able and noble man. He was therefore let alone; and his pamphlets, circulating in English society, then in a ferment of new ideas of all kinds, did make some converts, so that Miltonists or Divorcers came to be recognised as one of the Sects of the time. Thus, though Milton had been the friend and adviser of the five Smectymnuans who were now leading Presbyterians in the Westminster Assembly, though he had himself in his Anti-Episcopal pamphlets advocated what was substantially a Presbyterian constitution for the Church of England, and though, with hundreds of thousands of other Englishmen, he had signed the Solemn League and Covenant and welcomed the Scots, he had, by a natural course of events, been led to repudiate utterly the Presbyterians, the Scots, and their principles, and to regard them as narrow-minded and pragmatical men, enemies to English freedom.

Phillips believes that his uncle was so resolute in his Divorce views that he was prepared to put them in practice and risk the consequences. In or before 1645 there were proposals of marriage, Phillips had heard, to a Miss Davis, though that lady was naturally reluctant. Unexpectedly, however, and just at the crisis, the wife reappeared. The shattering of the King's fortunes at Naseby had led Mr. and Mrs. Powell of Forest-hill to reconsider the state of affairs, with the conclusion that it would be better for their daughter to go back to her husband. Arrangements having been made, she came to London; Milton was entrapped into an interview with her; and a reconciliation was effected. This was in July or August 1645, after two years of separation, and exactly at the time when Milton, having had pressing applications to receive more pupils than the Aldersgate Street house could accommodate, had taken a larger house in the same neighbourhood.

How completely Milton had desisted from Poetry during his five years in Aldersgate Street appears from the extreme slenderness of the list of his poetical pieces belonging to this period :

:

Sonnet "When the Assault was intended to the City" (Sonnet VIII.) 1642.

Sonnet to a Lady (Sonnet IX.) 1644.

Sonnet "To the Lady Margaret Ley" (Sonnet x.) 1644.

Translated Scraps from Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Horace, Sophocles, and Euripides, in the Prose Pamphlets (now appended to the Minor English Poems).

1641-1645.

Philosophus ad Regem Quendam (Greek Verses).

BARBICAN, LONDON.

1645-1647 ætat. 37-39.

The house to which Milton removed was in the street called Barbican, going off from Aldersgate Street at right angles, and within a walk of two or three minutes from his former house. As you went from Aldersgate Street it was on the right side of Barbican. It existed entire till the other day, when one of the new city railways was cut through that neighbourhood. Milton, with his wife, his father, the two nephews, and other pupils, entered the house, as I calculate, in September 1645, and it was to be his house for two years.

One of the first incidents after the removal to Barbican was the publication by the bookseller Moseley of the First or 1645 edition of Milton's Minor Poems (see General Introduction to Minor Poems). Milton evidently attached some importance to the appearance of the little volume at that particular time. It would remind people that he was not merely a controversial prose-writer, but something more. Nor was this unnecessary. Although he wrote no more upon Divorce, his opinions on the subject were unchanged, and the infamy with the orthodox brought upon him by his past Divorce Pamphlets still pursued him. The little volume of Poems might do something to counteract such unfavourable judgments. Not but that Milton had many friends whose admiration and respect for him were undisturbed, if indeed they were not enhanced, by the boldness of his opinions. Such were those, some of them relatives of his own, and others of considerable rank in London society, who accounted it a favour that he should receive their sons or nephews as his pupils. The two years in Barbican, we learn from Phillips, were his busiest time in pedagogy. The house seems to have been, in fact, a small private academy, in which Milton carried out, as far as he could with about a dozen day-scholars and boarders, the plan of education explained in his tract to Hartlib, and especially his method for expeditiously acquiring the Latin tongue, and at the same time a great deal of useful knowledge, by readings in a course of books different from those usually read in schools.

The King's cause having been desperate since Naseby, he at length left Oxford in disguise, to avoid being taken there

by the New-Model army of English Independents, and surrendered himself to the Scottish auxiliaries (May 1646), who immediately withdrew with him to Newcastle. The Civil War was then over, and the garrisons that still held out for the King yielded one by one. Oxford surrendered to Fairfax in June 1646; and Milton's father-in-law Mr. Powell, who had been shut up in that city, availed himself of the Articles of Surrender, and came to London, with his wife and several of their children. Through losses in the Civil War and sequestration of their small remaining property, they were in a very poor condition, and were glad of the shelter of Milton's house. Here Mr. Powell died January 1, 1646-7, leaving his affairs in sad confusion. Two months and a half afterwards Milton's own father died. He was buried in the Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, March 15, 1646-7. The birth of Milton's first child, a daughter named Anne, had preceded these deaths by a few months (July 29, 1646). After the death of Milton's father, Mrs. Powell and her children removed from the house in Barbican to some other part of London, Milton making her an allowance out of a small property in Oxfordshire of which he took legal possession as one of the creditors of his late father-in-law. Mrs. Powell and her affairs were to cause him a good deal of trouble, at intervals, for the next seven years.

