terms of friendship, his presence must have been to his uncle a pretty emphatic reminder of the collapse of his own teaching.

...

If the defection of his nephews was satiric, the rebellion of his daughters was sordidly tragic. The eldest, Anne, a handsome girl in spite of her lameness, was now seventeen; Mary, the second, was fifteen, and Deborah eleven. They had received only the rudiments of an education, the eldest not even being able to write. In spite of this their father undertook to make them do him a service in his literary labors which they would hardly have been prepared for by a formal college training. Edward Phillips says that he used them to" supply his want of eyesight by their ears and tongues. For though he had daily about him one or other to read to him, some, persons of man's estate, who of their own accord greedily catched at the opportunity of being his readers, . . . others, of younger years, sent by their parents to the same end, — yet, excusing only the eldest by reason of her bodily deformity and difficult utterance of speech (which, to say truth, I doubt was the principal cause of excusing her), the other two were condemned to the performance of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse: viz. the Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, Spanish, and French." That young girls could have been trained to read intelligibly languages of which they did not, as Phillips declares, understand a word, is almost beyond belief; but whether literally true or not, the statement implies a sternness and a length of discipline gruesome to imagine. Rebellion on their part was natural and inevitable, but before the miserable details of their growing aversion to their father, — their conspiring with the servants in petty pilferings from his purse, their making away with his books, the remark of one of them, on hearing of her father's third marriage, that "that was no news, but, if she could hear of his death, that was something," the mind turns sick, and wonders whether, if there were another Paradise Lost to purchase, it would be worth such a price. Taking the facts as we have them, even casuistry can make of them no clean bill of conscience for the father. The girls were, it is true, the fruit of an unloving marriage; their recalcitrancy Milton may have looked upon as a part of the grim logic of that forced "union of minds that cannot unite," and he may have found justification for his tyranny in the bitter memories of the days when he was pouring out his wrath and anguish in the tracts on divorce. The radical meanness of nature which betrays itself in their petty revenges may have served to wither affection in the bud. But such considerations explain, without extenuating, his attitude. His daughters remain the great blot upon his memory; they cannot make it less than august, but they suffice to render it, from the standpoint of the simple human charities, forbidding. They remained with him for eight years longer, when they were put out to learn feminine handicrafts. A glimpse which we get of the youngest, Deborah, many years after, gives a comforting assurance that, however she may have failed in filial duty during her father's lifetime, she cherished a sincere affection for his memory. In 1721 she was sought out by Vertue, the engraver, in the weavers' district of Spital

fields, where she lived in obscure widowhood. Some pictures of her father were shown her, to get her opinion of their authenticity. Several she passed by, saying "No, no," to the question whether she had ever seen such a face; but when a certain picture in crayons owned by Jonathan Richardson was produced, she cried out in transport, as related by Richardson, ""T is my father, 't is my dear father; I see him, 't is him!" and then she put her hands to several parts of the face, crying, "T is the very man! here, here!" In all her reminiscences of her father there was, her visitors report, the same tone of reverence and fondness.

Besides the robust and cheery figure of Andrew Marvell, a faithful visitor, there came to break the gloom of the Milton household a young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood. He was the son of a small country squire, and possessed of all the simplicity and heartiness proper to the character. He had embraced the Quaker faith by contagion from the enthusiasm of a family of Penningtons whom he visited, and along with his new faith felt a desire to grow in the wisdom of books. To that end, he was introduced to Milton, took a house in the neighborhood, and came every day full of joyous zeal to imbibe learning from the works which the great man set him to read aloud. Whether poor Ellwood gathered much intellectual sustenance from this haphazard diet or not, his presence must have been a wholesome and inspiriting one to the solitary scholar. From him and Phillips we get some interesting hints concerning Milton's habits of composition. "Leaning back obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it," he would dictate ten, twenty, thirty lines at a sitting. Sometimes he would "lie awake all night, striving, but unable to make a single line." Then again, when the mood was on him, the verse would come "with a certain impetus and aestro as himself seemed to believe," and he would call his daughter Mary out of bed to take the words from his lips. His own statement is recorded, too, that "his vein never happily flowed but from the autumnal equinoctial to the vernal, and that whatever he attempted (in the other part of the year) was never to his satisfaction, though he courted his fancy never so much."

