house in Holborn near Red Lion Fields, but soon removed to Jewin-street, and there married in his fifty-fourth year, his third wife Elizabeth Minshall, the daughter of a gentleman in Cheshire. As the misfortune of blindness seems particularly to require a female companion, and yet almost precludes the unhappy sufferer from selecting such as might suit him, Milton is said to have formed this attachment on the recommendation of his friend Dr. Paget, an eminent physi cian of the city, to whom the lady was related. Some biographers have spoken harshly of her temper and conduct; but let me observe, in justice to her memory, that the manuscript of Aubrey, to whom she was probably known, mentions her as a gentle person, of a peaceful and agreeable humour. That she was particularly attentive to her husband, and treated his infirmities with tenderness, is candidly remarked by Mr. Warton, in a posthumous note to the testamentary papers relating to Milton, which his indefatigable researches at length disco. vered, and committed to the press, a few

months before his own various and valuable labours were terminated by death. These very curious and interesting papers afford information respecting the latter days of the poet, which his late biographers were so far from possessing, that they could not believe it existed. Indeed, Mr. Warton himself had concluded, that all further enquiries for the will must be fruitless, as he had failed in a tedious and intricate search. At last however, he was enabled, by the friendship of Sir William Scott, to rescue from oblivion a curiosity so precious to poetical antiquarians. He found in the prerogative register the will of Milton, which though made by his bro ther Christopher, a lawyer by profession, was set aside from a deficiency in point of form the litigation of this will produced a collection of evidence relating to the testator, which renders the discovery of those long forgotten papers peculiarly interesting; they shew very forcibly, and in new points of view, his domestic infelicity, and his amiable disposition, The tender and sublime poet, whose sensibility and sufferings were

so great, appears to have been almost as unfortunate in his daughters as the Lear of Shakespeare. A servant declares in evidence that her deceased master, a little before his last marriage, had lamented to her the ingratitude and cruelty of his children. He complained, that they had combined to defraud him in the economy of his house, and sold several of his books in the basest manner. His feelings on such an outrage, both as a parent and as a scholar must have bcen singularly painful; perhaps they suggested to him those very pathetic lines, where he seems to paint himself, in Sampson Agonis

tes:

I dark in light, expos'd

To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors or without; still as a fool,

In power of others, never in my own,
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half,

Unfortunate as he had proved in matrimony, he was probably induced to venture once more into that state by the bitter want of a domestic protector against his inhuman daughters, under which description

I include only the two eldest; and in palkation even of their conduct, detestable as it appears, we may observe, that they are entitled to pity, as having been educated without the inestimable guidance of maternal tenderness, under a father afflicted with loss of sight; they were also young: at the time of Milton's last marriage his eldest daughter had only reached the age of fifteen, and Deborah, his favorite, was still a child of nine years.

His new connection seems to have afforded him what he particularly sought; that degree of domestic tranquillity and comfort essential to his perseverance in study, which appears to have been, through all the vicissitudes of fortune the prime object of his life; and while all his labours were under the direction of religion or of philanthropy, there was nothing too arduous or too humble for his mind. In 1661 he published a little work, entitled, “ Accidence commenced Grammar," benevolently calculated for the relief of children, by shortening their very tedious and irksome

progress in learning the elements of Latin. He published also, in the same year, another brief composition of Sir Walter Raleigh's, containing (like the former work of that celebrated man, which the same editor had given to the public) a series of political maxims; one of these I am tempted to transcribe, by the persuasion that Milton regarded it with peculiar pleasure, from its tendency to justify the parliamentary contention with Charles the First. Had the misguided monarch observed the maxim of Raleigh, he would not, like that illustrious victim to the vices of his royal father, have perished on the scaffold.-The maxim is the seventeenth of the collection, and gives the following instruction to a prince for preserving an hereditary kingdom.

"To be moderate in his taxes and impositions, and, when need doth require to use the subjects purse, to do it by parlia ment, and with their consent, making the eause apparent to them, and shewing his unwillingness in charging them. Finally, so to use it, that it may seem rather an offer