the poem; and, when the Restoration came, there was danger for a time that not only the poem, but the author's life itself, might be cut short. That danger over, he was at liberty, "on evil days though fallen, and evil tongues," to prosecute his labour in obscurity and

to separate lodgers, and that she found it more difficult to let the back rooms than those to the street-front. She knew about Milton, and would have it that he composed generally in the back-attic. From the window of her own room I looked into the back-yard, and saw the wall, built by Bentham, which cut off what had once been the main part of Milton's garden. Just beyond the wall there was the top of a small conical green-leaved tree, which the landlady duly chronicled as the cotton-tree planted by Milton. Having heard of a cotton-tree, or two cotton-trees, as existing here in Hazlitt's time, I had expected something larger of the tree kind than I now saw. Beyond the tree and the wall I could not see St. James's Park, but only intervening buildings, belonging, I think, to the Barracks. After I had looked about the room a little, I descended, with the landlady as my guide, to the back-yard. It was a narrow stone-flagged space, with a water-butt in it,—so narrow that it was only by leaning back against the wall and looking upwards that I could descry Bentham's inscription to Milton, or rather the place of it, on a ledge from the back-attic. The appearance of the house at the back was better than in front, being that of a narrow, old, threestoreyed, red brick house. Twice or thrice afterwards I visited the house again, and re-inspected its interior; and, so long as it existed, I was seldom in the neighbourhood without at least standing a moment or two opposite to it, and pointing it out to any friend that might be with me. For it was the last of Milton's many London residences then known to be extant, and certainly not the least interesting of them. Here it was that he lived when he knew and served Cromwell. Here he was first totally blind. Here his first wife died, and here the three young girls she left grew up, going from room to room in more than natural awe of their blind father. Here the second wife passed with Milton the brief period of their married life. Here, finally, it was that Paradise Lost was begun in earnest. -In 1875 I became aware that, in consequence of building exigencies in the York Street neighbourhood, connected with the completion of the great new fabric of family- tenements and lodging-chambers called "The Queen Ann's Mansions," the interesting house was likely to disappear. I made what appeal I could, publicly and privately, for its preservation, if that should be found possible, in some suitably repaired and readjusted form. The exigencies of building speculation were too strong for this proposal; and the house went gradually down before the pickaxe. In October 1876, on an incidental visit to London, I found only the dismantled shell still standing; and in March 1877, as I learnt, even that was swept away. For such Londoners now, therefore, as may desire more exact information respecting the site of the house than that it was in the vicinity of the St. James's Park station of the District Railway, the best direction that can be given will be to pass along the great pile of the Queen Ann Mansions and stop at that end of the pile in York Street which is farthest from Queen Square.

comparative peace.

He had finished it, according to Aubrey, "about 3 years after the K's restauracion," ie. about 1663. If so, he had been five or six years in all engaged on the poem, and the places in which he had successively pursued the task of meditating and dictating it had been mainly these: first, Petty France, Westminster, as aforesaid, till within a few weeks of the Restoration; next, some friend's house in Bartholomew Close, West Smithfield, where he lay concealed for a while after the Restoration; then, a house in Holborn, near Red Lion Fields, whither he removed as soon as it was safe for him to do so; and, finally and more certainly, from 1661 onwards, in Jewin Street, close to that part of Aldersgate Street where he had had his house some eighteen or nineteen years before, when Paradise Lost first occurred to his thoughts. During the five or six years occupied in the composition of the poem in these places, it has also to be remembered, Milton's condition had been that of a widower. His first wife had died in 1652, in the house in Petty France, leaving him three daughters; his second wife, whom he had married in November 1656, while residing in the same house, had survived the marriage little more than a year; and his marriage with his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, did not take place till February 1662-63, when, if Aubrey's account is correct, the poem was finished, or nearly SO. It is certain, however, that, though Milton may have advanced far with the poem in Jewin Street before his third marriage, much had still to be done with the manuscript in the house in “Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields," to which he and his third wife removed shortly after their marriage (in 1663 or 1664), and which was the last of Milton's London residences, and that in which he died.1 We have an interesting glimpse of the manuscript, at any rate, as in

1 Phillips's Memoir of Milton, 1694. Respecting the site of this house there was an interesting note by the late Mr. Thomas Watts, of the British Museum, which is quoted in the Addenda to Mr. Mitford's Life of Milton, prefixed to Pickering's edition of Milton's Works. From the absence of the name " Artillery Walk" in the elaborate map of London published by Ogilby in 1677, within three years after Milton's death, Mr. Watts found the identification of the site rather difficult; but he concluded it to be on that side of the present Bunhill Row where Ogilby's map shows a single row of houses opposite one of the walls of the London Artillery Ground. Mr. Watts's conclusion, we may add, is confirmed by Aubrey's words. "He [Milton]," says Aubrey, "died in Bunhill, opposite to the Artillery-ground wall." Aubrey had been in the house both before Milton's death and after.

