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Anglesey. We hear more vaguely from Phillips of still "others of the nobility" who used now to pay their respects to the blind poet in his house in Bunhill, and were probably less welcome there than such homelier friends of older date as Dr. Nathan Paget, Cyriack Skinner, and the ever-faithful Andrew Marvell.

Of Milton's habits, in his house near Bunhill Fields, through the last ten years of his life, we have pretty distinct accounts from various persons, as follows:- - He used to get up very early, generally at four o'clock in summer and five in winter. After having a chapter or two of the Hebrew Bible read to him, he worked, first in meditation by himself, and then, after breakfast, by dictation to his amanuensis for the time being, interspersed with farther readings to him from the books he wanted to consult, till near his mid-day dinner. A good part of the afternoon was then given to walking in the garden (and a garden of some kind had been always a requisite with him), or to playing on the organ, and singing, or hearing his wife sing, within doors. His wife, he said, had a good voice, but no ear. Later in the afternoon he resumed work; but about six o'clock he was ready to receive evening visitors, and to talk with them till about eight, when there was a supper of "olives or some light thing." He was very temperate at meals, drinking very little "wine or strong liquors of any kind"; but his conversation at dinner and supper was very pleasant and cheerful, with a tendency to the satirical. This humour for satire was connected by some of his hearers with his strong way of pronouncing the letter r: "litera canina, the dogletter, the certain sign of a satirical wit," as Dryden said to Aubrey when they were talking of this personal trait of Milton. After supper, when left to himself, he smoked his pipe and drank a glass of water before going to bed; which was usually at nine o'clock. He attended no church, and belonged to no communion; nor had he any regular prayers in his family, having some principle of his own on that subject which his friends did not understand. His favourite attitude in dictating was sitting somewhat aslant in an elbow-chair, with his leg thrown over one of the arms. He would dictate his verses, thirty or forty at a time, to any one that happened to be at hand; but his two younger daughters, Mary and Deborah, whom he had by this time

perfected in the art of reading to him in all languages without understanding what they read, had more than their share in such daily drudgery with him over his books. His poetical vein, Phillips tells us, flowed most happily “from the autumnal equinox to the vernal," i.e. from the end of September to the end of March, -so that, with all his exertions through the other half of the year, he was never so well satisfied with the results. His poor health, and frequent headaches and other pains, were another interference with his work, but less than might have been supposed. Gout was his most confirmed ailment, and it had begun to stiffen his hands.

As Dryden was appointed to the Laureateship in 1670, in succession to Davenant, who had died in 1668, it was an odd fact, at which Dryden would have been the first to smile, that he could count Milton for a time among his literary subjects. The last four or five years of Milton's life were the first four or five of Dryden's Laureateship, and they include the following interesting series of publications by Milton :-Accedence Commenc'd Grammar, a small Compendium of Latin Grammar in English, 1669; History of Britain to the Conquest, with his portrait by Faithorne prefixed, 1670; Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes together, 1671; Latin treatise on Logic, according to the system of Ramus, entitled "Artis Logica Plenior Institutio, ad Petri Rami Methodum Concinnata," 1672 (probably an old performance lying among his MSS.); an English tract Of true Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what best means may be used against the growth of Popery," 1673 (a very mild tract put forth in the midst of a "No Popery excitement, when Milton thought he might again be heard on a political topic); the Second Edition of his Minor Poems, 1673; the Second Edition of Paradise Lost, 1674; a translation of Letters Patent for the Election of John III. [Sobieski], King of Poland, 1674; his Epistolæ Familiares, with his juvenile Prolusiones Oratoria at Cambridge added, 1674. There is evidence in the number of these publications, and in the nature of some of them, that Milton's name prefixed to a book was again in some request.

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To complete our formal chronology of the Poems, we have now only to extricate from among the productions

of the ten years in Artillery Walk the following separ ately:

PARADISE LOST, 1667. Re-edited 1674.

Two Scraps of translated Verse from Geoffrey of Monmouth in History of Britain (annexed now to the Minor English Poems). 1670. PARADISE REGAINED. 1671.

SAMSON AGONISTES. 1671.

