complaint over his completed blindness. We could have conceived him penning an expostulation to the advancing shadow, equally sublime and equally vain, for it was God's pleasure that this great spirit should, like himself, dwell for a season in the thick darkness. The same year his wife died in childbed, leaving him alone, blind, and with the care of three infant daughters, the oldest of whom was not more than six years of age. But he was only forty-four-his circumstances were comfortable-his resolution was unconquerable, and he girded himself up to mate with and overcome his difficulties. Mr Philip Meadowes was appointed to assist him in his secretaryship, and yet his salary was not at first diminished. He was married, in the year 1656, a second time. His wife was the daughter of Captain Woodcock of Hackney. This marriage was very happy, but of short continuance. She, too, died in childbirth, within a year after marriage, and her memory lives in one of his sweetest sonnets. By and by his salary was reduced one-half, and his duties were divided, although his pen was ever ready to defend the government down almost to the date of the Restoration.

Relieved, first by the appointment of Meadowes, and then of the celebrated Andrew Marvel, as his colleague, he began to revolve certain vast literary projects, such as a Latin Thesaurus, a Body of Divinity out of the Bible, a History of his Native Country, and an EPICK POEM. For the Dictionary the preparations were begun, but left in a fragmentary state-the History was commenced after the "Paradise Lost" was finished -the System of Divinity was discovered, and published in 1825 -and the design of the Epick was built up into the sublimest production of the human mind. Meanwhile, in 1659, he published his Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, shewing that it is not lawful for any power on earth to compel in matters of religion; and, in the same year, Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church; a Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth; and a Letter to General Monk on the Present Means of a Free Commonwealth. In February, he gave to the world what he hoped might not contain the "last words of

expiring liberty," in a Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.

These efforts to retard the Restoration were strong, but convulsive and ineffectual. Cromwell's genius was latterly the one bulwark against the return of Charles; he was now removed, and there was nothing for it but that the nation, "like a tame elephant, should kneel" and receive its worthless rider. The consequences to Milton were disastrous; he had sat for years at ease in his "garden-house," labouring, but not toiling, visited by friends such as Lawrence, Skinner, Needham, and Marvel; visited, too, by foreigners, many of whom came to England simply to see Cromwell and Milton-in the possession of competence, if not wealth-blind, but full of internal light, of celestial cheer, and with great projects passing across his mind, and causing his eyes, as they passed, to twinkle with joy. Now his secretaryship was lost, he was obliged to take refuge in a friend's house in Bartholomew Close; nay, according to some accounts, to give himself out for dead, and to have a mock funeral made for him. His Eiconoclastes and Defensio were burned by the hands of the common hangman. He was not relieved from danger till the act of indemnity was passed; and, even after that, he was a short time in the custody of the serjeant-at-arms. As we have elsewhere said, although the heat of persecution was abated, the prospects of Milton were aught but cheering. He was poor, blind, solitary-his second wife dead-his daughters undutiful, unkind, and anxious for his death-his country was enslaved the hopes of the Church and the world seemed blasted-one might have expected that disappointment, regret, and vexation would have completed their work. It was the greatest crisis in the history of the individual man. Napoleon survived the loss of his empire, and men call him great because he survived it. Sir Walter Scott not only survived the loss of his fortune, but he struggled manfully amid the sympathy of the civilised species to repair it. But Milton, amid the loss of friends, fortune, fame, sight, domestic comfort, long cherished hopes, not only survived, but stood firm as a god over the ruins of a world-and not only stood firm, but,

alone and unaided, built to himself an everlasting monument. Verily, he was one of the celestial coursers who feed on no vulgar or earthly food. He had "meat to eat that the world knew not of."

