Milton-Royal, a market-town of England, county of Kent, on an inlet of the channel between the Isle of Sheppey and the mainland, 11 miles N.E. of Maidstone, and 39 E. by S. from London. The town stands on the declivity of a hill, and is old and irregularly built, but it contains many good houses and cottages of recent erection. The inhabitants are principally engaged in the oyster fishery,—the "Milton natives" being in great demand in the London market. Some trade in corn and other agricultural produce is also carried on. Market-day, Saturday. Pop. of parish (1831) 2407.

JOHN MILTON was born at his father's house in Bread Street, in the city of London, on the 9th of December 1608. Nothing of the material fabric of the street in which he was born now remains, the great fire of 1666 having destroyed that with so much of the rest of old London. But the present Bread Street, which is one of the streets striking off from the great thoroughfare of Cheapside towards the river, occupies the exact site of the old Bread Street; and the spot in which Milton was born may be yet identified as being that occupied by the third or fourth house on the left, going from Cheapside. Here, as one of a line of very respectable shops, and dwelling-houses over them, inhabited chiefly by merchants, and all, as was then the custom, distinguished by signs over the doors and not by numbers as at present, there stood, prior to the great fire, a house and shop known as the Black-Spread Eagle. Milton's father, whose name was also John, had occupied this house since 1603, and carried on in it the business of a scrivener or a copying-lawyer. The story is, that he had betaken himself to that profession some fifteen or twenty years before, on being disinherited by his father, a substantial yeoman in Oxfordshire, for having abandoned the Catholic faith. He had prospered well, and had become possessed of considerable property, including the house in Bread Street; and the sign of the Spread Eagle affixed to the house was no other than the armorial device of his family. Before removing to this house, and when verging on forty years of age, he had married a lady considerably younger than himself, whose name, according to one account, was Sarah Bradshaw, but according to another, Sarah Caston. Five children were the issue of the marriage, of whom only three attained to mature years—a daughter, Anne, a year or two older than the poet; the poet himself; and a son named Christopher, exactly seven years younger than the poet.

In Milton's case there is less trace of the effect of that rude, though powerful kind of education which is afforded to all children by the mere miscellany of external circumstance amid which they live, than of the effect of the more express education of orderly domestic training. Here, to use a common phrase, he had every advantage. Peace, piety, and comfort reigned in the home in Bread Street. Like most of the substantial London citizens of the time, the scrivener was of Puritan leanings in the matter of religion, and his household was regulated on Puritan principles. But he was also a man of liberal culture and taste. He was especially skilled in music; and specimens of his skill in this art may be seen in various musical publications of the day. It was from him that Milton derived his musical ear and his first tuition in music as an art and a science. This excellent man discerned the genius of his son from the first, and found the chief pleasure and pride of his life in fostering it and watching its growth. Of Milton's mother we hear less. She was, according to Milton himself, "a most amiable woman, particularly noted for her charities in the neighbourhood;" and Aubrey adds that she had such weak eyes, that before she was thirty years old she had to wear spectacles.

It was in his father's house that Milton received his earliest literary education. His first teacher was Thomas Young, a Scotchman, who, after having been educated at one of the Scottish universities, had migrated into England. His connection with the Milton family may have begun as early as 1618, when his pupil was ten years of age; and it must have closed by 1623, when Young went abroad as chaplain to the British merchants at Hamburg, from which exile he returned in 1628 to be settled as vicar of Stowmarket in Suffolk. While still under Young's care Milton was sent to St Paul's School—a public grammar school of as high celebrity as any in London, and convenient as being situated within a minute's walk of Bread Street. The head master of the school was Alexander Gill, a Lincolnshire man, whose reputation as a teacher was then great; and the usher, or under-master, was his son, the Rev. Alexander Gill, junior, who had recently left Oxford with a considerable name as a scholar. With him Milton contracted an acquaintance, which was continued afterwards; and he also formed a friendship with a fellow-pupil at the school, named Charles Diodati, the son of an Italian physician settled in London. Diodati left school for Oxford in 1621; but Milton remained at school three or four years longer. At school, according to Aubrey, "he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock, and his father ordered the maid to sit up for him; and in these years he composed many verses which might well become a riper age." Of these early poetical exercises, the only remaining specimens are his English Paraphrases of Psalms cxiv. and cxxxvi., which bear to have been done in his sixteenth year. Milton himself, however, confirms Aubrey's account of his excessive studiousness from his earliest boyhood; and he says, that when he was sent to the university he was already "instructed in various tongues;" and had "no mean apprehension of the sweetness of philosophy."

Cambridge has the honour of counting Milton among her many eminent sons. He was entered as a lesser pensioner at Christ's College, Cambridge, on the 12th February 1624–5, when he was sixteen years and two months old; and he continued his studies in the college for the full academic period of seven years. Concerning his college life there has been much difficulty among his biographers. Johnson was the first to hint the belief that while at college he sustained some punishment at the hands of the college authorities, if not the indignity of corporal chastisement. The original authority, however, for such a statement is Aubrey, whose memoir of Milton, accessible in print since 1813, Johnson had probably seen in MS. at Oxford. Aubrey says, that Milton having received "some unkindness" from his first tutor at college, left him for another; and over the words "some unkindness" there are inserted in the MS. the words "whipt him." On this, taken in connection with Milton's first Latin elegy, in which, writing to his friend Diodati, he seems to refer to some difference with the college authorities which was occasioning his temporary absence from college, the whole controversy has been raised. From the investigation we have been able to bestow on the subject, the facts seem to be these:—That about the second or third year of his residence at college Milton did have some difference with his first tutor, Mr William Chappell, then one of the most distinguished tutors in the university, and afterwards Bishop of Cork and Ross; that this difference did involve some interference on the part of the master of the college, Dr Bainbridge, in consequence of which Milton left college for a time; but that eventually the difference was adjusted by his being transferred from Chappell's tutorship to that of the Rev. Nathaniel Torrey, afterwards a parish clergyman in Leicestershire. It is certain, at least, that any "rustication" to which Milton was subjected did not involve the loss of a single term of his academic course. He took both his degrees exactly at the proper time—his B.A. degree in January 1628–9, and his M.A. degree in July 1632. Apart, Milton, however, from the controversy as to his rustication, it is certain, from Milton's own statements, that at first, owing to a certain haughtiness of manner, and also to a certain obstinacy in pursuing his own course of study, he was unpopular within the walls of the college. His college fellows, he tells us, used to nickname him "The Lady," in allusion partly to the delicacy of his personal appearance, and partly to his moral fastidiousness. He informs us distinctly, however, that this unpopularity was but temporary, and that long before he left college he had won the respect not only of the college, but of the whole university.

He speaks in one place of "that more than ordinary favour and respect which he found above any of his equals at the hands of those courteous and learned men" who were the authorities of his college, and who, he says, when he left them in 1632, "signified in many ways how much better it would content them that he would stay." In short, Milton left the university with the highest possible reputation.

"By his indefatigable study," says Anthony Wood, "he profited exceedingly, and was esteemed to be a sober and virtuous person, yet not to be ignorant of his own parts."

These last words are worth noting. From the very first there is discernible in Milton a vein of noble self-respect, and even self-assertion; a conviction of superior power when measured with others; a conscious dedication of his life to noble ends; and a resolution to preserve unimpaired the purity of his moral being, as essential to the capacity of truly great work in the world, or truly great endeavour of whatever kind.

On going to the university Milton had been destined for the church. For this purpose he had gone through the usual course of study in rhetoric, logic, and the scholastic philosophy and theology—studies, however, which even then he regarded in the main as barren and unprofitable, and on which, as on the whole system of university training, he afterwards looked back with vehement contempt.

There is evidence that during the seven years which he spent in Christ's College he led a life of singular intellectual independence, performing his academic tasks duly, but occupying himself with much else of his own choosing.

The following is a list of his remaining writings during this period (1625–1632):

I. Latin.—(1.) In prose, the first four of his Familiar Epistles, written in 1625 and 1628, and addressed to Thomas Young and Alexander Gill the younger; and seven college themes or orations on various subjects written between 1626 and 1632, and first published by him, along with his Familiar Epistles, in 1674, under the title of Prudentiae quaestiones Oratoriae. (2.) In verse, thirteen pieces, chiefly on incidents of his university life; to wit, the seven pieces in the English metre which form his Epistulae Litterariae, and the first six pieces of his so-called Spleen's Libellus.

II. English.—Thirteen poems, longer or shorter, as follows:—On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a cough, 1626—the infant being the poet's niece, the daughter of his sister Anne, who in 1624 or 1625 had married Edward Phillips from Shrewsbury, who held a situation in the Crown Office, London; part of a Vacation Exercise at College, 1628; The Hymn on the Nativity, 1629; On the Passion, 1630; On Time, 1630; On the Circumcision, 1630; At a Solemn Musick, 1630; On May Morning, 1630; On Shakespeare, 1630; On the University-Carrier (Hobson), "who sickened in the time of his vacancy (January 1630–1), being forbid to go to London by reason of the plague;" another on the same; An Epitaph on the Marquess of Winchester, 1631; Sonnet on his twenty-third birthday 1631.

No one can read these juvenile compositions now without discerning in them ample promise of what Milton became. The English poems are best known; and in one or two of them—as in that on the Fair Infant and that on Christ's Nativity—there is evidence of true poetic genius and of the most exquisite skill in words and verse. But it is in the less read Latin compositions, perhaps, that the leading traits in the character of the young poet are best exhibited. There, while we admire the strong understanding and a command of the Latin tongue in comparison with which the usual classical Latinity of modern scholars is forced and feeble, and while also, even in the cumbrous element of the Latin, we discern the graceful winging of the poetic muse, we see at the same time, better than we can see in the English poems, the habitually grave and austere tone of Milton's mind from his earliest youth,—its tendency, on the one hand, to scorn, and a kind of ferocity of disgust and reprobation; and on the other, to high ideal views and contemplations such as enter only the spirits of the sublime. Nowhere else in the range of juvenile writing known to us is there such distinct evidence of what Horace has called the "os magna sonitarum"—the mouth formed for great utterances. The very heaviness of such attempts as there are at these is factious and the humorous proves that it was not in these that Milton was fitted to excel. "Festivitates et salus," he says himself in one of the pieces, "in quibus peregrinum aquae facillatem meam." In other words, the basis of his character was a moral austerity inconsistent with mere frolic or frivolity, though not inconsistent with the free exercise, on the one hand, of a powerful and inquisitive intellect, or, on the other, of a phantasy delighting in the minutest forms of the musical and the graceful.

It is to be remembered that, though Milton had the compositions above mentioned in manuscript before leaving Cambridge, none of them was published prior to that time except the Epitaph on Shakspere. It appeared anonymously among the laudatory verses prefixed to the second folio Shakspere in 1632; and it is interesting to know that Milton's first appearance in print was on such an occasion. He was then in his twenty-fourth year. According to his original intention, he would about this time have been passing from college to some country curacy; and one can hardly help speculating as to what might have been the result for the Church of England had he done so. A Milton among the ecclesiastics of the days of Laud would have been a phenomenon of some interest. Long ere leaving college, however, he had abandoned the idea of being a clergyman. The reason was his jealous concern for his intellectual and religious freedom—a state of mind for which the condition of the Church of England under the ascendancy of Laud afforded little chance of satisfaction. Whoever would become a clergyman at that time must, he said, "subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that could not retch, he must stait periure himself." He describes himself, therefore, as "church-ouled by the prelates," and as having no other prospect left to him than that of a life devoted to study and literature. It says much for the liberality and discretion of his father, that in these circumstances, instead of urging him into a profession against his will, he suffered him to take his own way. Till he was thirty-one years of age Milton did not earn a penny for himself.

