Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/36

 xxviii THE LIFE OF MILTON

terms of friendship, his presence must have been to his uncle a pretty emphatic reminder of the collapse of his own teaching.

If the defection of his nephews was satiric, the rebellion of his daughters was sordidly tragic. The eldest, Anne, a handsome girl in spite of her lameness, was now seventeen ; Mary, the second, was fifteen, and Deborah eleven. They had received only the rudiments of an education, the eldest not even being able to write. In spite of this their father undertook to make them do him a service in his literary labors which they would hardly have been prepared for by a formal college training. Edward Phillips says that he used them to " supply his want of eyesight by their ears and tongues. For though he had daily about him one or other to read to him, some, persons of man's estate, who of their own accord greedily catched at the opportunity of being his readers, . . . others, of younger years, sent by their parents to the same end, yet, excusing only the eldest by reason of her bodily deformity and difficult utterance of speech (which, to say truth, I doubt was the principal cause of excusing her), the other two were condemned to the perform- ance of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse : viz. the Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, Spanish, and French." That young girls could have been trained to read intelligibly languages of which they did not, as Phillips declares, understand a word, is almost beyond belief ; but whether literally true or not, the statement implies a sternness and a length of discipline gruesome to imagine. Rebellion on their part was natural and inevitable, but before the miserable details of their growing aversion to their father, their con- spiring with the servants in petty pilf erings from his purse, their making away with his books, the remark of one of them, on hearing of her father's third marriage, that " that was no news, but, if she could hear of his death, that was something," the mind turns sick, and wonders whether, if there were another Paradise Lost to purchase, it would be worth such a price. Taking the facts as we have them, even casuistry can make of them no clean bill of conscience for the father. The girls were, it is true, the fruit of an unloving marriage ; their recalcitrancy Milton may have looked upon as a part of the grim logic of that forced " union of minds that cannot unite," and he may have found justification for his tyranny in the bitter memories of the days when he was pouring out his wrath and anguish in the tracts on divorce. The radical meanness of nature which betrays itself in their petty revenges may have served to wither affection in the bud. But such considera- tions explain, without extenuating, his attitude. His daughters remain the great blot upon his memory ; they cannot make it less than august, but they suffice to render it, from the standpoint of the simple human charities, forbidding. They remained with him for eight years longer, when they were put out to learn femi- nine handicrafts. A glimpse which we get of the youngest, Deborah, many years after, gives a comforting assurance that, however she may have failed in filial duty during her father's lifetime, she cherished a sincere affection for his memory. In 1721 she was sought out by Addison and others in the weavers' district of Spital-

�� �