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During the last four or five years of Milton's life his three daughters had ceased to reside with him. In or about 1669, the eldest being then twenty-three years of age and the youngest seventeen, they had all, by what seems to have been a really judicious arrangement of their stepmother, been sent out, at their father's expense, "to learn some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture that are proper for women to learn, particularly embroideries in gold and silver." From that time, therefore, Milton and his wife Elizabeth had been by themselves in the house near Bunhill Fields, with one maid-servant. It was probably the calmest time in Milton's life for many a day. Our best glimpse of him in those closing years is from the Notes of the painter Jonathan Richardson, published in 1734. "I have heard many years since," says Richardson, that he used to sit in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, without Moorgate, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air, and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts as well as quality; and very lately I had the good fortune to have another picture of him from an aged clergyman of Dorsetshire, Dr. Wright. He found him in a small house, he thinks but one room on a floor. In that up one pair of stairs, which was hung with a rusty green, he found John Milton sitting in an elbow chair, black clothes, and neat enough; pale but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk-stones. Among other discourse he expressed himself to this purpose,-that, was he free from the pain this gave him, his blindness would be tolerable." A day soon came when the slight figure in coarse grey was no more to be seen by the inhabitants of the obscure neighbourhood. He died peacefully, of what was called "gout struck in," on Sunday, Nov. 8, 1674, aged sixty-five years and eleven months; and he was buried, Nov. 12, beside his father, in the church

of St. Giles, Cripplegate, attended to the grave by "all his learned and great friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the vulgar." Andrew Marvell, who may have been among the mourners, promised Aubrey to write some account of Milton to be sent to Anthony Wood for his Fasti Oxonienses; but, Marvell having died in 1678, without having fulfilled the promise, Aubrey himself collected what information he could from Milton's widow, his brother, the elder Phillips, and others.

POSTHUMOUS DETAILS.

Milton, before his death, estimated his estate at about £1000 in money, besides household goods. Actually about £900 in money (worth about £2700 now) was the sum at once realised. It was the subject of litigation between the widow and the three daughters. A few months before his death, Milton, in a conversation with his brother Christopher, then a bencher of the Inner Temple, had signified his intention as to the disposition of his property thus: "The portion due to me from Mr. Powell, my former [first] wife's father, I leave to the unkind children I had by her, having received no part of it; but my meaning is that they shall have no other benefit of my estate than the said portion and what I have besides done for them, they having been very undutiful to me. All the rest of my estate I leave to the disposal of Elizabeth, my loving wife." For the right understanding of this, it is to be explained that there was due to Milton's estate a promised marriage-portion of £1000 with his first wife, and arrears of interest on the same since 1643, and that, though there had been little prospect of a recovery of the money at Mr. Powell's death in 1647, the Powell family were now in circumstances to bear the debt, and were under obligation to do so by Mr. Powell's will. Milton's meaning, therefore, was that his daughters should have a claim on their relatives, the Powells, for the £1000 and arrears of their grandfather's money, while his widow should have the whole of his own actual estate. The daughters, however, probably with the Powells urging them,-for their grandmother, Mrs. Powell, was still alive,-disputed the "nuncupative" or word-of-mouth will of their father, alleging that they had been and were "great frequenters of the church

and good livers," and insinuating that their uncle Christopher had an interest in upholding the will, inasmuch as there was a private understanding that the widow should hand over to his children, according to a desire which the deceased had expressed, any overplus that the estate might yield above £1000. The result was that, though there was perfect evidence of the facts, it was decided (Feb. 1674-5), on technical grounds, that the widow should have two-thirds and the daughters one-third among them. The widow acquiesced, and punctually paid to the three daughters about £100 each, having about £600 left for herself. She was then thirtysix years of age, and the money would yield her a meagre annuity.

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The widow, after remaining in London till about 1681, retired to Nantwich in her native Cheshire, where she lived to as late as 1727, a pious member of a Baptist congregation, having survived her husband nearly fifty-three years. inventory of her effects at her death has been recovered, and shows that she retained to the last some trinkets that had belonged to Milton, copies of his Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and two juvenile portraits of him.- -Milton's eldest daughter, Anne, "lame, and with a defect in her speech, but with a very handsome face," married". a masterbuilder," and died in her first childbirth, the child dying also. Mary, the second daughter, never married, and was dead before 1694. Deborah, the youngest and the best, and "very like her father," had gone to Dublin, as companion to a lady, before her father's death, and married there an Abraham Clarke, described as a weaver or silk-mercer. They came to London some time between 1684 and 1688, and settled in the weaving business in Spitalfields. She lived till 1727, and was visited in her later years by Addison and others, who were much pleased with her, and whom she surprised by repeating stray lines she remembered from Homer, Euripides, and Ovid. The Princess Caroline of Wales sent her fifty guineas, and a fund was raised for her benefit. Of ten children of hers only two survived to have issue. A son, Caleb Clarke, had gone to Madras before 1703, and had died as "parish-clerk of Fort George" in 1719, leaving progeny who are supposed to have all died in India. The last trace of them is the registration at Madras, April 2, 1727, of the birth of a daughter of Abraham

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