The possession of the King by the Scots at Newcastle had greatly complicated for a time the political struggle between the English Presbyterians and the English Independents. The Presbyterians wanted to treat with him in such a way as to get rid of the Army of Sectaries which the Civil War had created, and establish, after all, a strict and universal system of Presbytery in England, without any toleration. The Independents, on the other hand, if they were to treat with him at all, wanted to make terms that should prevent such a universal Presbyterian domination, and secure religious liberty for themselves and the sects. Thinking that the possession of him by the Scots gave the Presbyterians the advantage, the Independents and the Army were for a time furious against the Scots, and threatened to chase them out of England and take Charles from them by force. At length, however, Charles refusing to take the Covenant and consent to complete Presbytery, which were the only terms on which the Scots would stand by him, they accepted the arrears due

to them from the English, and retired into Scotland, leaving the King to the custody of the English Parliament (January 1646-7). Confined by the Parliament at Holmby House in Northamptonshire, and still refusing to come to any definite treaty on the basis of nineteen Propositions which had been sent to him, Charles then watched the chances in his favour arising out of the contest between the Presbyterians and the Independents on the question whether the Army should be disbanded. The Presbyterians, as the war was over, and the expense of the army was great, insisted that it should; but the Army itself refused to be disbanded, and the Independents abetted them, on the ground, among others, that there would be no security then for a right settlement with the King or for Liberty of Conscience in England. So violent grew the dispute that at last the Army disowned Parliamentary authority, moved about in revolt, and seized the King at Holmby (June 1647), with a view to come to an understanding with him in their own way. The indignation among the Presbyterians was then extreme; and the Londoners, who were in the main zealous for Presbyterian uniformity, rose in tumult, stormed the Houses of Parliament, and tried to coerce them into a conflict with the Army for its forcible disbandment and the rescue of the King. But the excitement was brief. Fairfax marched the Army into London; the tumults were quietly suppressed; a few of the leading Presbyterians in Parliament, whom the Army regarded as its chief enemies, were expelled from their seats; and the Parliament and the Army fraternised, and agreed to forget their differences (Aug. 1647).——The Army in fact, had assumed the political mastery of England. It was a strange crisis for the country, but for the King it brought chances which were the best he ever had. Since the Army had taken him in charge they had treated him very generously, permitting him to reside where he liked, and pay visits and receive visits freely, only within military bounds. And now, restored to his own Palace of Hampton Court, with his episcopal chaplains and others of his old courtiers about him, he was more like a sovereign again than a prisoner, the Army only guarding him, or massed in his near vicinity, while their chiefs, Fairfax, Cromwell, and Ireton, held interviews with him, and tried to bring him to a compact. The terms they offered were more liberal than those of the Presbyterians. They were anxious to try the experiment of

a restored Royalty with strong constitutional safeguards, and with an arrangement on the Church question which, while it should not disturb the Presbyterian establishment so far as it had been already set up, should save Charles's personal scruples in religion as much as possible, and guarantee to all non-Presbyterians a general liberty of belief and worship.

No man in England was more interested in all this than Milton in Barbican. Not only had a general system of Presbyterian Church-government been voted for England; but the system was by this time in actual operation in London and in Lancashire. Each London parish had its parochial Church Court; the parishes had been grouped into "classes" or Presbyteries, each with its Presbyterial Court; nay, the First Provincial Synod of all London had actually met (May 1647). Now, if this system had been as strict practically as it ought to have been by the theory of those who had set it up and those who administered it, Milton and all men like him would have fared rather badly. A marked heretic and sectary, whose name stood prominently in the black list again and again published by the London Presbyterians, he would have been called to account by the Church Courts and remitted by them to the Civil. Only the fact that the Presbytery set up was imperfect and tentative, with no real powers as yet over any but its voluntary adherents, prevented such consequences to Milton. Little wonder, then, that he followed with interest the movements of those whose activity stood between him and that Presbyterian domination which would have made such consequences inevitable. Little wonder that he approved heartily of all the Army had done, and regarded their march into London and seizure of the political mastery in August 1647 as not only a deliverance for England, but also a protection for himself.

With the exception of one Latin Familiar Epistle, dated April 1647, and addressed to his well-remembered friend, Carlo Dati of Florence, we can assign to Milton's two years in Barbican only the following pieces of writing :

In Effigiei ejus Sculptorem (Greek Verses). 1645.

Sonnet "On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises" (Sonnet XI.) 1645.

Sonnet "On the Same" (Sonnet XII.) 1645.

Sonnet "To Mr. Henry Lawes on his Airs" (Sonnet XIII.) 1646.