fabric of popular government was rushing to its fall. He heard enough to disquiet him, and he doubtless brooded over what he heard, but his practical withdrawal from the world must have deadened the shock of the Restoration and rendered less vivid his solicitude as to his own fate. To those, however, who have studied the shameful history of England for the year 1659, the isolation of the blind poet but adds to the pathos of the picture he presents a Republican Samson, captive in the midst of his contemptible foes. Yet even the pathos of this picture should not make us wish with Mark Pattison that Milton had never sunk the poet in the man of affairs. It seems as idle to argue that "Paradise Lost" would have been the poem it is without the poetic interregnum of 1640-1660, as it is to argue that Milton would have been as great a man without it. Those critics may indeed be right who maintain that Milton's nature was subdued to what it worked in, "like the dyer's hand," that the Puritan controversialist sometimes got the better of the poet long after occasion for controversy had passed away (as

if Milton could ever have thought this!)but such criticism means merely that Milton had not the universality of genius, the absolute perfection of artistic balance that characterize Homer, and perhaps Shakspere, alone of the world's poets. No one has ever claimed such universality, such perfect balance for him; his sublime elevation of consummate nobility being sufficient basis for his eternal fame.

CHAPTER III

THE SUPREME POET (1661-1674)

It is easy enough to infer that Milton did not fully understand the signs of the times from the fact that he published two of his idealistic political and theological tracts in 1659, and one, the "Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth," not two months before Charles II. reëntered his kingdom. If he had understood the times thoroughly, and perceived of what gross clay his fellow-countrymen were made, he would hardly have had the spirit to pen his eloquent periods. Yet he knew more or less what was coming, and he displayed his matchless courage in protesting the justice of Charles I.'s execution on the eve of the triumphal advent of Charles II. He was not foolhardy, however, for early in May he left his house and went into hiding in Bartholomew Close, Smithfield.

If either king or Parliament had been bloodyminded, Milton would almost certainly have been brought to the scaffold. His writings were burned by the hangman on August 27, but influential friends made it possible for his name to be omitted from the list of twenty persons who were proscribed in addition to the authentic regicides. He actually escaped arrest for a long while, and when this came, suffered only from the exaction of heavy fees. Finally he found a refuge in Holborn, his nerves. shaken, and his property greatly reduced, partly in consequence of his political affiliations. There is nothing more pathetic in history than this return of Milton to the outer world. Blind, reviled, despised by his own children, his ideals shattered, his health impaired, he had but one comfort, — his undefiled conscience; and but one hope, - the completion of the great poem he had already begun.

But by degrees his condition began to mend. His third marriage restored order to his home and prevented his daughters from selling his books. His friends visited him faithfully, and his organ was a source of unfailing pleasure.

Readers and amanuenses were provided, and the labor of composition went on, interrupted only by his own singular inaptitude for work at certain seasons. By 1663, five years after its inception, the first draft of the immortal epic was probably completed; in two years more it was in all likelihood fit for the printer; but the fatal Plague and Fire doubtless impeded business negotiations, and certainly sent the poet down to Chalfont St. Giles, where the interesting Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, visited him and asked the famous question which probably led to the composition of “Paradise Regained." Before, however, the latter poem was published along with "Samson Agonistes" in 1671, the greatest epic since "The Divine Comedy" had passed so as by fire through the sapient hands of the licenser, the Reverend Thomas Tomkyns, and had been printed by Samuel Simmons (in 1667) on terms that have been made the subject of many critical homilies.

Mr. Simmons may have driven a hard bargain, though there is much room to doubt it; but he did better by Milton and his epic than a good many modern critics have done who are