Page:Imperialdictiona03eadi Brandeis Vol3a.pdf/452

MIL all survived him, besides a son who died in infancy (as Shakspeare also, it may be recollected, while he left two daughters, lost his only son in boyhood). Milton, however, married again in 1656; but this second wife, Mary, daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney, to whom he appears to have been fondly attached, died likewise in child-bed within a year. He has commemorated her in one of his sonnets. The infant, a daughter, soon followed its mother. Finally, about the year 1664 he married a third wife, Elizabeth, daughter of a Cheshire gentleman, Sir Edward Minshull, who survived him.

But Milton's domestic world was neither his only nor his chief one. For the greater part of the busy twenty years of the civil war and the Commonwealth, although he never was a member of the government, or sat in parliament, or held a commission in the army, he was one of the most active of public men, and one of the most efficient ministers of the new political system which had supplanted for the time the old monarchy of England. It might almost be said that what Cromwell was with his conquering sword, he was with his sharp and ever ready pen. Who else is to be named with the one, any more than with the other? For yet a little longer, indeed, we find him still occupied in part with his pupils and his teaching schemes. In 1644 he published a Tractate on Education in the form of a letter to his friend Mr. Samuel Hartlib; and in the same year, having some time before been joined by his father, he removed to a larger house in Barbican, the rooms in which, however, were soon all occupied, not only by an increased resort of boarders, but by numerous relations of his wife, to whom in the ruin of their party he was, notwithstanding all that had happened, generous enough to give shelter. It was in this year, too, that he produced his noble "Areopagitica, a speech to the parliament of England for the liberty of unlicensed printing." In 1645, also, he gave to the world a collection of all his pieces in verse, both English and Latin, anticipating, so it might seem, that his countrymen and himself would probably have other work on hand than either the writing or the reading of poetry for some years to come. In 1647, having now lost his aged father, and some of his other inmates having left him, he removed to a smaller house in Holborn, opening from the back into Lincoln's Inn Fields, still, however, taking with him a few scholars. But immediately after the execution of the king in January, 1649, we have him again flaming in the front of the battle, with his "Tenure of kings and magistrates, proving that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any who have the power, to call to account a tyrant or wicked king; and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death." Forthwith, on the 13th of March, it is referred by the council of state to a committee "to speak with Mr. Milton to know whether he will be employed as secretary for the foreign tongues;" and two days after it is ordered that he be taken into the service of the council in that capacity. So here is at last an end of his school-mastering. He now removed in the first instance to apartments in the house of a person of the name of Thomson, next door to the Bull-head tavern at Charing Cross, and opening into Spring Gardens; but on the 19th of November it is ordered that "Mr. Milton shall have the lodgings that were in the hands of Sir John Hippesley in Whitehall;" and on the 14th of June in the following year "that Mr. Milton shall have a warrant to the trustees and contractors for the sale of the king's goods for the furnishing of his lodging at Whitehall with some hangings." From his apartments in Whitehall or Scotland Yard, however, where his son, who was named John, was born and died, he removed in June, 1651, to what his nephew. Philips, describes as "a pretty garden-house in Petty France in Westminster, next door to the Lord Scudamore's, opening into St. James' Park"—the same house, we believe, in what is now called Queen Square, which was for many years inhabited by the late Jeremy Bentham. Here Milton continued to reside till within a few weeks of the Restoration. His official position, however, did not remain exactly the same during the whole of this time. Several renewals of his appointment are recorded in the books of the council; but in 1655 it is directed that his salary of £288 should be henceforth commuted into a pension for life of £150, and from this date his duties appear to have been divided with a colleague. He had been attacked by a threatening of blindness so early as the year 1644; his right eye continued to serve him for some time after he lost the use of the other; but at last in 1654 he found himself in utter darkness.

No government secretary in any country, it may be safely affirmed, ever rendered such service to his employers as was rendered by Milton. His first publication was a large quarto volume in English entitled "Eikonoklastes," in reply to the famous Eikon Basilike attributed to the deceased king. It appeared in the latter part of 1649. Then followed, in the beginning of the year 1651, his Defence for the English People, in Latin, in reply to Salmasius—"Defensio pro Populo Anglicano contra Claudii Salmasii Defensionem Regiam"—in another quarto; and this was followed in 1654, after he had become quite blind, by his Second Defence—"Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano contra infamem libellum cui titulus, Regii Sanguinis Clamor adversus Parricidas Anglicanos." The real author of the publication to which this Second Defence is a reply was the Rev. Peter du Moulin, afterwards prebendary of Canterbury, although Milton supposes it to have been a certain Alexander More. He had besides previously corrected to the extent of half rewriting a Latin reply published in 1652 by John Philips, the younger of his two nephews, to another royalist writer whom he took for Bishop (afterwards Archbishop) Bramhall, but whom Mr. Todd has shown to have been really an obscure clergyman called John Rowland. Nor did his occasional services cease with his full salary and sole tenure of his appointment. "We have proof," says Todd, "that long after the date of April, 1655, his matchless pen was officially required, and was ready. Witness his elegant and feeling letters in the name of the Protector throughout that year and the three following; and, if such splendid evidence of his talents thus publicly employed had been wanting, he is also found, after the death of Oliver, remunerated for his services, which then had been divided with those of Andrew Marvell, as before they had been with those of Philip Meadows, not with the reduced sum of £150, but with that of £200." There are also other letters written by Milton, in 1658 and 1659, in the name of the Protector Richard. And to all this, and possibly much more official work, must be added several publications on his own account in the last days of the fast dissolving political system which he had laboured so earnestly to uphold:—"A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes," in 1659; "Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the church," and "A Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth," the same year; and in the next year, 1660, first, a Letter to Monk entitled "The present means and brief declaration of a free commonwealth, easy to be put in practice and without delay;" then, when the fondly-worshipped vision must have all but faded from almost every eye save the writer's own, whose mystic light was all from within, "The ready and easy way to establish a free commonwealth, and the excellence thereof compared with the inconveniences and dangers of readmitting kingship in this nation. The author, J. M." The advertisement of this last pamphlet may still be read in the Mercurius Politicus (the parliamentary newspaper) of the 8th of March, accompanied with a list of typographical errata which had been left unnoticed in the pamphlet itself, "by reason of the printer's haste." There was, indeed, no time to lose.

The Restoration, of course, stripped Milton both of office and pension. There is a tradition that it was thought prudent to get up a mock-funeral for him in the apprehensions that were felt for his safety. It is certain that he had to hide himself for a time in a friend's house in Bartholomew Close. But in about three months after the king's return the act of indemnity not only secured to him and others impunity for the past, but in his case did not even encumber the boon of life and liberty with any incapacitation for the future. In addition to having some powerful friends in the new government, he is said to have been mainly indebted for the leniency he experienced to the intercession of Sir William Davenant, who, ten years before, when he had fallen into the hands of the parliamentary party, had in like manner been saved through Milton's interest. Upon being obliged to leave the residence which he had occupied while he held the office of secretary to the late government, he had in the first instance retreated to a small house in Holborn, near Red Lion Fields (now Red Lion Square); but this he soon exchanged for one in Jewin Street, not far from his old abode in Aldersgate. The true old London to the east of St. Paul's, in which he had first seen the light, seems always to have had an attraction for him; and it so happened that he was also to lay his bones there. He was far, however, as yet from feeling that he was done with