The five years of Milton's life which followed his leaving college (1632–1637) were spent by him at Horton in Buckinghamshire, about 20 miles from London, whither his father had retired in his old age after giving up business. These five years, according to his own account, were spent in complete literary leisure and the enjoyment of the quiet rural beauty of the neighbourhood; not but that sometimes he "exchanged the country for the town, either for the purpose of buying books or for that of taking lessons in music or mathematics." During this time, he says, he turned over the Greek and Latin writers; doubtless also the Italian, French, and English; and there is proof also that he entertained for a time the notion of studying law along with his younger brother Christopher, who had adopted the law as his profession. Of his literary assiduity during the same period there is ample evidence in a long list of subjects for dramas and other poems, drawn out by him in the course of his miscellaneous reading, and now preserved, with others of his manuscripts, in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Of his actual and surviving writings during this period, however, the following is a list:

I. Three Latin Familiar Epistles—the first dated 1634, and addressed to Alexander Gill the Younger, and the other two dated September 1637, and addressed to Charles Diodati. Possibly also a scrap or two of Latin verse.

II. The following well-known English poems: 1. The Sonnet to the Nightingale; and possibly one or two other sonnets. 2. The two exquisite companion poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. 3. "Arcades," part of an entertainment presented to the Countess Dowager of Derby at Harefield by some noble persons of her family, who appear on the scene in pastoral habit." The Dowager Countess of Derby here alluded to was the same lady who, in her youth forty years before, had, under the name of Amaryllis, been the theme of Spenser's song. After the death of her first husband, Lord Strange, who succeeded his father as Earl of Derby in 1594, she had married the lord keeper, afterwards Lord Chancellor Egerton, by whose death in 1617 she was left a widow for the second time. She lived at Harefield House near Hambledon, where she frequently had her younger relatives about her, including the Earl of Bridgewater, her second husband's eldest son, who had a number of children by her first husband. It has been supposed that this venerable lady and her family had discovered the poetical talent of Milton, and had him frequently with them as a favoured guest; but the more probable supposition is, that the young people of her family, having resolved, according to the custom of the time, to get up a masque or musical entertainment in her honour, Milton wrote the words of the Arcades to oblige his intimate friend Henry Lawes the musician, who had been charged with the arrangements. The date of the entertainment was 1633 or 1634; and Arcades was therefore written when Milton was in his twenty-sixth year.

4. "Comus," a masque presented at Ludlow Castle 1634, before John, Earl of Bridgewater, then President of Wales. Pleased with the Arcades, the young people of the Bridgewater family had determined on a longer and more elaborate performance of the same kind; and they found an excellent opportunity for it in the autumn of 1634, when the earl went to Ludlow Castle in Shropshire to take up his official residence there as Lord President of Wales. His children,—Lord Brackley, Mr Thomas Egerton, and Lady Alice,—went with him; and there was a congress of the neighbouring nobility and gentry. The masque for such an occasion required to be something beyond ordinary; and while Lawes did his best for the music, it was felt by the family that it would raise the character of the entertainment if Milton would undertake the poetry. He did so; and taking a hint, it is said, from an adventure which had befallen Lady Alice in Haywood Forest, produced the beautiful masque of the Lady lost in the Enchanted Wood, and beguiled by Comus and his crew, till her brothers find her. It was by far the most considerable poem that Milton had yet produced, and the rumour of it must have carried his name into many circles. That it did so, we learn from the fact that Lawes published the poem in 1637, with a dedication to Lord Brackley, in which he says that "although not openly acknowledged by the author, yet it is a legitimate offspring, so lovely and so much desired, that the often copying of it hath tired my pen to give me several friends satisfaction, and wrought me to a necessity of producing it to the public view."

5. Lycidas, a monody on the death of Mr Edward King, a young gentleman of great promise, who had been Milton's college companion at Cambridge. He was drowned in August 1637 in sailing from Chester to Ireland, where his friends resided; and the event seems to have produced a great sensation at Cambridge, where a volume was published in the following year, containing three Greek, nineteen Latin, and thirteen English poems to his memory. Milton's Lycidas, which is signed "J. M.," closes the volume. He had most probably written it at Horton and sent it to Cambridge. He was then in his twenty-ninth year.

Such were Milton's productions during the five years of his residence under his father's roof at Horton, or from his twenty-fourth to his twenty-ninth year. They are small in bulk, but how exquisite in quality! The minor poems of Milton are, and ever will be, the admiration of critics; and had Milton died at the same time as the friend whom he celebrates as Lycidas, we should still have had, in virtue of those poems, to pronounce his beautiful name among those of the sons of the English muse.

Considered, however, in relation to our knowledge of Milton as he was all in all through life, there is a peculiarity in these early poems. They are truly Miltonic; but they are Miltonic, not in the sense that they represent the whole of Milton, even as he was when he wrote them, but in the sense that they represent him in those moments when he bent his softer genius to the exercise and relaxation of English verse. The poems belong, on the whole, to the idyllic, or what may be called the sensuous-ideal class; that is to say, they are rather poems of rich and beautiful phantasy, of quiet thoughts and imaginations sweetly linked, than of powerful human interest or greatly agitated feeling. They are in this respect not unlike the poetry of Spenser and Keats. According to Coleridge's remark, however, they prove all the better on this account that Milton was by nature a poet. The tendency to choose themes lying remote from ordinary social interests, and the ability, in treating such themes, to wander on and on in a purely ideal manner, weaving a tissue of sensuous fancies connected by occult relations of beauty rather than by the direct associations of place and time, are, according to Coleridge, the most hopeful signs in a youthful poet. These signs were visible in Milton from the first. With all his moral austerity, all his learning, all the strength of his understanding, and all his sterner inclination to the dogmatic, the indignant, and the polemical, his main delight from the first, when he was free to choose, was in purely literary and especially poetic recreation; as if to show how, by reason of very strength, a soul might come to rest in the sweet and exquisite, and so make true his own maxim,

"How charming is divine philosophy!— Not harsh and grinded as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute!"

His early preferences in literature, he tells us himself, had been for the "smooth elegiac poets," whom, both for their matter and "the pleasing sound of their numerous writing," he found "in imitation most easy, and most agreeable to nature's part" in him. He means here poets of the sensuous or sensuous-ideal order, and refers chiefly to Ovid and other classic and Italian poets, though Spenser may be included. That he was right in saying that, as regards their form, the imitation of these poets was agreeable to nature's part in him, no reader of the minor poems can doubt. One of the most striking things about them, especially when compared with the contemporary English poetry produced under Ben Jonson's critical supremacy during the last years of his laureateship, is the perfection of their literary texture,—the taste and finish of their language and versification. Ben died in 1637, and they were therefore in existence in time for him to have seen them, or some of them; and if he had seen them, he would have found even his own most graceful masques, and much more the productions of the Randolphins and others whom he regarded as his literary children, but slovenly things in comparison. But while the form of the poets whom he admired presented no difficulty to Milton, was rivalry with them in matter equally agreeable to nature's part in him? On this point there have been varieties in opinion. That all in all Milton was a poet; that he possessed the poetic faculty par excellence,—call it imagination, ideality, or what we will,—no one has yet been bold enough to deny; and there are perhaps few who would not agree with Coleridge that the nature of this "poetic imagination"—this "vision and faculty divine"—may be better studied in Milton, by reason of its colossal proportions in him, than in any other English poet. If imagination in the poet is the power of thinking in concrete circumstance, of embodying meanings and states of mind in imaginary scenes, incidents, and objects of beauty, which remain in the memory as "a joy forever;"—what imagination in the Penseroso and the Allegro, where the poet has collected and woven together with such musical art the circumstances of nature and life suggestive to the recluse of melancholy on the one hand, and of cheerfulness on the other; in the Arcades, where, upon the simple incident of two or three young people advancing on an English lawn with the homage of a speech and songs to a venerable lady seated under the trees to receive them, the poet has framed so complete and so charming a phantasy for ear and eye; in the Comus, where, on the suggestion of a larger incident of the same kind, he has provided for us, and placed irremovably in our literature, that phantasy of the enchanted forest, more British than any in Spenser, and yet wholly air-hung, through which the lost maiden is ever wandering, and the noble pair of brothers are ever searching for her, and the magical crew are ever revelling with evil intent, and the attendant spirit of purity, disguised as a shepherd, is ever walking his watchful round; finally, in the Lycidas, where, because a hopeful youth has died, we are back among the streams and dells of Arcadia, and behold a landscape in tears! And yet here occurs a question. Imagination or poetry consists in embodying meanings and feelings in forms, which forms must be sensuous; but can it be that a mind should have this poetic tendency to sensuous embodiment of an ideal kind without having a fondness for what may be called the actual sensuous, or, in other words, a love of natural beauty and an accurate perception of it? As regards Milton, this question has been raised incidentally by Mr Ruskin, who, in a classification he has given of eminent moderns according to the degree in which they seem to him to have possessed a constitutional delight in nature, or the habit of accurately perceiving natural beauty, has placed Milton, along with such men as Bacon and Johnson, among those in whom this quality was moderate or defective, as distinct from those, such as Shenstone, Keats, and poets generally, in whom it was evidently great. Now there is much importance in this separation of the men of thought and energy on the one hand, who act outwards upon nature, and whose greatness consists in such action, from the men of sensibility on the other, who are tremulous to the sights and sounds of nature, and find their function in recording and reproducing them; nor is Mr Ruskin wrong when he places Milton among the men of thought and dogma, who had strength within themselves, and whose faculty did not lie mainly in the tips of their outer senses. He seems to be unjust to Milton, however, in the negative part of his criticism, which denies to Milton keenness of external perception and sensibility to natural beauty along with his moral and speculative strength. His minor poems have much of their charm in their sensuousness; this is, indeed, the word that would be used to characterize what is most evident in them. By Wordsworth himself,—who recalled our poetry to truth and nature, and who was at war with almost all our poets from Dryden downwards, precisely because, as he said, they had never looked at nature for themselves, but had spoken of her by rote,—the accuracy of Milton's images from nature was never impugned, but was, on the contrary, asserted and exemplified, and held up by way of example; and it would take much argument now to prove that the sensuousness of Milton's poetry was a simulated or merely literary sensuousness, and not the real sensuousness of a man who delighted in the fields, and the flowers, and the clouds, and whose mind teemed with recollections of them.

We do not find in Milton, indeed, that universal retentiveness of objects and facts of all kinds, from the oddities of street life, up through the beauties of sylvan scenery, to the splendours of celestial space, which we find in Shakspeare, and to which, so far as facts of the lower or more uncouth order are admitted along with those of the higher, a certain humorous lightness of disposition, such as Milton did not possess, seems to be essential. It may be also that, in Milton as in other men, there had been developed a kind of secondary love of nature, as already transfigured and attenuated into literature, and seen through the mist of beautiful speech. All in all, however, as it was certainly the bent of his genius to express itself in sensuous imaginations, so there seems to have been no film separating him from the world of actual existence whence the materials for these imaginations are usually drawn; but, on the contrary, such a habitual intimacy of his senses with whatever in nature or life was beautiful or impressive, that whenever his phantasy began to work, his memory was ready with authentic forms, sounds, colours, or whatever else was necessary for any poetic combination. His woods, his flowers, his atmosphere, are the woods, the flowers, and the atmosphere of genuine English nature.

