It has been supposed that the impression made upon his imagination and his feelings, on this occasion, contributed no little to his description of the scene in Paradise Lost, in which Eve addresses herself to Adam for pardon and peace.

And certainly Milton, on this occasion, displayed no little magnanimity and nobility of character. His domestic peace and reputation had been most remorselessly attacked, yet, says Fenton, "after this reunion, so far was he from retaining an unkind memory of the provocations which he had received from her ill conduct, that when the king's cause was entirely oppressed, and her father, who had been active in his loyalty, was exposed to sequestration, Milton received both him and his family to protection and free entertainment in his own house, till his affairs were accommodated by his interest with the victorious faction." The old father-in-law had to smart for his attachment to the royal cause. He was publicly announced as a delinquent, and fined £576, 12s., 3d.; besides that his house was seized by the Parliamentary party.

It would be agreeable if from this time we could find data for believing that the returned wife and her friends showed a generous sense of the kindness of the poet. But we can not. It appears from Milton's nuncupative will, that the old man never paid him a penny of the promised marriage portion of £1000; and that the three daughters, too true daughters of such a mother, had behaved to him very undutifully. The whole of the view that we obtain of the Powell family is of a piece. After the royal power was restored, and Milton was in danger and disgrace, we hear of no protection afforded by them to him; no protecting roof extended, no countenance even to the daughters, their mother now being dead; but the father being poor, and out of favor, the daughters were suffered to take their fate. One died early, having married a master-builder; one died single; and the third married a weaver in Spitalfields. It should be recollected that all three daughters survived their father as well as mother, yet it does not appear that they received the slightest notice or assistance from their rich relations of Shotover. Yet his third daughter, Deborah, had great need of it, and, in many respects, well deserved it. She lived to the age of seventy-six. This is the daughter that used to read to her father, and was well known to Richardson and Professor Ward: a woman of a very cultivated understanding, and not inelegant of manners. She was generously patronized by Addison, and by Queen Caroline, who sent her a present of fifty guineas. She had seven sons and three daughters, of whom Caleb and Elizabeth are remembered. Caleb emigrated to Fort Saint George, where, perhaps, he died. Elizabeth, the youngest daughter, married Thomas Foster, a weaver in Spitalfields, as her mother had done before her, and had seven children, who all died. She is said to have been a plain, sensible woman, and kept a petty grocer's or chandler's shop, first at Lower Holloway, and afterward at Cock-lane, near Shoreditch Church. In April, 1750, Comus was acted for her benefit: Doctor Johnson, who wrote the prologue, says, "She had so little acquaintance with diversion or gayety, that she did not know what was intended when a benefit was offered her." The profits of the performance were only £67, the expenses being deducted, although Dr. Newton contributed largely, and Jacob Tonson gave £20. On this trifling augmentation to their small stock, she and her husband removed to Islington, where they both soon died.

Such is the history of Milton's posterity; that of Shakspeare was sooner terminated, though the descendants of his sister Joan still exist, in a poverty disgraceful to the nation.

With his two succeeding wives, Milton appears to have lived in great harmony and affection. His second wife, a daughter of Captain Woodcock, of Hackney, died in child-birth within a year of their marriage; and his sonnet to her memory bears testimony to his tender regard for her. His third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, of Cheshire, survived him, and went to reside in her native county, among her own relatives.

From this melancholy review of Milton's domestic history, let us now return to his homes in London after his return from Italy. He came back with great intentions, but to the humble occupation of a schoolmaster; and here we encounter one of the most disgraceful pieces of chuckling over his lowly fate, to be found in that most disgraceful life of our great poet and patriot, by Dr. Johnson. The Lives of the Poets, by Johnson, in the aggregate, do him no credit. In point of research, even, they are extremely deficient; but the warped and prejudiced spirit in which they are written destroy them as authority. On Milton's head, however, Johnson poured all the volume of his collected bile. Such a piece of writing upon the greatest epic poet, as well as one of the most illustrious patriots of the nation, is a national insult of the grossest kind. Take this one passage as a specimen of the whole. "Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performances; on the man who hastens home because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and, when he reaches the scene of action, vapors away his patriotism in a private boarding-school." The passage is as false as it is malicious. Milton did not promise to come home and put himself at the head of armies or of senates. He knew where his strength lay, and he came to use it, and did use it most effectually. He did not say, "I will be another Cromwell," but he became the Cromwell of the pen. It was precisely because he was poor—that he had no interest or connections to place him in the front ranks of action, that he showed the greatness of his resolve, in hastening to the scene of contest, and standing ready to seize such opportunity as should offer, to strike for his country and for liberty. He desired to do his duty in the great strife, whatever might be the part he could gain to play; and had he only sincerely desired to do that, and had yet not done it for want of opportunity, he would still have been worthy of praise for his laudable desire.

