Lady Fareham encouraged his visits, and was always gracious to
him. She discovered that he possessed the gift of music, though not in
the same remarkable degree as Henri de Malfort, who played the guitar
exquisitely, and into whose hands you had but to put a musical instrument
for him to extract sweetness from it. Lute or theorbo, viola or viol di
gamba, treble or bass, came alike to his hand and ear. Some instruments he
had studied; with some his skill came by intuition.
Denzil Warner performed very creditably upon the organ. He had played on
John Milton's organ in St. Bride's Church, when he was a boy, and he had
played of late in the church at Chalfont St. Giles, where he had visited
Milton frequently, since the poet had left his lodgings in Artillery Walk,
carrying his family and his books to that sequestered village in the
shelter of the hills between Uxbridge and Beaconsfield. Here from the lips
of his sometime tutor the Puritan had heard such stories of the Court as
made him hourly expectant of exterminating fires. Doubtless the fire would
have come, as it came upon Sodom and Gomorrah, but for those righteous
lives of the Nonconformists, which redeemed the time; quiet, god-fearing
lives in dull old city houses, in streets almost as narrow as those which
Milton remembered in his beloved Italy; streets where the sun looked in for
an hour, shooting golden arrows down upon the diamond-paned casements, and
deepening the shadow of the massive timbers that held up the overlapping
stories, looked in and bade "good night" within an hour or so, leaving
an atmosphere of sober grey, cool, and quiet, and dull, in those obscure
streets and alleys where the great traffic of Cheapside or Ludgate sounded
like the murmur of a far-off sea.
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