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fourteen were expected to have a good knowledge of Latin and 
Greek classics, and at odd moments to work at Hebrew, Italian, 
Syriac and Chaldee ? and that was only a portion of the course 
that Milton supplied to his schoolboys of that day. He had 
opened his school chiefly to educate his sister’s sons by her first 
husband, John and Edward Philips. One day he left school and 
returned with a young bride, Mary Powell, the daughter of a 
country gentleman, but the marriage was not a happy one. 
Within a month of the honeymoon she found her way back to 
her former home. 
As to his political career Milton, in 1649, was made Secretary 
for the Foreign Tongues, or translator of State dispatches for the 
Government, by the Council of State unde Cromwell at £288 a 
year. He was now a mere channel through which the operations 
of the Government should pass. He had to do the miserable 
drudgery of translating State documents from English into Latin 
for the foreign courts. His salary was gradually reduced to £150 
—perhaps his sight had something to do with it. 
We now pass to the shadows through which his path lay. At 
43 years of age Milton became blind in one eye. He alluded to 
his blindness in a letter to a friend, and in the opening of the 
third book of ‘‘ Paradise Lost,’ in Sonnets 19, 22 and 23, and in 
‘Samson Agonistes.” His prose writings are perfect models of 
magnificent English, such as the grand defence of Unlicensed 
Printing—‘ The Areopagitica.” Some of the sentences required 
more breath than he had to get to the end of them, but in their 
balanced fulness could hardly be matched in English literature 
anywhere else. He had been most shamefully taunted on his 
blindness, and had made a remarkably fine reply in the second 
Defence of the English people, ‘‘ Defence for the Revolution.” 
«« And indeed, in my blindness, I enjoy in no inconsiderable degree the 
favour of the Deity, who regards me with more tenderness and compassion in 
proportion as I am able to behold nothing but Himself. Alas! for him who 
insults me, who maligns and merits public execration! For the divine law 
not only shields me from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack ; 
not indeed from the privation of my sight, as from the overshadowing of those 
heavenly wings which seem to have occasioned this obscurity ; and which, 
when occasioned, He is wont to illuminate with an interior light, more 
precious and more pure.” 
His firet wife lived nine years, and after her death he married 
Catherine Woodcock, and in the 28rd Sonnet, after her death, he 
called her his ‘late espoused Saint.” 
One of the most interesting things that I think has been 
attempted in connection with the writings of Milton, is the effort 
made by Rey. James Graham, a Vicar in Herefordshire, to cull 
out of his writings an autobiography fetched entirely from his 
writings, prose and poetic. 