But every thing that Milton promised he performed: who performed so much? He did not make great promises, and show small performances; he did not vapor away his patriotism in a private boarding-school. He took to a school, because he must live; but he soon showed that every moment not required for teaching his private pupils was ardently and unceasingly devoted to teaching the nation and the world. His pen was worth a thousand swords; his thoughts flew about and slew faster than bullets or cannon-balls; his word became the word of exhortation and command to his country. In his hand lay victory, not for the day and the time only, but for all time. Shame to the old bigoted lexicographer! must every true son of his country and lover of truth exclaim, when he reads what Milton wrote and what he did. To say nothing of his Tractate of Education, and a number of other works; to say nothing of his Paradise Lost, and all his other noble poems; all breathing the most lofty and godlike sentiments—those sentiments which create souls of fire, of strength and truth, in every age as it arises; what are his Areopagitica? his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates? his Eiconoclastes? his Defensio Populi? his Defensio Secunda? his Treatise on the Means of Removing Hirelings out of the Church? his Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Cases? his State Letters, written at the command of Cromwell and the Parliament? Are these nothing? If ever there was a magnificent monument of human genius, of intellectual power, and glorious patriotism, built up by one man, it exists in these immortal works. Vapored away his patriotism in a private boarding-school! There was no private boarding-school which could long hold such vaporing as this; it was of a kind that did, or it needs must, come forth to the face of the government, the country, and mankind. The poor schoolmaster, who on the plains of Italy heard the cry of his country for help, flew to her rescue as confidently as if he had been a prince, with fleets and armies at his command. In a poor hired dwelling he prepared his missiles and warlike machines. Men like Johnson, in the bigotry of despotism, might despise him and them; for they were but a few quires of paper and a gray goose-quill; but he soon shot that quill higher against the towers of royalty, deeper into the ranks of the oppressors, than ever the bullets of Cromwell and Fairfax could pierce. His papers flew abroad, the unfurled banners of liberty, before which kings trembled, and the stoutest myrmidons dropped their arms. The poor schoolmaster became speedily the oracle of the government. His Tenure of Kings and Magistrates vindicated in unanswerable eloquence the right of nations to call their monarchs to account for their offenses against the laws. His Defense of the People from the accursed charges of the hireling Salmasius flew through Europe, and struck kings and servile senates dumb. By the side of Cromwell the visage of the blind but divine old man was seen, with awe and wonder; the learned and the wise from distant realms came to gaze upon the unequaled twain; and when the inspired secretary exclaimed,

the guilty persecutors shrunk aghast, for they knew that where the voice of Milton could reach, the arm of Cromwell could reach too. Who shall say how much of the renown of England at that day sprung from the pen and soul of John Milton! how much he inspired of that which Cromwell did! and how much of the grand march of political and social renovation, which is now going on throughout the world, originated in the vaporings of the poor schoolmaster! Before his fame how pales that of him who has dared thus to revile him! What are all the works of Johnson—and we are inclined to give them their fullest due—when compared with those of Milton, and their consequences? Before him

it became the man who so worthily chastised the meanness of a Chesterfield, to have bowed with humility and reverential love. As it is, we turn with disgust from this humiliating spectacle, of Johnson, the reviler of the noble dead, to Johnson, the friend of Goldsmith, the vindicator of Savage, and the sympathizer with the poor and suffering.

Of all the various residences of Milton in London, as I have remarked, scarcely one has escaped the ravages of the fire, and the progress of improvement and population. The habit which he had of selecting houses standing in gardens, on account of their quietness, has more than any thing else tended to sweep them away. These places, as population increased, were naturally crowded, and the detached houses pulled down to make way for regular streets. His first lodging was in St. Bride's Church-yard, Fleet-street, on his return from Italy. Here he began educating his two nephews, John and Edward Phillips. Of this lodging nothing now remains. The house, as I learn from an old and most respectable inhabitant of St. Bride's parish, who lives in the church-yard, and very near the spot, was on the left hand, as you proceed toward Fleet-street through the avenue. It was a very small tenement, very old, and was burned down on the 24th of November, 1824, at which time it was occupied by a hair-dresser. It was—a proof of its age—without party walls, and much decayed. The back part of the Punch-office now occupies its site.

