Anne was strong, robust and hearty; John was slender, pale, with dreamy, dark gray eyes and a head too big for his body; Christopher was so-so.  And, in passing, it is well to explain, once for all, that Christopher made his way straight to the front in life, taking up his father’s business and being appointed a Court Officer.  Thence he was promoted to the Woolsack, became rich, cultivated a double chin, was knighted, and passed out full of honors.  The chief worriment and source of shame in the life of Sir Christopher Milton came from the unseemly conduct of his brother John, who was much given to producing political and theological pamphlets.  And once in desperation Sir Christopher Milton requested John Milton to change his family name, that the tribe of Milton might be saved the disgrace of having in it “a traducer of the State, an enemy of the King, and a falsifier of Truth.”  Sir Christopher Milton was an excellent and worthy man, and I must apologize for not giving him more attention at this time; but lack of space forbids.

Sickly boys who are wise beyond their years are ever the pets of big sisters, and the object of loving, jealous, zealous care on the part of their mothers.  John Milton talked like an oracle while yet a child, and one biographer records that even as a babe he sometimes mildly reproved his parents for levity.

He was a precocious child, and have we not been told that precocity does not fulfill its promises?  But this boy was an exception.  He was incarnated into a family that prized music, poetry, philosophy, and yet held fast to the Christian faith.  His father set psalms to music, his sister wrote madrigals, and his mother played sweet strains on a harp to waken him at morningtide.  The entire household united in a devotion to poetry and art.  Possibly this atmosphere of high thinking was too rarefied for real comfort—­the gravity of the situation being sustained only by a stern effort.

But no matter—­father, mother and sister joined hands to make the pale, handsome boy a prodigy of learning:  one that would surprise the world and leave his impress on the time.

And they succeeded.

Of the three Milton children that passed away in childhood, I can not but think that they succumbed to overtraining, being crammed quite after the German custom of stuffing geese so as to produce that delicious diseased tidbit known to gourmets as pate de foies gras.  John Milton stood the cramming process like a true hero.  His parents set him apart for the Church—­therefore he must be learned in books, familiar with languages, versed in theories.  They desired that he should have knowledge, which they did not know is quite a different thing from wisdom.

So the boy had a private tutor in Greek and Latin at nine years of age, and even then began to write verse.  At ten years of age his father had the lad’s portrait painted by that rare and thrifty Dutchman, Cornelius Jansen.  We have this picture now, and it reveals the pale, grave, winsome face with the flowing curls that we so easily recognize.