father had many years before loaned Powell five hundred pounds, and the interest on this sum was a part of Milton's regular income. Possibly he went down into Oxfordshire to make arrangements for the payment of the principal or to inquire why the interest had stopped. He was gone about a month, and, to use the words of his nephew, "home he returns a married man that went out a bachelor."

Mr. Powell was blessed with a family of eleven children. Mary, the eldest of the five daughters, was a little more than seventeen years old. It is a question whether Milton had ever known her before, but she was made his wife on this memorable journey, Milton's own words implying that either he himself or the young bride felt some hesitancy at such a hasty consummation; he implies that "the persuasion of friends and the argument that increasing acquaintance would amend all" had weight with one or both of them.

Some of Mrs. Milton's relatives accompanied her back to London, and the quiet, philosophic house was given over for some days to "feasting in celebration of the nuptials." When the bride was at length left alone with a husband twice her age, the loneliness and incongruity of her situation probably made her mope. Milton, who had peculiar views of the duties of woman, could not have been at all sympathetic. Indeed, it is charged that he composed his famous treatise on divorce during that most forlorn of honeymoons! Before the summer was over, she returned on a visit to her father's house, Milton consenting on condition that she should return to him before the end of September. But when the appointed time came Mrs. Milton came not. He sent letters and at last a messenger; the letters were unanswered, the messenger brought an insulting answer.

He had already published the first edition of his "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce"; after his wife's refusal to return, in the February following, he issued a second edition. He argued that incompatibility of mind or temper was equally with infidelity a full and sufficient ground for dissolution of the marriage bond, and that the parties, after divorce, were at liberty to marry again. The second edition was dedicated to Parliament and naturally, in a country where even now a man is not allowed to marry his deceased wife's sister, caused a storm of indignation. He was denounced as a heretic, attacked from the pulpit, denounced in bitter pamphlets. He replied to some of these attacks, and when the Presbyterian divines made public complaint of him, he and his writings became the subject of a special Parliamentary investigation.

Meantime Milton's father had been living with Christopher in Reading, but when Reading surrendered to the Parliamentary forces in April, 1643, Christopher, who sympathised with the Royalists and afterwards became a Roman Catholic, broke up his establishment, and the elder Milton went to live with the poet. He had other additions to his household: a number of pupils came to take advantage of his teaching, and in September, 1645, requiring enlarged quarters, he removed

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to Barbican Street, two or three minutes' walk from his former house. Here he lived two years, signalised at the very beginning by two important events. Óne was the publication of his minor poems by Moseley and the other was the return of Mrs. Milton. Two causes are assigned for this reconciliation. The Civil War was practically terminated in favour of the Parliamentarians by the battle of Naseby in June, 1645. The positions of recalcitrants was disagreeable, and it is surmised that the fact of Milton enjoying repute in the opposite and triumphant party caused his wife's family to see in him a possible relief from their troubles. Moreover, Milton had been openly on the way to carrying out his heretical doctrines: he was paying his addresses to a very handsome and witty gentlewoman, one of Dr. Davis's daughters." Rumours of this may have reached the Powells. One day Milton was calling at the house of a kinsman and "was surprised to see one whom he thought to have never seen more, making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him." Readers of "Samson," and the tenth book of the "Paradise Lost" will discover reminiscences of the dramatic scene that ensued. It ended in reconciliation. Milton magnanimously received to his house not only his recreant wife, but also her father and mother and several of their sons and daughters, the family having been completely ruined by the defeat of the Royalists. The house must have been uncomfortably crowded, for there were also about a dozen pupils under Milton's roof.

Milton's daughter Anne was born July 29, 1646; six months later his father-in-law died, and in March, 1647, his own father died. Shortly after, Milton, who perhaps no longer felt the necessity upon him of giving so much time to teaching, dismissed his pupils and took a smaller house. At the same time the Powells also removed to another part of London where Milton helped to support them. As to himself, he says:

"No one ever saw me going about, no one ever saw me asking anything among my friends, or stationed at the doors of a Court with a petitioner's face. I kept myself almost entirely at home, managing on my own resources, though in this civil tumult they were often in great part kept from me, and contriving, though burdened with taxes in the main rather oppressive, to lead my frugal life."

