write his Eikonoclastes, in answer to the famous "Eikon Basilike," the supposed literary relic of Charles I. But the most important of these polemical writings which Milton's position as a literary servant of the government of the Commonwealth induced him to undertake, was the celebrated Defensio pro populo Anglicano, published in 1651, in reply to the Latin Defence of Charles I., put forth by the Frenchman, Claude de Saumaise, who, under his Latinized name of Salmasius, was then one of the most renowned scholars of Europe. Milton appears to have thrown his whole strength into this production, which was regarded as a triumphant demolition of his antagonist, and procured him applauses and encomiums from all quarters.

On his appointment to the Secretaryship, Milton, who seems now to have given up his pupils, had removed from Holborn to apartments in Scotland Yard. It was while residing here, in the year 1652, that he was visited by the crowning calamity of his life, his blindness. His sight had been gradually failing for ten years; and at last it completely gave way under the serious labours in which he involved himself when preparing his great work against Salmasius. His own description of the manner in which the blindness came on is worth quoting:

"On the left side of my left eye (which began to fail some years before the other,) a darkness arose that hid from me all things on that side: if I chanced to close my right eye, whatever was before me seemed diminished. In the last three years, as my remaining eye failed gradually some months before my sight was utterly gone, all things that I could discern, though I moved not myself, appeared to fluctuate, now to the right, now to the left. Obstinate vapours seemed to have settled all over my forehead and temples, overwhelming my eyes with a sort of sleepy heaviness, especially after food, till the evening; so that I frequently recollect the condition of the prophet Phineus in the Argonautics :

Him vapours dark

Enveloped, and the earth appeared to roll
Beneath him, sinking in a lifeless trance.

But I should not omit to say that, while I had some little sight remaining, as soon as I went to bed I reclined on either side, a copious light used to dart out from my closed eyes ;-then, as my sight grew daily less, darker colours seemed to burst forth with vehemence and a kind of internal noise; but now, as if everything lucid were extinguished, blackness, either absolute, or chequered and interwoven as it were with ash-colour, is accustomed to pour itself on my eyes; yet the darkness perpetually before them, as well during the night as in the day, seems always approaching rather to white than to black, admitting, as the eye rolls, a minute portion of light, as through a crevice."-Letter to Philaras of Athens, Sept. 28, 1654.

Even when totally blind, Milton continued to hold his office as Latin Secretary; latterly, however, a colleague was appointed, who did most of the work, and received about half of the salary. For the sake of his health Milton, one of whose peculiarities it seems to have been never to be satisfied with the house he lived in, removed to a house in Petty France, Westminster, opening into St. James's Park. Here he remained for about eight years, or till the Restoration of Charles II. compelled him to seek a less public place of residence. These eight years produced not a few changes in his household. In 1652 his wife died, leaving him, a widower and blind at the age of forty-four, with three infant daughters, the oldest of whom was not more than six years old. In 1656 he married a second wife, who did not survive the marriage, however, more than a year. Her death was probably a misfortune to the poor children of the former wife, who, left thereafter to the care of their blind and austere father, seem to have grown up in a kind of horror of him, increased rather than diminished by the efforts he appears to have made from time to time to impart to them some portions of his linguistic learning. As they were not old enough yet to act as his amanuenses, the various works written by him at this period must have been dictated either to his nephew Philips, or to some other of his grown-up pupils. Among these works were several in continuation of his answer to Salmasius-such as the Defensio secunda pro Populo Anglicano, published in 1654, as a reply to a work written by Peter du Moulin, but advertised under the name of Alexander More; and the Defensio pro se called forth by More's rejoinder. These, however, were but incidental exercises of his pen; and the greater part of his time after the year 1654 appears to have been devoted to several great literary projects which he had resolved upon as appropriate work for his now advancing years and disabled condition-such as the composition of a large History of England, the compilation of an Elaborate Thesaurus or Dictionary of the Latin language, and the preparation of a Body of Systematic Divinity out of the Bible.

Once more the retired man of letters tried to make his voice heard amid the concerns of a world shut out for evermore from his bodily view. It was during that brief period after the death of Cromwell, the man after Milton's own heart, when the nation, torn by all manner of new distractions, saw no hope of rest but in the restoration of the monarchy of the Stuarts, with all its miserable chances. Grieved, alarmed, and indignant, the blind Republican did all he could to avert the catastrophe and arouse his countrymen to a better faith and a more enduring courage. In a treatise Of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, and in an

other On the Means of removing Hirelings out of the Church, both published in 1659, he endeavoured to maintain the waning spirit of political reform, and to direct it on to new triumphs which would secure, as he thought, the dear-bought liberties of the nation; and finally, in A Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth, a tract entitled, A Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, and a short criticism on a Royalist sermon preached in March 1660, he addressed himself directly to the question of a continuation of the Commonwealth as against the recall of the Stuarts. All in vain. "No blind guides" was the only answer his appeals elicited; Charles II. sat upon the throne of his fathers; and Milton, hardly escaping the death awarded to so many others for the part they had acted under the Parliament and the Protectorate, sought a refuge in silence and privacy.