These lodgings were too small, and he took a garden-house in Aldersgate-street, situated at the end of an entry, that he might avoid the noise and disturbance of the street. To his nephews he here added a few more pupils, the sons of his most intimate friends. This house was large and commodious, affording room for his library and furniture. Here he commenced his career of pure authorship, all he did having public reform and improvement for its object. Here he wrote, as a fitting commencement, a treatise Of Reformation, to assist the Puritans against the bishops, as he deemed the Puritans deficient in learning for the defense of the great principles they were contending for. That Milton would turn out a stern reformer of church matters, might be clearly seen from a passage in his Lycidas, written before he was twenty-nine years old. In this he is said even to anticipate the execution of Laud. The passage is curious:

Here he next wrote his treatise, Of Practical Episcopacy, in defense of the Smectymneans, against Archbishop Usher; then, Reasons of Church Government, urged against Prelacy. In this work he revealed to his readers his plans for a great poem—the Paradise Lost; which only was deferred till the advocacy which the times demanded of him should be completed. Here he finished the controversy, by his Apology for Smectymnus, in 1642; and in 1643 married Mary Powell, and saw her desert him at the instigation of her time-serving family. This led to his writings of Divorce. These were followed by a Treatise of Education; and, finally, by his famous Areopagitica—altogether an extraordinary mass of labor to proceed from the private abode of a poor vaporing schoolmaster!

It was in this house, on the approach of the troops of Prince Rupert to the capital in 1642, soon after the battle of Edge Hill, that Milton placed in imagination, if not in actual ink, his proudly deprecatory sonnet:

His next remove was to a house in Barbican, now also, without doubt, removed: this was a larger house, for it was necessary to accommodate, not only his wife, but all her family. "When it is considered," says Todd, "that Milton cheerfully opened his doors to those who had treated him with indignity and breach of faith; to a father, who, according to the poet's nuncupative will, never paid him the promised marriage portion of a thousand pounds; and to a mother, who, according to Wood, had encouraged the daughter in her perverseness; we can not but concede to Mr. Hayley's conclusion, that the records of private life contain not a more magnanimous example of forgiveness and beneficence. They are supposed to have left him soon after the death of his father, who ended a long life in 1647, and whose declining days had been soothed by every attention of a truly affectionate son."

From the Barbican issued the first volume of his poems, including Comus, Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, &c.; a strange Parnassus, as it now seems to us. In 1647, his large troop of inmates having left him, he once more flitted, to use the good old Saxon term, into a smaller house in Holborn, opening backward into Lincoln's Inn Fields; this house will now be sought in vain. Here he published, in 1649, his bold Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in which he vindicated what the Parliament had done in 1648, in the execution of the king; this was followed by some other political pamphlets. As he had made himself a marked man before, this open defense of the royal decapitation bound him up at once with the measures of the ruling government. Such a champion was not to be overlooked; and accordingly, immediately afterward, he was invited by the Council of State, without any expectation or solicitation on his part, to become Latin secretary; as they had resolved neither to write to others abroad, nor to receive answers from any, except in that language, which was common to them all. Thus the vaporing schoolmaster, without any anxious solicitation, any flatteries, or compromise of his dignity and integrity, had steadily advanced to that post in which he could effectually serve his country. He was here not merely the secretary, he was the champion of the government; and, accordingly, the Eicon Basiliké, attributed to King Charles himself, was ordered by him to have an answer; which answer was his Eiconoclastes, or the Image-breaker. Then came his great Defense of the People of England against Salmasius; this work was received, both at home and abroad, with the greatest excitement, abuse, and applause, as the different parties were affected: at Paris and Toulouse it was burned; at home, Milton was complimented on his performance of his task, by the visits or invitations of all the foreign ministers in London; his own government presented him with a thousand pounds, as a testimony of their approbation of the manner in which he had acquitted himself; and even Queen Christina, of Sweden, the patron of Salmasius, could not avoid applauding it, and soon after dismissed Salmasius from her court. The work itself, and the effect it produced, are said to have shortened the life of Salmasius, who died about two years afterward, without having finished his reply, upon which he was laboring.

On being made Latin secretary, Milton quitted Holborn, and took lodgings in Scotland-yard, near Whitehall: here he lost his infant son; and his own health being impaired, he removed to a more airy situation; that is, into one of his favorite garden-houses, situated in Petty-France, Westminster, which opened into St. James's Park, in which he continued till within a few weeks of the Restoration: in this house some of the greatest domestic events of his life occurred. Here he lost the entire use of his eyes; his left eye having become quite dark in 1651—the year in which he published his Defensio Populi—the second in 1653. His enemies triumphed in his blindness as a judgment from Heaven upon his writing against the king; he only replied by asking them, if it were a judgment upon him to lose his eyes, what sort of judgment was that upon the king, which cost him his head; and by adding, that he had charity enough to forgive them. We have seen that he laid the foundation of this deprivation in his youth, by unremitted and nocturnal study; and, when writing the Defense of the People, the physicians announced to him that he must desist, or lose his sight: he believed his duty required him to go on, and he went on, knowing the sacrifice he made.

