Such friends as did still come about him were chiefly Nonconformists of the more devout and persecuted sects, Independents, Baptists, or Quakers. Andrew Marvell, young Lawrence, Marchamont Needham, Cyriack Skinner, and the high-minded Lady Ranelagh, sister of Robert Boyle, who had been among his most frequent visitors in the house in Petty France, found their way occasionally to Jewin Street. Dr. Paget, a physician of that neighbourhood, was very intimate with him; and now and then some foreigner would appear, desiring to be introduced. Such visits to Milton by foreigners, it seems, had become customary in the time of his Secretaryship to the Commonwealth and to Cromwell. They did not like to leave London without having seen the author of the Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, and even the house in Bread Street where he had been born. Still solitude," the word which Milton himself uses, describes his present condition too truly. The house in Jewin Street must have been a small one; and, as Milton had now no official income, and had lost by the Restoration a great part of his savings, invested in Commonwealth securities, or others as bad, the economy of his household must have been very frugal. He had always a man or a boy to read to him, write to his dictation, and lead him about in his walks; one or other of his two nephews, Edward and John Phillips, now shifting for themselves in or near London by tutorship and literary hackwork, would sometimes drop in, and yield him superior help; and there were young men ready to volunteer their occasional services as amanuenses, for the privilege of his conversation, or of lessons from him. A young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, recommended to him by Dr. Paget, made his acquaintance this way in Jewin Street in 1662, valuing the privilege much, and taking a lodging near on purpose. For the management of his house and of his daily life, however, Milton had to depend on his daughters, and the dependence was a sad one. The poor girls, the eldest in her seventeenth year in 1662, the next in her fifteenth, and the youngest in her eleventh, had been growing up ill looked after, and, though one does hear of a governess, but slenderly educated. The eldest, who was lame and deformed, could not write; the other two could write but indifferently. But, though Milton can therefore hardly have employed his daughters much as amanuenses, he did exact from them

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attendance which they found irksome. When no one else was at hand, he would make them, or at least the two younger, read to him; and, by some extraordinary ingenuity in his method, or by sheer practice on their part, they came at last, it is said, to be able to read sufficiently well for his purpose in Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, and even Hebrew, without themselves understanding a word. This drill, as far as the youngest daughter was concerned, can have been little more than begun in the Jewin Street house; but there all three were already in rebellion. They "made nothing of deserting him"; 'they did combine together and counsel his maid-servant to cheat him in her marketings"; they "had made away with some of his books, and would have sold the rest to the dunghill women. Things had at last come to such a pass that, on the recommendation of Dr. Paget, Milton, Feb. 24, 1662-3, married a third wife. She was an Elizabeth Minshull, from Cheshire, a relation of Dr. Paget's, and not more than twenty-four years of age, Milton being fifty-four. A very excellent and careful wife she was to prove to him through the rest of his life. When Mary, the second daughter, heard of the intended marriage, she said "that that was no news, to hear of his wedding, but, if she could hear of his death, that was something." This, which is certified on

oath, is almost too horrible for belief.

Nothing was published by Milton during the three or four years of his residence in Holborn and in Jewin Street after the Restoration. He was busy, however, over his collections for a Latin Dictionary, over his compilation of a Latin Digest of Theology from the Bible, and especially over his Paradise Lost.

ARTILLERY WALK, BUNHILL FIELDS.

1664-1674: atat. 56—66.

Not long after Milton's third marriage (probably in 1664) he left Jewin Street for what was to be the last of all his London houses. It was in "Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields," i. e., as has been ascertained with some trouble, in that part of the present Bunhill Row where there is now a clump of newer houses "to the left of the passen

ger who turns northward from Chiswell Street towards St. Luke's Hospital and Peerless Pool." It was opposite to the wall of the Artillery Ground, or exercising-place of the old London Trained Bands; and hence the name. Bunhill Fields Burying Ground, long the place of sepulture for London Dissenters, and where people now go to see the tombs of Bunyan, Defoe, and others, did not exist when Milton domiciled himself in the neighbourhood. The street in which he lived was less a street than a single row of houses, with gardens behind them, lining a passage which led, by the side of the Artillery Ground Wall, from the denser northern outskirts of the city to the open Bunhill Fields and the country towards Newington. On the whole, the remove, though it did not take him far from his former residence, was into greater privacy and obscurity. The three daughters still accompanied him, better managed now that the third wife had the charge of the housekeeping, but naturally in warfare with her.

Before Milton had been two years in the house in Artillery Walk, Paradise Lost had been completed. For, when the Great Plague broke out in London in 1665, and Milton (perhaps driven from his house by the fact that Bunhill Fields had been chosen as a "pest-field" where the dead could be buried in pits) went to spend the summer in a cottage which Ellwood had taken for him at Chalfont-St.-Giles, Buckinghamshire, he took the finished manuscript with him. See the proof in the Introduction to Par. Lost, Section II. That country-cottage, therefore, has to be remembered, in this exact place, and with this interesting association, as one of Milton's residences. It still exists, a very small cottage indeed, with a very small garden, standing on the slope of the public road at one end of the quiet old village of Chalfont, about twenty-three miles from London; and, when it was in good tending and there were honeysuckles about it, the summer air in its tiny rooms, with the lattices open, may have been pleasant. The old lattices, with their lozenges of glass set in lead, still remained when I was last there, and there were other relics of its original condition. When I first saw it, the cottage, or at least its main portion, was empty and to let, but in my last visit I found it again tenanted.

Back in London in 1666, Milton may have been prevented

from publishing his Paradise Lost in that "annus mirabilis " by the Great Fire. The fire did not reach indeed so far north as his purlieu; but it left a vast space of the city in ruins, with his native Bread Street in the very heart of the burnt space. From that date there could be no more visits of admiring foreigners to the old "Spread Eagle" where he had been born; but all his other London residences remained. In 1667, the year after the Fire, the due license having been obtained and other arrangements made (see the particulars in the Introduction to Par. Lost, Section I.), the epic was published. The publication was an event of some consequence to Milton personally and socially. It threw between him and all that past part of his life which lay under public obloquy the atonement of a great Poem. Whatever he had been, was he not now the author of Paradise Lost? Gradually, as the poem was read, though here and there some of the meaner critics persisted in jeers and sarcasms, this was the feeling among all the abler leaders of the Restoration Literature itself. "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too," is reported to have been Dryden's criticism; and it was probably after Dryden had read the poem and said this that he first sought out Milton,—unless, indeed, Dryden had known Milton already from as far back as 1657, when there is proof that Dryden was doing work of some clerkly kind for Oliver's secretary and Milton's brother-official, Thurloe, and receiving payment for the same. It was probably after the fame of Paradise Lost was established that the straggling of admiring visitors, especially of foreigners, to Milton's house, which even the Restoration had not quite stopped, swelled out again into that conflux of the learned about him, "much more than he did desire," of which we hear from Aubrey. Certain it is that Dryden, not nearly yet at his best in the world, but the manliest and greatest figure already in the whole society of the Restoration wits, had contracted a profound reverence for the blind Republican, from which he never swerved, and to which on every possible occasion he gave the most generous expression. Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, was another of Milton's frequent literary visitors after his Paradise Lost had made him again a famous personage; and it is probably from the same time that we are to date the intimacy between Milton and so eminent a Restoration statesman as the Earl of

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. 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

He