Thus it was that French example set our writers prosing about rhyme, and this dignified style replaced the verse of Shakespeare, which had sunk so low in polite estimation. Yet in these days Milton, never to be understood by France, was attuning his divine song to the measure which was not held, even by the chief advocate for its use in tragedy, to be dignified enough for " a paper of verses." For Milton was

Unchanged

"To hoarse or mute, though faller on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when morn
Purples the east: still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few."

8. John Milton (ch. viii. § 30, 51–55, 60, 62, 63, 65, 69; ch. ix. § 2—8, 25) at the Restoration withdrew from danger to a friend's house in Bartholomew Close, while his prosecution was voted by the Commons, and his "Iconoclastes" and "Defence of the People of England" were ordered to be burnt by the hangman. His friend, Andrew Marvell, was member for Hull; but Anthony à Wood says that Davenant now returned an old obligation (ch. ix. § 23), and saved Milton from being placed among the exceptions to the Act of Oblivion passed on the 29th of August. Milton was nevertheless arrested, but his release was ordered by the House of Commons on the 15th of December, and he appealed against the excessive fees charged for his imprisonment. For about a year he lived in Holborn, near Red Lion Square. In 1662 he was in Jewin Street, whence he removed to a small house in Artillery Walk, by Bunhill Fields, his home for the rest of his life. Robert Boyle's sister, Lady Ranelagh (ch. viii. § 64; ch. ix. § 18), was a kind and active friend, but his daughters were growing up in the home of a blind father without a mother's care, and he, too, needed domestic aid and comfort. In Jewin Street, by the advice of Dr. Paget, his physician, Milton again married. He was then fifty-four years old, and his third wife was a distant relation of the doctor's-Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Edward Minshull, of Cheshire. Her age must have been little more than twenty. She devoted herself to her husband; but the addition of a young wife into the household did not benefit the daughters. In 1662, Milton's eldest daughter, Anne, was sixteen; his second daughter, Mary, was fifteen ; and Deborah, his youngest, ten. Milton's home life was

TO A.D. 1665.]

noon.

simple. He rose at four in summer, five in winter, heard a chapter of the Hebrew Bible, and was left till seven in meditation. After breakfast he listened to reading and dictated till From twelve to one he walked, or took exercise in a swing. At one he dined; then until six he was occupied with music, books, and composition. From six to eight he gave to social chat with friends who came to visit him. His youngest daughter, Deborah, said of Milton, many years after his death, "that he was delightful company; the life of the conversation, not only on account of his flow of subject, but of his unaffected cheerfulness and civility." At eight Milton supped, then smoked a pipe, and went to bed at nine.

One of those who read to him was a young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood. The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood Written by his Own Hand, is a most interesting record of the persecution suffered by the Quakers (ch. ix. § 16) in the reign of Charles II. His troubles had been chiefly at home in Oxfordshire, when his desire to improve himself in knowledge urged on his friend, Isaac Pennington, of Chalfont, caused Ellwood to come to London. His "friend had an intimate acquaintance with Dr. Paget, a physician of note in London, and he with John Milton, a gentleman of great note for learning throughout the learned world, for the accurate pieces he had written on various subjects and occasions. This person having filled a public station in the former times, lived now a private and retired life in London, and having wholly lost his sight, kept always a man to read to him, which usually was the son of some gentleman of his acquaintance, whom, in kindness, he took to improve in his learning." Ellwood, when twenty-three years old, obtained in 1662, through Dr. Paget, the liberty of coming to Milton's, house "when I would, and to read to him what books he should appoint me, which was all the favour I desired." Ellwood tells of his courteous reception; of Milton's teaching him the foreign pronunciation of Latin; and how Milton, " perceiving with what earnest desire I pursued learning, gave me not only all the encouragement but all the help he could. For, having a curious ear, he understood by my tone when I understood what I read, and when I did not; and accordingly would stop me, examine me, and open the most difficult passages."

