accepted without hesitation. By so doing he put off once more, this time it might seem for ever, the possibility of fulfilling his secret purpose. He had not served in the armies of Parliament; indeed, when the King's forces had advanced to Brentford and thrown London into a panic, he had not even gone out with the train-bands to Turnham Green to join in repulsing the foe, but had stayed at home instead and written a sonnet to Prince Rupert's troopers, beseeching them, in the name of the Muses, to spare his house from rapine. But if he had not chosen to shoulder a musket he had shown himself able to do yeoman's service with his quill. It may well have been with the thought of making good his failure to take up the sword in the time of his country's need, that he now laid at her feet the most eloquent pen in Europe.

His first important service was a reply to the Eikon Basilike, a book purporting to have been written by the late King while in imprisonment, and now seized upon with devotion by the partisans of the exiled family. Against this "Royal Image" Milton wrote Ikonoklastes, the "Image-breaker." It is a work which reflects little credit upon the author. He imputes to the dead king, as one of his crimes, a taste for Shakespeare, and makes it a prime argument of his hypocrisy that one of the prayers which he was believed to have used in his captivity was taken from a passage a very beautiful and devout passage of Sidney's Arcadia. One of the curiosities of Milton's complex character was, as Lowell has reminded us, his power to force his conviction into the service of his enthusiasm. When it was necessary for him to defend his use of blank verse in Paradise Lost he repudiated the value of rhyme in toto, though his own works were there to gainsay him; his own marriage having proved unfortunate, he was for wiping the whole institution out of existence. In the same spirit of false but absolutely sincere generalization, he turns here upon his beloved Shakespeare and honored Sidney, because he finds them made use of by a man whose memory he execrates.

Following upon these pamphlets came Milton's great opportunity for a European hearing in vindication of the Commonwealth, and he embraced it at a frightful price. Charles II., an exile at the Hague, had cast about for some man learned enough to support the cause of his house against the revolutionists. He found such a one in Salmasius, a world-famous scholar and a mighty man of Latin. Nobody to-day would dream of employing for such a task the services of a mere scholar, however colossal, but the seventeenth-century reverence for the pedantry of learning gave the name of Salmasius a portentous weight. On the appearance of his book, the Defensio Regia, Milton was instructed to prepare a rejoinder. He gave himself to the task with an ardor doubly inflamed by the magnitude of the quarrel and the reputation of his antagonist. He called his reply a Defense of the English People, but as we look at it to-day the great issues seem buried almost irrecoverably beneath a mass of very unheroic personalities. Milton sneers at Salmasius's Latinity, twits him with subjection to his wife, and exhausts the vocabulary of thieves' Latin trying to find a name of contumely adequate to character his baseness. In the midst of this work Milton's eyes showed signs of failing, and he was

warned by his physician that to persevere to the end would mean certain blindness. With stoical devotion, as splendid as it was perverted, he decided to pay the price. We groan when we think of the real insignificance of the object for which the light of those eyes was spent - spent recklessly, with a kind of frenzy of waste which shows what funds of fanaticism lay beneath the placid surface of his nature.

In the quarrel which dragged on for several years more with Morus, to whom Salmasius's cause had descended, the tone of petty personality gained steadily over the real question at issue, though at the same time the frankly autobiographic passages of Milton grow nobly dignified, and his eulogies upon the leading men. of the Commonwealth, taken together, form an august vindication of their cause. It would be unprofitable to dwell upon the disagreeable aspects of the Salmasius controversy, were it not that they illustrate forcibly certain elements of the poet's nature which tradition has obscured, yet which are essential to even a primary understanding of him. Wordsworth condensed into a single line the popular misapprehension. So far from being a soul which dwelt like a star apart, Milton was one of the most inflammable, mobile, and social of beings. A slight stung him, an honor lifted him, a sneer maddened and blinded him. For poetry, indeed, he kept the clear ichor of his temperament, free from roil; and it is as a poet that he is remembered; but one who looks discerningly can detect in the very splendor and volume of that utterance the stress of a humanity more than ordinarily obvious to passion.