Underneath the grace and the flowers, however, there are in these minor poems of Milton all the signs of his manly strength. We have called them sensuous-ideal in their general character, and have spoken of them as being, even in virtue of their singular excellence in this kind, essentially Miltonic; but they are Miltonic also in a higher and more complete sense, as indicating the massiveness of Milton's moral, and the height of his intellectual, nature. The purity of tone in all of them is as perfect as the literary taste; and every now and then, from amid the softness and the luxuriance there breaks forth a passage of luminous speculative meaning or sublime moral maxim. In Comus the very theme is the inviolability of virtue by all the powers and wiles of assailing circumstance; and here, as also in the later poem of Lycidas, there are outbreaks of the spirit of the future polemic and stern social reformer.

Just before Lycidas was written Milton's mother had died (Aug. 3, 1637) at Horton, where she lies buried. From his father, now about seventy-four years of age, the poet not long after obtained leave to make a continental tour, more expressly for the purpose of visiting Italy. He set out with one servant towards the end of the year, taking with him some letters of introduction, and some good advice from Sir Henry Wooton, provost of Eton, who had been King James's ambassador at Venice. He was kindly received at Paris by Lord Scudamore, the English ambassador, who introduced him to Grotius, then ambassador in Paris for Queen Christina of Sweden, and also gave him letters to English merchants in Italy. He went to Genoa by way of Nice, and from Genoa to Leghorn, Pisa, and Florence. At Florence he remained two months, frequenting the society of artists and men of letters. From Florence he went to Siena, and thence to Rome, where he also stayed some time and formed some useful acquaintances. He next visited Naples, where he received much attention from the aged Giovanni Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa, the friend and patron of Tasso. Manso at parting took him to task in a friendly manner for his imprudence in speaking too frankly of religious matters. From Naples it was Milton's intention to proceed to Sicily and Greece; but the news which he received of the imminence of a civil war in his native land determined him to return. "I thought it dishonourable," he says, "that I should be travelling at my ease for amusement when my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for liberty." Returning northwards, therefore, he reached Rome again, where he was told that the Jesuits had laid a plot against him; but though he remained two months more there, and made no concealment of the strength of his Protestantism, he was not molested. From Rome he went again for two months to Florence; thence to Lucca, and so across the Apennines, through Bologna and Ferrara, to Venice. Thence, after a month's stay, and having shipped for England the books he had bought in Italy, he travelled, by Verona, Milan, and the Pennine Alps, to Geneva, where he became acquainted with the theologian Diodati, the uncle of his friend Charles; and so through France back again to England, from which he had been absent in all a year and three months. While still abroad, Milton had heard of the death of his friend Charles Diodati; and on his return he wrote his Latin poem entitled Epitaphium Damonis in honour of his memory. One result of the Italian tour, which has not perhaps been sufficiently noted, was its effect in stimulating his literary ambition. While in Italy he had shown about, according to the custom, or had recited in literary circles, some of his juvenile compositions in Latin and English, and had also written some additional trifles, among which were his few Italian sonnets, and his three short Latin poems, *Ad Leonorum Roma canentem*; and the two longer ones, entitled *Manus* and *Ad Salsillum poetam Romanum agrotantem*. These specimens of his taste and skill had won him, in return, complimentary letters and copies of verses from the Italian scholars and wits, some of which he thought worth preserving, to be shown afterwards to his less appreciating countrymen. "Gratified," he says, with encomiums of this kind, "which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps," he had no sooner returned to England than he felt the desire for literary production more strongly than ever. "I began," he says, "thus far to assent both to them and to divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die." His aspirations had even taken a certain determinate direction as regarded the work on which he was to spend his strength. Knowing that "it would be hard to arrive even at the second rank among the Latins," he had resolved that his literary labours thenceforth should be chiefly in his mother tongue, "not caring once to be named abroad, though perhaps he could attain to that, but content with these British islands as his world." He had resolved, moreover, that his main work should be a poem, and a poem of the higher order, in which "what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old, did for their country," he "in his proportion, with this over and above of being a Christian," might do for his. As to the precise form and subject of such a poem, however, he had not made up his mind—whether it should be epic, after the model of Homer, Virgil, and Tasso, and if epic, what king or knight of British history before the Conquest should be chosen as the hero; or whether it should be a stately drama, in which something of the form of Sophocles and Euripides should be combined with still higher forms, of which the Bible, and especially the Apocalypse, afforded examples; or whether, finally, it should be some grand lyric, such as heathen genius had hardly yet attempted.

Alas! these schemes and ruminations were destined to a speedy and severe interruption. The civil war, prognostications of which had reached him in Italy and hastened his return, was now about to begin in earnest; and for a period of twenty years Britain was to be the scene of a social strife such as had been scarce paralleled in the world before. During these twenty years there was very little literature produced in England that was not polemical in its tenor. There were controversial treatises and pamphlets in abundance; there were also satires and songs for political purposes, and full of political allusions; but of pure history, pure philosophical writing, or pure poetry, there was little. The men of talent from whom literature of such kind was to be expected were either dispersed abroad, or, if they remained in England, were whirled along in the common agitation. In the lives of Shirley, Waller, Hobbes, Davenant, Cleveland, Denham, and Cowley, and even in those of men like Jeremy Taylor and Fuller, the effects of the civil wars of Charles's reign, as bending them somewhat, both in external and in internal respects, out of what might otherwise have been their course, may be traced without difficulty. But in the case of Milton the effect is infinitely more striking. But for the civil wars we should have known but half the man. In his case there was a pre-established harmony of mind with the great national revolution through which he had to pass; there were elements in his moral and intellectual being which actually waited for the convulsion; nay, of him alone, in the midst of the Davenants, and Cowleys, and Wallers, can it be said that there was something in his very notions of literature itself which, corresponding as it did by a profound affinity to the new Puritan spirit then beating in the heart of the English people, pointed for that very reason to a literary development which should be no mere continuation of the dregs of Elizabethan wit, but an outburst as original intellectually as the Puritan movement was socially, and requiring partizanship with that movement as its explanation and comment. On the first manifest signs of that movement he consented, as he says, "to lay aside his singing-robes" for a more convenient season, and "to leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts," in order to "embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes." He imagined that a year or two of such work, to which he felt that he was lending "only his left hand," would be all that would be required of him. But once engaged in the controversies of the time, he was led on and on; and for the space of full twenty years we see him only as a polemical prose writer, giving and taking blows in the cause of the Revolution, and producing nothing at all in verse except an occasional Latin scrap or epigram, and a few English sonnets suggested by passing occurrences. To attempt here a full and connected narrative of this period of his life is evidently impossible; it will be sufficient to present a chronological scheme of the main facts, including a list of his successive publications.

1640-42 (Milton *et al.* 31-33).—The Long Parliament met November 3, 1640. Milton had by this time changed his mode of life. The household at Horton having been broken up, and his father having gone to reside at Reading with his younger son Christopher, then a barrister-at-law and of royalist politics, Milton had taken lodgings in the house of one Russell, a tailor in St Bride's Churchyard, Fleet Street. Here he took to lodge and board with him his two young nephews, Edward and John Phillips, then about nine or ten years of age, the sons of his sister Anne, now married for the second time to a Mr Agar of the Crown Office. The arrangement seems to have been one of mere kindness at first; but his friends having suggested to him that he might take a few more boys to educate, he removed in 1641 to a larger house in Aldersgate Street, situated in a garden, and out of the bustle of the city. Here he received some additional pupils, the sons of wealthy friends, and occupied his time partly in educating them after a peculiar system of his own, and partly in private studies. It was in these circumstances that he wrote his first pamphlet. Amid the numerous matters occupying the attention of Parliament—the trial of Strafford, &c.—that of church reform was paramount. The root of the evil, it was felt by the Puritans, was in the prelatical constitution of the church; and already there were petitions and bills having for their object nothing less than an abolition of bishops, deans, and chapters, and all Episcopal forms, and a reconstruction of the Church of England after the Presbyterian model. Into this controversy Milton threw himself; and, the press being then free for such opinions, he published in 1641 a treatise or bulky pamphlet in two books, in the form of a letter to a friend, entitled *Of Reformation, touching Church Discipline in England, and the Causes that hitherto have hindered it*. The treatise answers to its name, and is throughout a vehement attack on Prelacy in its forms and essence. It helped to infuriate the controversy which was already waging. A defender of Episcopacy appeared in Hall, Bishop of Norwich. Hall was answered by a counterblast from five Puritan ministers—Stephen Marshall, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young (Milton's old tutor), Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstow—who clubbed the initials of their names together so as to form the word "Smectymnus;" and Archbishop Usher came to the rescue of Hall, and wrote a confutation of Smectymnus. Milton feeling that the prelates were likely to have the best of the debate, both in learning and in literary talent, unless he interfered, grappled with Usher and his associates in two additional pamphlets; the one, entitled Of Pretatent Episcopacy, addressed mainly to the question of the apostolical origin of Episcopacy; the other, which is much the longer, entitled The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy. Nor was this all. Bishop Hall having himself written a reply to Smectymnus, entitled The Remonstrant's Defence, Milton produced a fourth tract, written in the form of a dialogue, and entitled Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence, &c.; and, finally, these "Animadversions" having drawn forth an anonymous reply, supposed to be by a son of Bishop Hall, in which Milton's character was scurrilously attacked, the controversy was wound up (1642) by Milton's Apology against a Pamphlet called "A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against Smectymnus."

