private boarding-school;’ but that this observation was dictated by the good Doctor’s spleen is made plain by his immediately proceeding to point out, with his accustomed good sense, that there is really nothing to laugh at, since it was desirable that Milton, whose father was alive and could only make him a small allowance, should do something, and there was no shame in his adopting an honest and useful employment.

To be a Parliament man was no part of the ambition of one who still aspired to be a poet; who was not yet blind to the heavenly vision; who was still meditating what should be his theme, and who in the meantime chastised his sister’s sons, unruly lads, who did him no credit and bore him no great love.

The Long Parliament met in November, 1640, and began its work—brought Strafford to the scaffold, clapped Laud into the Tower, Archbishop though he was, and secured as best they could the permanency of Parliamentary institutions.  None of these things specially concerned John Milton.  But there also uprose the eternal Church question, ‘What sort of Church are we to have?’  The fierce controversy raged, and ‘its fair enticing fruit,’ spread round ‘with liberal hand,’ proved too much for the father of English epic.

      ‘He scrupled not to eat
Against his better knowledge.’

In other words, he commenced pamphleteer, and between May, 1641, and the following March he had written five pamphlets against Episcopacy, and used an intolerable deal of bad language, which, however excusable in a heated controversialist, ill became the author of Comus.

The war broke out in 1642, but Milton kept house.  The ‘tented field’ had no attractions for him.

In the summer of 1643 he took a sudden journey into the country, and returned home to his boys with a wife, the daughter of an

Oxfordshire Cavalier.  Poor Mary Powell was but seventeen, her poetic lord was thirty-five.  From the country-house of a rollicking squire to Aldersgate Street was somewhat too violent a change.  She had left ten brothers and sisters behind her, the eldest twenty-one, the youngest four.  As one looks upon this picture and on that, there is no need to wonder that the poor girl was unhappy.  The poet, though keenly alive to the subtle charm of a woman’s personality, was unpractised in the arts of daily companionship.  He expected to find much more than he brought of general good-fellowship.  He had an ideal ever in his mind of both bodily and spiritual excellence, and he was almost greedy to realize both, but he knew not how.  One of his complaints was that his wife was mute and insensate, and sat silent at his board.  It must, no doubt, have been deadly dull, that house in Aldersgate Street.  Silence reigned, save when broken by the cries of the younger Phillips sustaining chastisement.  Milton had none of that noble humanitarian spirit which had led Montaigne long years before him to protest against the cowardly traditions of the schoolroom.  After a month of Aldersgate Street, Mrs. Milton begged to go

home.  Her wish was granted, and she ran back to her ten brothers and sisters, and when her leave of absence was up refused to return.  Her husband was furiously angry; and in a time so short as almost to enforce the belief that he began the work during the honeymoon, was ready with his celebrated pamphlet, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce restored to the good of both sexes.  He is even said, with his accustomed courage, to have paid attentions to a Miss Davis, who is described as a very handsome and witty gentlewoman, and therefore not one likely to sit silent at his board; but she was a sensible girl as well, and had no notion of a married suitor.  Of Milton’s pamphlet it is everyone’s duty to speak with profound respect.  It is a noble and passionate cry for a high ideal of married life, which, so he argued, had by inflexible laws been changed into a drooping and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption.  He shuddered at the thought of a man and woman being condemned, for a mistake of judgment, to be bound together to their unspeakable wearisomeness and despair, for, he says, not to be beloved and yet retained is the greatest injury to a gentle spirit.  Our present doctrine of divorce, which sets the

household captive free on payment of a broken vow, but on no less ignoble terms, is not founded on the congruous, and is indeed already discredited, if not disgraced.

This pamphlet on divorce marks the beginning of Milton’s mental isolation.  Nobody had a word to say for it.  Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Independent held his doctrine in as much abhorrence as did the Catholic, and all alike regarded its author as either an impracticable dreamer or worse.  It was written certainly in too great haste, for his errant wife, actuated by what motives cannot now be said, returned to her allegiance, was mindful of her plighted troth, and, suddenly entering his room, fell at his feet and begged to be forgiven.  She was only nineteen, and she said it was all her mother’s fault.  Milton was not a sour man, and though perhaps too apt to insist upon repentance preceding forgiveness, yet when it did so he could forgive divinely.  In a very short time the whole family of Powells, whom the war had reduced to low estate, were living under his roof in the Barbican, whither he moved on the Aldersgate house proving too small for his varied belongings.  The poet’s father also lived with his son.

Mrs. Milton had four children, three of whom,

all daughters, lived to grow up.  The mother died in childbirth in 1652, being then twenty-six years of age.

The Areopagitica, a Speech for Unlicensed Printing, followed the divorce pamphlet, but it also fell upon deaf ears.  Of all religious sects the Presbyterians, who were then dominant, are perhaps the least likely to forego the privilege of interference in the affairs of others.  Instead of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, instead of ‘a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House, another from the west end of Paul’s,’ there was appointed a commission of twenty Presbyterians to act as State Licensers.  Then was Milton’s soul stirred within him to a noble rage.  His was a threefold protest—as a citizen of a State he fondly hoped had been free, as an author, and as a reader.  As a citizen he protested against so unnecessary and improper an interference.  It is not, he cried, ‘the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitring of a bishop, that will make us a happy nation,’ but the practice of virtue, and virtue means freedom to choose.  Milton was a manly politician, and detested with his whole soul grandmotherly legislation.  ‘He who is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not being

known to be evil, and standing to the hazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himself reputed in the commonwealth wherein he was born, for other than a fool or a foreigner.’  ‘They are not skilful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin.’  ‘And were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil doing.’  These are texts upon which sermons, not inapplicable to our own day, might be preached.  Milton has made our first parent so peculiarly his own, that any observations of his about Adam are