From “Woman’s Work in the Home.”

FEW things shock us more in the records of history than the mention of bad daughters. Happily they are not numerous. It is inexpressibly painful to find among them two at least of the daughters of Milton—Mary and Anne, the two elder. The third daughter, Deborah, seems to have been better than her unnatural sisters, and spoke of her father with affection after his death.

  There is too much reason to fear that heredity, as well as the many unhappy circumstances which surrounded that ill-starred family, may account for a relationship so disastrous. Miss Powell, whom Milton married, was the daughter of a rowdy, impecunious, and broken-down cavalier. It would have been impossible for him to select a young lady less suited to be at the head of a sober Puritan household. There are strong grounds for the belief that she treated him shamefully—far more shamefully than is usually suspected. And though, in his consummate magnanimity, he forgave her and received her back into his home, and also gave shelter to her endangered and broken-down relatives, it is hardly likely that their union ever produced much happiness. Her daughters seem to have resembled her. No doubt Milton made mistakes in the too scanty intellectual training which he alone was able to give to those shallow natures. His ideal of womanhood was not ignoble, as we see in what he writes of Eve—

	“She as a veil down to the slender waist
	Her unadorned golden tresses wore,
	As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
	Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
	And by her yielded, by him best received.
	For contemplation he, and valor formed;
	For softness she, and sweet attractive grace:
	He for God only, she for God in him.

  But this Hebrew and Puritan ideal required to be colored with some of the hues of chivalry. Milton adored his second wife, and we hear the sobs which sound through his sonnet on his “late espoused saint,” after her too early death. When he was old and blind, and could no longer court for himself, his third wife was chosen for him by his friend Dr. Paget. This lady, Elizabeth Minshull, who was much younger than Milton, seems to have been of a retiring and self-respecting character. In his last conversation with his brother Christopher, he spoke of her as “his loving wife.” But it was impossible for her to live with the daughters of Milton and Mary Powell. She wisely persuaded Milton to have all three “sent to learn some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture that are proper for women to learn, particularly embroideries in gold or silver.” The maidservant who gave evidence about Milton’s will tells us that when the second daughter, Mary, was told that her father was to be married, “she said that was no news, but if she should hear of his death, that was something.”

  It is difficult to pardon their frightful and unnatural Philistinism, and Milton felt it deeply. The worst was that they were guilty of petty purloinings, cheated him, and actually sold his books, forcing him to feel an anguish more acute than that caused by his blindness. He would leave them nothing but what was supposed to belong to their mother, “because,” he said, “they have been very undutiful to me.” “My children have been unkind to me,” as he often told his brother, “but my wife has been very kind and careful of me.” It may be a palliation, not an excuse, that they had to read to him in eight languages, not one of which they understood, because, he would often say in jest, that “one tongue was enough for a woman.” Doubtless they felt a rebellious dissatisfaction at the dullness of their lives in that sad home, with nothing about them except books, which they loathed.

  Perhaps some of the bitterness of Milton’s disappointments in his experience of womanhood breathes through the lines of “Paradise Lost”:—

	“For that fair female troup thou saw’st, that seemed
	Of goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay,
	Yet empty of all good wherein consists
	Woman’s domestic honor and chief praise;
	Bred only, and completed to the taste,
	Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance,
	To dress, and troll the tongue, and roll the eye.”

  But I will conclude with the picture of a model daughter, of one whose name shines out on the page of history as a supreme example of daughterly affection,—Margaret Roper, the favorite child of Sir Thomas More.

  Some writers imagine that learning and advanced education in the children tend to diminish affection towards the parents. History does not bear out the suspicion. Margaret Roper is one conspicuous instance to the contrary. She, the best and most loving of daughters, was one of the most learned women of her day. She wrote Latin with such elegance as to excite the astonishment and admiration of the accomplished Cardinal Pole. She wrote an essay in Latin on the “Four Last Things,” which her father, the great and learned chancellor of England, preferred to one which he himself had composed on the same subject. She was capable of discussing with her father some of the gravest questions of theology and politics. Another remarkable proof that learning interferes in no way with the domestic affections is Lady Jane Grey—

	“Girl never breathed to rival such a rose,
	Rose never blew that equaled such a bud.”