By 1652 Milton's blindness had become complete. He had meanwhile removed from rooms in Whitehall, assigned him during the first years of his incumbency of the Secretaryship, to a house in Petty France, pleasantly situated near St. James Park, across which he had to be led when his presence was needed at the Council. His duties were gradually lightened, the routine work being given to an assistant. Edward Phillips was still with him, to serve as amanuensis, and acquaintance with the young poet Andrew Marvell, afterwards his assistant in the Secretaryship, brought him another hand to lighten the burden of his blindness. We get from Edward Phillips and others many pleasant glimpses of the life which he now led, visited by distinguished strangers anxious for a sight of the victor in the Salmasius quarrel," of which all Europe rang from side to side." Hints of more intimate converse we get in the sonnets to Cyriack Skinner and to young Lawrence, poetical invitations to supper and a cosy evening by the fireside, which assure us by their tone of sober gaiety how well Milton bore his misfortune. The geniality of the lines reminds us of Phillips's bit of gossip concerning the young "beaux" with whom his uncle, after his return from Italy, was accustomed to keep an occasional "gaudy-day." But that life in the little house was not all made up of amenities we can conjecture from the characters of the three young girls who had been left motherless there. During these untended years rebellion against their stern father was growing towards its sickening outcome. In 1656 their father married again, this time Katharine Woodcock, of whom nothing is known but what can be gleaned from the sonnet which he wrote upon her death, little more than a year later. To

judge from the deep marital tenderness of these lines upon his late espoused saint," hers must have been the most gracious influence in the poet's adult life.

Up to the close of Cromwell's reign Milton continued, as a kind of Latin Secretary extraordinary, to indite those messages to foreign powers which made the period of the Protectorate the most dignified in the diplomatic history of England. The most famous of these was among the last, a letter to the Duke of Savoy concerning the Piedmontese massacre; in its official way it is as impressive as the sonnet on the same subject in which Milton gave vent to his individual horror and indignation. His duties were nominally continued under Cromwell's son Richard; but events were hastening with irresistible force toward the downfall of the Protectorate and the recall of the King. Milton was one of the last to succumb to the logic of the situation. His attitude toward the great questions of Church and State had changed many times in the twenty years that were passed. He had begun as an Episcopalian with reservations; he had written his first pamphlets in advocacy of a modified Presbyterianism; next he had gone over to the "Root and Branch" party, and advocated complete disestablishment of the Church; then, turning fiercely upon the Presbyterians, and declaring that "New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large," he had joined the Independents, and had finally pushed the thesis of this party to the length of complete toleration of religious opinion. But in all these changes, except the last, he had gone with the country. His mind, as Lowell says, had not so much changed as expanded to meet new national conditions. Though he had differed stoutly from Cromwell in his later policy, he had remained unshaken in his allegiance to the idea of popular government, even in the unpropitious form of a military dictatorship. Dismissed from his office by General Monk in April, 1659, on the very eve of the return of the exiled court, he published his pamphlet entitled A Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. The very phrase was full of unconscious satire. Upon the blind poet, as he sat meditating through those days of public rejoicing, there rested a second blindness, that of the idealist resolute to see nothing but his ideal.

The King's return, however, at last became so imminent that the stoutest idealism had to succumb. Nobody knew how inclusive the royal clemency would prove to be, and Milton was too marked a man to abide the event with safety. The last glimpse we get of him for the next four months is in the shape of a conveyance of bond for four hundred pounds, to Cyriack Skinner, dated the day before the public proclamation of Charles in London. With the ready money thus furnished he went into hiding, Phillips informs us, at a friend's house in Bartholomew Close. On June 16 an order for his arrest was issued by the House of Commons, and two months later his Eikonoklastes and Defense of the English People were ordered burnt by royal proclamation. Strangely enough, however, in the final Bill of Indemnity his name is not mentioned. Why the author of the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates should have been let off scot free from the vengeance which overtook so many men essentially less implicated, constitutes a historical puzzle which Professor Masson has labored in vain to solve. Andrew Marvell afterwards obtained

from the House an abatement of the excessive fee demanded from Milton by an officious sergeant who had carried out the nullified order of arrest, and his voice was doubtless raised now in behalf of his friend and master. There is also a pleasant tradition that the poet Davenant repaid an old kindness by a like intercession. To whomever the clemency was due, however, Milton was left free by the passage of the Act of Oblivion to emerge from hiding. He was not yet perhaps wholly free from danger by mob violence. On the night before the anniversary of Charles I.'s death, the disinterred corpses of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were brought for safe keeping to the Red Lion Inn, only a short distance from Milton's new lodgings in Holborn; and it was up Holborn that the crazy mob followed the carts next day to the ghastly gibbeting at Tyburn.

