I collected this account from the mouths of those who were immediate actors in this most sacrilegious scene; and before the voice of charity had reproached them with their impiety. By it those are exculpated whose just and liberal sentiments restrained their hands from an act of violation, and the blood of the lamb is dashed against the door-posts of the perpetrators, not to save, but to mark them to posterity.
This Mr. Neve, whose pious horror at the sacrilegious desecration of the poet’s tomb seems only to have been awakened at the eleventh hour, and whose restitution of the relics he obtained does not appear, was probably the P.N. who was the author, in 1789, of ‘Cursory Remarks on some of the Ancient English Poets, particularly Milton.’ It is a work of some erudition, but the hero of the book, as its title plainly shows, was Milton. Neve places him in the first rank, and can hardly find words with which to extol his genius and intellect, so that, probably, some hero-worship was interwoven in the foregoing relation of the discovery of Milton’s body; and it may be as well if the other side were heard, although the attempt at refutation is by no means as well authenticated as Neve’s narrative. It is anonymous, and appeared in the _St. James’s Chronicle_, September 4-7th, 1790, and in the _European Magazine_, vol. xviii, pp. 206-7, for September, 1790, and is as follows:
_Reasons why it is impossible that the Coffin lately dug up in the Parish Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, should contain the reliques of_ MILTON.
_First._ BECAUSE _Milton_ was buried in 1674, and this coffin was found in a situation previously allotted to a wealthy family, unconnected with his own.--See the mural monument of the _Smiths_, dated 1653, &c., immediately over the place of the supposed MILTON’S interment.--In the time that the fragments of several other sarcophagi were found; together with two skulls, many bones, and a leaden coffin, which was left untouched because it lay further to the north, and (for some reason, or no reason at all) was unsuspected of being the _Miltonic_ reservoir.
_Secondly._ The hair of MILTON is uniformly described and represented as of a light hue; but far the greater part of the ornament of his pretended skull is of the darkest brown, without any mixture of gray.[18] This difference is irreconcilable to probability. Our hair, after childhood, is rarely found to undergo a total change of colour, and MILTON was 66 years old when he died, a period at which human locks, in a greater or less degree, are interspersed with white. Why did the Overseers, &c., bring away only such hair as corresponded with the description of _Milton’s_? Of the light hair there was little; of the dark a considerable quantity. But this circumstance would have been wholly suppressed, had not a second scrutiny taken place.