In this house he lost, too, his first wife, Mary Powell; their infant son was dead, but she left him three daughters, the only children that survived him. Of this ill-starred marriage we have said and seen enough. He afterward married Catharine, the daughter of Captain Woodcock, of Hackney, who died in childbed within a year of their marriage. Of the beautiful character of this excellent woman, he has left us that beautiful testimony, his twenty-second sonnet:

Here Milton wrote his Second Defense of the People against the attack made in a book called Regii Sanguinis clamor ad Cœlum adversus parricidas Anglicanos; written by one Peter du Moulin, afterward Prebendary of Canterbury; with other things in the same controversy. As he was now blind, he had the excellent Andrew Marvel associated with him as assistant secretary. His industry continued at writing, as if he had full use of his eyes. He published now his Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Cases, and The Means of Removing Hirelings out of the Church; collected the Original Letters and Papers addressed to Oliver Cromwell concerning the affairs of Great Britain, from 1649 to 1658, with other things.

This memorable dwelling is yet standing. It no longer opens into St. James's Park. The ancient front is now its back, and overlooks the fine old, but house-surrounded garden of Jeremy Bentham. Near the top of this ancient front is a stone, bearing this inscription: "Sacred to Milton, the Prince of Poets." This was placed there by no less distinguished a man than William Hazlitt, who rented the house some years, purely because it was Milton's. Bentham, when he was conducting people round his garden, which is now in the occupation of Mr. Gibs, the engineer, used to make them sometimes go down on their knees to this house. The house is tall and narrow, and has nothing striking about it. No doubt, when it opened into St. James's Park, it was pleasant; now it fronts into York-street, which runs in a direct line from the west end of Westminster Abbey. It is number 19, and is occupied by a cutler. The back, its former front, is closed in by a wall, leaving but a very narrow court; but above this wall, as already said, looks into the pleasant garden of the late venerable philosopher.

But the time of the Restoration was approaching, and Milton began to retrace his steps toward the city, by much the same regular stages as he had left it. After secreting himself in Bartholomew-close till the storm had blown over, and his pardon was signed, he once more took a house in Holborn, near Red Lion Fields; and thence removed to Jewin-street, near Aldersgate. All these places have been rebuilt, and no house of Milton is now to be found in these thickly-populated parts. People have often wondered why Milton always showed such a preference for the city. There are many reasons. In the first place, he was born and brought up till his seventeenth year in it; the associations of youth form strong attractions. In the second, as Dr. Johnson considerately tells us, Aldersgate-street and the like were not then so much out of the world as now. Besides this, after the Restoration, it would be far more agreeable to Milton to be at some distance from the West End, where cavaliers and courtiers were now flaunting with newly-revived insolence; and nothing but taunts, insults, and the hearing of strange and most odious doings, could have awaited him. Here Milton married his third and last wife, Elizabeth Minshull, of a good family in Cheshire, with whom he seems to have lived in great affection; so much so, that he wished to leave her all that was left him of his property.

From Jewin-street he made his last remove, as to his London residences, into Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. Bunhill Fields were probably, in those days, open, and airy, and quiet; at present, with the exception of the Artillery Ground itself, and the thickly-populated burial-ground which contains the bones of Bunyan and De Foe, the whole of that neighborhood is covered with a dense mass of modern houses. Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, is no longer to be found. The nearest approach that you get, even to the name, is Artillery Place, Bunhill Row, which is merely a row of new houses adjoining the Artillery Ground, and a new church, which has been erected in that busy, ordinary, and dingy street, still called Bunhill Row. Besides an Art of Logic, his Treatise on True Religion, Heresie, Schism, Toleration, and what best means may be used against the growth of Popery; his Familiar Letters in Latin; and a translation of a Latin Declaration of the Poles in favor of John III., their heroic sovereign—the last two published in the last year of his life; his residence in Bunhill Fields was made remarkable by the publication of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. He left, moreover, in manuscript, a Brief History of Muscovy, and of other less known Countries lying Eastward of Russia as far as Cathay, which was published in 1682, and his System of Theology, which was long supposed to have perished, but has been recovered and published of late years, much to the scandal of the orthodox.

