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 circumstances to make good. The daughters, with the Powells probably abetting them, went to law with the widow to upset the will; and the decision of the court was that they should receive £100 each. With the £600 thus left, the widow, after some further stay in London, retired to Nantwich in her native Cheshire. There, respected as a pious member of a local Baptist congregation, she lived till 1727, having survived her husband fifty-three years. By that time all the three daughters were also dead. The eldest, Ann Milton, who was somewhat deformed, had died not long after her father, having married “a master-builder,” but left no issue; the second, Mary Milton, had died, unmarried, before 1694; and only the third, Deborah, survived as long as her step-mother. Having gone to Ireland, as companion to a lady, shortly before her father’s death, she had married an Abraham Clarke, a silk-weaver in Dublin, with whom she returned to London about 1684, when they settled in the silk-weaving business in Spitalfields, rather sinking than rising in the world, though latterly some public attention was paid to Deborah, by Addison and others, on her father’s account. One of her sons, Caleb Clarke, had gone out to Madras in 1703, and had died there as “parish-clerk of Fort George” in 1719, leaving children, of whom there are some faint traces to as late as 1727, the year of Deborah’s death. Except for the possibility of further and untraced descent from this Indian grandson of Milton, the direct descent from him came to an end in his granddaughter, Elizabeth Clarke, another of Deborah’s children. Having married a Thomas Foster, a Spitalfields weaver, but afterwards set up a small chandler’s shop, first in Holloway and then in Shoreditch, she died at Islington in 1754, not long after she and her husband had received the proceeds of a performance of Comus got up by Dr Johnson for her benefit. All her children had predeceased her, leaving no issue. Milton’s brother Christopher, who had always been on the opposite side in politics, rose to the questionable honour of a judgeship and knighthood in the latter part of the reign of James II. He had then become a Roman Catholic—which religion he professed till his death in retirement at Ipswich in 1692. Descendants from him are traceable a good way into the 18th century. Milton’s two nephews and pupils, Edward and John Phillips, both of them known as busy and clever hack-authors before their uncle’s death, continued the career of hack-authorship, most industriously and variously, though not very prosperously, through the rest of their lives: Edward in a more reputable manner than John, and with more of enduring allegiance to the memory of his uncle. Edward died about 1695; John was alive till 1706. Their half-sister, Ann Agar, the only daughter of Milton’s sister by her second husband, had married, in 1673, a David Moore, of Sayes House, Chertsey; and the most flourishing of all the lines of descent from the poet’s father was in this Agar-Moore branch of the Miltons.

Milton’s literary life divides into three almost mechanically distinct periods: (1) the time of his youth and minor poems, (2) his middle twenty years of prose polemics, and (3) the time of his later Muse and greater poems.

Had Milton died in 1640, when he was in his thirty-second year, and had his literary remains been then collected, he would have been remembered as one of the best Latinists of his generation and one of the most exquisite of minor English poets. In the latter character, more particularly, he would have taken his place as one of that

interesting group or series of English poets, coming in the next forty years after Spenser, who, because they all acknowledged a filial relationship to Spenser, may be called collectively the Spenserians. In this group or series, counting in it such other true poets of the reigns of James I. and Charles I. as Phineas and Giles Fletcher, William Browne and Drummond of Hawthornden, Milton would have been entitled, by the small collection of pieces he had left, and which would have included his Ode on the Nativity, his L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, his Comus and his Lycidas, to recognition as indubitably the very highest and finest. There was in him that peculiar Spenserian something which might be regarded as the poetic faculty in its essence, with a closeness and perfection of verbal finish not to be found in the other Spenserians, or even in the master himself. Few as the pieces were, and owning discipleship to Spenser as the author did, he was a Spenserian with a difference belonging to his own constitution—which prophesied, and indeed already exhibited, the passage of English poetry out of the Spenserian into a kind that might be called the Miltonic. This Miltonic something, distinguishing the new poet from other Spenserians, was more than mere perfection of literary finish. It consisted in an avowed consciousness already of the os magna soniturum, “the mouth formed for great utterances,” that consciousness resting on a peculiar substratum of personal character that had occasioned a new theory of literature. “He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter on laudable things ought himself to be a true poem” was Milton’s own memorable expression afterwards of the principle that had taken possession of him from his earliest days; and this principle of moral manliness as the true foundation of high literary effort, of the inextricable identity of all literary productions in kind, and their coequality in worth, with the personality in which they have their origin, might have been detected, in more or less definite shape, in all or most of the minor poems. It is a specific form of that general Platonic doctrine of the invincibility of virtue which runs through his Comus.

That a youth and early manhood of such poetical promise should have been succeeded by twenty years of all but incessant prose polemics has been a matter of regret with many. But this