Milton’s birth and nurture were thus in the centre of London; but the London of that day had not half the population of the Liverpool of ours.  Even now the fragrance of the hay in far-off meadows may be inhaled in Bread Street on a balmy summer’s night; then the meadows were near the doors, and the undefiled sky was reflected by an unpolluted stream.  There seems no reason to conclude that Milton, in his early boyhood, enjoyed any further opportunities of resort to rural scenery than the vicinity of London could afford; but if the city is his native element, natural beauty never appeals to him in vain.  Yet the influences which moulded his childhood must have been rather moral and intellectual than merely natural:—­

   “The starlight smile of children, the sweet looks
    Of women, the fair breast from which I fed,”

played a greater part in the education of this poet than

   “The murmur of the unreposing brooks,
    And the green light which, shifting overhead,
    Some tangled bower of vines around me shed,
    The shells on the sea-sand, and the wild flowers.”

Paramount to all other influences must have been the character of his father, a “mute” but by no means an “inglorious” Milton, the preface and foreshadowing of the son.  His great step in life had set the son the example from which the latter never swerved, and from him the younger Milton derived not only the independence of thought which was to lead him into moral and social heresy, and the fidelity to principle which was to make him the Abdiel of the Commonwealth, but no mean share of his poetical faculty also.  His mastery of verbal harmony was but a new phase of his father’s mastery of music, which he himself recognizes as the complement of his own poetical gift:—­

   “Ipse volens Phoebus se dispertire duobus,
    Altera dona mihi, dedit altera dona parenti.”

As a composer, the circumspect, and, as many no doubt thought prosaic scrivener, took rank among the best of his day.  One of his compositions, now lost, was rewarded with a gold medal by a Polish prince (Aubrey says the Landgrave of Hesse), and he appears among the contributors to The Triumphs of Oriana, a set of twenty-five madrigals composed in honour of Queen Elizabeth.  “The Teares and Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soule”—­dolorous sacred songs, Professor Masson calls them—­were, according to their editor, the production of “famous artists,” among whom Byrd, Bull, Dowland, Orlando Gibbons, certainly figure, and three of them were composed by the elder Milton.  He also harmonized the Norwich and York psalm tunes, which were adapted to six of the Psalms in Ravenscroft’s Collection.  Such performance bespeaks not only musical accomplishment, but a refined nature; and we may well believe that Milton’s love of learning, as well as his love of music, was hereditary in its origin, and fostered by his contact with his father.  Aubrey distinctly affirms that Milton’s skill on the organ was directly imparted to him by his father, and there would be nothing surprising if the first rudiments of knowledge were also instilled by him.  Poetry he may have taught by precept, but the one extant specimen of his Muse is enough to prove that he could never have taught it by example.