Note 21 — MILTON’S BONES.

Thomas Newton, Bishop of Bristol, thus writes in his life of Milton, prefixed to his edition of ‘Paradise Lost,’ London, 1749: ‘His body was decently interred near that of his father (who had died very aged about the year 1647) in the chancel of the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate; and all his great and learned friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the common people, paid their last respects in attending it to the grave. Mr. Fenton, in his short but elegant account of the life of Milton, speaking of our author’s having no monument, says that “he desired a friend to inquire at St. Giles’s Church, where the sexton showed him a small monument, which he said was supposed to be Milton’s; but the inscription had never been legible since he was employed in that office, which he has possessed about forty years. This sure could never have happened in so short a space of time, unless the epitaph had been industriously erased; and that supposition, says Mr. Fenton, carries with it so much inhumanity that I think we ought to believe it was not erected to his memory.” It is evident that it was not erected to his memory, and that the sexton was mistaken. For Mr. Toland, in his account of the life of Milton, says that he was buried in the chancel of St. Giles’s Church, “where the piety of his admirers will shortly erect a monument becoming his worth, and the encouragement of letters in King William’s reign.” This plainly implies that no monument was erected to him at that time, and this was written in 1698, and Mr. Fenton’s account was first published, I think, in 1725; so that not above twenty-seven years intervened from the one account to the other; and consequently the sexton, who it is said was possessed of his office about forty years, must have been mistaken, and the monument must have been designed for some other person, and not for Milton.’