Milton survived the Restoration fourteen years, residing first in a house he had taken in Holborn; next in Jewin Street, Aldersgate; then as a lodger in the house of Millington, a wellknown auctioneer of books; and last of all in Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields. During four years of this period he remained unmarried; but in 1664, or when he was in his fiftysixth year, he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshul, daughter of a Cheshire baronet. She appears to have been a rather elderly person, who had been recommended by one of his friends as a fit housekeeper for him in his old age; and the evidence seems to say that he would not have married again at all but for the undutiful conduct of his daughters. The three girlsthe eldest of whom, Anne, was now about eighteen years of age, the second, Mary, about sixteen, and the youngest, Deborah, about fourteen-used "to combine together," it is said, "and counsel his maid-servant to cheat him in his marketings;" they used also to pawn and sell his books; and on one occasion, shortly before his third marriage, when the maid-servant told the second daughter, Mary, that she heard her father was to take another wife," the said Mary replied to the said maidservant, that it was no news to hear of his wedding, but if she could hear of his death, that would be something.' With the exception of the youngest, Deborah, the daughters appear scarcely to have lived with their father after his third marriage. The eldest, Anne, who was somewhat deformed, set up in business as a gold and silver lace maker, and afterwards married a master-builder; and her sister Mary seems to have gone with her. So long as they lived with him, all the three daughters appear to have acted as his amanuenses; after his marriage, however, this species of work devolved sometimes on the wife, sometimes on the daughter Deborah, until she also escaped by

marriage with a weaver in Spitalfields, and sometimes on any stray boy that could be induced by love or money to lend his services to the imperious old man. It was in this way that he composed and made ready for publication the numerous writings which formed his sole occupation and delight during the fourteen years that intervened between his retirement into private life in 1660, and his death in 1674. Of these the following were in prose-Accidence, or Commenced Grammar of the Latin tongue, published in 1661; a History of Britain to the Norman Conquest, first published in 1670, as a contribution to the larger work he found himself unable to complete; a tract published in 1673, and entitled, Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what best means may be used against the growth of Popery; a Latin treatise on logic, published about the same time, and entitled, Artis Logica plenior Institutio ad Petri Rami methodum concinnata; a collection of his Familiar Latin Epistles, published with a few other academic trifles, in the last year of his life; a Brief History of Muscovy and the Countries beyond Russia, left by him in manuscript, and not published till 1682; his materials for a Thesaurus of the Latin Authors, also left in manuscript for the use of subsequent lexicographers; and, finally, the celebrated Miltonian system of theology, or Latin Treatise on Christian Doctrine, the manuscript of which, after having been lost for a century and a half, was accidentally discovered in the Statepaper office, and edited in English by the present Archbishop of Canterbury in 1825. Laborious as these latest prose writings of Milton were, however, they were but the severer amusements of a mind which had at last, after so many years, returned to its first and most enduring love. Never, amid all the turmoil and harsh controversial warfare of his middle life, had Milton forgotten his early promise, from the performance of which he had but requested the indulgence of a few years less congenially spent; and when at last, after not a few but many years so spent, time and sore chance threw him aside from worldly ties, and assigned to him a career of aged loneliness, with death as its welcome close, then the old aspiration came back, and with it the ease of a readier choice and the faculty of a more seer-like song. The Paradise Lost, the Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes were given in succession to the world. And so, if when the time came for him to die, and to exchange the earthly vacancy in which his eyes had so long rolled, for the visible splendours and illuminations of the world he had preconceived, he then left not behind him a heritage of that kind in which most men place their boast-weeping friends, dutiful and well circumstanced children, and the fructifying deeds of a prosperous civil life; if, instead of all this, he saw from his dying pillow children scat

tered, rebellious, and mechanically natched, (doubtless in part his own blame,) a wife greedy for his remnant of household goods, and a State which had rejected and cast out all his counsels; yet this he could even at that last moment be sure of, that his life had not been spent in vain, and that whenever the men of future ages should look back to the times foregone, they would pronounce, and pronounce truly, that the soul then ebbing away had been the soul of one of the noblest of God's Englishmen.

Some particulars of interest are recorded of Milton, as he was seen and conversed with in his later years. Even in old age he preserved his comeliness, so as to seem much younger than he was. His eyes never betrayed their loss of sight by any outward speck or blemish, but remained clear and perfect, so that it was only by observing them closely that one could perceive that he was blind. "An aged clergyman of Dorsetshire," says the novelist Richardson, "found John Milton (in his house in Artillery Walk) in a small chamber, hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow-chair, and dressed neatly in black, pale, but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalkstones. He used also to sit in a grey coarse cloth coat, at the door of his house near Bunhill-fields in warm weather, to enjoy the fresh air, and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts as well as quality." He had some intimate friends who came to see him almost daily, chiefly bookish men of the graver sects, whose opinions agreed with his own. After his blindness and other infirmities prevented him from walking much about, he had a machine made to swing in for the sake of exercise. He used to rise about four or five o'clock; dictate or have books read to him all morning; spend part of the afternoon in playing on the organ or bass-viol, sometimes singing, and sometimes making his wife sing, who, he said, had a good voice but no ear; then study again for an hour or two; then have a few friends about him till supper time, when, after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water, he went to bed. One curious little glimpse of his household habits is obtained from the deposition of the witnesses who were examined before the Prerogative Court after his death, on the matter of a nuncupative or unwritten will, which he was alleged to have made. By this will, his widow maintained he had left all his property to her, with the exception of the £1000 still due to him out of the estate of his first wife's father-which £1000, and nothing more, he left to his three daughters by that wife, "they having been very undutiful to him," and he "having already spent the greater part of his estate in providing for them." The daughters, however, contested the will, and gained the suit. One of the witnesses was a maid-servant, Elizabeth Fisher, who deposed thus: