of the Act of Indemnity, Milton was not mentioned for exception on any ground or to any extent whatsoever. From the 29th of August 1660, therefore, he was legally a free man, the Act of Indemnity protecting every person not specially named in itself for exception, and therefore quashing the previous procedure of the Commons against Milton. The manner of his escape suggests curious inquiries. It was effected by first black-marking him most strongly by a Parliamentary order for special prosecution and punishment, and then ignoring him altogether in a General Bill passing through the Parliament. It is worthy of note also that the two publications of his brought before the House of Commons and the country for incrimination were his Eikonoklastes and Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, while his recent Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth and his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,—by the very date of which last, and by its terrible title, if read in full, he was legally implicated in the Regicide before the fact, -were somehow kept out of sight. All in all, the conclusion is inevitable that there must have been a very powerful combination of influences in favour of Milton and very cautious and dexterous Parliamentary management of his case. The tradition that Davenant exerted himself in Milton's behalf, in return for a similar service done by Milton to Davenant under the Commonwealth, is credible enough; but it was on the Parliament that Milton's fate depended, and Davenant was not in the Parliament. Andrew Marvell, who was in the Parliament, must have done all he could; but Marvell was not an important member. The same tradition that attributes so much to Davenant mentions Monk's brother-in-law Sir Thomas Clarges, and Monk's intimate friend and follower Sir William Morrice, the new Secretary of State, both of them very important members of the Commons House, and both very active in the conduct of the Indemnity Bill through that House, as having taken up Milton's case warmly. If we add Mr. Arthur Annesley, also a most important member, who had been Monk's chief colleague in the preliminaries to the Restoration, and who is found afterwards, under his higher title of Earl of Anglesey, greatly admiring Milton and much in his society, the mystery of Milton's impunity so far as the Commons were concerned, and of the management necessary to secure that impunity in a House in which Prynne and other ruthless enemies of Milton were eagerly on the watch, will be considerably diminished. It has to be remembered, however, that the Indemnity Bill had to pass through the Lords, with the strictest revision by that House of every arrangement made by the Commons, and so that, if Chancellor Hyde, as Prime Minister for Charles, or if Charles himself, had lifted a finger against Milton, his escape would have been impossible. There is no proof of any interference by either the King or the Chancellor, for or against; but, if the propriety of bringing Milton to punishment was ever discussed in any meeting of Charles's Privy Council, the conclusion must have been "It is not worth while : let the blind blackguard live." From and after August 29th, 1660, we repeat, Milton was legally a free man. Emerging from his concealment in Bartholomew Close, he was beginning to be led about in the streets again, when, by some mistake, or by malice on the part of some one, he was arrested and taken into custody. This seems to have been either in September 1660, in which month there were several public burnings of his Eikonoklastes and Defensio pro Populo Anglicano by the hands of the hangman in London and elsewhere, as by the recent proclamation, or in October, which was the month of the executions of the condemned Regicides at Charing Cross and Tyburn. It is probable that the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons, who had fees to expect from his prisoners, thought himself still entitled to act on the order of the Commons of the preceding 16th of June for the arrest of Milton, notwithstanding the intervening Bill of Indemnity. At all events, the Journals of the House of Commons record that, on Saturday the 15th of December 1660, the Sergeant-at-Arms was ordered to release Mr. Milton forthwith on payment of his fees, and that, on the following Monday, December 17th, on a complaint from Mr. Milton that the fees demanded by the Sergeantat-Arms were exorbitant, the matter was referred to the Committee of Privileges, with powers to call Mr. Milton and the Sergeant-at-Arms before them and settle the dispute. From another authority we learn that the fees demanded were £150, worth about £500 now, and that the member who brought Milton's complaint before the House was Mr. Andrew Marvell. HOLBORN AGAIN, AND JEWIN STREET. 1660-1664: aætat. 52-56. For some little time after Milton's complete release he lived in Holborn, near what is now Red Lion Square, on the opposite side of the great Holborn thoroughfare from that which contained his former house in the same thoroughfare. As soon as possible, however, he removed to his old and favourite Aldersgate Street vicinity, having taken a house in Jewin Street, which goes off from Aldersgate Street on the same side as Barbican, but nearer to St. Martin's-leGrand than either Barbican or the site of Milton's former Aldersgate Street house. If this Jewin Street house exists, it has not been identified. It was from those two houses, in Holborn and in Jewin Street, that Milton witnessed, or rather heard of, all those miscellaneous events and proceedings of the Hyde or Clarendon administration which were to undo, as far as was possible, the achievements of the preceding twenty years, and which are comprised now in English Histories in the single phrase The Restoration. What had been the united