1643-45 (Milton et al. 34-36).—The civil war had now fairly begun. The king had his head-quarters at Oxford, and his troops and those of the Parliament were fighting for the possession of the country. The Westminster Assembly had met to help the Parliament in discussing the religious question. In the midst of this confusion Milton took a step usually taken in quieter times. "About Whitsuntide" (1643), says his nephew Phillips, "he took a journey into the country, nobody about him certainly knowing the reason, or that it was more than a journey of recreation." After a month's stay from home, he returns a married man who set out a bachelor; his wife being Mary, the eldest daughter of Mr Richard Powell, then a justice of the peace of Forest Hill, near Shotover in Oxfordshire." There had been a previous acquaintance and some money transactions between the two families. What occurred after the marriage is known to everyone. Being no Minerva, but a simple and apparently rather stupid country girl, "accustomed to dance with king's officers at home," the young wife found the life she was leading intolerable, and could see nothing in her husband but a man of harsh and morose ways, whom she could not understand, and who was always at his books. She asked leave to return home on a short visit, and, having gone, she flatly refused to come back. Her parents abetted her in the refusal, and seem, among other things, to have alleged their son-in-law's politics as a reason, they being royalists. Milton's conduct on the occasion was most characteristic. Where other men would have remained quiet, or, if so inclined, have consoled themselves in secret, he made his case the matter of public argument. In a subsequent sketch, indeed, of his own life about this time, he speaks as if it was less any private reason than the systematic prosecution of a path of activity which he had marked out for himself that led him to the public discussion in which he now engaged. While other men were fighting for liberty, he says, he had resolved to do what he could for the same great cause by expounding the true theory of liberty; and having already written on ecclesiastical liberty, and seen that question brought by events to some sort of settlement, he now saw remaining the equally important questions of private liberty and civil liberty. This is no doubt substantially accurate; and Milton's views on the marriage question were no doubt so properly a part of his general philosophy, that they might have been evolved in the mere course of speculation, without the stimulus of any private interest in the matter. On the whole, however, their connection with his own case is undeniable. It is as if he said,—"I have found myself in circumstances in which a fundamental rule of society as it exists has come in conflict with my comfort in such a manner as to lead me to examine its validity by the higher laws and principles on which it professes to rest; and as I am not a man to do anything underhand, I here publish my views in justification of whatever I may see fit to do." He published in quick succession four tracts on this subject; The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce restored to the good of both Sexes from the Bondage of Canon Law, &c. (1644, in which year two editions appeared, both addressed "to the Parliament of England, with the Assembly"); The Judgment of Martin Bucer touching Divorce (a translated series of extracts, also published in 1644); Tetrachordon, or Expositions upon the four chief places in Scripture which treat of Marriage or Nullities in Marriage (published in 1645, and addressed to the Parliament); and Colasterion; a Reply to a Nameless Answer against the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1645). The doctrine in all these tracts is, that moral incompatibility is as good a ground for divorce as conjugal infidelity, if not a better—a doctrine leading to numerous applications which he does not state, and which it is needless to say no civilized society has yet seen fit to adopt. One notices in the tracts, too, a singular disposition to treat the question as if it were entirely a man's question; and indeed they are full of those notions of the inferiority of women which Milton held all his life, and which are generally repudiated with indignation by those who now adopt views similar to his as to the theory of the marriage bond. At the time, the pamphlets produced some sensation, and the author was nearly being taken to task for them by Parliament at the instance of the Presbyterian divines in the Assembly. As regards Milton himself, his views were never carried out, the king's waning fortunes having made it convenient for his wife's family to bring about a reconciliation, the effect of which was, that towards the end of 1645 Mrs Milton was again domiciled with her husband. It was not to the house in Aldersgate Street, however, that she returned, but to a larger house which Milton had taken in Barbican, and which was then getting ready. Here, besides her husband and his pupils, she found old Mr Milton the father, who had been obliged during her absence to leave his younger son's house in Reading, in consequence of the surrender of that town to the Parliament, and to take up his quarters with his son John. It remains to add, before quitting Aldersgate Street, that here Milton wrote, besides his divorce pamphlets, his tract On Education, addressed to Mr Samuel Hartlib, and his noble Areopagitica, or Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. Both were published in 1644, and they contain Milton's views on questions of great public interest at the time—the first, his views on the state of the universities, and his plan of a gymnasium which should supersede both them and the grammar schools, and do the work of both better in a much shorter time; and the second, his views on the liberty of the press, in the form of an appeal to Parliament to reconsider an order they had just passed subjecting books to a censorship. When we add, that about the same time Milton prepared for the press the first edition of his poems (published in 1645, in a small volume, by Humphrey Moseley, the Tonson of his day, and containing, besides the pieces in English and Latin already named, some sonnets written in the meantime), it will be seen that there was industry enough in the house in Aldersgate Street during the absence of Mrs Milton.

1646-48 (Milton et al. 37-39).—Mrs Milton's return, indeed, seems rather to have interrupted than to have forwarded his literary activity. One reason of this may have been that she brought her whole family after her. Her father, mother, brothers, and sisters were in Oxford when it surrendered to the parliamentary army in June 1646; and, being thus driven from home, they came up to London and were kindly received by Milton into his house till matters could be better arranged. As old Mr Milton was still there, and as Milton's first daughter Anne had just been born (July 29, 1646), the house seems to have been inconveniently crowded; at least Phillips hints as much when he says that after their departure it "looked again like a house of the muses." This cannot have taken place prior to the 1st of January 1646-7, when the father-in-law died in Milton's house. Milton's own father died in the March following, at the age of eighty-four or upwards. These deaths, the return of the Powells to Oxfordshire, and probably also a falling-off in the number of Milton's pupils, determined him to give up his house in the Barbican, and to remove (1647) to a smaller one in Holborn, having its back to Lincoln's Inn Fields. He does not seem to have continued to receive pupils long after this time, but to have been content with his scholarly studies and the quiet exercise of his pen. It has been remarked by Mr Keightley, that Milton was fond of the humble literary practice of compilation when there was nothing better for him to do; and accordingly it seems to have been during the years (1646-1648) when he was living in the Barbican and at Holborn, waiting for the farther issue of events, that he prepared for his own use, or for that of his pupils, some of those compilations which he afterwards published. At this time, at all events, he wrote a portion of his History of England. In poetry he still did next to nothing.

1648-9 (Milton catat. 40).—On the 30th January 1648-9 Charles was beheaded, and England became a Commonwealth, presided over by a council of state, served in the field by Cromwell and other generals, and assisted in legislation by the Rump Parliament. The Revolution had thus been borne on by its bolder spirits to a stage at which, while the outside world stood aghast, multitudes of those in Britain itself who had followed it so far, including the Scots and the Presbyterians generally, fell off or turned reactionary. At this crisis Milton came forward to justify what the bolder spirits had done, and "to compose the minds of the people," naturally unsettled by the charges, flung upon them on all sides, that they had murdered their sovereign. Within a week or two after the execution of Charles he published a short pamphlet, the full title of which it is worth while to quote:

The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; proving that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any who have the power to call to account a tyrant or wicked king, and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordinary magistrate have neglected or denied to do it; and that they who of late so much blame deposing [i.e., the Presbyterians] are the men that did it themselves. So seasonable an interposition could not be overlooked by the government of the Commonwealth; and as Milton was personally known to Bradshaw and others of the council of state, they were empowered to consult with him as to his willingness to accept the office of foreign or Latin secretary to the council. He did accept the office, with a salary, as it appears, of about £290 per annum, and his appointment is dated the 15th of March 1648-9. In order to be near the scene of his duties, he removed from Holborn to lodgings at Charing Cross; he was subsequently in the course of the year accommodated with rooms at Whitehall, but only till an official residence which had been assigned him in Scotland Yard could be got ready. Prior to his acceptance of the foreign secretarship he had published a pamphlet entitled Observations on Articles of Peace between the Earl of Ormond and the Irish Rebels, in which is discussed the policy of the late king in the matter of Irish Popery and Presbyterianism.

1649-53 (Milton catat. 40-44).—Milton's official duties consisted in preparing drafts of such letters in Latin as the council desired from time to time to address to foreign princes, governments, and ambassadors; and a series of forty-six such letters, written by him for the council, and the publication of which was prevented during his lifetime, was edited from his papers after his death. But much more important work was devolved on Milton by the council. The famous Icon Basilike had just appeared, and was circulating in hundreds of copies through the country, representing the late king, on the professed authority of his own private papers, as a saint ever on his knees during his hours of solitude and misfortune, and doing much, therefore, to win popular acquiescence in the use of the term "royal martyr," as already posthumously applied to him. By way of counteractive, Milton wrote and published a long pamphlet entitled Eikonoklastes, in which, without questioning the authenticity of the pretended manifesto of royalty, he criticizes it mercilessly. The preparation of this pamphlet must have occupied him during a considerable portion of the year 1649; but it was hardly finished when a still harder piece of work was required of him. Charles II, then a refugee in Holland, had got the great scholar Salmasius, alias Claude de Saumaise, of the university of Leyden, to undertake the advocacy of his cause in a treatise such as might be submitted to the learned throughout Europe; and the Continent was now ringing with the fame of the Defensio Regia pro Carolo Primo ad Carolum Secundum which Salmasius had published. Fearful of the damage that such a work might do abroad, the English council of state bethought themselves of their secretary as the man to answer it suitably. On the 8th of January 1649-50 it was ordered by the council "that Mr Milton do prepare something in answer to the book of Salmasius, and, when he hath done it, bring it to the council." In execution of this commission, Milton prepared his famous First Defence for the People of England; or, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, contra Claudii anonymi alias Salmasii Defensionem Regiam, the order for the publication of which appears in the council-minutes under date December 23, 1650. It has been stated that Milton received £1,000 for the performance; but the minutes of council exhibit nothing more than a vote of thanks. The success of the treatise was infinitely beyond what might have been expected. Salmasius found himself assailed in his philosophy, in his Latinity, and in his powers of opprobrious rhetoric, by a man who was more than his match; in all; and it is even said that his death, which occurred not long afterwards, was caused by chagrin at his loss of credit. Satisfied with his triumph, Milton rested from literary exertion, except of a private kind, for about two years. It was during this time that he removed from Scotland Yard to a house "in Petty France, Westminster, opening into St. James's Park," which house (afterwards occupied by Bentham) he continued to live in till the Restoration. It was about this time also, and apparently in the house in Petty France, that he was visited by the great calamity of his life—his blindness. From a letter on the subject written by him at a later period, it appears that his eyesight had begun to fail as early as 1644, when he was about thirty-five years of age, and that the process of obscuration was so gradual that it was not till about 1650 or 1651 that total blindness was threatened. The preparation of the treatise against Salmasius was believed by himself to have hastened the fatal result. At all events, by the end of the year 1653 Milton was totally blind, and the fact of his blindness was publicly talked of both by his friends and his enemies. The fatal affection was of the kind called gutta serena; and Milton himself tells that it left his eyes perfectly clear and without any mark, speck, or external disfigurement whatever. It may have been while the blindness was not yet total, but only nearly so, that he sustained what even for him, in such circumstances, must have been another great loss, and which was certainly a great loss for his children. This was the death of his wife, the precise date of which has not been discovered, though it was either in 1652 or 1653. She left three children, all daughters,—the eldest, Anne, about seven years of age; the second, Mary, about five; and the third, Deborah, a mere infant in arms. Although she may not have been the fit person to be the wife of Milton, one cannot but imagine the house in Petty France more desolate from her absence; the blind and austere widower left in one part of it to contemplations in which some thoughts of Mary Powell, as she was when he first bore her away from her Oxfordshire home, can hardly have been wanting; and the poor motherless children, known to him only as tiny voices of complaint going about in the darkness near, with none but an alien voice any more to hush or overawe them!

1653–1658 (Milton etat. 44–49).—Notwithstanding his blindness, Milton continued in the active discharge of his duties as Latin secretary during the whole protectorate of Cromwell, which began on the 16th of December 1653, and terminated on Cromwell's death on the 3rd of September 1658. Between seventy and eighty Latin letters, written by him in Oliver's name, are included in the collection of his state papers; and besides these he wrote a Latin state paper of some length on the subject of the Protector's differences with the Spanish court. He had, however, an assistant in his office who relieved him of a part of the work; and there is a council order, dated April 17, 1655, reducing his salary to L.150 per annum, with the proviso that the same should be paid to him during his life. It seems, however, that both Milton and his friend Andrew Marvell, who was latterly associated with him in the office, received an actual salary of L.200 a year. That Milton was not only an admirer of Cromwell's genius,—he had already celebrated him in a sonnet as "Cromwell, our chief of men,"—but also an entire believer in the necessity and the advantage of his government, is proved by the tenor of his writings during the Protectorate. These consisted of three pamphlets growing out of the Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. As early as 1651, indeed, an anonymous reply to this treatise had appeared; but Milton, who attributed it to Bishop Bramhall, left the confusion of it to his nephew John Phillips, and only revised what Phillips had written. Another work having appeared abroad, however, in 1652, with the title Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Calum adversus Parricidas Anglicanos, Milton, who was grossly and calumniously attacked in it, and represented as a blind monster, thought it fit to reply in person. The real author of the work was the Frenchman Peter Dumoulin, afterwards a prebendary of Canterbury; but the reputed author at the time was Alexander More, a Scotchman, settled in France, who had been concerned in seeing it through the press; and against him Milton directed the full force of his vengeance. In the Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano, which was not published till 1654, Milton meets the personal accusations of his antagonist, and retaliates with scurrilities quite as coarse and offensive, though doubtless better founded; but he also returns to the main question, in the course of the discussion of which he introduces a splendid panegyric on Cromwell, and brief eulogistic sketches of some of the other heroes of the Commonwealth. Not content with what he had said in his own defence in this pamphlet, he followed it up by another entitled Authoris pro se Defensio contra Alexandrum Morum, Ecclesiasten (1655); and More having rejoined, he wound up with Authoris ad Alexandri Mori Supplementum Responso, published in the same year. These pamphlets must necessarily have been written by the method of dictation, and in the first of them there is a passage written with express reference to his blindness. During the remaining three years of the Protectorate, Milton had leisure to fall back upon the compilations which he had on hand. During the same period he married his second wife, Catherine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney, of whom little or nothing is known. The marriage took place on the 12th November 1656 by civil contract; and on February 1656–57 Milton was again left a widower by the death of his wife in childbirth. He has testified his affection for her in a well-known sonnet.

1658–1660 (Milton etat. 49–51).—The twenty months which followed the death of Cromwell were a time of varying anarchy and uncertainty, in the midst of which events slowly shaped themselves towards one inevitable issue, which men began to think of by themselves long before they dared to speak of it to one another,—the restoration of Charles II. The state of Milton's mind and the course of his life during these perplexing months are to be inferred from what remains of his writings during them. As Latin secretary he wrote eleven letters for Richard Cromwell, and two letters in the name of the Restored Parliament after Richard's abdication. The last letter is dated May 15, 1659, after which we hear no more of Milton officially. But as a citizen he was not idle; and if the resolution and the reasonings of one man could have maintained republicanism in England, and kept the door fast against the return of royalty, whether accompanied by Prelacy or by Presbyterianity, the work would have been done by Milton. His revived anxiety on the religious question was exhibited in two tracts, both written in 1659, and addressed to Parliament; the one entitled A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, showing that it is not lawful for any power on earth to compel in matters of religion; and the other, Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church; wherein is also discussed of Tithes, Church Fees, and Church Revenues, and whether any maintenance of ministers can be settled by law. As these tracts were intended by their author to stem what he considered a return of the national mind towards intolerance in religion, so his anxiety with respect to what was more properly the political reaction was shown in A Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth (dated October 1659, though not then published), and in a subsequent more public pamphlet entitled The Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, and the excellence thereof compared with the inconveniences and dangers of readmitting Kingship into this nation. The views addressed in this pamphlet to the public at large were even recapitulated by him at the last hour for the private eye of General Monk, in a short letter headed The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, easy to be put in practice and without delay. Monk's mind, however, was better made up than Milton's as to the ease or difficulty of the solution in question; and the last act of the despairing republican was to publish Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon titled "The Fear of God and the King," preached and since published by Matthew Griffith, D.D., and Chaplain to the late King. No Blind Guides was the title as well as the tenor of a short answer to this criticism, written by L'Estrange the essayist; and in May 1660 Charles II. was on the throne. Milton, as almost coming within the doomed category of the regicides, was for some time in danger of being included among those whom the new government exempted from amnesty. His more obnoxious writings were called in by proclamation, and publicly burnt by the hands of the hangman; he was actually in custody after the Act of Indemnity had been passed; and that he escaped finally without punishment is said to have been owing chiefly to the intercession of the poet Davenant.

The period of Milton's life which we have thus hastily traversed, extending from his thirty-second to his fifty-second year, and coinciding, therefore, with what may be called his middle life or manhood,—was, we would again observe, all but entirely a period of polemical prose-writing. The four-and-twenty separate pamphlets, treatises, &c., which he wrote during these twenty years, make in all, when collected, three or four goodly volumes; while the stray sonnets and other metrical scraps, in which during these years he hinted rather than asserted that he had not parted with his title as a poet, do not amount to more than a few pages. The reader will do well to note this interpolation of a middle period of prose polemics between a poetic youth and an old age dedicated to poetry again, as a significant fact in the life of Milton. It arose, as we have seen, from an imperative necessity of the times, which affected other lives besides his, and the result of which in the aggregate was an apparent break or variation in our literary history co-extensive with the entire period of Puritan ascendancy. But that this fact in the general life of the nation should be illustrated so visibly, and with such mechanical exactness, in the life of Milton, marks him out as pre-eminently, in literary respects, the representative of his age. All the other wits and writers of any note were on the other side, and therefore represent the contemporary mind of England only negatively; in him alone among the writers have we a colossus marching by the law of his own independent constitution in the direction of the movement and in the midst of it, and capable, therefore, of illustrating it positively.

Milton was fitted for the part he performed in connection with the Puritan movement by that very peculiarity of constitution to which we have already referred as distinguishing him from most poets. Poets generally, it is supposed, are and ought to be characterized by an excess of sensibility over principle,—a certain mobility of the whole mind and temper rather than the prevalence in the mind of any one moral mood or gesture. Milton, however, as we have seen, was one of a class of poets, claiming also such poets as Dante and Wordsworth, of whom this cannot be said. Whatever his sensibility, whatever the range and freedom of his imagination, he was a man at the basis of whose nature was a moral austerity compacted of certain definite and deliberate conclusions as to what was right or wrong, allowed or forbidden, everlastingly true and expedient, or everlastingly false and pernicious. Being such, he was necessarily, in relation to the society in which he moved, a man of dogma and asseveration as well as a poet. Possibly this alone might account for the part he took in the social controversies of the time, and for the unusual combination he presents of the reformer with the poet; for generally such a nature, by reason of its dissatisfaction with much that exists, will ally itself to what seems the innovative or progressive tendency; whereas that absence of opinion, except on matters of taste, which is believed to characterize poets and artists as a class, will in itself usually function as an opinion in favour of things as they are. In order to account fully, however, for Milton's thorough identification of himself with the most advanced social tendencies and aspirations of his age, we must think not only of the strength of the moral or dogmatic element in him, but also of the peculiar effects of this dogmatic habit when associated with a most courageous and inquisitive intellect. No man of the time was more resolute in asserting that right of free thought, the recognition of which, as applied to the Bible, he regarded as the essence of Protestantism; no man spurned more angrily all trammels which tradition, authority, and custom would impose on a mind already sufficiently bound, as he thought, by its own idea of allegiance to its Maker. Hence, in his conclusions on social questions, he came uniformly to occupy ground on the farthest verge of the speculation of the time, so far as it still acknowledged the Christian creed and the code of Christian ethics. Nay, on various questions on which men who had passed over to Pyrrhonism were practically conservative, he, the English Christian, was practically revolutionary. In the language not only of Johnson, but of those of our own time to whom his opinions on church and state are still offensive, Milton was one of the rebellious or anarchical order of spirits. In the matter of ecclesiastical polity, for example, he had passed through Church of England Puritanism and Presbyterianism to take up a station somewhere among, if not already beyond, the Independents and other extensive sects of Nonconformists. In some of his writings he appears as a pioneer of the Voluntary Principle. In his opinions on marriage he was heterodox among the heterodox. He had notions of education such as would hardly be propounded now by the most radical of university reformers. He advocated toleration of all Protestant sects, and the freedom of the press, at a time when these ideas were new, in language from which even those who now profess them as a matter of course are accustomed sometimes to abate a little. In state politics he was an ultra-republican, with some modifying reservations. It is, in fact, owing to the peculiar ensemble which his creed presents of so many extreme views harmonized in his case unto a kind of unity, but otherwise only found detached and scattered among the sects of his time, that it is reckoned impossible to identify him with any of these sects in particular, or even, as some think, with the Puritans as a party. Both Coleridge and Mr Macaulay have noticed this eclectic character of Milton's intellect as shown in his writings. "From the Parliament and from the court," says Mr Macaulay; "from the conventicle and from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepulchral rites of the Roundheads and from the Christmas revel of the hospitable cavalier, his nature selected and drew to itself whatever was great and good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious ingredients by which these finer elements were defiled." In the sense in which it is intended this is true. As a man of scholarship and academic culture, as a lover of music and of art generally, and with a fancy accustomed to range in search of beauty through the whole world of fact and of literature, it was not to be supposed that the partizanship of Milton, even when most resolute, would be of a barbarous or meagre kind, confounding principle with forms and minutiae. Like Cromwell, who was also exempt from the prejudices of his party against art and liberal culture, he fought in the struggle as a general fights, and not as the common soldier. Nevertheless, it is to be remembered that he did fight; and as the true spirit of a cause is better and more profoundly represented in its leaders than in its inferior adherents, so it would be but pedantry to say, that because Milton wore his hair long, or because he has spoken reverently of the richly-stained glass and the pealing organ of a Gothic cathedral, therefore he was not a Puritan. Let us make whatever we can of the fact, he did belong, with his whole heart and soul, to the English Puritan and republican movement of the seventeenth century. He honoured what it honoured; he hated what it hated; he shared its detestation and intolerant dread of Popery. If he was not a Puritan, it was because he was a Puritan and something more; that "something more" being an expression for much that Milton's mind, rolling magnificently within itself, had thought out as properly belonging to Puritanism, and as necessary to be worked into it in order to give it its full development. In this sense, because Milton was an ideologist in the van of the extreme sects, it might perhaps be argued that he did not properly belong to a sect at all. The idealism of Milton's politics,—the spirit of prophetic enthusiasm rather than practical tact with which, in his political speculations, he wraps the facts of his time, and even human nature in general, round his own inwardly evolved theories and his schemes of what might be,—must strike every reader of his prose writings. In reading them we at once see the difference between a Milton theorizing nobly for Puritanism in his closet, and a Cromwell as the man of action, with enthusiasms as fervid and an ideal as high, grappling in the same interest with events and contingencies. Milton's plans, for example, submitted to Monk for averting the Restoration are interesting now chiefly as very simple-minded proofs of his tenacity as a theorist.