But to Milton's ears, in these days, the rioting of the "sons of Belial" who had come back to flout with insolence and outrage every ideal for which the men of the Commonwealth had given their lives, must have sounded dim and far away. The time had come for him to fulfil the boyish boast made more than twenty years before, when he had replied to his friend's question, "Of what am I thinking? In God's name, of immortality! I am pluming my wings for a flight." Though held under by an immense sustained effort of will, the ambition conceived so long ago had never for long been absent from his mind. Added to the sense of his mission as a singer, sent by the great Task-master to add to the sum of beauty in the world, there rested upon him now another obligation, no less impelling. The Puritan moral scheme, the new social instauration, which had failed on earth, he must carry over into the world of imaginative permanence. He must justify to men the ways of that God who had dealt so darkly with his chosen people. Already, though "long choosing and beginning late," he had carved out from the hollow dark the vast traits of his theme.

VI

FROM THE ACT OF OBLIVION TO THE COMPLETION OF PARADISE LOST,

1660-1665

For a man of Milton's temper the state of public affairs alone would have been a sufficient bitterness; but private trials added their simples to the cup. One of the minor but most satiric of these was furnished by the two nephews upon whom he had lavished his time and his educational theories. How well the youngest, John Phillips, had imbibed his uncle's teachings, he had shown long ago by publishing a Satire Against Hypocrites and a Miscellany of Choice Drolleries, which earned him a sharp reprimand from Cromwell's Council. His graver brother Edward followed the primrose path thus gallantly marked out, by publishing a volume entitled The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, or the Arts of Wooing and Complimenting, with a preface to the youthful gentry of England. The royalism of both was pronounced; and although Edward continued to visit the house on

terms of friendship, his presence must have been to his uncle a pretty emphatic reminder of the collapse of his own teaching.

If the defection of his nephews was satiric, the rebellion of his daughters was sordidly tragic. The eldest, Anne, a handsome girl in spite of her lameness, was now seventeen; Mary, the second, was fifteen, and Deborah eleven. They had received only the rudiments of an education, the eldest not even being able to write. In spite of this their father undertook to make them do him a service in his literary labors which they would hardly have been prepared for by a formal college training. Edward Phillips says that he used them to "supply his want of eyesight by their ears and tongues. For though he had daily about him one or other to read to him, some, persons of man's estate, who of their own accord greedily catched at the opportunity of being his readers, others, of younger years, sent by their parents to the same end, yet, excusing only the eldest by reason of her bodily deformity and difficult utterance of speech (which, to say truth, I doubt was the principal cause of excusing her), the other two were condemned to the performance of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse: viz. the Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, Spanish, and French." That young girls could have been trained to read intelligibly languages of which they did not, as Phillips declares, understand a word, is almost beyond belief; but whether literally true or not, the statement implies a sternness and a length of discipline gruesome to imagine. Rebellion on their part was natural and inevitable, but before the miserable details of their growing aversion to their father, - their conspiring with the servants in petty pilferings from his purse, their making away with his books, the remark of one of them, on hearing of her father's third marriage, that "that was no news, but, if she could hear of his death, that was something," - the mind turns sick, and wonders whether, if there were another Paradise Lost to purchase, it would be worth such a price. Taking the facts as we have them, even casuistry can make of them no clean bill of conscience for the father. The girls were, it is true, the fruit of an unloving marriage; their recalcitrancy Milton may have looked upon as a part of the grim logic of that forced "union of minds that cannot unite," and he may have found justification for his tyranny in the bitter memories of the days when he was pouring out his wrath and anguish in the tracts on divorce. The radical meanness of nature which betrays itself in their petty revenges may have served to wither affection in the bud. But such considerations explain, without extenuating, his attitude. His daughters remain the great blot upon his memory; they cannot make it less than august, but they suffice to render it, from the standpoint of the simple human charities, forbidding. They remained with him for eight years longer, when they were put out to learn feminine handicrafts. A glimpse which we get of the youngest, Deborah, many years after, gives a comforting assurance that, however she may have failed in filial duty during her father's lifetime, she cherished a sincere affection for his memory. In 1721 she was sought out by Addison and others in the weavers' district of Spital