Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/33

 LATIN SECRETARYSHIP, 1649-1659 xxv

warned by his physician that to persevere to the end would mean certain blindness. With stoical devotion, as splendid as it was perverted, he decided to pay the price. We groan when we think of the real insignificance of the object for which the light of those eyes was spent spent recklessly, with a kind of frenzy of waste which shows what funds of fanaticism lay beneath the placid surface of his nature.

In the quarrel which dragged on for several years more with Morus, to whom Salmasius's cause had descended, the tone of petty personality gained steadily over the real question at issue, though at the same time the frankly autobiographic passages of Milton grow nobly dignified, and his eulogies upon the leading men of the Commonwealth, taken together, form an august vindication of their cause. It would be unprofitable to dwell upon the disagreeable aspects of the Salmasius controversy, were it not that they illustrate forcibly certain elements of the poet's nature which tradition has obscured, yet which are essential to even a primary understanding of him. Wordsworth condensed into a single line the popular mis- apprehension. So far from being a soul which dwelt like a star apart, Milton was one of the most inflammable, mobile, and social of beings. A slight stung him, an honor lifted him, a sneer maddened and blinded him. For poetry, indeed, he kept the clear ichor of his temperament, free from roil ; and it is as a poet that he is remembered ; but one who looks discerningly can detect in the very splendor and volume of that utterance the stress of a humanity more than ordinarily obvious to passion.

By 1652 Milton's blindness had become complete. He had meanwhile removed from rooms in Whitehall, assigned him during the first years of his incumbency of the Secretaryship, to a house in Petty France, pleasantly situated near St. James Park, across which he had to be led when his presence was needed at the Council. His duties were gradually lightened, the routine work being given to an assistant. Edward Phillips was still with him, to serve as amanuensis, and acquaintance with the young poet Andrew Marvell, afterwards his assistant in the Secretaryship, brought him another hand to lighten the burden of his blindness. We get from Edward Phillips and others many pleasant glimpses of the life which he now led, visited by distinguished strangers anxious for a sight of the victor in the Salmasius quarrel, " of which all Europe rang from side to side." Hints of more intimate converse we get in the sonnets to Cyriack Skinner and to young Lawrence, poetical invitations to supper and a cosy evening by the fireside, which assure us by their tone of sober gaiety how well Milton bore his misfortune. The geniality of the lines reminds us of Phillips's bit of gossip concerning the young " beaux " with .whom his uncle, after his return from Italy, was accustomed to keep an occasional " gaudy-day." But that life in the little house was not all made up of amenities we can conjecture from the characters of the three young girls who had been left motherless there. During these untended years rebellion against their stern father was growing towards its sickening outcome. In 1656 their father married again, this time Katharine Woodcock, of whom nothing is known but what can be gleaned from the sonnet which he wrote upon her death, little more than a year later. To

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