It is not only, however, as illustrating Milton's character, or the higher tendencies of that historical movement with which he was associated, that his polemical prose writings are now of interest. They have an interest other than historical. It is because the bulk of polemical writing is on points of ephemeral importance, and is therefore of ephemeral application, that so little of it endures in proportion to what has been produced, and that ages which may have teemed with such literature appear often as mere blanks in the retrospect of the literary historian. The pamphlets did their work; and when the day for which they were calculated was over, they disappeared with its buzzing insects. Their very efficiency sometimes might be measured by the rapidity with which they were forgotten. But as there are certain controversies which are not ephemeral, so there is polemical writing, the lease of which, to borrow Milton's own figure, may be "for three lives and downwards." To a great extent Milton's prose writing is of this class. Two centuries have elapsed since he lived and wrote, but (and it would have surprised him to learn that it would be so) the war in which he fought is not yet over. In Europe,—nay, in Great Britain itself,—some of the questions which he discussed are not yet settled, or, after having apparently been settled, are again rising ominously into sight. Hence, as Milton did not concern himself with the accidents of these questions, but invariably plunged into their essentials, there is still, with every allowance for the change in the intellectual point of view between his time and this, a permanent interest in most of his argumentations. Apart, however, from the interest which these prose writings thus retain as belonging in the main to one side of a yet unfinished controversy, they have an interest of a more general kind to which none can be indifferent. As Burke's political writings are admired for their elevation of sentiment, and the richness of their intellectual matter, by those who either dissent from their practical tenor or care little about it, so, and even in a more superb degree, there is that in Milton's prose treatises which will keep them immortal. They are as truly Miltonic as his poetry. As Milton's poetry is unique in one section of our literature, so is his prose in the other. It is prose of that old English, or as some might say, old Gothic kind, which was in use among us ere yet men had given their days and nights to Addison, and when it seemed as lawful that thought in prose should come in the form of a brimming flood, or even of a broken cataract, as in that of a trim and limpid rivulet. But even amid the greatest specimens of such prose of the pre-Addisonian period Milton's prose is peculiar. That of Bacon may roll with it a richer detritus of speculative hints and propositions; that of Jeremy Taylor may have a mellower beauty; but no prose in the language is grander than Milton's, or more indicative of moral greatness. Its characteristic in its best passages is a kind of sustained and sometimes cumbrous and opere magniloquence. Milton tells us himself that he wrote slowly; and one can see that as he wrote he was abashed by no weight of thought or sublimity of fancies that could come to him, but would pile thoughts and fancies together till no prose sentence could carry the whole burden in its cadence, and the residue had to be conveyed in a poetic chant. Many passages in his treatises might be read apart as prose odes; and even where he is roughest and most controversial, and where his actual reasonings seem, as they often do, poor and inconclusive, it is as if, in order to bury his adversary anyhow, he were tumbling, in sheer rage, a temple into ruins. This is true of his Latin prose writings (of which no fit translation exists) as well as of his English.

Milton survived the Restoration fourteen years (1660–1674), and these fourteen years form the third period of his literary life. To him, if to any man, those days must have seemed dark and evil. One set of men had gone out of office, and been thrust down into the obscurer recesses of the body-politic, there to cherish their principles secretly until such time as they should reappear in the guise of modern Whiggism and modern Dissent. The public direction of affairs had passed into the hands of men of principles directly opposite. Of the state of manners and morals in the court of the witty and licentious Charles II., and of the contrast which it presented to the Puritan government which it had superseded, all have some idea. The superficial change throughout the nation at large, and especially in and about the metropolis, corresponded with this change in the personnel of the government. Execration of Puritanism, and a reaction in favour of whatever Puritanism had forbidden or denounced, characterized the popular conduct and every department of the public procedure. Above all, the change was visible in the new literature which began at this time to spring up in consequence of the social calm, such as it was, that had followed an age of conflict and turmoil, and especially in those portions of this new literature which depended on the patronage of the court, or appealed most directly to popular and metropolitan feeling. The literature of the Restoration, as all know, was marked by a certain combination of qualities distinguishing it as a whole from the literature of any preceding, and from that of most subsequent, eras of our national history. It was in the main low in aim, and coarse in tone, exhibiting a robustness in the organs of appetite, accompanied by some keenness in those of perception, rather than a predominance of the imaginative or higher intellectual faculties such as had borne up the Elizabethan literature into universal grace and proportion. Above all, it was pervaded by an anti-Puritan spirit, or spirit of retrospective disgust for the Puritan rule, which showed itself partly in direct satires and denunciations of Puritanism, whether in prose or verse; partly in a predominant tendency towards the comic and jocose in all forms. The reopening of the theatres, and the consequent revival of dramatic writing, gave an increased stimulus to the anti-Puritan spirit, and afforded a special outlet for it. Initiated by Davenant and other survivors of the literary school of the reign of Charles I., among whom were Shirley and Cowley, the drama of the Restoration attained its height in Dryden, who succeeded Davenant as poet-laureate in 1670, precisely because of his dramatic successes during the ten preceding years, and who thus became officially, as he was by right of genius, the chief star of the new literary cluster. Around Dryden, and belonging to the same literary cluster, might be seen, earlier or later, between the years 1660 and 1674, such men as Butler, the author of Hudibras, the Duke of Buckingham, the Earls of Dorset and Roscommon, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley, and Thomas Shadwell. These, and such as these, were the so-called "wits of the Restoration;" while the honours of philosophic or other graver prose literature were supported by the veterans Hobbes and Izaak Walton, or by Clarendon, Browne, Barrow, and South. It is worth noting also, that these first fourteen years of the reign of the second Charles, remembered as they chiefly are as a period of spiritual degeneracy in our literature, were the era of the rise among us of mathematical and physical science. The Royal Society dates its existence almost ex- Milton, actly from the Restoration; and Boyle, Barrow, Wallis, Wilkins, Wren, and Hooke, were already busy with their researches, and waiting for the appearance among them of young Mr Newton.

It was rather on the border of this, the well-known world of Pepys and Aubrey, than as actually in it and belonging to it, that Milton spent his declining years. He still, indeed, made London his home; living from 1660 to 1662 in a house in Holborn, near Red Lion Square; then from 1662 to 1665, or thereabouts, in a house in Jewin Street, near his old quarters in Aldersgate Street; then for a short time in lodgings with Millington, a famous book-auctioneer of the day; and finally, from 1665 onwards, in a small house in Artillery Walk, leading into Bunhill Fields. Of course there may have been occasional visits to the country; and one such visit was in the year 1665-6, when, on account of the great plague in London, he took a cottage for some months in the village of St Giles Chalfont, Buckinghamshire. Two years prior to this—in 1662-3, when he was living in Jewin Street—he contracted his third marriage. He was then fifty-four years of age; his wife, who was about twenty-eight years younger, was Elizabeth Minshull, daughter of Mr Ralph Minshull, of a good family in Cheshire. The marriage, which was arranged for him by his friend Dr Paget, was one of convenience—occasioned, it would appear, chiefly by the fact that his daughters, who had grown up without any maternal care, had become a trouble rather than an assistance to him in his housekeeping. At the date of the marriage the eldest of the daughters (who was lame and otherwise deformed) was nearly seventeen years of age, the second nearly fifteen, and the youngest not eleven; and they appear all to have remained with him for some years afterwards in a state of chronic contention with their stepmother. Her temper, it is stated, was none of the best; but we have it on her husband's own authority, that "she was very kind and careful of him;" and we have the same authority for the sad fact that his children were "unkind and undutiful." It is on evidence that his brother Christopher had heard him complain that "they were careless of him, being blind, and made nothing of deserting him;" and also that he complained that "they did combine together with the maid to cheat him in her marketings," and that "they made away with some of his books, and would have sold the rest to the dumghill woman." This, so far as it relates to their conduct before his third marriage, must apply chiefly to the two eldest daughters, Anne and Mary. The youngest, Deborah, probably as being the youngest, and as having therefore come more within the control of the third wife, has left a more amiable memory of herself. She is said to have been her father's favourite reader and amanuensis so long as she remained with him; she, as well as her sister Mary, having been trained by him to what they thought the irksome work of writing to his dictation, and reading to him in several languages without understanding their meaning. But she too ultimately quarrelled with her stepmother; and about the year 1669 all the three sisters, according to Phillips, were "sent out to learn some curious or ingenious sorts of manufacture that are proper for women to learn, particularly embroidery in gold and silver."

Accordingly, during the last four or five years of his life we are to imagine Milton's household in Artillery Walk as consisting but of himself, his wife, and one or two servants; his three daughters no longer living under the same roof. Whether they lived with him or not, however, his circumstances were such as to enable them to depend on him as long as might be necessary. He had now, indeed, no official or stated income as formerly; any casual receipts from his writings can hardly have amounted to much; his first wife's marriage portion of L1000 had never been paid; and there is proof that the property left him by his father had been impaired by considerable losses or forfeitures at the Restoration. Still, enough remained for his moderate wants as long as he lived, and at his death there was a residue over.

Shut out from the busy world in some measure by the unpopular political recollections which attached to his name, and shut in from it still more by his blindness and by his undisguised scorn of nearly all that, had the privilege of sight remained to him, there would have been for him there to see, Milton found his solace in his own thoughts, in the conversation of a few friends who would drop in to enjoy his society and were proud to lead him out in his daily walks, and also in his books and in continued literary occupation. He did not yet cease from prose writing, but finished or prepared for the press various works which he had begun before the Restoration, and from time to time undertook new ones. The following is a list of his prose writings published during this period, and of such works as, though left ready for the press, were not published till after his death:

1. Accedence Commenc't Grammar; a short skeleton of Latin grammar, possibly prepared many years before, though not published till 1661.

2. The History of Britaine, that part especially now called England, from the first Traditional Beginning, continued to the Norman Conquest; i collection out of the antientest and best authors thereof. This was not published till 1670, though much of it was written before the Restoration.

3. Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio, ad Petri Ramii Methodum coniuncta. This is a Latin compendium of logic after the method of Ramus, in two books, with a brief Life of Ramus appended. It was published in 1672, but may have been in manuscript many years before.

4. Of True Religion, Heresie, Schisme, Toleracion, and what best means may be used against the growth of Popery. This little tract was published in 1673, and was doubtless written at that time as a contribution to a controversy again rising into interest. It is written in a calm spirit, and with none of the vehemence of his earlier polemical writings, and is interesting as showing his matured views on the subject of religious toleration. He is for the absolute toleration, both as regards doctrine and as regards worship, of all dissenting sects,—the Church of England, Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arians, Socinians, &c.; but, as regards worship, he excludes Roman Catholics, partly on the civil ground that they acknowledge a foreign allegiance, partly on the theological ground that they deny the essential authority of Scripture, which denial, and nothing else, he holds, is heresy. He is not for punishing them "by corporal punishment or fines on their estates," because he supposes this "stands not with the clemency of the gospel more than what appertains to the security of the state;" but he is for suppressing their worship and removing its furniture.

5. Epistolae Familiariae Liber Unus, seu Commentarii Prae-justitiae quaestionis Oratoriae. These are the "Familiar Epistles" and the "Oratorical Exercises at College," already alluded to. They were printed in 1674, the last year of Milton's life, apparently not on Milton's own motion, but as a speculation of the publisher.

6. A Brief History of Moscow and of other less known Countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay; gathered from the writings of several eyewitnesses. This short sketch was left in manuscript, and was published eight years after Milton's death.

7. Lettera Senatori Anglicani; necnon Cromwelli, &c., nomine ac jure conscripta. These are the "Letters of State" already referred to as written by Milton in his official capacity under the Commonwealth. The bookseller who published his "Familiar Letters" intended to publish these in the same volume, but was warned not to do so, and they were not edited till after Milton's death.