How far Paradise Lost had progressed by the time of Milton's instalment in the house in Jewin Street, whither he removed from his temporary lodgings in Holborn, is only matter of conjecture. At the beginning of the third book the movement of the poem is interrupted by a splendid "hymn to light" which may mark the resumption of the task after interruption caused by the King's return. A similar break occurs at the beginning of Book VII, and references in this passage to the "evil days and evil tongues" upon which the poet has fallen, as well as to postrestoration literature and manners, the "barbarous dissonance of Bacchus and his revellers," point to this as more probably marking the time of resumption. The probability is increased by the fact that the next distinct break in the narrative, at the beginning of Book IX, would then correspond to the last serious interrup tion which the work could have suffered, that occasioned by Milton's third marriage, this time to Elizabeth Minshull, a handsome young woman of twenty-six, and his removal to a new house in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Field. It was certainly fin

ished by the summer of 1665. In July of that year the coming of the great Plague, the most terrible which ever visited England, made it necessary for Milton to find some refuge in the country. Ellwood found a place for him, a "pretty box" in the little village of Chalfont St. Giles, only a few miles from Harefield, the scene of Arcades, and not far from Horton, where in early manhood he had spent the five happy years of his "long vacation." The country sights, which in those days he had given delighted chronicle in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, could not reach him now. Those poems belonged to a world which was shut away from him by many a tragic change besides that which had quenched his bodily vision. But he carried with him, blind and fallen on evil days, the resultant of the twentyfive intervening years of battle and sacrifice, in the mighty martial rhythms and battailous imaginings of his completed epic. Honest Ellwood was rewarded for his fidelity by being the first, so far as we know, to see Paradise Lost in its final form. He came one day to visit Milton at the little irregular cottage in sleepy Chalfont, and thus describes the incident: "After some discourse had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his; which, being brought, he delivered to me, bidding me to take it home with me and read it at my leisure, and, when I had so done, to return it to him, with my judgment thereon. When I came home and had set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled Paradise Lost."

VII

MILTON'S LAST YEARS, 1666-1674

ALTHOUGH by February or March of 1666 the Plague had sufficiently abated to allow of a return to the house in Artillery Walk, it was not until September of the following year that Paradise Lost was published. A part of this delay was doubtless due to the great fire which raged in London from the second to the fifth of September, 1666. Among the worst sufferers were the booksellers and publishers, whose shops were clustered thickly about Old St. Paul's. When the poem did appear, it was with the imprint of an obscure publisher, one Samuel Simmons. There was for a moment some question whether even under these modest auspices it was to see the light, for a passage in the first book aroused suspicions of treason in the breast of the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, M. A., whose business it became to license the manuscript. The contract for the book is still extant, showing that the author received five pounds at the time of issue, and was guaranteed a similar amount upon the exhaustion of each succeeding issue, up to the sum of twenty pounds. The first edition of 1300 copies was exhausted in eighteen months.

Milton's life-dream was fulfilled. He had accomplished the purpose which had been the secret motive of his whole conscious existence, as well as the subject of many a proud public utterance in the midst of those noises and hoarse disputes where he had felt the need of such utterance to sustain him. But he did not for

that reason loose his grasp on the large lyre so painfully builded and strung. A chance remark of Ellwood's on returning the manuscript of Paradise Lost had suggested to him a companion subject. "Thou hast said much here," the young Quaker had observed ("pleasantly," as he assures us), "of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?" The poet had made no answer, but sat some time in a muse. Had he, after all, completed his task of justifying the ways of God to men? Satan he had left triumphant, man he had left outcast from Eden, earning his painful bread under the curse. Did not the real justification lie in that part of the cosmic story which he had as yet only vaguely foreshadowed, in the bruising of the Serpent's head by that greater man who should recover Paradise? Out of such questioning came, some time in the next two years, Paradise Regained. The poem was finished before the publication of Paradise Lost, but not published until 1671.