Little is known of his life during his residence at Lincoln's Inn Fields, High Holborn, during eighteen months. He had several projects for prose works, -a Latin Dictionary, a System of Divinity taken directly from the Bible, and a History of England. During the prosaic work of collecting materials for these enterprises, stirring events were at hand. Charles I. was executed on the thirteenth of January, 1649. Milton defended this act, and in a pamphlet composed in a little more than a week he argued that it was lawful “for any who have the power to call to account a Tyrant or Wicked King, and after due conviction, to depose and put him to death.”

This article brought its reward. The very next month Milton was

appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council, at a salary of £300 a year equivalent to about $5000 now. The duties were to prepare, and translate into Latin, all despatches to and from foreign governments. In order that he might be near the scene of his labours he removed to Spring Gardens, and was soon afterwards provided with an official residence in Whitehall Palace in Scotland Yard. Shortly after he had occupied the seven or eight rooms of these official quarters the Council voted him some of the hangings of the late king for their decoration.

Milton was soon called upon to employ his talents in the controversies raised by the execution of the king. First came the "Ikonoklastes or Image Breaker," in reply to the famous "Eikon Basilikę or Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings " -a book popularly supposed to be the work of the king himself, written during his last days, but now known to have been a forgery. It was immensely popular and went through at least fifty editions. Milton's answer to it went through only three. Then a Dutch professor, the learned Salmasius, published his defence of Charles I. and attack on the Commonwealth It was ordered by the Council of State that Milton should " prepare something in answer to the book of Salmasius." He would gladly have abstained from this task: one eye had become useless and he was in danger of becoming wholly blind. The physicians warned him to desist, but he felt that his duty called him to do the work. "The choice," he says, "lay before me of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight; in such a case I could not listen to the physician, not if Esculapius himself had spoken from his sanctuary; I could not but obey that inward monitor, I know not what, that spoke to me from heaven."

It is to be hoped that the heavenly voice did not impel him to the more than vivacious invectives with which he overwhelmed the unfortunate Salmasius. Personalities could hardly have been carried further. But the work was a great success and it was universally felt that the victory remained with Milton. Every foreigner of note then in London called to congratulate him. Five editions were almost immediately printed in Holland. Copies of the work had the honour of being burned or confiscated in various parts of Europe, and Milton's name was literally blazed through the world.

If the reward was fame, the penalty was blindness. He had recourse to physicians, but with no result. The perpetual darkness to which he was doomed was, as he says in his quaint English, rather whitish than blackish, and his eyes were not disfigured. He was not permitted to resign his situation. Assistants were appointed, but he was retained in his full title, and every day he was to be seen, led by his attendant from his new residence in Petty France across the Park to the meeting of the Council. In this case the Republic belied the proverb of gratitude, but his enemies regarded his affliction as a just punishment.

Milton wrote his sonnets to Vane and Cromwell in the spring of

1652, just at the time when these two leaders were coming to an open rupture. Cromwell expelled Vane and fifty-two other members on April 20, 1653. The Commonwealth was at an end. Henceforth till his death, September 3, 1658, Cromwell was supreme. Milton on the whole approved of the dictatorship, and was therefore continued in the Latin secretaryship. His State letters are remarkable examples of clear, lucid style; one of them that in remonstrance on the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants by the Duke of Savoy- has a splendid corollary in his greatest sonnet beginning "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints."

In 1654 Milton's wife died, leaving three daughters, the eldest about eight, the youngest an infant. The widowed poet in November, 1658, married Katherine Woodcock, but neither she nor her infant daughter long survived. Milton's sonnet to his late deceased wife implies that he had never seen her with his visual eyes. The same year that this was written he began the composition of Paradise Lost" projected in dramatic form nearly thirty years before.