Thus to the last did this wonderful man live and labor. Never did any man less "vapor away his patriotism." There is something singularly interesting and impressive in our idea of him, as he calmly passed his latter days in his quiet habitation in Bunhill Fields. He had outlived the great battle of king and people, in which extraordinary men and as extraordinary events had arisen, and shaken the whole civilized world. Charles I., Laud, and Strafford had fallen in their blood; the monarchy and the Church had fallen. Pym, Hampden, Marvel, Vane, and the dictator Cromwell, had not only pulled down the greatest throne in Europe, but had made all others seem to reel by the terrific precedent. All these stern agents, with the generals Ireton, Harrison, Lambert, Fleetwood, and their compeers, who had risen from the people to fight for the people, were gone, like the actors in an awful tragedy who had played their rôle; some had perished in their blood, others had been torn from their graves; the monarchy and the Church, the peerage and all the old practices and maxims, were again in the ascendant, and had taken bloody vengeance; yet this one man, he who had incited and applauded, who had defended and made glorious, through his eloquence and his learning, the whole Republican cause, was left untouched. As if some especial guardianship of Providence had shielded him, or as if the very foes who pulled the dreaded Cromwell from his grave, feared the imprecations of posterity, and shrunk from the touch of that sacred head—there sat the sublime old man at his door, feeling with grateful enjoyment the genial sunshine fall on him. There he sat, erect, serene, calm, and trusting to God the Father of mankind. He had lived even to fulfill that long-deferred task of poetic glory; the vision of Paradise Lost passed before him, and had been sung forth in the most majestic strains that had ever made classical the English tongue. His trust in Providence had been justified; he had served his country, and had yet not missed his immortality. The great and the wise came from every quarter to converse with him; and the wonderful passages through which he and his nation had lived, were food for the musings of the longest day or the most solitary moments.

Many have thought that those melancholy lines in Samson Agonistes, commencing

were his own wretched cogitations. But Milton, unlike Samson, had no weak seductions from the path of his great duty to reproach himself with; and far likelier were it that the whole apostrophe to light, spoken in his own character in the opening of the third book of Paradise Lost, was the more usual expression of his feelings:

Such is the view that Richardson has given us of him in his declining days: "An ancient clergyman, of Dorsetshire, Dr. Wright, found John Milton in a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow-chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale, but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk stones. He used, also, to sit in a gray, coarse cloth coat, at the door of his house in Bunhill Fields, 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."

Much pains have been taken to represent Milton as morose and exacting in domestic life; and as proof of it has been adduced, the leaving of him by his first wife, and the statement that he made his daughters read to him in Latin and Greek, though he would not allow them to learn a syllable of those languages. If these things were true, I should be the last man to defend them, or to endeavor to gloss them over; but they are at least very doubtful. We must remember that these were the charges of his enemies, and they were many and bitter, and by no means truthful. The causes for his wife's desertion we have already examined, and they reflect discredit on her and her family, and not on him. In that account, all that is generous and honorable lies on his side. As to his daughters, probably they did not wish to learn the classical languages; and how they could read in them, while ignorant of them, so as to satisfy his ear, is not so easily conceivable, when we recollect that when Elwood did not understand what he was reading, he immediately detected it, and stopped him. Be this, however, as it may, Dr. Newton tells us, that all who had written accounts of Milton agreed that "he was affable and instructive in conversation, and of an equal and cheerful temper." It is not so easy to excuse him for refusing to leave any of his property to his daughters, "because they had been very undutiful to him." No doubt he had much to complain of in that disposition which they had imbibed from their mother and her family, but it became a great man, like Milton, to cherish a great affection toward his own children, and to manifest toward them a great forgiveness.

There is an episode in the later life of Milton which we are made acquainted with by Thomas Elwood, the Quaker, and which has something very pleasing and picturesque about it. It is that of his abode at Chalfont St. Giles, in Buckinghamshire. Elwood, who was the son of a country justice of peace, was one among the first converts to Quakerism, and has left us a most curious and amusing autobiography. In this he tells us that, while Milton lived in Jewin-street, he was introduced to him as a reader, the recompense to Elwood being that of deriving the advantage of a better knowledge of the classics, and of the foreign pronunciation of Latin. A great regard sprung up between Milton and his reader, who was a man, not only of great integrity of mind, but of a quaint humor and a poetical taste. On the breaking out of the plague in London, Milton, who was then living in Bunhill Fields, wrote to Elwood, who had found an asylum in the house of an affluent Quaker, at Chalfont, to procure him a lodging there. He did so; but before Milton could take possession of his country retreat, Elwood, with numbers of other Quakers, was hurried off to Aylesbury jail. The persecution of that sect subsiding for a while, Elwood, on his liberation, paid Milton a visit, and received the MS. of Paradise Lost to take home and read. With this, Elwood had the sense to be greatly delighted, and, in returning it, said, "Thou hast said a great deal upon Paradise Lost; what hast thou to say upon Paradise Found?" Milton was silent a moment, as pondering on what he had heard, and then began to converse on other subjects. When, however, Elwood visited him afterward in London, Milton showed him the Paradise Regained, saying, "This is owing to you, for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont; which before I had not thought of."