In this poem there is noticeable a distinct change from Milton's earlier manner, —a sudden purging away of ornament, a falling back on the naked concept, a preference for language as slightly as possible tinctured with metaphoric suggestion. A portion of this change may be due to failing vividness of imagination; certainly the abandonment of rapid narrative for tedious argumentation marks the increasing garrulity of age. Christ and Satan in the wilderness dispute with studied casuistry, until the sense of the spiritual drama in which they are protagonists is almost lost. As this same weakness is apparent also in the later books of Paradise Lost, we must lay it largely to the score of flagging creative energy. But in still greater measure the change seems to be a deliberate experiment in style, or perhaps more truly a conscious reproduction, in language, of that rarefied mental atmosphere to which the author had climbed from the rich valley mists of his youth. Unalluring at first, this bareness comes in time to have a solemn charm of its own, comparable, as has been said, to that of mountain scenery above the line of vegetation. Some such beauty as this Milton, himself above all a student and amateur of style, must have prized in Paradise Regained, unless we are to attribute to a narrow pride his refusal to tolerate the opinion of its inferiority to Paradise Lost. Whether deliberate or not, this same quality of style appears in the dramatic poem of Samson Agonistes, of the same 1671 volume, stripped of discursiveness, and wrought to the hard dark finish of bronze. By reason both of its form and of its content this last work of Milton is of absorbing interest.

Ever since the days of Arcades and Comus, Milton had cherished a fondness for the dramatic form. For several years after his return from Italy he had persevered in the intention to make his master-work a drama, and even made several tentative sketches of Paradise Lost in that form. The suppression of stage plays by the Long Parliament he had concurred in, but without loss of sympathy with the theatre, at least as an ideal institution. It was characteristic of the unified purpose of his intellectual life that he should go back now to gather up this, the only one of the main threads of his intention still left hanging. For a subject, too, he went back to a theme pondered thirty years before. Samson Purso

phorus or the Fire-bringer, and Samson Hybristes or Samson Marrying, were among the subjects pencilled in his note-book in 1642. At that time Samson had apparently engaged his attention no more deeply than other Bible heroes whose names occur in his notes; but events had gradually been shaping his life into such a form that it now found in Samson's story its sufficient prototype and symbol No hint escapes the poet that the many-sided correspondence of his own case with that of his hero is in his mind; the treatment is throughout sternly objective, even sculpturesque in its detachment; but the autobiographic meaning is everywhere latent, giving to the most restrained lines an ominous emphasis and to the least significant a strange kind of wintry passion. He too had been a champion favored of the Lord, and had matched his giant strength against the enemies of his people. He had sent the fire-brands of his pamphlets among their corn, and slain their strongest with simple weapons near at hand. He too had taken a wife from among the worshippers of Dagon; he had made festival with her people over the nuptials which brought him a loss as tragic as Samson's, - the loss of human tenderness, a lowered ideal, and a warped understanding of the deepest human relationships. Now, blind and fettered in the midst of an idolatrous generation, he may well have longed for another Salmasius upon whom to wreak, as Samson upon Harapha of Gath, the energy which still swelled his veins. In another year or two, when Dryden should "tag his verses," and transform his august epic into a trivial opera, he would be brought like Samson to make sport before the Philistines, as a juggler or a mime. Perhaps he might still hope, bowing his head in prayer to the God of the spirit, to bring down the temple builded by the men of the Restoration to the gods of the flesh, and bury in the ruins all the insolence and outrage of the times. With some such autobiographic second intention in mind as this, one must read the gray pages of Samson Agonistes. It offers perhaps the most remarkable instance in all art of an artist's personal story revealed by impersonal symbols, set forth in their traditional integrity, unmanipulated to any private end. Milton had three more years to live after the publication of his last His daughters had a year before been put out to learn, Phillips says, 66 some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture that are proper for women to learn, particularly embroideries in gold and silver;" and he was left alone in the house in Bunhill Fields with his young wife Elizabeth, of whom he seems to have been fond. The publication of Paradise Lost had again made him a figure of some note, visited by persons of distinction. The most interesting of these visits was that made by Dryden, for the purpose of asking permission to put Paradise Lost into rhyme, as a kind of sacred opera. The value of rhyme over blank verse, for heroic purposes, had been the main contention of Dryden's Essay on Dramatic Poetry, and the publication of the epic shortly after had been a powerful practical manifesto on Milton's part of his opposed opinion. This difference of artistic theory only serves to emphasize the fundamental differences between the two men, spokesmen and champions of antipodal creeds. Their trivial meeting takes on a kind of moral picturesqueness when we think of them in their typical characters, the militant

poems.