1649-53 (Milton ætat. 40-44). - Milton's official duties consisted in preparing drafts of such letters in Latin as the council desired from time to time to address to foreign princes, governments, and ambassadors; and a series of forty-six such letters, written by him for the council, and the publication of which was prevented during his lifetime, was edited from his papers after his death. But much more important work was devolved on Milton by the council. The famous Ikon Basilike had just appeared, and was circulating in hundreds of copies through the country, representing the late king, on the professed authority of his own private papers, as a saint ever on his knees during his hours of solitude and misfortune, and doing much, therefore, to win popular acquiescence in the use of the term "royal martyr," as already posthumously applied to him. By way of counteractive, Milton wrote and published a long pamphlet entitled Elkovokλαorns, in which, without questioning the authenticity of the pretended manifesto of royalty, he criticizes it mercilessly. The preparation of this pamphlet must have occupied him during a considerable portion of the year 1649; but it was hardly finished when a still harder piece of work was required of him. Charles II., then a refugee in Holland, had got the great scholar Salmasius, alias Claude de Saumaise, of the university of Leyden, to undertake the advocacy of his cause in a treatise such as might be submitted to the learned throughout Europe; and the Continent was now ringing with the fame of the Defensio Regia pro Carolo Primo ad Carolum Secundum which Salmasius had published. Fearful of the damage that such a work might do abroad, the English council of

state bethought themselves of their secretary as the man to answer it suitably. On the 8th of January 1649-50, it was ordered by the council "that Mr. Milton do prepare something in answer to the book of Salmasius, and, when he hath done it, bring it to the council." In execution of this commission, Milton prepared his famous First. Defence for the People of England; or, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, contra Claudii anonymi alias Salmasii Defensionem Regiam, the order for the publication of which appears in the council-minutes under date December 23, 1650. It has been stated that Milton received £1000 for the performance; but the minutes of council exhibit nothing more than a vote of thanks. The success of the treatise was infinitely beyond what might have been expected. Salmasius found himself assailed in his philosophy, in his Latinity, and in his powers of opprobrious rhetoric, by a man who was more than his match in all; and it is even said that his death, which occurred not long afterwards, was caused by chagrin at his loss of credit. Satisfied with his triumph, Milton rested from literary exertion, except of a private kind, for about two years. It was during this time that

he removed from Scotland Yard to a house in "Petty France, Westminster, opening into St. James' Park," which house (afterwards occupied by Bentham) he continued to live in till the Restoration. It was about this time, also, and apparently in the house in Petty France, that he was visited by the great calamity of his life his blindness. From a letter on the subject written by him at a later period, it appears that his eyesight had begun to fail as early as 1644, when he was about thirty-five years of age, and that the

process of obscuration was so gradual that it was not till about 1650 or 1651 that total blindness was threatened. The preparation of the treatise against Salmasius was believed by himself to have hastened the fatal result. At all events, by the end of the year 1653 Milton was totally blind, and the fact of his blindness was publicly talked of both by his friends and his enemies. The fatal affection was of the kind called gutta serena; and Milton himself tells that it left his eyes perfectly clear and without any mark, speck, or external disfigurement whatever. It may have been while the blindness was not yet total, but only nearly so, that he sustained what even for him, in such circumstances, must have been another great loss, and which was certainly a great loss for his children. This was the death of his wife, the precise date of which has not been discovered, though it was either in 1652 or 1653. She left three children, all daughters :- the eldest, Anne, about seven years of age; the second, Mary, about five; and the third, Deborah, a mere infant in arms. