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his daughters than any mere repugnance to the drudgery of reading for him, or inability to agree with their stepmother. A few months before his death, i.e. in July 1674, his daughters having then been four or five years apart from him, he made this solemn declaration as to the mode in which he wished his property to be disposed of: "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, 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 residue "of my estate I leave to disposal of Elizabeth, my loving wife." This declaration was made, in the house in Artillery Walk, to Milton's brother, Christopher Milton, then a bencher of the Inner Temple (afterwards Sir Christopher Milton, and a judge), the occasion being a visit of Christopher to his brother to take leave of him before going to Ipswich for his usual autumn vacation. After Milton's death, Christopher, believing that his brother had intended him to take the foregoing as his "nuncupative" or word-of-mouth will, in case they should not meet again, did draw it up on paper in the interest of the widow. The daughters contested it; and the records of the proceedings are still extant, including the examinations of Christopher Milton, and of two sisters, Mary Fisher and Elizabeth Fisher, who had been in Milton's service in the last year of his life. From their testimonies it appeared that the unpaid marriage portion of Milton's wife, which he had left to his three daughters, amounted to 1000, besides interest on the same for about twenty years, and that the members of the Powell family, from whom the money was to come, were well able to pay it, and were under instructions to do so by the first Mr. Powell's will. If this was true, then £1000 and twenty years' interest would not have been an unfair provision for the daughters, after what Milton had "besides done for them": by which seems to be meant the expense he had been at in getting them taught embroidery in gold and silver, etc., and perhaps in boarding them for some time while they were learning those arts after they had left his house. For the estimated value of the whole residue that would come to the widow was £1000; or, if it exceeded that sum, then,— as the widow had informed Christopher Milton, though he had heard nothing of it from the deceased himself,-Milton had privately expressed a wish to her that she should give the overplus to Chris

topher Milton's children. It also came out in the evidence of all the three witnesses that Milton had often spoken of the undutifulness of his children. "As touching deceased's displeasure with them," was their uncle Christopher's evidence, "he only heard him say, at the "time of declaring his will, that they were undutiful and unkind to "him, not expressing any particulars; but in former times he hath "heard him complain that they were careless of him being blind, and "made nothing of deserting him." Elizabeth Fisher's evidence, given apparently without any acrimony, contains a passage more startling. "This respondent hath heard the deceased declare his "displeasure against the parties ministrant, his children; and, parti"cularly, the deceased declared to this respondent that, a little before "he was married to Elizabeth Milton, his now relict, a former "maid-servant of his told Mary, one of the deceased's daughters, and one of the ministrants, that she heard the deceased was to be married; to which the said Mary replied to the said maid-servant "that that was no news, to hear of his wedding, but, if she could hear "of his death, that was something: and [deceased] further told this "respondent that all his said children did combine together and "counsel his maid-servant to cheat him, the deceased, in her market

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ings, and that his said children had made away some of his books, "and would have sold the rest of his books to the dunghill-women." This is too terrible. It carries us back, it will be noted, to the period before Milton's third marriage and the residence in Artillery Walk, and gives us a glimpse of the state of things in that house in Jewin Street where Milton resided between 1661 and 1663, and where probably a large portion of Paradise Lost grew into completion. We see the blind man in his chamber there, meditating his lofty theme, and his three daughters, when they were not with him, gadding with the servants below, and left to their own devices. Is it to be wondered at that Milton's old friend, Dr. Paget of Coleman Street, thought he was doing a service to him, and to the girls too, when he recommended to him a third wife in the person of the careful, tidy, kindly, still young, and apparently not unhandsome Elizabeth Minshull, from the neighbourhood of Nantwich in Cheshire? She was Dr. Paget's own kinswoman, it seems; but it was a service. However difficult it may have been for the daughters, such as they were, to get on with her, she was a thoroughly conscientious wife to Milton, and to her was owing the comparative