9. In 1665, London was desolated by the plague, and most people who were able to escape from it into the country did so. Young Thomas Ellwood, at Milton's request, took a small house

for him in Chalfont St. Giles. When Milton came to it Ellwood was in Aylesbury Prison, under a new and severe law, made specially against the meeting of Quakers for worship. "But now," he wrote, “being released and returned home, I soon made a visit to him to welcome him into 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 judgment thereupon. When I came home, and had 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 but freely told him; and, after some further 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 brake off that 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 occasions drew 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."" It is still the same John Milton, sociable and kindly to the last. Ellwood's question was

not a very wise one, because Milton's first poem did include what he had to say about Paradise Found. But Milton had tried its effect on a simple, pious mind, and Ellwood's question indicated to him that the average mind of a religious Englishman wanted yet more emphasis laid on the place of Christ in his religious system. His fit audience, though few, was of men who would put their souls into the reading of his poem. Ellwood, he knew, had no skill as a critic; what he would bring to his reading would be a religious mood. It was this which had prompted the question, indicating that in him there was yet a religious want unsatisfied. Milton resolved to make his purpose sure, and wrote the second poem. Paradise Lost, then, was finished before the end of 1665; and Paradise Regained probably

TO A.D. 1667.]

MILTON'S PARADISE LOST.

645

was written before April 27, 1667, the date of Milton's agreement with Samuel Simmons to sell him the copyright of Paradise Lost" for £5, with conditional payment of another £5 when 1,300 copies had been sold, and of another £5 after the sale of 1,300 copies of the second edition, and of the third -each edition to be of not more than 1,500. Milton received altogether in his lifetime £10 for Paradise Lost; and his widow received £8 for her remaining interest in the copyright. The poem, divided at first into ten books, was well printed in a little quarto volume, price three shillings. It was without preface or note of any kind, and had no Arguments" before the books. It was simply Paradise Lost: a Poem written in Ten Books by John Milton, and published in 1667. It had to be licensed. Cromwell had got rid of the licenser, but he was now revived, and the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, suspected a political allusion in the lines

66

"As when the sun, new risen,

Looks through the horizontal misty air,

Shorn of his beams; or, from behind the moon,

In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds

On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs."

This perplexed Tomkyns; but the difficulty was overcome, and Milton, the stronger as a poet for the years of waiting while he did day labour in the service of his country, gave to his countrymen the poem to which he had aspired when in his youth he nursed his wings at Horton, and whispered his dream of immortality into the ears of his friend Diodati (ch. viii. § 54). The subject chosen was the worthiest he had been able to conceive. He would enshrine in his work the religion of his country: Opening with invocation of the Holy Spirit, he made it his labour to

66

"Assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men."

Dryden was among the visitors of the companionable poet in his later years; and in the preface to his "Fables," Dryden wrote: Milton is the poetical son of Spenser. Milton has confessed to me that Spenser was his original." Spenser and Milton, indeed, have a distinct relation to each other as combatants on the same side in the same battle at two different points. Each, with his own marked individuality, expressed also, as a representative Englishman, the life of his own time. Different as their two great poems are in form and

structure, there is likeness in the difference; for the Faerie Queene, in which all qualities of mind and soul are striving heavenward, was a religious allegory on the ways of men to God. "Paradise Lost' was designed to approach the national religion from the other side, and show the relation, justify the ways, of God to men. Milton furnished his epic with sublime machinery, after the manner of Homer and Virgil, by taking from the fathers of the Church the doctrine of angels and archangels, and the story of the fall of Lucifer, which had from old time been associated with the Scripture narrative (ch. iv. § 5). The legend of Lucifer originated in a cry of the prophet against Babylon (Isa. xiv. 12-15):-" How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cast down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit." From the time of St. Jerome downward, this symbolical representation of the King of Babylon in his splendour and his fall has been applied to Satan in his fall from heaven, probably because Babylon is in Scripture a type of tyrannical self-idolizing power, and is connected in the book of Revelation with the empire of the evil one. The use of this machinery, and that of the archangels, enabled Milton to place Adam on earth between the powers of heaven and hell, and represent the contest vividly to the imagination. To represent the unseen by new combinations of the seen was inevitable. It is simply impossible to describe that of which no man has ever had experience on earth. Therefore Raphael tells Adam—

"What surmounts the reach

Of human sense, I shall delineate so

By likening spiritual to corporal forms

As may express them best; though what if earth

Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein

Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?"

Milton's poetry shows deep traces of his study of Plato; and this last question enables the mind of the reader to pass from admission that new combinations of the known must represent the unknown, through philosophic thought, into a livelier acceptance of the narrative so prefaced.

The poem, as we now have it in twelve books, falls naturally