening the temper of the time. John
Milton is not only the highest but the completest type of Puritanism.
His life is absolutely contemporaneous with his cause. He was born when
it began to exercise a direct influence over English politics and
English religion; he died when its effort to mould them into its own
shape was over, and when it had again sunk into one of many influences
to which we owe our English character. His earlier verse, the pamphlets
of his riper years, the epics of his age, mark with a singular precision
the three great stages in its history. His youth shows us how much of
the gaiety, the poetic ease, the intellectual culture of the Renascence,
lingered in a Puritan home. Scrivener and "precisian" as his father was,
he was a skilled musician, and the boy inherited his father's skill on
lute and organ. One of the finest outbursts in the scheme of education
which he put forth at a later time is a passage in which he vindicates
the province of music as an agent in moral training. His home, his
tutor, his school were all rigidly Puritan; but there was nothing narrow
or illiberal in his early training. "My father," he says, "destined me
while yet a little boy to the study of humane letters; which I seized
with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever
went from my lesso