Thus, in this abode at Chalfont, we hear the first mention of Paradise Lost, and to it we owe Paradise Regained. It is supposed that Milton wrote the whole of the latter poem there, and that he must have done, or the greater part of it, from his being able so soon after his return to show it to Elwood.

It says much for the proprietors of the cottage at Chalfont, and for the feeling of the country in general, that this simple dwelling has been sacredly preserved to this time. You see that all the others near it are much more modern. This is of the old framed timber kind, and is known, not only to the whole village, but the whole country round, as Milton's house. Mr. Dunster, in the additions to his edition of Paradise Regained, says that the cottage at Chalfont "is not pleasantly situated; that the adjacent country is extremely pleasant; but the immediate spot is as little picturesque or pleasing as can well be imagined." He might have recollected, that it could signify very little to Milton whether the spot was picturesque or not, if it were quiet, and had a good air; for Milton was, and had been, long quite blind. But, in fact, the situation, though not remarkably striking, is by no means unpleasing. It is the first cottage on the right hand as you descend the road from Beaconsfield to Chalfont St. Giles.

Standing a little above the cottage, the view before you is very interesting. The quiet old agricultural village of Chalfont lies in the valley, amid woody uplands, which are seen all round. The cottage stands facing you, with its gable turned to the road, and fronting into its little garden and field. A row of ordinary cottages is built at its back, and face the road below. To the right ascends the grass field mentioned; but this, with extensive old orchards above the house, is pleasing to the eye, presenting an idea of quiet, rural repose, and of meditative walks in the shade of the orchard-trees, or up the field, to the breezy height above. Opposite to the house, on the other side of the way, is a wheelwright's dwelling, with his timber reared among old trees, and above it a chalk-pit, grown about with bushes. This is as rural as you can desire. The old house is covered in front with a vine; bears all the marks of antiquity; and is said by its inhabitant, a tailor, to have been but little altered. There was, he says, an old porch at the door, which stood till it fell with age. Here we may well imagine Milton sitting, in the sunny weather, as at Bunhill Fields, and enjoying the warmth, and the calm sweet air. Could he have seen the view which here presented itself, it would have been agreeable; for though in this direction the ascending ground shuts out distant prospect, its green and woody upland would be itself a pleasant object of contemplation; shutting out all else, and favorable to thought. The house below consists of two rooms, the one on the left, next to the road, a spacious one, though low, and with its small diamond casements suggesting to you that it is much as when Milton inhabited it. Here he no doubt lived principally; and to all probability, here was Paradise Regained dictated to his amanuensis, most likely at that time his wife, Elizabeth Minshull. The worthy tailor and his apprentice were now mounted on a table in it, busily pursuing their labor.

Outside, over the door, is an armorial escutcheon, at the foot of which is painted, in bold letters, Milton. The old man, who was very civil and communicative, said that it was not really the escutcheon of Milton, but of General Fleetwood, who purchased the house for Milton, and who at that time lived at the manor-house, and lies buried in the church here. Of this, Elwood tells us nothing, but, on the contrary, that he procured the house for Milton. Whether this escutcheon be really Fleetwood's or not, I had no means of ascertaining, as it was not only very indistinct, but too high to examine without a ladder; but as Milton's armorial bearing contained spread eagles, and as there were birds in the shield, it no doubt had been intended for Milton by those who placed it there. Fleetwood's living at Chalfont might be an additional reason for Milton's choosing it for his then retreat; but Elwood, and not Fleetwood, took the house, and it is doubtful even whether Fleetwood was still living, being one of the regicides condemned, but never executed. Independent, however, of any other consideration, Milton had many old associations with Buckinghamshire, which would recommend it to him; and in summer the air amid the heaths and parks of this part of the country is peculiarly soft, delicious, and fragrant.

