send out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases. To this must be added select reading, and steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs.... And now, good Tom, to reading."

Elwood took up the Latin author which he was at present engaged upon, and proceeded with it. Whenever the preternaturally acute ear of Milton detected, by Elwood's intonation, that he did not quite understand a sentence, he would stop him, examine him, and elucidate the difficult passage. By and by, "You will find a saying very similar to that," he observed, "in Virgil his Fourth Eclogue. Fetch down the book, and let us hear what the Mantuan hath written therein."

Elwood searched along the bookshelves, but to no avail. "Friend," said he, "thy Virgil is no longer here. Yesterday I handled it myself,—to-day it is vanished. So is the Lucretius." A frown contracted Milton's splendid brow. "These women-kind," he muttered like rumbling thunder, "they are verily the root of all evil. Bid me hither my wife and daughters, and Mary Fisher the maid moreover." The first and the last, being summoned, arrived in all haste, and disavowed any knowledge of the missing books. Anne and Mary Milton, it appeared, were gone out marketing: but little Deborah, being strictly cross-examined, confessed that she had seen sister Anne carrying books away from the study last night when their father had retired: the wherewithal for "marketing" was easily obtained in this way.

Milton groaned in his ineptitude. "How have I deserved this treacherous dealing at their hands? Lord, how long shall I be

dark in light exposed

To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,

Within doors and without, still as a fool

In power of others, never in my own?

(Samson Agonistes).

Here, by a happy coincidence, there was a sturdy hammering heard at the front door, and Andrew Marvell was ushered in, "I am out of my due time," said he, "for it is not yet gone six,"—(six to eight P.M. being Milton's best time for receiving visitors). "Yet to so old an offender as myself, John, I know thou wilt make an exception." Marvell was the one friend of his own type and standing, the one constant and inalienable comrade, upon whose fidelity the blind man could rely. He had formerly been Milton's colleague under the Cromwellian Government: and was his kindred spirit, so far as anyone could claim such relationship with the frozen heights of the poet's intellect.

With him, during the next two hours—the learned physician Paget joining them, and Elwood listening in respectful silence to the converse of these mighty men—Milton forgot the vexations of his ill-assorted household. He assured his friends that he was truly far happier now, in poverty, infirmity and neglect, occupied solely upon his long-projected masterpiece, than during the eighteen years of his manly prime, when his mind and pen were solely employed upon the controversies which he now professed to hate. "Never again," he declared, "shall earthly ambitions interrupt and thwart me: never now shall I endure to leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a tumbled sea of noises and hoarse disputes. Cast out of my fool's Paradise of fame not worth the finding, shall, not I and the hope whereunto I am wedded explore some fair and fragrant tract of outer Eden? Even as I have set forth the banishment of our first parents:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,