A theatre
now stood where the boy and a fellow-scholar had played trap and ball,
and the stately houses of Queen Street hard by were alive with rank and
fashion.
In addition to the classical curriculum which Milton had taught with the
solemn earnestness of one in whom learning is a religion, Denzil had
acquired a store of miscellaneous knowledge from the great Republican;
and most interesting among these casual instructions had been the close
acquaintance with nature gained in the course of many a rustic ramble in
the country lanes beyond Gray's Inn, or sauntering eastward along the banks
of the limpid Lee, or in the undulating meadows beside Sir Hugh Middleton's
river. Mixed with plain facts about plant or flower, animal or insect,
Milton's memory was stored with the quaint absurdities of the Hermetic
philosophy, that curious mixture of deep-reaching theories and old women's
superstitions, the experience of the peasant transmuted by the imagination
of the adept. Sound and practical as the poet had ever shown himself--save
where passion got the upper hand of common sense, as in his advocacy
of divorce--he was yet not entirely free from a leaning to Baconian
superstitions, and may, with Gesner, have believed that the pickerel weed
could engender pike, and that frogs could turn to slime in winter, and
become frogs again in spring.
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