We come now to Milton's last house, the narrow house appointed for all living, in which he laid his bones beside those of his father. This was in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. He died on Sunday, the 8th of November, 1674, and was buried on the 12th. His funeral is stated to have been very splendidly and numerously attended. By the parish registry we find that he was buried in the chancel: "John Milton, gentleman. Consumption. Chancell. 12. Nov., 1674." Dr. Johnson supposed that he had no inscription, but Aubrey distinctly states that "when the two steppes to the communion-table were raysed in 1690, his stone was removed." Milton's grave remained a whole century without a mark to point out where the great poet lay, till in 1793 Mr. Whitbread erected a bust and an inscription to his memory. What is more, there is every reason to believe that his remains were, on this occasion of raising the chancel and removing the stone, disturbed. The coffin was disinterred and opened, and numbers of relic-hunters were eager to seize and convey off fragments of his bones. The matter at the time occasioned a sharp controversy, and the public were at length persuaded to believe that they were not the remains of Milton, but of a female, that by mistake had been thus treated. But when the workmen had the inscribed stone before them, and dug down directly below it, what doubt can there be that the remains were those of the poet? By an alteration in the church when it was repaired in 1682, that which was the old chancel ceased to be the present one, and the remains of Milton thus came to lie in the great central aisle. The monument erected by Whitbread marks, as near as possible, the place. The bust is by Bacon. It is attached to a pillar, and beneath it is this inscription:

This church is remarkable for the marriage of Oliver Cromwell having taken place in it, and for being the burial-place of many eminent men. In the chancel, in close neighborhood with Milton, lay old John Speed, the chronicler, and Fox, the martyrologist, whose monuments still remain on the wall. That of Speed is his bust, in doublet and ruff, with his right hand resting on a book, and his left on a skull. It is a niche, representing one of the folding shrines still seen in Catholic churches on the Continent. There is a monument, also, seen there, to a lady of the family of Sir Thomas Lucy, of Shakspeare notoriety; and another of some noble person, having beneath the armorial escutcheon an opening representing skulls, bones, and flames, within a barred grating, supposed to be symbolic of purgatory. The burial-ground of Bunhill Fields, where Bunyan and De Foe lie, belongs also to this parish, and their interments are contained in the registry of this church.

Thus the Prince of Poets, as Hazlitt styled him, sleeps in good company. The times in which he lived, and the part he took in them, were certain to load his name with obloquy and misrepresentation; but the solemn dignity of his life, and the lofty tone and principle of his writings, more and more suffice not only to vindicate him, but to commend him to posterity. No man ever loved liberty and virtue with a purer affection; no man ever labored in their cause with a more distinguished zeal; no man ever brought to the task a more glorious genius, accomplished with a more consummate learning. Milton was the noblest model of a devoted patriot and true Englishman; and the study of his works is the most certain means of perpetuating to his country spirits worthy of her greatness.

SAMUEL BUTLER.

"In the midst of obscurity passed the life of Butler, a man whose name can only perish with his language. The mode and place of his education are unknown; the events of his life are variously related; and all that can be told with certainty is, that he was poor."

Such are the expressive words with which Dr. Johnson winds up his meager account of the witty author of Hudibras. A more significant finish to a poet's biography could scarcely be given. A more striking instance of national neglect, and the ingratitude of posterity, is nowhere to be found.

Strensham, in Warwickshire, claims the honor of his birth. His father is said to have been an honest farmer there, with a small estate, who made a shift to educate his son at the grammar-school at Worcester, whence he is supposed to have gone to the university, but whether of Oxford or Cambridge, is matter of dispute. His brother asserted that it was Cambridge, but could not tell at which hall or college. Dr. Nash discovered that his father was owner of a house and a little land, worth about eight pounds a year, which, in Johnson's time, was still called Butler's tenement.

When we consider the humble position of the father, we can only wonder that he contrived to give him an education at a classical school at all, and may very well doubt, with the great lexicographer, whether he in reality ever did study at Cambridge. Having, however, given his son a learned education, his resources were exhausted, he had no patronage, and the young man became, and might probably think himself fortunate in doing so, a clerk to a justice of peace, Mr. Jefferys, of Earl's Croomb, in Worcestershire. Here he appears to have passed an easy and agreeable life. "He had," says Johnson, "not only leisure for study, but for recreation; his amusements were music and painting; and the reward of his pencil was the friendship of the celebrated Cooper. Some pictures, said to be his, were shown to Dr. Nash at Earl's Croomb; but when he inquired for them some years afterward, he found them destroyed to stop windows, and owns that they hardly deserved a better fate."