8. Johannis Miltoni Anglii de Doctrina Christiana ex Sacris duntaxat Libris petiti, Disquisitiones Libri Duo. This is the famous "Treatise on Christian Doctrine," the manuscript of which having been accidentally discovered by Mr Lemaire, in 1828, in the State Paper Office, was edited and subsequently translated by the Rev. Charles R. Summer, afterwards Bishop of Winchester. The history of the work is as follows:—In his mature life Milton, dissatisfied with such systems of theology as he had read, and deeming it to be every man's right and duty to draw his theology for himself from the Scriptures alone, had begun to compile a system for his own use, carefully collecting texts, and aiming at doing little more than grouping and elucidating them. He continued this work till he had finished it. Considering it of importance enough to be published, but knowing that it contained some matter which might Besides the above, there are some other things which are supposed, on evidence more or less slight, to have come from Milton's pen in his later life; and it is known that in 1661 he edited from a manuscript of Raleigh's entitled Aphorisms of State. (He had previously, in 1658, edited another MS. of Raleigh's entitled The Cabinet Council.) In addition to all this, he had collected a considerable quantity of materials towards a dictionary of the Latin language, the papers containing which fell into the hands of Edward Phillips, who is supposed to have used them in compiling the Cambridge Dictionary of 1693. How he managed in his blindness to go through so much labour of mere reading and accumulation, is explained partly by what Phillips tells us of his methods. The severe use which he made of his two younger daughters, till at last they would bear it no longer, and detested the very sight of him and his books, has already been mentioned. There were others, however, who, both while his daughters lived with him and after they went away, were but too glad to serve the scholarly and exacting old Lear. "He had daily about him," says Phillips, "one or other to read—some persons of man's estate, who of their own accord greedily catched at the opportunity of being his readers, that they might as well reap the benefit of what they read to him as oblige him by the benefit of their reading; others, of younger years, who were sent by their parents to the same end." One of his readers, recommended to him by Dr Paget, was a young Quaker named Ellwood.

Milton's later prose writings, however, derive most of their interest from the fact that they belong to the same period as his later poems. It was not to them, nor even to the much more splendid polemical writings which had preceded them, that Milton could point as the fulfilment of his early pledge, that if God gave him strength, he would leave behind him some worthy work of Christian genius in which Britain should exult as a national possession, and which posterity would not willingly let die. Often as, amid the turmoil of his middle life, this pledge had recurred to him, how he must have sighed over the work that was then occupying him, and felt it all to be very sickening, and longed for a sabbath at the end of his life when his soul might sail again into the haven of a majestic calm! After all, controversy was but the work of his "left hand," and he longed for the time when his right hand should again have its turn, and he could rejoice in the renewed sensations of its superior strength and more natural cunning. His sonnets and other stray pieces of verse written during the civil wars and the Commonwealth, and perhaps also those occasional passages of lyric grandeur in his prose writings where he seems to be spurning prose underfoot, and almost rising for the moment on poetic wings, may be regarded as so many brief efforts whereby he assured himself, while his higher and finer faculty was in abeyance, that he had not lost it. It was not till towards the end of Cromwell's protectorate, however, and when already he had for several years been blind, that he was able to begin an undertaking commensurate with his life-long aspiration. According to Aubrey, it was then (1658), when it appeared as if, under the settled rule of Cromwell, the nation was entering on a long period of peace and leisure, that the Paradise Lost was begun. Whether it was then begun in the actual shape in which we now have it, or whether Milton was at this time only turning over the subject in his mind, and ruminating it in that form of a sacred mystery or drama in which we find it first rudely sketched in the Cambridge manuscripts, can hardly be ascertained. Cromwell was not to live long enough to initiate by his great and peaceful rule that new literature, signs of the rise of which were not wanting towards the close of his protectorate. When the new literature did arise, it was in the guise of the literature of the Restoration; and whatever progress Milton may have made in his great poem before the accession of Charles II., the bulk of it was written after that monarch was on the throne.

The facts respecting Paradise Lost, and the other later poems of Milton, will be best presented in a table of his later poetical publications supplementary to that of his later prose writings already given:

1. Paradise Lost. This poem was certainly complete by the 27th of April 1667 (Milton's 48th), on which day it was sold to Samuel Simmons, bookseller, for £10 down, with a promise of £5 more when 1300 copies of the first edition should have been sold; £5 more when 1300 copies of the second edition should have been sold, and so on for successive editions,—each edition to consist of 1500 copies. According to Ellwood, however, the poem must have been ready more than a year before that time; for he says, that on visiting Milton while he was at Chalfont in Buckinghamshire (1655-6), he gave him the complete manuscript of the poem to read. As originally published, the poem consisted of ten books, and was sold at three shillings per copy. The stipulated 1300 copies must have been sold before the 26th of April 1669, on which day Milton signs a receipt for the second £5. This was a very good sale in two years; but the remaining copies do not seem to have gone off so fast, as it was not till 1674, or the year of Milton's death, that a second edition was published. In this second edition the ten books were converted into twelve by a division of the seventh and tenth; and there were some other alterations. A third edition was called for in 1678; and in December 1680 Milton's widow parted with all her interest in the work for one sum of £2, paid to her by Simmons.

2. Paradise Regained. When Ellwood returned the manuscript of Paradise Lost to Milton, they had some talk, he says, as to the merits of the poem, in the course of which Ellwood ventured pleasantly to say to him, "Thou hast said much here of paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of paradise found?" To this, he says, Milton made no answer, but fell into a muse, and broke off the discourse. When, however, some time after the sickness was over, Ellwood revisited Milton in London, he showed him Paradise Regained, saying, "This is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which before I had not thought of." Assuming this to be literally accurate, we should have to suppose Paradise Regained finished in 1667, if not earlier; but it was not published till 1671 (Milton's 62nd), on which occasion it was issued, not by Simmons, but by another bookseller, in the same volume with Samson Agonistes.

3. Samson Agonistes, a Dramatic Poem, published as above, 1671.

4. A second edition of his minor poems was published in 1673, the year before his death, containing the pieces which had appeared in the edition of 1644, with some additions.

At this point it is that the fact of the interposition of a middle period of prose polemics between the earlier and the later poetry of Milton becomes of importance to the critic of his works. Poetry, as such, is the exercise of imagination; and when a man makes poetry his work, or, after having been engaged on other kinds of work, returns to poetry, it is implied that the whole strength of his mind passes for the time being into the imaginative faculty. But here, as usual, it becomes apparent that our distinctions of faculties are partly devices for our own convenience in conceiving of things. Imagination is not, properly speaking, the imagining part of the mind, but rather the whole mind in the act of imagining; and hence, though some Milton minds tend more to this act than others, yet the nature and the worth of the imaginations of any particular mind are determined by the total character and contents of that mind. On this principle, also, we see how it is that in one and the same mind there may be poetic development, and how a poet's later muse may differ from his earlier, just as a philosopher's later may differ from his earlier doctrine. Imagination is said to be the faculty of youth; which, however, is true to some extent only in this sense, that men as they advance in life have so many things to do that, even if they set out with a strong imaginative tendency, they indulge it less and less. In the cases of professed poets, however, who preserve and cherish their imaginative tendency, and go through the working world laurelled and privileged to dream, it is not observed that the imagination grows weaker so long as there is growth in the being at all, but, on the contrary, that it gains strength. By the mere necessities of existence, acquisition, and experience, it is a more rich and powerful imagining mind in the later than it was in the earlier stages of the progress. And so also if, after an intermediate period of non-poetical activity, or of activity in the main non-poetical, a mind originally poetical reverts, before decay has set in, and ere the old habit has been forgotten by too much disease, to its first occupations. In either case there will be differences between the earlier and the later poetry. The themes in all probability will be different, and the style and manner of treatment will be different likewise. So it was with Milton. In his youth his was the imagination of a mind naturally firm and austere, it is true, and already cultured and well equipped with learning, but still sufficiently untorn and unexercised in the contemporary medley of human things to find its delight in fancies of the sweet and sensuous order, in themes of idyllic grace, or of purely ideal beauty. In his old age, or second poetic period, it was different. Imagination was again his darling faculty; but it was now the imagination of the same mind tried and disciplined in a thousand things by what it had meanwhile passed through,—heavily freighted, as it were, with twenty years of griefs, ideas, recollections, and experiences, which had not at first belonged to it. If, then, imagination is the whole mind in the act of imagining, and if, accordingly, the poems which a poet successively puts forth may be regarded as in a profound sense allegories, on a larger or smaller scale, of his entire being at the moments to which they appertain, it was in the nature of things that Milton's later poetry, though bearing certain resemblances to his earlier, should yet differ from it. By universal admission such is the fact. In *Paradise Lost*, *Paradise Regained*, and *Samson Agonistes*, we have the same peculiar Miltonic genius which we discern in *Penseroso*, *Comus*, or *Lycidas*; but it is as if that genius had meanwhile absorbed and incorporated into its fibre all that we know of the intermediate polemic and prose writer. The themes are of larger dimensions and of more direct human and historic interest; the filling up is more various, erudite, and elaborate; the artistic harmony is more complex; and while the whole matter is cast in the mould of the imagination, much of it is of independent and extra-poetical, not to say controversial, value.

Each of the three later poems of Milton has its separate merits as a poem, and also its separate interest in connection with the poet's biography. In the noble *Eschylean* drama of the blind Samson among the Philistines, one seems to see a scarcely disguised allegory of the poet himself agonizing in the midst of evil times. There is no need to ask how that subject occurred to him. As regards the *Paradise Regained*, though here also we can discover points of contact between the subject and the author, such as might have determined him independently towards the choice of that epic from the first, we yet know that it was composed mainly as a sequel to the *Paradise Lost*. It remains, then, to account for the origin of this greater epic, the crowning glory of Milton's life, and to which it is owing that he is remembered and will be remembered for ever, not only as a noble Englishman who did his duty manfully in a troublous period of his nation's history, nor even only as this, with the addition of having been a notable English poet, but as one of those select few of the children of men who, having wedded their genius to universal themes, stand apart as the great poets of the world, and the authors of the world's masterpieces. Notwithstanding the tradition, through Phillips and Ellwood, of Milton's preference for the *Paradise Regained*, there can be no doubt that it was to the *Paradise Lost* that he himself looked as the fulfillment of his life-long promise.

The most important act of the artist, and that which involves the greatest amount of presumptive evidence respecting him, is his choice of a subject. Milton, we have seen, had wavered long before deciding as to the best theme for his intended masterpiece. Like Wordsworth before he determined on his long philosophical poem, he appears to have ranged through history in search of a subject of sufficient interest and capability; going back through British history, and there resting fondly for a time on the subject of King Arthur, then deviating into general mediæval history, and finally extending his quest still backward and backward through ancient to primeval times. At last in his search he reaches a point beyond which it was impossible to go—the point where human history itself began, and where our planet, with life but newly planted upon it, is seen emerging for its special voyage out of the obscurities of prior and universal existence. The more he thinks of this subject, already familiar to him in its biblical relations, the more sensible he becomes, not only of its intrinsic capabilities, but also of its fitness for himself. The qualities and endowments for which it affords scope,—an imagination delighting in conceptions of the physically vast, as in astronomy, and yet capable of that kind of sensuousness which consists in love of the physically rich, as in landscape and vegetation; great acquired learning, classical and theological; a moral sublimity of nature almost at war with human society as seen around it, and driven, therefore, to communion with objects and intelligences unseen; an intellect withal massive and severely logical to exclude in the process of imagination whatever should be beneath the philosophy of the time, and to shape all into clear form and sequence according to high literary rule;—these are the very qualities and endowments which he is conscious of possessing. On the other hand, those qualities of the want of which he was or might have been conscious,—humour, for example, as in Chaucer and Shakspeare, and the corresponding dramatic faculty of light incident and varied painting of physiognomies and characters to pass and repass in quick succession in a story,—were qualities the exercise of which the theme itself precluded. What room for humour in the grand story of our earth's beginning, or for elaborate portrait-painting in the description of a world tenanted as yet but by the two first beings of our race? In short, by the instinct both of what he could and of what he could not do, Milton's choice was made; and, it having been also at last decided that the form of the poem should be the epic and not the dramatic, and moreover (which was then a great innovation, and was proclaimed by Milton to be such) that the verse employed should be the heroic blank and not rhyme, *Paradise Lost* slowly grew into being. For seven years or thereby, and mostly amid the streets of bustling London, where Charles was amusing himself with his court, and Dryden was seeing his plays acted, and poor Butler was growing morose from ill usage, and Pepys was running about and taking notes, the plan was carried in the blind man's head, till at last, by dictations of twenty or fifty lines at a time, the work was completed. is Milton's description of the matter of his poem. The description is just; and it is part of his title to immortality that he spent his genius on a theme of universal interest, which, seeing that it had been reserved for him to sing it, could certainly now, for that very reason, never be sung a second time even had he sung it worse.

