MILTON 



205 



defence of the deed, The Tenure of Kings and 

 Magistrates. Having thus definitively cast in his 

 lot with the ruling party, he was appointed on 

 March 15 to a post which no other man in England 

 was so competent to fill, that of ' Secretary of 

 Foreign Tongues,' whose duty it was to draft 

 diplomatic correspondence with foreign powers, 

 then carried on in Latin. Milton had few equals 

 in that age as a Latinist, whether in prose or verse, 

 and his public letters were an honour to himself and 

 his country, hat there is no reason to suppose that 

 he was ever much more than the mouthpiece of the 

 government. His services were more conspicuous 

 in another department, his justification of the 

 king's execution in his reply to Salniasius's Regii 

 Siim/iiinit Clamor ad Citlinn, a pamphlet whose 

 publication hail been a European event. Milton's 

 Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio ( 1651 ) was pro- 

 nounced, even by those who condemned it, a great 

 controversial victory. In erudition, Latinity, 

 and, it must be added, scurrility, the combatants 

 were well matched, but Milton spoke from the 

 heart, ami Salmosius from a brief. This work, 

 now go little read, made Milton famous all over 

 Europe, and is memorable as the immediate 

 occasion of the loss of his eyesight, deliberately 

 yielded up by him in the cause of his country. By 

 1652 the unpaired vi.-i'>n had wholly failed, and it 

 was necessary to provide him with an assistant in 

 his official duties. His domestic life at this period 

 was tranquil, distinguished chietly by his second 

 marriage and tin- lo-s of his wife ( 1656-58), and the 

 pleasing intimacy of young friends, recorded in his 

 sonnets. The magnificent sonnet on the massacre 

 of the Vaudois was written in 1655. Several contro- 

 versial pamphlets with Alexander Morus followed 

 Ills contest with Salmasius, chiefly remarkable for 

 the fortitude and dignity of his references to his 

 affliction, ami for his flattering portraits of the great 

 men of the Commonwealth, especially Cromwell. 

 Always leaning to the more radical side, he had 

 supported Cromwell in all his extra legal measures, 

 though the disappointment of his early republican 

 ideal must have cost him many pangs. He re- 

 tained his secretaryship until the abdication of 

 Richard Cromwell, when the condition of public 

 affairs again made him a pamphleteer. His writings 

 of this period, greatly inferior in splendour of diction 

 to his first productions of the kind, are still most 

 interesting as passionate protests, conclusive of 

 his entire lack of practical statesmanship and his 

 essentially poetical temperament. The Restoration 

 druve him into concealment. Few had more 

 bitterly exasperated the Royalist party ; but the 

 new government was not bloodthirsty, ami altout 

 the beginning of 1661 he found himself settled in 

 Jewin Street ( afterwards in Artillery Walk, I'.unli i 1 1 

 Fields), honourably released from politics with the 

 gratifying i-'insciousness of having dime his duty 

 and his best, and free to devote himself entirely to 

 the permanent purpose of his life. 



Paradise Lost was probably commenced some 

 time before the Restoration, and completed alxrat 

 1663 a striking instaiii-i* of rapid composition, con- 

 sidering the magnitude and perfection of the work, 

 the interruption by political revolution, and the 

 fact that Milton's poetical vein only flowed freely 

 between the autumnal equinox and the vernal. It 

 was chiefly composed at night, and necessarily 

 dictated to some amanuensis, usually one of his 

 daughters. Plague and fire for a time warred 

 against tin- pnUicfttioB, which at length, after 

 some difficulty on the licenser's part had been 

 surmounted, took place in August 1667. Every one 

 knows that the copyright was sold for five pounds : 

 it is not always rememl>ered that that sum repre- 

 sented three times its value at the present day. and 

 that there were contingencies which, had Milton 



lived to benefit by them, would have raised his 

 emolument to about 70 of our money. The sale 

 of thirteen hundred copies within twenty months is 

 certainly no discredit to the taste of the age. 

 Milton's claim to a place among the great poets of 

 his country seems to have been admitted from the 

 first, though in the absence of reviews his fame 

 travelled slowly. The year 1671 witnessed the pub- 

 lication of Paradise Regained, probably written in 

 1665-66, and of Samson Aqonistes, written later still. 

 The former was composed at the suggestion of the 

 Quaker Ellwood, working on the suspicion Milton 

 could not but entertain that he had after all made 

 Satan the hero of Paradise Lost. Samson 

 Agonistes, dramatic in form, is lyrical in substance, 

 a splendid lament over the author's forlorn old age, 

 and the apostasy, as he deemed it, of his nation. 

 Both pieces evince the continued tendency of his 

 style towards simplicity, which sometimes de- 

 generates into baldness. They are noble pendants 

 to Paradise Lost, but the more their relation to 

 this palmary work is studied the more one feels 

 that it and it alone places him among the supreme 

 poets of the world. 



Milton's domestic life during this period had not 

 been fortunate. The great cause of sorrow was the 

 undutifulness of his daughters very ordinary 

 young women, it would seem, who felt no sympathy 

 or admiration to counterbalance their natural 

 impatience of their heavy task as his readers and 

 amanuenses. The blind poet on his part was no 

 doubt often stern and exacting; and on the whole 

 the history of his household is one of sordid sadness 

 up to his marriage (1663) with Elizabeth Minshull, 

 a pretty and domestic woman of twenty-five, the 

 daughter of a Cheshire yeoman. She restored 

 comfort to his house, but failed to conciliate his 

 daughters, who, after being taught embroidery at 

 their father's expense, left to set up for themselves. 

 The accounts we have of him in his later years 

 convey a generally pleasing picture of a not un- 

 cheerfiil retirement solaced by music and the atten- 

 tion of friends. When the poetic impulse had 

 departed he addressed himself vigorously to other 

 unfulfilled designs of his youth, writing the early 

 history of England and endeavouring to amend 

 men's conceptions of grammar and logic. These 

 writings are indeed of little value ; but his Latin 

 Treatise of Christian Doctrines, though devoid of 

 all pretensions to eloquence, is a memorable work. 

 His theology had become profoundly modified in 

 the course of his life ; he is now an Arian as 

 regards the person of Christ ; he is indifferent to 

 all rites and ceremonies ; he is as anti-Sabbatarian 

 as Luther ; he would even tolerate polygamy. The 

 charm of the treatise consists in its dignified 

 candour, and the absence of all polemic viru- 

 lence. The tranquillity of evening was indeed 

 closing around him as he penned this last legacy, 

 the MS. of which, confiscated and mislaid, was not 

 to see the light for a hundred and fifty years. 

 Reduced still further in means by losses through 

 the great fire of 1066, but still above want ; exe- 

 crated as a regicide by the majority of his country- 

 men, but already acclaimed by the discerning as the 

 first poet of his age ; worn by attacks of gout, but 

 cheerful and even joyous in the intervals of pain, 

 he closed his chequered life on November 8, 1674. 

 He was interred in St Giles's, Cripplegate. 



Milton is one of the poets respecting whose place 

 in literature there has been least question, whether 

 as regards the literature of their own country or 

 that of the world. He stands at the head of those 

 epic poets whose themes have not, like Homer's or 

 Virgil's, been national, or have not, like Dante's, 

 condensed the essence of the belief of ages. He is 

 indebted for this superiority partly to his felicitous 

 choice of the finest subject which yet remained for 



