Page:Milton - Milton's Paradise Lost, tra il 1882 e il 1891.djvu/10

vi to a young lady of great wit and beauty, whom he was upon the point of marrying, when his wife suddenly returned and implored and obtained his forgiveness.

Milton's keen pen so recommended him to Cromwell's esteem that at the establishment of the Commonweath he was appointed secretary of foreign tongues in 1649, which preferment he enjoyed until the restoration of Charles II. For some time he had an apartment at Whitehall, but afterward removed to lodgings opening into St. James's Park. Soon after he was instituted in his office his wife died in childbed, and in 1656 he married Catharine Woodcock, who died in the same unfortunate manner about a year later. "Her monument is the sonnet in which the widower commemorated his loss." In 1663 the poet married for the third time—Elizabeth Minshull, with whom he appears to have lived very happily, and who survived him.

At about the time of the death of his first wife Milton became totally blind; this by no means, however, discouraged him from work. When he found himself free from the burden of public controversy, he commenced a History of England, which, however, he carried no farther than the Norman Conquest. The Restoration deprived him of his office, and he was driven into political obscurity. Fortunately for literature, his genius was to be no longer employed in the defence of political factions. Blind, and in a degree solitary, he held communion with his spirit, saw wonderful visions, and produced his immortal poem of Paradise Lost, which received but scant attention in an age given over to ribaldry and lewdness. For this immortal work Milton received but ten pounds, and his widow later accepted eight pounds in discharge of all further claims. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, Milton's last poems, were published in 1670.

The illustrious poet died in 1674, and was buried in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, in the chancel of the church. In 1737 a monument was raised to his memory in Westminster Abbey, and later another was placed in the church in which he was buried. Very recently a magnificent stained-glass window in his memory has been placed in St. Margaret's, Westminster; it is the gift of Mr. George W. Childs, and bears the following inscription of Whittier:

The New World honors him whose lofty plea For England's freedom made her own more sure, Whose song, immortal as its theme, shall be Their common freehold while both worlds endure."