Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/354

Rh 336 the Restoration as one of &quot;solitude.&quot; Nor was this the worst. His three daughters, on whom he ought now to have been able principally to depend, were his most serious domestic trouble. The poor motherless girls, the eldest in her seventeenth year in 1662, the second in her fifteenth, and the youngest in her eleventh, had grown up, in their father s blindness and too great self-absorption, ill-looked- after and but poorly educated ; and the result now appeared. They &quot; made nothing of neglecting him &quot; ; they rebelled against the drudgery of reading to him or other wise attending on him ; they &quot; did combine together and counsel his maid-servant to cheat him in her marketings &quot; ; they actually &quot;had made away some of his books, and would have sold the rest.&quot; It was to remedy this horrible state of things that Milton consented to a third mar riage. The wife found for him was Elizabeth Minshull, of a good Cheshire family, and a relative of Dr Paget s. They were married on the 24th of February 1662-63, the wife being then only in her twenty-fifth year, while Milton was in his fifty-fifth. She proved an excellent wife ; and the Jewin Street household, though the daughters remained in it, must have been under better management from the time of her entry into it. From that date Milton s circum stances must have been more comfortable, and his thoughts about himself less abject, than they had been through the two preceding years, though his feeling in the main must have been still that of his own Samson : &quot; Now blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonoured, quelled, To what can I be useful ? wherein serve My nation, and the work from heaven imposed ? But to sit idle on the household hearth, A burdenous drone, to visitants a gaze, Or pitied object.&quot; That might be the appearance, but it was not the reality. All the while of his seeming degradation he had found some solace in renewed industry of various kinds among his books and tasks of scholarship, and all the while, more particularly, he had been building up his Paradise Lost. He had begun the poem in earnest, we are told, in his house in Petty France, in the last year of Cromwell s Protectorate, and then not in the dramatic form contem plated eighteen years before, but deliberately in the epic form. He had made but little way when there came the interruption of the anarchy preceding the Restoration and of the Restoration itself ; but the work had been resumed in Jewin Street and prosecuted there steadily, by dictations of twenty or thirty lines at a time to whatever friendly or hired amanuensis chanced to be at hand. Considerable progress had been made in this way before his third marriage ; and after that the work proceeded apace, his nephew Edward Phillips, who was then out in the world on his own account, looking in when he could to revise the growing manuscript. It was not in the house in Jewin Street, however, that Paradise Lost was finished. Not very long after the third marriage, probably in 1664, there was a removal to another house, with a garden, not far from Jewin Street, but in a more private portion of the same suburb. This, which was to be the last of all Milton s London residences, was in the part of the present Bunhill Row which faces the houses that conceal the London artillery-ground and was then known as &quot; Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields.&quot; Here the poem was certainly finished before July 1665; for, when, in that month, Milton and his family, to avoid the Great Plague of London, then beginning its fearful ravages, went into temporary country-quarters in a cottage in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, about 23 miles from London, the finished manuscript was taken with him, in probably more than one copy. This we learn from his young Quaker friend, Thomas Elhvood, who had taken the cottage for him, and who was shown one of the manuscript copies, and allowed to take it away with him for perusal, during Milton s stay at Chalfont. Why the poem was not published immediately after his return to his Bunhill house in London, on the cessation of the Great Plague, does not distinctly appear, but may be explained partly by the fact that the official licenser hesitated before granting the necessary imprimatur to a book by a man of such notorious republican antecedents, and partly by the paralysis of all business in London by the Great Fire of Sep tember 1666. It was not till the 27th of April 1667 that Milton concluded an agreement with a publisher for the printing of his epic. By the agreement of that date, still extant, Milton sold to Samuel Simmons, printer, of Alders- gate Street, London, for 5 down, the promise of another 5 after the sale of a first edition of thirteen hundred copies, and the further promise of two additional sums of 5 each after the sale of two more editions of the same size respec tively, all his copyright and commercial interest in Paradise Lost for ever. It was as if an author now were to part with all his rights in a volume for 17, 10s. down, and a contingency of 52, 10s. more in three equal instalments. The poem was duly entered by Simmons as ready for publication in the Stationers Registers on the 20th of the following August; and shortly after that date it was out in London as a neatly printed small quarto, with the title Paradise Lost : A Poem ivritten in Ten Books : By John Milton. The publishing price was 3s., equal to about 10s. 6d. now. It is worth noting as an historical coincidence that the poem appeared just at the time of the fall and disgrace of Clarendon. The effect of the publication of Paradise Lost upon Milton s reputation can only be described adequately, as indeed it was consciously described by himself in metaphor, by his own words on Samson s feat of triumph over the Philistines : But he, though blind of sight, Despised, and thought extinguished quite, With inward eyes illuminated, His fiery virtue roused From under ashes into sudden flame, And as an evening dragon came, Assailant on the perched roosts And nests in order ranged Of tame villatic fowl, but as an eagle His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.&quot; As the poem circulated and found readers, whether in the first copies sent forth by Simmons, or in subsequent copies issued between 1667 and 1669, with varied title- pages, and the latest of them with a prefixed prose &quot; Argument,&quot; the astonishment broke out everywhere. - This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too &quot; is the saying attributed to Dryden on the occasion ; and it is the more remarkable because the one objection to the poem which at first, we are told, &quot; stumbled many &quot; must have &quot; stumbled &quot; Dryden most of all. Except in the drama, rhyme was then thought essential in anything professing to be a poem ; blank verse was hardly regarded as verse at all ; Dryden especially had been and was the champion of rhyme, contending for it even in the drama ; and yet here was an epic not only written in blank verse, but declaring itself on that account to be &quot; an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming.&quot; That, notwithstanding this obvious blow struck by the poem at Dryden s pet literary theory, he should have welcomed the poem so enthusiastically and proclaimed its merits so emphatically, says much at once for his critical perception and for the generosity of his temper. An opinion pro claimed by the very chief of the Restoration literature could not but prevail among the contemporary scholars ; arid, though execration of the blind and unhanged regicide.