As soon as he felt himself out of danger, he settled in Holborn, and then in Jewin Street, Aldersgate, and resumed his wonted studies. In 1664 he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, daughter of Sir Edward Minshull, in Cheshire. It was a "made-up match," she having been chosen at his request by his friend Dr Paget, to be the nurse of his declining years. Like his other two wives, she was a maiden. He had an aversion to marrying widows. His daughters, three in number, Anne, Mary, and Deborah, acted as his amanuenses till the period of their respective marriages. They were taught to read, without understanding, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, to their blind father. From this slavery it is not to be wondered that they shrunk; but, besides, they are said to have combined with his maid-servant in cheating him, and to have pawned his books. On what terms he lived with his third wife is not quite certain. A little after his marriage, he is said to have been offered the Latin secretaryship again, but declined it. About this time commenced his intimacy with Ellwood the Quaker. This amiable and intelligent young man used to come every afternoon except that of Sunday, and to read Latin to him. Ellwood, though himself an object of persecution, found means to be serviceable to Milton. He had got a situation as tutor in the family of a rich Quaker in Chalfont, Buckinghamshire, and when the plague broke out in London in 1665, he hired there a house for the poet, who removed to Chalfont with all his family. When he arrived, he found Ellwood imprisoned in Aylesbury gaol on account of his religion. As soon, however, as he obtained his liberty, he paid Milton a visit, who put into his hands a MS., requesting him to read it, and give him his opinion. It was Paradise Lost! He had commenced this marvellous poem two years before the Restoration, and it had thus occupied him seven years-a time neither too long nor too short for the construction of such a piece of Cyclopean

masonry. His purpose of writing an epic had never been relinquished, and from harsh and crabbed controversies he returned gladly to poetry, like a wearied sea-bird to his nest. It was not composed, as might have been imagined, in slow and regular succession of effort, but at fits and snatches, the "spirit moving him at times," as it did of old his Danite hero. It is curious, that, though the most intensely cultivated of poets, he was most dependent on moods and moments; his favourite season was from the "autumnal to the vernal equinox." Now, he could only indite coarse and clumsy prose, and, anon, "flowed free his unpremeditated verse" in a "torrent rapture" of beauty, music, and power. The poem, though completed and approved of by Ellwood, was nearly stifled in its cradle by the licenser, who detected treason in that noble simile of the eclipse

"With fear of change perplexing monarchs."

Perhaps, also, he felt some little spite to the author of the Areopagitica, who had treated his tribe with such crushing contempt. At length, however, licensed the poem was, and Milton sold his copy, April 27, 1667, to Samuel Symmons, for an immediate payment of five pounds-an agreement with the bookseller, however, entitling him to a conditional payment of five pounds more when thirteen hundred copies should be sold of the first edition; of the same sum after the same number of the second edition; and of another five pounds after the same sale of the third; the number of each edition was not to exceed fifteen hundred copies. It appeared in a small quarto form, in ten books, and was sold for three shillings. We have seen this first edition as well as the third, and, humble as they were in binding, they seemed to our eyes covered all over, like a summer's sunset, with glory. In two years the sale gave the author a right to his second instalment. The second edition appeared in 1647, and was arranged into twelve books. Milton lived not to receive the price stipulated for this impression. The third edition was published in 1678, and, on the receipt of eight pounds, the widow of the poet gave it over entire to Symmons, who sold it for twenty-five pounds to Aylmer, and

from him it passed into Jacob Tonson's hands. It is singular, contrasting this "goodly price" at which the greatest of English poems was prized, with the large sums which have been paid since for Marmions, and Lalla Rookhs, and Childe Harolds, or even with the experiences of our own day, in which, a month or two ago, a young author sold his first poem for one hundred pounds. But readers were then scarce, poetry was still more than now a drug; Milton's name had become odious from his principles, and he seems to have never complained of his bargain. He saw, shall we say, those poor five bank-notes fluttering in the breath of eternal fame? He cast his book upon the waters, knowing that it would be found after many days.

Slowly and surely it made its way. First Barrow and Marvel prefixed complimentary verses to the second edition, then Dryden wrote his celebrated hexastich, beginning,

"Three poets in three distant ages born," &c.

which accompanies the fourth, besides praising it in the preface to his "State of Innocence" as "one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." Woodford, Lord Roscommon, Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, and Bishop Atterbury, followed in diversified measures of praise; and even before Addison wrote his long analysis of it in the Spectator, its character and fame were established on an indestructible basis.

We must not omit the numerous prose works he wrote before or after the "Paradise Lost." These were his Accidence or Commenced Grammar of the Latin Tongue, published in 1661; a History of Britain to the Norman Conquest, in 1670; a tract published in 1673, entitled, Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what best Means may be used against the Growth of Popery-a Latin treatise on logic-a collection of his familiar epistles in Latin-a brief History of Muscovy and the countries beyond Russia, which was left by him in MS., besides the materials for his Thesaurus, and his treatise on Christian Doctrine. One is utterly amazed at the industry, the determination, the energy, the power of mind and memory, the almost miraculous