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 $4 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS In 165 1 Milton's first wife died, after she had given him three daughters In that vear he had already lost the use of one eye, aiui was warned by the phy- sicians that if he persisted in his task of replying to Salmasius he would prob- ahlv lose the other. The warning was soon accomplished, according to the com- mon account, in 1654; but upon collating his letter to Phalaris the Athenian, with his own pathetic statement in the " Defensio Secunda," we are disposed to date it from 1652. In 1655 he resigned his office of secretary, in which he had latterly been obliged to use an assistant. S ne time before this period he had married his second wife, Catherine NVoodcock, to whom it is supposed that he was very tenderly attached. In r she died in child-birth, together with her child, an event which he has recorded in a very beautiful sonnet. This loss, added to his blindness, must have made his home, for some years, desolate and comfortless. Distress, indeed, was now gathering rapidly upon him. The death of Cromwell, in the following year, and the imbecile character of his eldest son, held out an invitation to the aspiring in- triguers of the day, which they were not slow to improve. It soon became too evident to Milton's discernment that all things were hurrying forward to restora- tion of the ejected family. Sensible of the risk, therefore, and without much hope, but obeying the summons of his conscience, he wrote a short tract on the ready and easy way to establish a free commonwealth, concluding with these noble words: "Thus much I should perhaps have said, though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet. Oh earth ! earth ! earth ! to tell the very soil itself what her per- verse inhabitants are deaf to. Xay, though what I have spoken should happen [which Thou suffer not, who didst create free, nor Thou next who didst redeem us from being servants of men] to be die last words of our expiring liberty.* What he feared was soon realized. In the spring of 1660 the Restoration was accomplished amid die tumultuous rejoicings of the people. It was certain that the vengeance of government would lose no time in marking its victims ; and some of them in anticipation had already fled. Milton wisely withdrew from the first fury of the persecution which now descended on his party. He secreted himself in London, and when he returned to the public eye in the winter, found himself no farther punished than by a general disqualification for the pub- lic service, and die dis grace of a public burning inflicted on his " Eikooodastes " and his " Defensio pro Populo Angficano." Apparently it was not long after this time that he married his third wife, Elisabeth MinshuL a lady of good family in Cheshire. In what year he began the composition of his " Paradise Lost " is not certainly known ; some have supposed in 165S. There is better ground for fixing the period of its dose: Dating the plague of 1665 he retired to Chalfont, and at that time Ehrood, the Quaker, read the poem in a finished state. The general interruption of business in L ondon, occasioned by the plague, and prolonged by the great fire in 1660, explain why the publication was delayed for nearly two years. The coi U i a cl with the publisher is dated April 26, 1667, and in the course of that year the