comfort of his later years. Nor must we forget the excuse there was for the daughters themselves. They had grown up, young motherless children, under the charge of a noble but austere father, less considerate of their peculiar wants than he ought to have been even in his blindness, and the best of whose theories in any case was perhaps not that which he entertained respecting the proper training for girls. In behalf of at least one of them, also, the date of that miserable state of things of which we have a glimpse in Jewin Street has to be recollected. Anne, the eldest daughter, was over sixteen years of age at the time, and therefore responsible; Mary, of whom the worst story is told, was over fourteen; but Deborah, the youngest, was scarcely eleven, and therefore wholly at the bidding of her sisters. One would fain exempt this youngest daughter,—who was, we are told, her father's favourite, and who lived to speak of him with fond enthusiasm when she was an old woman, and people visited her on his account,—from the charge of positive undutifulness to him in his lifetime.1

1 The reader may like to have, in a note, a more detailed summary than that given in our General Memoir of what is known of the subsequent histories of Milton's widow and his three daughters. The following is the best condensation of particulars I can make from Aubrey, Phillips, Toland, the Nuncupative Will proceedings, Birch, Newton, Todd, Mr. Marsh's Milton's Papers, Mr. Hunter's Milton Gleanings, an Article in the Edinburgh Review, No. 50, and other Sources:- -THE WIDOW. She was not quite thirty-six years of age at her husband's death. The issue of her suit in the matter of Milton's nuncupative will was that the will was set aside by the Court, not on account of any discredit of the evidence, but because all the formalities required in nuncupative wills had not been complied with. Instead of a probate of the will, the widow therefore received (Feb. 25, 1674-5) administration of all her late husband's property and rights in the ordinary way. By custom, she was entitled herself to two-thirds,— one-third as widow, and one-third as administratrix,-the remaining third being due to the daughters. She seems to have been prompt and considerate in settling matters according to this arrangement. Before the letter of administration was granted, she had given security to the two elder daughters for the payment to each of £100, to be invested for their benefit in life-annuities, under the care of their uncles, Christopher Milton and Richard Powell: taking the release of the two daughters for the same, as, with one specified exception, a full discharge of all their claims. By the 27th of March following, she had handed over to the youngest daughter her £100, together with "several goods": taking her release and her husband's for all their claims, with one exception. The exception in each case seems to have related to the possibility of the subsequent coming-in of debts to Milton not yet realised, the marriage-portion of £1000 from the Powells, for example; in which case the daughters reserved a right beyond the

We are now prepared to understand how far Milton's daughters are likely to have been the amanuenses to whom he dictated his £100. On the assumption, however, that £100 was the just share of each of the daughters in the existing property, the total value of that property was £900, and the widow's share £600. On this, with whatever else she had of her own, the widow lived in London, and probably in the house near Bunhill Fields, for some years longer. Aubrey continued to visit her, and obtained from her some of the most interesting particulars about Milton preserved in his notes. He describes her, from this acquaintance with her, as "a gent. person, a peacefull and agreeable humour.” In December 1680, as we have seen (ante, p. 19), she received from Samuel Simmons, the original publisher of Paradise Lost, eight pounds, as Simmons's discharge in full of all remaining claims upon him on account of the book; and in April 1681 (ante, p. 20), she gave Simmons a still more comprehensive release to the same effect. About this time, being then forty-two or forty-three years of age, she seems to have made up her mind to leave London, and return to her native county of Cheshire. There is a legal document, of date June 1680, by which it appears that she was then negotiating, through her brother, Richard Minshull, framework-knitter, of Wisterton, near Nantwich, Cheshire, for the lease of a house, etc., in his neighbourhood. Accordingly, she removed to Nantwich; where, amid her relations and old acquaintances, she lived a frugal, if not somewhat pinched, but eminently pious and respectable life, till as late as the autumn of 1727, when she died at the age of eighty-nine years. Her widowhood had thus extended over the unusually long period of fifty-three years. Few persons seem to have inquired after her, Nantwich being so far out of the world. Phillips, writing in 1694, mentions her only as "said to be yet living." Toland, when preparing his Memoir of Milton, in 1698, caused a friend to write to her for information, and a letter from her was received in reply. Bishop Newton had received later accounts of her, which he incorporated in his Life of Milton, written in 1749. When talked with, she confirmed the usual stories of Milton's habits; but, "being asked whether he did not often read Homer and Virgil, she under"stood it as an imputation upon him for stealing from those authors, and answered "with eagerness that he stole from nobody but the Muse who inspired him; and, being asked by a lady present who the Muse was, replied it was God's grace, and the Holy Spirit that visited him nightly." Newton had also heard (Note, in Newton's Milton, to Par. Lost IV. 305) that her hair had been originally of a golden hue. There is evidence that at Nantwich she was member of a Baptist congregation; and it is possible, though not proved, that she was the Elizabeth Milton at whose death a funeral sermon was preached by the Rev. Isaac Kimber, Baptist minister in Nantwich. In a printed volume of Kimber's Sermons, edited by his son in 1756, it is positively stated that she was; but, if so, a wrong date is there given to the sermon. There is no allusion to Milton in the sermon, to settle the point. Her will, dated August 22, 1727, provided that any overplus of her effects, after payment of her just debts and her funeral expenses, should go to her nephews and nieces in Nantwich. She must have died before the 10th of October following; on which day the will was proved. Her estate was sworn at under £40; so that, if she had other property when alive, it must