Commonwealth was again broken into its three parts, England, Scotland, and Ireland; and in each the partisans of the late system found themselves disgraced and degraded, and the regulation of affairs passed into the hands of Cavaliers returned from exile, and of such renegades or new men as these drew in their train. In England Episcopacy was restored, with the Liturgy, and all else that belonged to the old Anglican Church; two thousand Presbyterian and Independent or Baptist ministers were ejected from their livings by the Act of Uniformity; and by other Acts civil penalties and disadvantages, gradually more and more excruciating, were attached to every profession of Dissent. In Scotland all acts passed since 1633 were repealed; the Kirk was forced back into Prelacy, with Archbishop Sharp at its head; and there began, under a Privy Council in Edinburgh the chiefs of which are said by Burnet to have been generally drunk, those ruthless barbarities against the Presbyterians which are still remembered as "The Persecutions." In Ireland there were measures to correspond. With this universal political reaction, there was a change in public morals and manners, Round a Court which set an example of shamelessness, London and the general English world were whirled, by a rebound from the extreme Puritan strictness that had been in fashion, into an ostentatious revelry in Anti-Puritanism. Swearing, swaggering, and an affectation of profligacy, were the proofs of a proper abhorrence of the cant of the lately ruling Saints, and a proper loyalty to the existing powers. The new political system and the new social spirit were faithfully represented in a new Literature. Much, indeed, that had flourished through the late twenty years of Puritan ascendency still lingered and asserted itself. Veterans like Hobbes and Sanderson, with Hacket, Bramhall, Izaak Walton, Howell, Browne of Norwich, Jeremy Taylor, Dr. Henry More, and others, among the graver Anglican prosewriters who had survived from the reign of Charles I. and the Commonwealth, and Shirley, Herrick, Waller, Davenant, Denham, Cowley, Henry Vaughan, and others, surviving from among the poets of the same period, were very much their former selves, only rejoicing in the restored Royalty; Puritan theologians and writers of various sorts, such as Goodwin, Calamy, Baxter, and Owen, still managed to live and write, though obliged to conform carefully to the changed conditions; and the specific tendency to mathematical and physical science which had already grouped together such men as Wilkins, Wallis, Petty, Boyle, and Hooke, through the Commonwealth and Protectorate, now only displayed itself more signally in the institution of the Royal Society by royal authority (1662). There was, however, a special new Literature, belonging properly to the Restoration itself, and exhibiting all the characteristics of its origin. While there was an immediate paralysis of Newspaper Literature, and of all that cognate Pamphlet Literature, or Literature of Public Questions, which had been so vigorous and various through the time of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth,-while the repression of all free Literature of this kind by Restoration censorship, and the reduction of the Newspaper and Pamphlet press to a wretched authorised minimum under the superintendence of such government licensers and police-agents as Birkenhead and L'Estrange, actually diminished the total quantity of annual book-production in England to about a third of what it had lately been, a proportion of the energy thus repressed found The exercise in forms which the Restoration did foster. Literature of the Restoration, properly so called, had a character of its own. To the core it was Anti-Puritan, reactionary, unearnest. Never in English literary history had there been such a run of talent to the comic, the jocose, the witty. The revived Drama of the re-opened theatres, to which people rushed now with an avidity all the keener for the disuse of that amusement for nearly eighteen years, consisted chiefly of comedies and farces, in which wit was desirable, but indecency indispensable. New things called tragedies there were, but of such texture and quality that Time has refused to remember them. For what of Tragedy was wanted, reproduction of Elizabethan pieces was found best in the age itself, on the stage as elsewhere, the comic faculty was paramount. Off the stage it showed itself in songs, stories, satires, essays, character-sketches, and burlesques. Even the forms and mechanisms of English Literature were changed. The cavaliers and courtiers had brought back from their exile acquired French tastes in literature, as in other matters. The most remarkable experiments made in Tragedy were the so-called Heroic Plays, or stilted tragedies of Rhymed Declamation, by the Earl of Orrery and others, voted to be after the manner of Corneille; the syntax of English prose was made neater and easier than it had been, partly by French example; and the English metrical ear was tuned by the same influence to stricter and more mechanical rhythms.-Over this rising Popular Literature of the Restoration the nominal president was Davenant, the reinstated Laureate, really one of the best of his time: but the robust Dryden was making his way to the supremacy in the drama and in all other departments, with Howards, Killigrews, Wilsons, Buckinghams, Lacys, Ethereges, Buckhursts, and Sedleys about him, and Wycherleys, Shadwells, and others appearing on the horizon. Butler's Hudibras was out, and Charles and his courtiers were laughing over that immortal burlesque. On the verge of this new world of the Restoration, dis owning it and disowned by it, the blind Milton lived, "On evil days now fallen, and evil tongues, In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, |