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xxxvi

THE LIFE OF JOHN MILTON.

mean that they were brought up under a governess. To this expenditure was added the cost of enabling them to learn the art of embroidery, and the assistance rendered to them during the last four or five years of his life, when they had ceased to be a part of his household. It is towards the close of those years that he speaks of having "spent the greater part of his estate in providing for them." He says at the same time that they have been "undutiful and unkind to him;" that they were "careless of him being blind, and made nothing of deserting him;" that, in place of being the comfort to him he needed, "they did combine together in counseling his maidservant to cheat him in her marketings;" that they had made away with some of his books, and would have sold the rest of his books to the dunghill women; and that Mary, the second in age being told that her father was about to marry, said that the better news to her would be to hear that he was dead.

With regards to Milton's wife, she was twenty-six years of age when she married, and she is described by Aubrey, who knew her, as "a genteel person, of a peaceful and agreeable humour." From all that is said of her we may presume that she was a woman of personal attractions. We know that she held her husband in great veneration; that poetry which came to him in the night, she often committed to writing at his dictation early in the day; that she studied his comfort in all things, and proved, in fact, an excellent wife. According to Milton's own words she was a "loving wife;" and his brother Christopher states on oath, that he "complained, but without passion, that his children had been unkind to him, but that his wife had been very kind and careful of him." In leaving his disposable property to her, which, altogether, would not give her anything beyond the means of a moderate subsistence, he regarded himself as discharging a debt of gratitude. In the compromise ultimately made when the will had been disputed, the daughters were content to receive £100 each as their share. At the same time, the £1,000 still due to him from the Powells, acknowledged by persons competent to pay it as an honourable debt, he left his daughters to claim.¹ "Phillips relates," says Johnson, "that Mrs. Milton persecuted the children during the life of her husband, and cheated them at his death." It must suffice to say that Phillips has not made that statement, nor any statement at all like it; nor is this the only instance in which Johnson's hostile feeling has betrayed him into infamous representations of this description. The will made in behalf of the widow, and which she very probably induced her husband to make, was the only cheating with which she could be charged; and, with regard to persecution, Deborah might have left a home of reasonable comfort to have been virtually adopted as she was, by Mrs. Merien; while her elder sisters could hardly have lived from five to six years as young women with their step-mother, had they been subject to grave ill-treatment at her hands. On the whole, in relation to Milton's conduct towards his children, as towards his first wife, without venturing to say that he was without fault, we feel no difficulty in saying that he was a man much more sinned against than sinning.²

¹ "According to the custom of London, previous to the statute 1 James II., c. 17, Mrs. Milton would be entitled to two-thirds of her husband's effects—one-third as widow, and one-third as administratrix, the remaining third being the property of the children; and, consequently, £300, the amount paid to them, would represent the full share of their father's estate, if it amounted to no more than £900, even without taking into account any such future payment as, according to a conjecture, hazarded in a note, a clause in the leases may possibly allude to. There is no very strong evidence that it amounted to more than this. Phillips writes that he is said to have died worth £1,500 in money, a considerable estate, all things considered; so that the writer, while giving currency to what may have been his cousin's exaggerated statement of their father's property, seems to intimate his own opinion, that it was more than he should have expected; but Milton himself is proved to have contemplated, as a mere possibility, the event of his property realising more than £1,000, in which case he expressed his wish that his brother Christopher's children should have the overpluss, though he probably considered the chances too remote to be worth providing for in his will."—Cheetham Publications, vol. xxiv. 13.

² See these particulars given in some detail by Todd, Mitford, and Keightley, but especially in the Papers connected with Milton and his Family, in vol. xxiv. of the Cheetham Publications.

THE LIFE OF JOHN MILTON.

xxxvii

Milton did not continue long in Jewin Street after his marriage. His next, and his last, remove was to a house in Artillery Walk, then a pleasant avenue to Bunhill Fields. But he had not been long settled in his new house when he was driven from it by the Plague; which came with such terrible effect over the metropolis in 1665. Milton now took possession for a while of a cottage at Chalfont, in Buckinghamshire, which had been hired for him by his young friend Elwood, the Quaker. By this time he had completed, or very nearly completed, his Paradise Lost.

Our earliest information concerning the intention of Milton to write an epic poem comes to us during his continental tour. The eulogy pronounced on him in Florence shows that he must have mentioned some purpose of this kind to his friends in that city. We have seen, that in his poem to Manso of Naples, a few months later, he is explicit on this point; but the subject then in his thoughts was King Arthur and the Knighthood of his Age. In his treatise on Church Government, published in 1641, this purpose is again indicated, and the subject is still King Arthur. We know not how or when the British theme came to be displaced by the Biblical; but in 1658 this change had taken place, and some years before, Phillips and other friends had seen fragments of the poetry, especially the Address of Satan to the Sun, which appeared ultimately in the Paradise Lost. Through some eight or ten years, accordingly, this subject may be said to have occupied the poet's thought, and to have moved him more or less to write upon it; and through seven years preceding its publication, it had been his chosen and settled theme. Milton's earliest conception of the work, as is well known, presented it in the form of a drama. The Milton manuscripts at Cambridge place before us dramatic schemes on the Fall of Man, framed somewhat in the manner of the old mysteries. Happily that form was abandoned, and very little time would seem to have been wasted upon it.

The most potent cause leading to the choice of this higher theme will probably be found in the new current given to Milton's thoughts on his return to England in 1639. While at Cambridge, his discontent with the state of things in the English Church had precluded him from becoming a clergyman. His Lycidas shows that this feeling had grown upon him when that poem was written. But his residence at Horton, and his continental tour, embrace the interval in his career which may be said to have been the brightest, and had his life continued to be of that cheery hue, it is probable that the epic poem would have been on the old British chivalry. But as the quarrel between Charles and the Parliament ripened towards civil war, the grave questions of civil and religious liberty became to him the great questions of the hour, and not only revived the religious spirit observable in his earlier years, but deepened it, and gave it the force of habit.

We have mentioned elsewhere how Milton placed the manuscript of Paradise Lost in the hand of Elwood, at Chalfont; and the remark of the poet's Quaker friend, that one who had written so well on Paradise Lost should write on Paradise Regained, which led to the writing of that poem since known by that name. Milton returned to London in 1666, early probably in that year. The check which had been given to book publishing in 1665 by the Plague, was followed in September, 1666, by the Great Fire of London, which must have been felt by authors and booksellers as even a greater discouragement to such enterprises. But Milton had written his Paradise Regained for the most part, if not entirely, away from his books, in his humble retreat at Chalfont; and had written his greater poem amidst the ceaseless distractions occasioned by the agitation and perils which beset the Commonwealth through the first five years of its existence, and amidst the many disheartening events which attended the Restoration. It was in keeping with his elastic energy and hopefulness, that Milton now trod the pathways of the city where the pestilence had lately sent such horrors into every dwelling; and where, from the late fire, whole streets were still in