63 
At the Restoration Milton escaped with the forfeiture of three- 
fourths of his property, and with the remainder he took a house 
in Artillery Fields. He had little to look forward to, and he 
eould only look back to the wreck of his political hopes. But I 
like to think of Milton falling back upon himself, and to parallel 
him with the prophet Isaiah, Saint Augustine, and Dante. On 
the ruins of Rome St. Augustine of Hippo makes his magnificent 
theological work the City of God ; on the wreck of political hopes 
Dante could divert his attention to the kingdom beyond. In the 
ease of Milton his creed had been formed in a very peculiar 
school, and one of the most difficult things about him was to make 
out a case for his creed by his writings—a strong Puritan, and 
at the back of his wstheticism you get Arianism, which is abso- 
lutely discounted in some of his works—notably in ‘ Paradise 
Regained.” How are you to account for these various sides of a 
man’s intellectual life? I venture to think that the explanation 
is the originality of the man—that he was able to detach himself 
from any political, social, or theological environment of the times 
in which he found himself. It is something in the intellectual 
sphere paralleled in the moral sphere sketched by Victor Hugo in 
‘‘ Les Misérables,” in the notable scene where the moral Valjean, 
the higher, hesitates to yield himself up in place of a man so like 
him, the lower Valjean, who was taken by the police, and in 
danger of condemnation. In the case of Milton, the only explan- 
ation is the domination of his intellectual forces, which enabled 
him so to throw himself into his theme that he lost himself in 
the dominating power that the subject had over him. (Cheers.) 
So that I would not endeavour to justify his inconsistencies. I 
think he is above justification. 
In the closing scenes of his life (he died at 66 years) the 
routine of his day was simple—up at four in summer and five in 
winter ; always a chapter of the Hebrew Bible if he could get 
anybody to read it to him, and then listening to his daughter or 
Ellwood, his Quaker friend, or sometimes a poor illiterate boy. 
After his simple mid-day meal he would go to his organ or listen 
to his daughters while they sang to him or sing himself. Then 
again to his books till six—his books always being books in 
the hands of other people. His daughters had been taught to 
read Latin without understanding it. He had sometimes to 
have recourse to a poor illiterate lad in the writing of the ‘‘Para- 
dise Lost’’ and had to tell him every letter, and in that way he 
dictated about thirty or forty lines a day. Supper at eight, after 
which he retired to bed. Picture him in a faded room, feeble 
and old, and subject to paroxysms of gout—there is Jolin Milton 
dictating slowly his grand poem, and then when the pangs come 
on swaying himself to and fro in his armchair with the gouty 
chalk stones in his hands. 
