long after his please his wife.

marriage. Perhaps the house did not At all events, in the spring of 1665 he was living in a small house in Artillery Walk, leading into Bunhill Fields; "which," says Phillips, "was his last stage in this world." It would seem most natural, that a man who had his house furnished would of course move at once to his new residence, and transfer thither his furniture. But Richardson tells us, that shortly after his marriage he went to lodge with Millington, the famous book-auctioneer of that time, who lived in Little Britain, and that his host was used to lead him by the hand when walking in the streets. He says he had the account from a person who had often met them. May not however Millington have been only a neighbour or friend, who took pleasure in the society of such a distinguished man?

When the Plague broke out, in May, 1665, Milton X prudently resolved to quit London, and he employed his friend Ellwood, who was now engaged as tutor in the family of a wealthy Quaker, at Chalfont, in Buckinghamshire, to look out for some place for him in his neighbourhood. I took a pretty box for him," says he, "in Giles Chalfont,* a mile from me, of which I gave him notice, and intended to have waited on him, and seen him well settled in it, but was prevented by imprisonment," thing with which poor honest Ellwood was

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*Warton says, "The house. . . is still standing, small, but pleasantly situated." Dunster says, The adjacent country is indeed extremely pleasant; but the immediate spot is as little picturesque or pleasing as can well be imagined. Immediately in front of the house a grass field rises so abruptly as completely to exclude all prospect; and the common road of the village passes by the gable-end, adjoining to which is the end of a small dwelling, which runs behind that inhabited by Milton." Prospects however are very indifferent to the blind.

but too familiar, in consequence of the odious persecuting spirit which then prevailed. He however was not long detained in Aylesbury gaol, and "being now released," he proceeds, "I soon made a visit to him, to welcome him to the country. After some common discourses had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his, which being brought he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me, and read it at my leisure; and when I had so done, return it to him, with my judgement thereupon.

When I came home, and set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled Paradise Lost. After I had with the best attention read it through, I made him another visit, and returned him his book, with due acknowledgment of the favour he had done me in communicating it to me. He asked me how I liked it, and what I thought of it, which I modestly and freely told him; and after some farther discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, 'Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?' He made me no answer, but sat some time in a muse, then broke off the discourse, and fell upon another subject.

"After the sickness was over, and the city well cleansed, and become safely habitable again, he returned thither; and when, afterwards, I went to wait on him there, which I seldom failed of doing whenever my occasion led me to London,-he showed me his second poem, called Paradise Regained, and in a pleasant tone said to me, '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."

From this account we learn, among other interesting

particulars, that in 1665 the Paradise Lost was com- X pleted; and that in that year, at Chalfont, he composed, or at least may have commenced, the Paradise Regained; and from this we may infer, that his amanuenses were probably his wife and daughters.

The pestilence ceased by the end of the year, but probably Milton did not return to London till the spring of 1666. It, in fact, is not unlikely that he had taken the house at Chalfont for a year from Midsummer. We have no information as to where he was at the time of the Great Fire, which broke out in the following month of September; but Bunhill Fields were beyond its range, and so he could not have sustained any injury from its ravages. His last Latin letter, addressed to a learned German, is dated London, August 15, 1666.

Milton having now two poems ready for the press, resolved to proceed to the publication of them, commencing with the Paradise Lost, as first in magnitude and in order of time. When we recollect that nearly the whole city of London. was burnt in the end of the autumn of 1666, it may surprise us, but at the same time give us a forcible idea of the energy of the English character, to find that the agreement for the sale of this poem to Samuel Simmons is dated April 27, 1667; and our wonder would be raised still higher if the conjecture of Hayley were correct, that it had been already printed at the expense of the author. But this is not by any means a probable supposition.

It is well known that the terms on which this great poem were published were £5 in hand, the same sum on the sale of thirteen hundred copies of the first edi tion, £5 on the sale of the like number of the second edition, and another £5 after the same sale of the third;

F

no edition to exceed fifteen hundred copies. So that, on a sale of three thousand five hundred copies, the author was at the utmost only to receive £20! This really seems almost incredible. The book, no doubt, was sold at what we may regard as a very moderate price,a small quarto, neatly bound, for three shillings; but surely publishing must have been a very poor trade, or Simmons a very dishonest man, which we have no reason to suppose, when the profits on three large editions would enable him to give the author,-whose share publishers at the present day usually calculate at half profits, only the paltry sum above-mentioned. Such however is the fact.*

This great poem even ran a chance of not being allowed to appear in print. Cromwell had magnanimously adopted the suggestion made on the subject in our author's Areopagitica, and abolished the office of Licenser; but the bigotry and despotic temper of Clarendon, Sheldon, and other advisers of Charles II., had caused it to be restored by Act of Parliament in 1662 Its duties were divided among the Judges, some of the Officers of State, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Poetry came under the supervision of the last, and Sheldon's chaplain, the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, to whom the task of examining the Paradise Lost was deputed, fancied he discerned something very like treason in the simile—

* After the publication of the third edition in 1678, Mrs. Milton gave Simmons a general release, on the receipt of £8, dated April 29, 1681. Simmons transferred his right to Brabazon Aylmer for £25, who sold one half of it August 17, 1683, and the other half, March 24, 1690, to Jacob Tonson, at a great advance of price.-Todd, from Gent.'s Mag., July, 1822. We may remark, that Tonson gave Dryden £300 for his Fables, which do not contain many more verses than the Paradise Lost.

"As when the sun, new-risen,

Looks through the misty horizontal air,” etc.

However his own good sense or the opinions of others prevailed, and the imprimatur was granted.

The first edition, of fifteen hundred copies, sold fast enough to entitle the author to his second £5 at the end of two years; and when we consider the state of the times, the ill-odour which the name of the author must have been in with the greater part of the aristocracy, the clergy, and the classes in general who were the chief purchasers of books, and other circumstances, we cannot regard the sale as a bad one. We should recollect the slow sale of the poems of Wordsworth and Southey in our own days. As to the assertion of the X poem being above the age in which it appeared, we cannot regard it as correct; the knowledge of the Scrip- X tures, the classics, and the Italian poets, was probably greater at that time than it is at the present day; and this is the knowledge requisite for understanding the Paradise Lost. What seems most strange to us is, that the remaining two hundred copies should have supplied the demand for the following five years, and that Simmons should then have ventured on another impression also of fifteen hundred copies.

The only work which Milton gave to the press for X some years was his History of England, which he brought down to the Norman Invasion, and published in 1670. But he must have been at this time chiefly occupied with his great work, De Doctrina Christiana, which was not destined to see the light till after the lapse of a century and a half.

In 1671 he published Paradise Regained and Sam- X son Agonistes, in a thin octavo volume, handsomely