Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/38

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��ished by the summer of 1665. In July of that year the coming of the great Plague, the most terrible which ever visited England, made it necessary for Milton to find some refuge in the country. Ellwood found a place for him, a " pretty box " in the little village of Chalfont St. Giles, only a few miles from Harefield, the scene of Arcades, and not far from Horton, where in early manhood he had spent the five happy years of his " long vacation." The country sights, which in those days he had given delighted chronicle in L' Allegro and II Penseroso, could not reach him now. Those poems belonged to a world which was shut away from him by many a tragic change besides that which had quenched his bodily vision. But he carried with him, blind and fallen on evil days, the resultant of the twenty- five intervening years of battle and sacrifice, in the mighty martial rhythms and battailous imaginings of his completed epic. Honest Ellwood was rewarded for his fidelity by being the first, so far as we know, to see Paradise Lost in its final form. He came one day to visit Milton at the little irregular cottage in sleepy Chalfont, and thus describes the incident : " After some discourse had passed be- tween us, he called for a manuscript of his ; which, being brought, he delivered to me, bidding me to take it home with me and read it at my leisure, and, when I had so done, to return it to him, with my judgment thereon. When I came home and had set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled Paradise Lost"

��VII MILTON'S LAST YEARS, 1666-1674

ALTHOUGH by February or March of 1666 the Plague had sufficiently abated to allow of a return to the house in Artillery Walk, it was not until September of the following year that Paradise Lost was published. A part of this delay was doubtless due to the great fire which raged in London from the second to the fifth of September, 1666. Among the worst sufferers were the booksellers and pub- lishers, whose shops were clustered thickly about Old St. Paul's. When the poem did appear, it was with the imprint of an obscure publisher, one Samuel Simmons. There was for a moment some question whether even under these modest auspices it was to see the light, for a passage in the first book aroused suspicions of treason in the breast of the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, M. A., whose business it became to license the manuscript. The contract for the book is still extant, showing that the author received five pounds at the time of issue, and was guaranteed a similar amount upon the exhaustion of each succeeding issue, up to the sum of twenty pounds. The first edition of 1300 copies was exhausted in eighteen months.

Milton's life-dream was fulfilled. He had accomplished the purpose which had been the secret motive of his whole conscious existence, as well as the subject of many a proud public utterance in the midst of those noises and hoarse disputes where he had felt the need of such utterance to sustain him. But he did not for

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