Milton's possession in a satisfactory state during the summer of 1665. As the Great Plague was then raging in London, and as the neighbourhood of Bunhill Fields was especially terrible, because of the existence there of a public pit, or burial-ground, into which the dead were thrown indiscriminately,1 Milton had removed from his house in Artillery Walk to a cottage at Chalfont-St.-Giles, in Buckinghamshire, which had been taken for him, at his request, by his young Quaker friend Thomas Ellwood, whose acquaintance with him had begun a year or two before in Jewin Street. Visiting Milton at Chalfont as soon as circumstances would permit, Ellwood was received in a manner of which he has left an account in his Autobiography. "After some common discourses," he says, "had passed between us, "he called for a manuscript of his; which, being brought, he "delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me and read it at my leisure, and, when I had so done, return it to him with my "judgment thereupon. When I came home, and had set myself to "read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entituled "Paradise Lost." 2 "2 The anecdote proves the existence of at least one, and most probably of more than one, complete copy (for the author would hardly lend his only copy), in the autumn of 1665; which may, accordingly, be taken as the date when the poem was considered ready for press. The delay of publication till two years after that date is easily accounted for. It was not, says Ellwood, till "the Sickness was over, and the city well cleansed, and become safely habitable again," that Milton returned to his house in Artillery Walk. Then, still farther paralysing business of all sorts, came the Great Fire of September 1666; and there were difficulties, as we have seen, about the licensing of a poem by a person of Milton's political antecedents.

Whether the time spent by Milton in the composition of Paradise Lost was five years (1658—1663) or seven or eight years (1658—

1 This "pest-field,” described vividly by Defoe in his History of the Plague of London, was the actual beginning of the Bunhill Fields Burying-ground, used so long as a place of interment by all Dissenters who objected to the English Burial Service. See Cunningham's Handbook of London, Art. Bunhill-Fields BuryingGround. Milton, when he removed to Artillery Walk, had not anticipated such a ghastly use of the neighbouring ground within so short a time.

2 Life of Thomas Ellwood (originally published 1714): Reprint of 1855,

p. 165.

1665), it is certain that he bestowed on the work all that care and labour which, on his first contemplation of such a work in his earlier manhood, he had declared would be necessary. The "industrious and select reading" then spoken of as one of the many requisites had not been omitted. Whatever else Paradise Lost may be, it is certainly one of the most learned poems in the world. In thinking of it in this character, we are to remember, first of all, that, before Milton's blindness had befallen him (middle of 1652), his mind was stored with an amount of various and exact learning such as few other men of his age possessed; so that, had he ceased then to acquire more, he would still have carried in his memory a vast resource of material out of which to build up the body of his poem. His memory must have been always very retentive; and it is probable that his blindness increased its powers. But he did not, after his blindness, cease to add to his knowledge by reading. At the very time when he was engaged on his Paradise Lost, he had several other great undertakings in progress, for which daily reading and research were necessary, even if they could have been dispensed with for the poem. He was engaged in the construction of a Body of Divinity from the Scriptures, in the completion of a History of Britain, and in the collection of materials for a new Dictionary of the Latin tongue. For works like these, as will be evident from their very nature, daily readings and researches were indispensable. It would not be difficult to prove, however, that among the labours undertaken specially for the purposes of Paradise Lost while it was in progress must have been readings in certain books of geography and Eastern travel, and in certain Rabbinical, early Christian, and mediaval commentators on the subjects of Paradise, the Angels, and the Fall. Nothing is more striking in the poem, nothing more touching, than the frequency, and, on the whole, the wonderful accuracy, of its references to maps. Now, whatever wealth of geographical information Milton may have carried with him into his blindness, there are evidences, I think, that he must have refreshed his recollections of this kind after his sight was gone. There are evidences in the poem itself; and, if external evidence were needed, it might be found in one of his letters to his young foreign friend, Peter Heimbach, dated Nov. 8, 1656. Here he thanks Heimbach for sending him information which he had desired as to the price of a great Atlas, requests further information as to the size of the work, and as to the comparative accuracy of two

editions of it, and jests rather mournfully on the apparent absurdity of the fact that a blind man should be so anxious to obtain a set of maps, and willing to give so much for them.1 In another letter, also to a foreign friend (March 24, 1656-57), there are inquiries about copies of some volumes of the Byzantine Historians which he wants for his library. In short, for Paradise Lost, as well as for the prose labours carried on along with it, there must have been abundance of reading; and, remembering to what a stock of prior learning, possessed before his blindness, all such increments were added, we need have no wonder at the appearance now presented by the poem. To say merely that it is a most learned poem, the poem of a mind full of miscellaneous lore wherewith a grand imaginative faculty might work, is not enough. Original as the poem is, original in its entire conception, and in every portion and passage, it is yet full of flakes,—we can express it no otherwise,-full of flakes from all that is greatest in preceding literature, ancient or modern. This is what all the commentators have observed, and what their labours in collecting parallel passages from other poets and prose-writers have served more and more to illustrate. Trivial as have been the results of those labours in many cases, certain as it is that often, where a parallelism has been produced by Hume, Newton, Todd, or others, Milton can have had no thought of such a thing,—it is yet true that he must often have knowingly recalled a passage or passages of previous authorship, and fused them into his own language. In the first place, Paradise Lost is permeated from beginning to end with citations from the Bible. Milton must have had the Bible almost entirely by heart. Not only are some passages of his poem, where he is keeping close to the Bible as his authority, intentional coagulations of dispersed Scriptural texts; but it is possible again and again, throughout the rest, to detect the flash, through his noblest language, of some suggestion from the Psalms, the Prophets, the Gospels, or the Apocalypse. So, though in a less degree, with Homer, the Greek Tragedians (among whom Euripides was a special favourite of his), Plato, Demosthenes, and the Greek classics generally. So with Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, and the other Latins. So with the Italian writers whom he knew so well,Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and others now less remembered. 1 Epistola Familiares, printed 1674. 2 Epist. Fam. “Emerico Bigotio."