ceived from his mother so many other tokens of likeness, she probably gave him her weak eyes also; and it is with so little foundation in truth, that his biographers would make a personal merit of an hereditary disease.

Aubrey makes a query, 'when he became stark blind;' and the question still remains to be mooted. The common account is, that the left eye was gone in 1651; and that the right followed in 1654. But he is taunted with blindness in the answer of Salmasius, which must have been written in 1653: a letter from the Hague, dated in June, the same year, already calls him un aveugle nommé Milton;'* and, in his Epistle to Philaras, which is dated Sept. 28, 1654, he does not seem to speak of the calamity as of recent occurrence. His biographers tell us, that he became blind two or three years before he took his second wife; and that she died in childbed within a year after the marriage.f Her burial, according to Bishop Kennet, took place on the 10th of February, 1657. He must have been married, therefore, early in 1656; and three years from that, will leave us 1653.

He was blind, at any rate, when he wrote his Defensio Secunda; which appeared in 1654, as an answer to a publication of Peter Du Moulin, called Regië Sanguinis Clamor ad Cælum adversus Parricidas Anglicanas. The publication of the latter was committed to Alexander More, of Holland, whom Milton, at first, seems to have considered as the author; and, though apprised of the mistake before his answer was printed, he had played too many jokes on the word Morus, to think of altering the address. Well,” said he, that was all one; he having writt it, (the Def. Sec.) it should goe into the world; one of them was as bad as the other."* Were such puns as these, for instance, to be given up? “Morus es? an Momus? an uturque idem est ?' Morus is the Latin for the mulberry :-therefore,

-Poma alba ferebat
Quæ post nigra tulit Morus.

Pontia was a maid of More's friend, Salmasius:--

Galli ex concubitu gravidam te, Pontia, Mori,
Quis bene moratam, morigeramque neget?

a

More replied with the Fides Publica; in which he disavowed the authorship of the Clamor, and produced a string of testimonies to his personal character. Milton rejoined in a Defensio pro Se. More returned a Supplementum; and Milton finished the altercation with a brief Responsio. It was in the same year, 1655, that, as Latin secretary to Cromwell, he is supposed to have written the Reasons for a war with Spain. His agency,' says Dr. Johnson,

was considered as of great importance; for, when a treaty with Sweden was artfully suspended, the delay was publicly imputed to Mr. Milton's indisposition; and the Swedish agent was provoked to express his wonder, “that only one man in England could write Latin, and that man blind.'

We know not upon what authority this anecdote is related; and, even if it be true, we are at a loss to see how it proves Milton's agency to have been

considered as of great importance. The same men, who could artfully suspend' a treaty, would not lack art to justify the suspension by a public false. hood. That Milton was considered as a person of little consequence in the administration, is abundantly evident, not only from his own testimony, but from that of his biographers and cotemporary historians. A young friend had solicited his intercession for the secretaryship in the embassy to Holland. 'I am grieved,' answered Milton, Dec. 18, 1657, that it is not in my power to serve you in this point, inasmuch as I have very few familiarities with the gratiosi of the court, who keep myself almost wholly at home, and am willing to do so. “He does not appear,' says one of his earliest biographers,

to have been in the confidence of Cromwell during the whole government, there being no trace of his activity in all the vast collection of Secretary Thurloe's papers.'* Again, even during the prevalence of Milton's party,' says Hume, he seems never to have been much regarded; and Whitlocke talks of one Milton, as he calls him, a blind man, who was employed in translating a treaty with Sweden into Latin.'t The expression of Whitlocke is the more remarkable, because his history is professedly confined to an account of what passed from the begin. ning of the reign of Charles I. to the restoration of Charles II.' But the restored king himself, in the proclamation against Milton's books, calls the author an 'obscure' personage;t and it is somewhat singular, that, in a work of so much detail as the Crom

a

• Tol. p. 97, note. | Tol. p. 113, note.

+ Hist. Eng. ch. Ixii. sub fin.

welliana, the name of Milton should not once occur. Indeed, it was chiefly by strangers that he was caressed and visited;* and we are told, upon what seems to be good authority, that he was allowed a weekly table for the entertainment of foreign ministers, and persons of learning.'t

The latter fact will, in part, enable us to account for the inconsistency of Milton, in continuing to act as Latin secretary to the new government, after Cromwell had swerved from all his republican principles, and become a despot under the name of protector. Having now tasted the honey of public employment,' says Dr. Johnson, he would not return to hunger and philosophy; but, continuing to exercise his office under a manifest usurpation, betrayed to Cromwell's power the liberty which he had defended.' Mr. Godwin, on the contrary, cannot bear to think, that the author of Paradise Lost-which book is his standing topic of argument, should ever have acted from so mean a motive; and we are accordingly told, that Milton only submitted to the load of despotism for the good of his country,—magnanimously repressing his own indignation at present abuses, and patiently expecting the advent of better times. Officially,' too, says the apologist, he had no concern but with the foreign politics of Cromwell; and his foreign politics he for the most part approved.' This wretched shift is followed with an allusion to the 'noble and courageous advice' which was given to Cromwell in the Defensio Secunda. Mr. Godwin is willing to forget, that, for one line of courageous advice,' there were two of servile flattery;ll and that he has himself recorded, in another place, the very month and year in which Milton crowned his humiliation by presenting Cromwell with a copy of his book.* Hè must have been less acquainted with the protector, than his opportunities of observation will suffer us to admit, if he did not know, that Cromwell would probably swallow all the flattery, and give his admonitions to the wind. Milton's present employment was attended with considerable nity. He had a fixed salary; and was enabled to entertain all his visiters at the public expense. The office of schoolmaster was comparatively mean: the gains were more precarious: there could be no such thing as keeping a weekly table for the reception of foreign ministers, and persons of learning;' and the difference between the two stations was, perhaps, considered as cheaply purchased by the sacrifice of a little political consistency:

The servility of bowing to power, when once reconciled to a man's better feelings, will easily slide into a habit; and the restoration of the old republican parliament gave Milton another opportunity to display his skill at flattering the strongest party. Cromwell died in September, 1658. His son Richard immediately took his place; and parliament was ordered to meet in January, 1659. Milton prepared, against the sitting,' says Mr. Godwin, a Treatise of Civil Powers in Ecclesiastical Causes ; showing, if we may believe the title page, that it is not lawful for any power on earth to compel in matters of religion. But, in May, 1659, Richard came down; and the long parliament resumed its functions.

* This event,' says Mr. Godwin was a source

Johnson compares Cromwell to Cæsar; who, says he, 'when he assumed the perpetual dictatorship, had not more servile or more elegant flattery. If Cromwell had known, as well as Cæsar, how to relish the elegance of classical latinity, the comparison would not have been so inept.

Gody, Phh. p. 27. May, 1654.