"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe,"

is his opening more particular definition of the purport of his song. This definition, however, if taken by itself, is totally inadequate; nor, if this were the theme, could it be said to have been unattempted before. The true theme of *Paradise Lost* is the story of the connection of this world, as a whole, with what may be called the larger universe of ante-human existence; and "man's first disobedience" is but the last incident in the story, to which, as to a narrow point, all the prior incidents tend. The true hero of the poem,—the being in whose movements and actions from the beginning to the end the unity of the epic is maintained,—is the archangel Satan. Adopting the scriptural account of this great being, as one in whose life the past and primeval system of things is fatally connected with ours, and adhering also with theological conscientiousness to whatever circumstances Scripture has supplied towards filling out the story, the poet has passed the whole through the mould of his imagination in such a manner that now it is Milton's story of the origin and first events of the universe, rather than the biblical outline which suggested it to him, that has taken possession of the British mind. As, however, there is no contradiction of the biblical narrative, but only an expansion of it, the majority of readers find in the poem an absolutely unexceptionable rendering of the theme; while, on the other hand, even those who hold aloof from theology in such matters, or would treat the Mosaic account rather as a figure than as a narrative, admit that, as there must be some conception of the theme for the mind of man to take hold of, so no more sublime conception of it than Milton's has been provided by a human poet, or could be presented to the Christian world. To both classes of readers the poem properly shapes itself as in the main a Sataniad, or epic of Satan's life from the time of his being an archangel among the hosts of heaven to the time of the execution of that scheme whereby, after the fall of himself and his fellow-rebels, he becomes the lord and minister of evil on our particular earth.

From the very nature of the theme it arises that the extent of physical space which the poem fills is larger than that which any other known poem takes in, or any other conceivable poem could possibly require. The universe of Dante's poem, physically regarded, is but a nutshell to that of Milton's, which stretches in its totality beyond all telescopic bounds, and incloses, as but a drop of central azure, the whole visible region of the stars and galaxies. A diagram of the plan of the poem would illustrate this. It presents to us the first primeval Infinity, not as a universe of stars at all, but as a sphere, if we may so say, of infinite radius, divided into two and only two parts—the higher or upper hemisphere of Heaven, which is a region all of light, formed forth in some inconceivable way into tracts of field and continent, and populated in some inconceivable way by angelic beings, all near to Deity, and doing his missions, but distributed into hosts and hierarchies, and leading lives of freedom; and the lower or nether hemisphere of Chaos, where no such beings habitually are, but which is a great sea or swelter of darkness and confusion,—a limitless, fathomless quagmire of elemental pulp. While we are contemplating this eternal Infinity, divided equatorially, as it were, into a Heaven above and a Chaos below,—lo! the event which breaks in on the grand monotony of ante- as perhaps positively qualifying him for that kind of imagination and description of which five-sixths of the poem consist—the imagination and description of vast physical space, variously shaded and divided; of luminous orbs in quiet motion through the nocturnal deep; of luminous or else shadowy beings passing or repassing singly or in battalions; of contrasts of light and darkness in all their forms. In the remaining parts of the poem, where the poet descends on our own earth, and describes the beauty of Paradise, there is certainly no lack of sensuousness, in the more ordinary sense of the term; but it may be questioned whether, with all the richness of those paradisiac descriptions, there is not evidence that the poet was now but living fondly on his recollections of a world of colour and vegetation from which he had been long shut out. At all events, much even of the subsidiary and terrestrial imagery of the poem will be found to consist of light and darkness worked cunningly into visual contrast; and the florid offering on the bier of Lycidas is richer in botanical colour and embroidery than the nuptial bower of Eve.

A question as to Milton's theological belief, which was suggested to some keen critics by certain passages of his *Paradise Lost*, has been answered, in favour of their conjecture, by the discovery of his *Treatise on Christian Doctrine*. In one chapter of that work he expresses views at variance with the orthodox notions of the Trinity. Bishop Sumner gives a summary of these views in theological language. Milton asserts, he says, "that the Son of God existed in the beginning, and was the first of the whole creation;" that "by his delegated power all things were made in heaven and in earth;" that "he was begotten within the limits of time," and "induced with the Divine nature and substance, but distinct from and inferior to the Father." In other words, Milton in his later life was an Arian, and there is a trace of at least incipient Arianism in the *Paradise Lost*.

Milton lived seven years and a half after the publication of his *Paradise Lost*, and three years after the publication of his subsequent volume containing the *Paradise Regained* and *Samson Agonistes*. The personal sketches which we have of him refer mostly to this time of his life.

Of a stature somewhat below the average, Milton had in his youth been singularly handsome, with a complexion of delicate white and red, dark gray eyes, light auburn hair, parted in the middle, and altogether an appearance of slender and even feminine grace, which it required his manly bearing and his confidence as a swordsman to contradict. Even in later life he was usually mistaken for ten years younger than he really was. In his old age, however, his blindness, accompanied by the gout and other infirmities, had abated his activity and vigour. "An aged clergyman of Dorsetshire," says the painter Richardson, "found John Milton in a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale, but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalkstones. He used also to sit in a gray coarse cloth coat at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air; and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts as well as quality." To this we may add some particulars from other sources. "He was an early riser," says Aubrey; "to wit, at four o'clock in the morning, yea, after he lost his sight." In winter his hour of rising was five; and sometimes he would lie in bed after he was awake composing mentally or dictating. He had a man to read to him as soon as he got up, and also after breakfast, and he always began the day with a chapter or two of the Hebrew Bible. The early part of the day was spent by him in reading and writing; "the writing," says Aubrey, "usually as much as the reading." He used to dictate, sitting obliquely in an elbow chair, with his leg thrown over the arm. At one o'clock, after a short walk, he dined, eating well of such dishes as he liked, but drinking little except water. "God have mercy, Betty," he said to his wife one day at dinner about a year before his death, "I see thou wilt perform according to thy promise, in providing me such dishes as I think fit whilst I live, and when I die thou knowest that I have left thee all." After dinner he used to walk again in the garden or out in the neighbourhood, with some one guiding him; or sometimes he would take exercise in a kind of swinging chair which he had contrived; generally, however, in the course of the afternoon, playing for an hour on the organ or the bass-viol, and either singing himself or making his wife sing, who, he said, had a good voice, but no ear. An hour or two towards evening were again given to his books; about six o'clock visitors would drop in, whom he would entertain till eight; he then had olives or something light by way of supper with them; and, after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water, he went to bed. "Extremely pleasant in his conversation at dinner, supper, &c., but satirical," says Aubrey, who adds, that "he was visited by the learned much more than he did desire." In particular, foreigners of note, when in London, would seek him out; and, indeed, before the publication of *Paradise Lost* he was liable to the visits of admiring foreigners, some of whom, according to Aubrey, regarded him as hardly less a lion than "O. Protector" himself, and would insist (the Great Fire not having yet done its work) on seeing the house and chamber where he was born. "He was much more admired abroad," says Aubrey, "than at home." At home, however, more especially after the publication of his great epic, he did not lack admirers. Which of the "quality" paid him visits we do not know; but among the "people of distinguished parts" was Dryden, whose admiration of him was extreme, and who on going to see him was, it is said, received civilly, though Milton had a low idea of Dryden's poetry. Hobbes was not of his acquaintance, nor had he any liking for Hobbes, but acknowledged him to be a man of great parts. His familiar friends were men of the graver sort, among whom were Andrew Marvell, Dr Paget, and Cyriack Skinner. He attended no church and belonged to no particular communion; nor had he any rites of worship in his family—though what were his reasons for this was not very well known even to his friends. He remained a theoretical republican to the last. His favourite poets among the classics are said to have been Homer, Euripides, and Ovid; and among the English, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Cowley. Aubrey adds that, in speaking or reading, he pronounced the letter r very hard; "a litera canina," as Dryden said to Aubrey, "a certain sign of a satirical wit." From Ellwood we learn that he could not endure the English mode of pronouncing Latin, and that his ear was so quick that he knew at once when his reader had come to a sentence which he did not understand.

The date of Milton's death was November 8, 1674. The cause, according to Aubrey, was "gout struck in;" but his death was calm and easy. He was then close upon being sixty-six years old. He was buried beside his father, in the church of St Giles, Cripplegate. Shortly after his death there was a lawsuit between his widow and his daughters as to the inheritance of his remaining property, which amounted to about £1,500. The widow pleaded a nuncupative, or declaratory will, made by the deceased before witnesses, to the effect that she was to be his sole heir, and that the daughters, having been "very undutiful" to him, were to receive nothing except their interest in their mother's marriage-portion, which, though never paid, was yet in good hands, and recoverable. The decision, however, was so far favourable to the daughters, that each got something out of the property. The subsequent history of the family was as follows:—The widow survived her husband not less than forty-five years, dying, in very old age, Milwaukee in 1729, at her native place of Nantwich in Cheshire, where she was a member of the Baptist communion. Of the three daughters, the second, Mary, died unmarried; the eldest, Anne, married rather late in life a master-builder, and died in her first childbirth; and the youngest, Deborah, alone left issue. She had gone over to Ireland as companion to a lady before her father's death; there in 1674 she married a Mr Abraham Clarke, a silk-weaver, with whom she returned to London in or about 1687, and settled in Spitalfields, where Addison and others saw her, and asked her questions about her father; and she died in 1727, after having had a large family, of whom only one son and one daughter survived. The son, who was named Caleb, went to the East Indies, and died at Madras in 1719, leaving children, whose issue cannot be traced. The daughter, whose name was Elizabeth, married a Thomas Foster of Spitalfield, who afterwards kept a small chandler's shop in Holloway, and was in very poor circumstances. Some money was collected for her in 1750 by Dr Birch, Johnson, and others; and she died at Islington in 1754, having had seven children, none of whom survived, or at least left descendants. Thus disappeared all the direct posterity of the poet. It remains to be added, that his brother Christopher, having adhered steadily to his royalist politics, was knighted by James II. in 1686, and became one of that king's servile judges, but was set aside at the Revolution, and died at Ipswich in 1692; that the two Phillipses, the poet's nephews, had some reputation as hack-writers in the reigns of James and his successor; and, finally, that their mother, the poet's only sister, had other children by her second marriage, whose descendants are still to be traced.

(M.M.—N.)