From this gentleman's service he passed into that of the Countess of Kent. The celebrated John Selden was then steward of the countess, and it was probably through him, or for his purposes, that Butler was introduced into the family. He was much noticed by Selden, and employed by him as an amanuensis. Whether this was the actual capacity in which he stood in the family of the countess, is, like almost every other event of his life, however, quite unknown. One thing seems certain, that, both at Mr. Jefferys' and here, he had been turned loose into great libraries, the sort of pasture that he of all others liked, and had devoured their contents to some purpose, as is manifested in his writings. These were the real colleges at which he studied, and where he laid up enormous masses of information.

His next remove was into the family of Sir Samuel Luke, one of Cromwell's officers. This was the decisive circumstance of his life. Sir Samuel was the hero of his future poem—the actual Hudibras. But he was here in the very center of republican action, and sectarian opinion and discussion. In Sir Samuel he had a new and rich study of character; in those about him, a new world, abounding with all sorts of persons, passages, and doctrines, which made him feel that he also had a world unknown still in himself, that of satirical fun infinite. Into this world he absorbed all the new views of things; the strange shapes that came to and fro; the strange phraseology and sounds of conventicle hymns that assailed his ears. The historian and poet of the new land of Goshen, where all was light, while the neighboring Egypt of royalty was all in darkness, was born into it; and Hudibras, and his Squire Ralph, Sidrophel, Talgol and Trulla, the Bear and Fiddle, all sprung into immortal existence.

The story of the utter neglect of Butler by the king and court, at the time that not only they, but all Royalists in the kingdom, were bursting with laughter over Hudibras, is too well known. Once it was hoped that he was on the verge of good fortune, and Mr. Wycherley was to introduce him to the all-powerful Duke of Buckingham. The story of this interview is too characteristic to be passed over.

"Mr. Wycherley," says Packe, "had always laid hold of an opportunity which offered of representing to the Duke of Buckingham how well Mr. Butler had deserved of the royal family, by writing his inimitable Hudibras, and that it was a reproach to the court that a person of his loyalty and wit should suffer in obscurity, and under the want he did. The duke always seemed to hearken to him with attention enough; and after some time undertook to recommend his pretensions to his majesty. Mr. Wycherley, in hopes to keep him steady to his word, obtained of his grace to name a day when he might introduce that modest and unfortunate poet to his new patron. At last an appointment was made, and the place of meeting was agreed to be the Roebuck. Mr. Butler and his friend attended accordingly; the duke joined them; but, as the d—l would have it, the door of the room where they sat was open, and his grace, who had seated himself near it, observing a pimp of his acquaintance—the creature, too, was a knight—trip by with a brace of ladies, immediately quitted his engagement to follow another kind of business, at which he was more ready than at doing good offices to men of desert, though no one was better qualified than he, both in regard of his fortune and understanding, to protect them; and from that time to the day of his death, poor Butler never found the least effect of his promise!"

The brightest gleam of his life would seem to be between his quitting Sir Samuel Luke's and the publication of his Hudibras; but when this exactly took place, and how long this lasted, we are not informed. It must, however, have taken place between the king's return, which was in 1659, and 1664, some five years or so. During this period he was made secretary to the Earl of Carberry, president of the principality of Wales, who made him steward of Ludlow Castle when the Court of Marches was revived.

This was a post in which a poet might feel himself well placed. This ancient castle of the Lacys and Mortimers stands at the west end of the town of Ludlow, on a bold rock, overlooking the River Corve, and near the confluence of that river and the Teme. Many striking events had occurred here since the time that William the Conqueror bestowed it on Roger de Montgomery, from whose descendants it passed successively into the hands of the crown, the Warines, the Lacys, and the Mortimers. On the borders of Wales, it was a strong-hold for the crown of England, and after it fell again into the hands of the king, became the palace of the President of the Marches, and often the residence of princes. Here the young king Edward V. lived, and left it only to proceed to London into the murderous hands of his uncle, Richard III., who, within two months of his quitting this quiet asylum, had him and his brother smothered in the Tower. Here Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII., was married to Catharine of Aragon, who, after his death, was married to his brother, Henry VIII.; her divorce finally leading to the Reformation in England. Here Sir Philip Sidney's father, Sir Henry Sidney, had lived, as President of the Marches; and many a scene of splendor and festivity had lit up the venerable towers, on the occasion of royal visits, and other seasons of rejoicing. Above all, it was for one of those occasions that the youthful Milton had composed his Comus; and on a visit of Charles I., in 1631, to the Earl of Bridgwater, then President of the Marches, it was performed before him, the work being founded on a real incident occurring in the lord president's own family, which is thus related by Nightingale: "When he had entered on his official residence, he was visited by a large assembly of the neighboring nobility and gentry. His sons, the Lord Brackley and Sir Thomas Egerton, and his daughter, the Lady Alice, being on their journey,