She was so devoted to learning that, at the age of sixteen, as Roger Ascham tells us, she preferred studying Plato’s “Phædo” with Roger Ascham to joining the youths and maidens in the exhilarating diversion of the chase. Yet she was a model of loving obedience to her parents, and of devotion to her husband. And this was the case although her parents educated her with the astonishing and atrocious cruelty which was in those days deemed necessary to success in education. Fuller may well say that her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, treated “with more severity than needed to so sweet a temper” their lovely child, who at thirteen was writing Greek, and at fifteen was also learning Hebrew, Latin, Italian, and French, and corresponding with the learned Bullinger, while she could also embroider beautifully, and had many feminine accomplishments. Yet here, taken from Roger Ascham’s “Scholemaster,” is the account she gave him of the way in which she was trained: “When I am in presence either of father or mother; whether I speake, or keepe silence, sit, stand, or go, eate, drinke, be merrie or sad, be sowying, playing, dauncing, or doing anie thing else, I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfitelie as God made the world, or else I am so sharplie taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presentlie sometimes with pinches, nippes, and bobbes, and other waies which I will not name, for the honour I bear them, without measure misordered, that I thinke myselfe in hell.”

  But to return to Margaret Roper, the passages which describe her relation to her father are very beautiful:—

“When he had remained with great cheerfulness about a month’s space in the Tower, his daughter Margaret, longing sore to see her father, made earnest suit, and at last got leave to go to him; at whose coming, after they had said together the seven psalms and litanies, among other speeches he said thus unto her: ‘I believe, Megg, that they who have put me here think they have done me a high displeasure, but I assure thee, mine own good daughter, that if it had not been for my wife, and you my children, whom I account the chief part of my charge, I would not have failed long ere this to have closed myself in as strait a room as this, and straiter too.’”

  Here is the famous description of the last parting of father and daughter by his great-grandson, Cresacre More:—

“When Sir Thomas was come now to the Tower-wharf, his best-beloved child, my Aunt Roper, desirous to see her father … to have his last blessing, gave her attendance to meet him; whom, as soon as she espied, after she had received upon her knees his fatherly blessing, she ran hastily unto him, and without consideration of care of herself, passing through the midst of the throng and guard of men, who, with bills and halberds compassed him round, there openly in the sight of them all embraced him, took him about the neck and kissed him, not able to say any word but ‘Oh, my father! Oh, my father!’ He liking well her most natural and dear affection to him, gave her his fatherly blessing, telling her that, whatsoever he should suffer, though he were innocent, yet it was not without the will of God, counseling her to accommodate her will to God’s blessed pleasure, and to be patient for her loss. She was no sooner parted from him, and had gone scarce ten steps, when she, not satisfied with her former farewell, like one who had forgot herself, ravished with the entire love of so worthy a father, having neither respect to herself nor to the press of people about him, suddenly turned back and ran hastily to him, took him about the neck, and divers times together kissed him; whereat he spoke not a word, but carrying still his gravity, tears fell also from his eyes; yea, there were very few in all the troop who could refrain hereat from weeping;… yet, at last, with a full, heavy heart, she was severed from him.”

  The day before his execution he wrote a letter to her with a coal, the use of pen and ink being still denied him, in which he expressed a great affection for all his children, and a grateful sense of her filial piety and tenderness when she took leave of him in the street. He sent her also his whip and shirt of hair.

  To any who know how deep and rich may be the blessings and life compensations of a happy Christian home—to any who have breathed the air of that paradise—it must be saddening to read that the emancipation of womanhood from many trammels which this age has witnessed is said to have culminated in a “revolt of the daughters.” I can imagine many fatal errors in the training of daughters and of sons. I can imagine that the daughters of women of fashion, who are that and nothing more, may think their own aims at least as noble and as little reprehensible as that of any mother who would sell their happiness into the gilded servitude of a “great” or a “wealthy” marriage with some decrepit millionaire or titled debauchee. I can imagine, too, that many mothers may make the mistake about their daughters which so many fathers make about their sons, in expecting that their children ought to be like themselves, and have similar views and similar aspirations. Every human soul is an island, and it is surrounded by an unvoyageable sea. It does not, by any means, follow that the child will reflect either the character or the ideal of its parents. It may even revert by atavism to some far distant type wholly alien from that of its immediate progenitors; and, in any case, our children, like all other human beings, are—as someone has said—simply the summed-up totals of innumerable double lines of ancestors which go back to our first parents, Adam and Eve. A Commodus, who is a monster of brutalism and vulgarity, is the son of a Marcus Aurelius, who is the “bright consummate flower” of all pagan morality. An Agrippina the younger, whose name was stained with so many infamies, was the daughter of the virtuous wife of Germanicus, who set an example of stainless purity in an evil and adulterous age. If there be any general “revolt of the daughters,” which I do not believe, there must be some deep underlying germ of disease in our modern civilization. It can hardly occur when parents are wise and loving, and when, for the fussiness of wearisome restraints and incessant interferences, they substitute the firm control of gentleness and love.