During the twenty-one months of Richard Cromwell's inefficient dictatorship Milton was still at his post and receiving his diminished salary of £200 a year. But the majority of the people had declared in favor of the Stuarts. In spite of all Milton's arguments monarchy was to be again the established order. Charles made his re-entry toward the last of May, 1660. Milton was already in hiding in Bartholomew Close, Smithfield. For some time he was actually in danger, but while no severity was spared in apprehending and executing the regicides, Milton's case, by dexterous management in Parliament, was left in abeyance and finally ignored. After the twenty-ninth of August he was legally a free man. Nevertheless by some mistake or by malice he was arrested shortly after and kept for a little time in custody. Toward the middle of December he was ordered to be released on payment of fees of £150. These being considered exorbitant were reduced, and Milton found.a temporary refuge on the north side of Holborn till he secured another house in Jewin Street near one of his earlier habitations. Here he lived till 1664. Life must have been gloomy enough to the blind man : the work of twenty years seemingly thrown away, his friends dead or in exile, his property reduced, domestic trials gathering about him.

The relations between Milton and his three daughters are not the least pathetic among the tribulations of his last days, but it seems as it. he himself were mainly to blame. His views of the education of women were peculiar; his oldest daughter, who was ptty though slightly deformed, could not even write her own name; the others were taught to read to their father in foreign languages, but it was only mechanically, repeating words without knowing the sense. They combined with the serving maid to cheat him in the marketing; they sold his books, and they made his life miserable. At last he was advised to marry again. He offered himself to Elizabeth Minshull, a young lady

of twenty-four. The marriage took place February 24, 1662-3. His second daughter, Mary, is reported upon oath to have said that it was no news to hear of his wedding, but if she could hear of his death that was something. His third wife proved to be a blessing to him as long as he lived. She was pretty and had golden hair; she sang to his accompaniments on the organ or bass viol, and was sufficiently alive to his intellectual requirements as to like to talk with him about Hobbes and other learned men. Not long after their marriage they went to live in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. This was his last residence, and considerable is known about the details of his domestic economy there. He had a man servant named Greene, who, it is said, was able to read aloud to him from the Hebrew Bible. His chief recreations were walking in his garden, swinging in a chair, and making music. Andrew Marvell, Cyriack Skinner, and other distinguished men used often to visit him. He is reported as having been "extremely pleasant in conversation. though satirical.”

"Paradise Lost" was completed by 1663 and revised during the summer of 1665, while, in order to escape from the plague that was then devastating London, he went with his wife and his three daughters to Chalfont St. Giles in Buckinghamshire. His friend Elwood, the Quaker, lived near there, and to him Milton loaned a copy of the great poem. The Quaker approved of it, but suggested that he had said much of Paradise Lost but nothing of Paradise Found. This sug

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gestion resulted in the shorter epic. The next year · that of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis — the great fire still further abridged his fortunes by destroying the house in which he had been born and which he still owned. A few years later his comfort and that of his household was increased by the departure of his daughters, who were sent out to learn embroidery for their own support.

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After the publication of his great epic visitors were frequent, and we have several descriptions of his appearance, both as he sat out of doors on his porch and as he was indoors, in a room hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow chair, black clothes and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk stones"; his habits at table were abstemious, but his later days were troubled by gout. His last poem was the perfect Greek tragedy "Samson Agonistes," which has an interesting autobiographic import. This was written in 1671. Three years later "the gout struck in," and he died on November 8, 1674, and was buried beside his father in the Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. All his learned and great friends in London, and a "friendly concourse of the vulgar," attended the funeral. Milton had intended to cut off his "unkind" and "undutiful" children with only that portion of his estate that was due it from the Powells, but they contested the nuncupative will and received as their share of their father's estate about 100 each, while the widow was left with a pittance of £600. She retired to her native Cheshire, and died in 1727, having survived her husband nearly fifty-three years. Among