Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/351

Rh MILTON 333 Whitehall for a house he had taken on the edge of St James s Park, in what was then called Petty France, Westminster, but is now York Street. The house existed till the other day, but has been pulled down. In Milton s time it was a villa-looking residence, with a garden, in a neighbourhood of villas and gardens. He had now more to do in the special work of his office, in consequence of the increase of correspondence with foreign powers. But he had for some time been in ailing health ; and a dimness of eyesight which had been growing upon him gradually for ten years had been settling rapidly, since his labour over the answer to Salmasius, into total blindness. Actually, before or about May 1652, when he was but in his forty-fourth year, his blindness was total, and he could go about only with some one to lead him. Hence a re arrangement of his secretarial duties. Such of these duties as he could perform at home, or by occasional visits to the Council Office near, he continued to perform ; but much of the routine work was done for him by assistants, one of them a well-known German named Weckherlin, under the superintendence of Mr John Thurloe, who had succeeded Mr Walter Frost in the general secretaryship. Precisely to this time of a lull in Milton s secretaryship on account of his ill-health and blindness we have to refer his two great companion sonnets To the Lord General Cromivell and To Sir Henry Vane the Younger. To about the same time, or more precisely to the interval between May and September 1652, though the exact date is uncertain, we have to refer the death of his only son, who had been born in his official Whitehall apartments in the March of the preceding year, and the death also of his wife, just after she had given birth to his third daughter, Deborah. With the three children thus left him, Anne, but six years old, Mary, not four, and the infant Deborah, the blind widower lived on in his house in Petty France in such desolation as can be imagined. He had recovered suffici ently to resume his secretarial duties; and the total num ber of his dictated state letters for the single year 1652 is equal to that of all the state letters of his preceding term of secretaryship put together. To the same year there belong also three of his Latin Familiar Epistles. In December 1652 there was published Joannis Philippi Angli Responsio ad Apologiam Anonymi Cnjusdam Tene- brionis, being a reply by Milton s younger nephew, John Phillips, but touched up by Milton himself, to one of several pamphlets that had appeared against Milton for his slaughter of Salmasius. The ablest and most scurrilous of these, which had just appeared anonymously at the Hague, with the title Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum adversus Parricidas Anglicanos (&quot; Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven against the English Parricides &quot;), Milton was reserving for his own attention at his leisure. On the 20th of April 1653 there was Cromwell s great act of armed interference by which he turned out the small remnant of the Rump Parliament, dismissed their council of state, and assumed the government of England, Ireland, and Scotland into his own hands. For several months, indeed, he acted only as interim dictator, governing by a council of his officers, and waiting for the conclusions of that select body of advisers which he had called together from all parts of the country, and which the Royalists nicknamed &quot;The Barebones Parliament.&quot; In December 1653, however, his formal sovereignty began under the name of the Protectorate, passing gradually into more than kingship. This change from government by the Rump and its council to government by a single military Lord Protector and his council was regarded by many as treason to the republican cause, and divided those who had hitherto been the united Commonwealth s men into the &quot; Pure Re publicans,&quot; represented by :;uch men as Bradshaw and Vane, and the &quot; Oliverians,&quot; adhering to the Protector. Milton, whose boundless admiration of Cromwell had shown itself already in his Irish tract of 1649 and in his recent sonnet, was recognized as one of the Oliverians. He remained in Oliver s service and was his Latin secretary through the whole of the Protectorate. For a while, indeed, his Latin letters to foreign states in Cromwell s name were but few, Mr Thurloe, as general secretary, officiating as Oliver s right-hand man in everything, with a Mr Philip Meadows under him, at a salary of 200 a year, as deputy for the blind Mr Milton in foreign correspondence and translations. The reason for this temporary exemption of Milton from routine duty may have been that he was then engaged on an answer, by commission from the late Government, to the already-mentioned pamphlet from the Hague entitled Regii Sanguinis Clamor. Salmasius was now dead, and the Commonwealth was too stable to suffer from such attacks ; but no Royalist pamphlet had appeared so able or so venomous as this in continuation of the Salmasian controversy. All the rather because it was in the main a libel on Milton himself did a reply from his pen seem necessary. It came out in May 1654, with the title Joannis Miltoni Angli pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (&quot;Second Defence of John Milton, Englishman, for the People of England &quot;). It is one of the most inter esting of all Milton s writings. The author of the libel to which it replied was Dr Peter du Moulin the younger, a naturalized French Presbyterian minister, then moving about in English society, close to Milton ; but, as that was a profound secret, and the work was universally attributed on the Continent to an Alexander Morus, a French minister of Scottish descent, then of much oratorical celebrity in Holland, who had certainly managed the printing in consultation with the now deceased Salmasius, and had contributed some portion of the matter, Milton had made this Morus the responsible person and the one object of his castigations. They were frightful enough. If Salmasius had been slaughtered in the former Defensio, Morus was murdered and gashed in this. His moral character was blasted by exposure of his antecedents, and he was blazoned abroad in Europe as a detected clerical blackguard. The terrific castigation of Morus, however, is but part of the Defensio Secunda. It contains passages of singular autobiographical and historical value, and includes laudatory sketches of such eminent Common wealth s men as Bradshaw, Fairfax, Fleetwood, Lambert, and Overton, together with a long panegyric on Cromwell himself and his career, which remains to this day unap- proached for elaboration and grandeur by any estimate of Cromwell from any later pen. From about the date of the publication of the Defensio Secunda to the beginning of 1655 the only specially literary relics of Milton s life are his translations of Psalms i.-viii. in different metres, done in August 1654, his translation of Horace s Ode i. 5, done probably about the same time, and two of his Latin Familiar Epistles. The most active time of his secretary ship for Oliver was from April 1655 onwards. In that month, in the course of a general revision of official salaries under the Protectorate, Milton s salary of 288 a year hitherto was reduced to 200 a year, with a kind of re definition of his office, recognizing it, we may say, as a Latin secretaryship extraordinary. Mr Philip Meadows was to continue to do all the ordinary Foreign Office work, under Thurloe s inspection ; but Milton was to be called in on special occasions. Hardly was the arrangement made when a signal occasion did occur. In May 1655 all England was horrified by the news of the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants by the troops of Emanuele II., duke of Savoy and prince of Piedmont, in consequence of their disobedience to an edict requiring them either to leave