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It may yet be recovered, and THE THREE DAUGHTERS :

Paradise Lost. All the three daughters were with him, so far as appears, during the entire time of the composition of the poem: in have been in the form of life-interest merely. It is interesting to know, from the minute inventory of her effects at death (a Notice of which, by Mr. J. F. Marsh, appeared in vol. vii. of the Proceedings of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire), that she retained to the last the relics of her husband which she had brought with her from London, including not only the silver seal, mentioned ante, p. 10, but also two portraits of Milton, one as a boy of ten, the other as a youth of one-and-twenty, which had hung in Milton's own parlour in his lifetime. These two portraits were sold by her executors. The first was sold for twenty guineas, and its history can be traced with perfect accuracy down to a few years ago, when it was in the possession of Edgar Disney, Esq., of The Hyde, Ingatestone, Essex. The other was bought from the widow's executors by the Right Hon. Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons; it was often engraved in the last century by Vertue and others; and it remained in the possession of the Onslow family till 1828, when, unfortunately, the late Earl of Onslow parted with it since which time it has been lost sight of. there would be no difficulty in identifying it. The eldest daughter, Anne Milton, who, though lame and with a defect in her speech, is said to have had a "very handsome face," was twenty-eight years of age at the time of her father's death. According to the evidence of Elizabeth Fisher in the matter of Milton's will, she had then a trade by which she could live, "which is the making of gold and silver lace, and which the deceased bred her up to." With this, and with the £100 which came to her as her share of her father's effects, she lived on in London till her marriage (date unknown) with a person described as "a master-builder." She died in giving birth to her first child, which died with her.--Mary Milton, the second daughter, and, according to Aubrey, more like her mother than her father, was twenty-six years of age when her father died. She never married, and was dead before 1694.——The youngest daughter, Deborah Milton, " very like her father," according to Aubrey, was twenty-two years of age at her father's death, having been born in the house in Petty France, May 2, 1652. At the time of her father's death she was in Ireland, having gone thither as companion to a lady named Merian. Shortly after her father's death, she married an Abraham Clarke, of the city of Dublin, described as "a weaver": "a mercer, sells silk," is Aubrey's addition. Accordingly, in her release to her stepmother for her £100, dated March 27, 1675, she signs her name "Deborah Clarke," and her husband signs the document jointly with herself. After remaining in Dublin for a good many years, her husband and she came over to London, where her husband is thenceforward heard of as "a weaver in Spitalfields." She survived till August 27, 1727, when she died at the age of seventy-five. In her later years she was visited by many persons for her father's sake; among whom were Addison, the engraver Vertue, and Professor Ward of Gresham College. Vertue consulted her as to her father's portraits, and obtained exact and useful information from her on that subject. Addison was struck by her resemblance to her father in the Faithorne portrait, and in others derived thence. She spoke to him and others of her father with becoming