Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/35

 COMPLETION OF PARADISE LOST xxvii

from the House an abatement of the excessive fee demanded from Milton by an officious sergeant who had carried out the nullified order of arrest, and his voice was doubtless raised now in behalf of his friend and master. There is also a pleasant tradition that the poet Davenant repaid an old kindness by a like intercession. To whomever the clemency was due, however, Milton was left free by the passage of the Act of Oblivion to emerge from hiding. He was not yet perhaps wholly free from danger by mob violence. On the night before the anniversary of Charles I.'s death, the disinterred corpses of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were brought for safe keeping to the Red Lion Inn, only a short distance from Milton's new lodgings in Holborn ; and it was up Holborn that the crazy mob fol- lowed the carts next day to the ghastly gibbeting at Tyburn.

But to Milton's ears, in these days, the rioting of the " sons of Belial " who had come back to flout with insolence and outrage every ideal for which the men of the Commonwealth had given their lives, must have sounded dim and far away. The time had come for him to fulfil the boyish boast made more than twenty years before, when he had replied to his friend's question, " Of what am I thinking ? In God's name, of immortality ! I am pluming my wings for a flight." Though held under by an immense sustained effort of will, the ambition conceived so long ago had never for long been absent from his mind. Added to the sense of his mission as a singer, sent by the great Task-master to add to the sum of beauty in the world, there rested upon him now another obligation, no less impelling. The Puri- tan moral scheme, the new social instauration, which had failed on earth, he must carry over into the world of imaginative permanence. He must justify to men the ways of that God who had dealt so darkly with his chosen people. Already, though " long choosing and beginning late," he had carved out from the hollow dark the vast traits of his theme.

��VI

FROM THE ACT OF OBLIVION TO THE COMPLETION OF PARADISE LOST,

1660-1665

FOR a man of Milton's temper the state of public affairs alone would have been a sufficient bitterness ; but private trials added their simples to the cup. One of the minor but most satiric of these was furnished by the two nephews upon whom he had lavished his time and his educational theories. How well the youngest, John ' Phillips, had imbibed his uncle's teachings, he had shown long ago by pub- lishing a Satire Against Hypocrites and a Miscellany of Choice Drolleries, which earned him a sharp reprimand from Cromwell's Council. His graver brother Edward followed the primrose path thus gallantly marked out, by publishing a volume entitled The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, or the Arts of Wooing and Complimenting, with a preface to the youthful gentry of England. The royalism of both was pronounced ; and although Edward continued to visit the house on

�� �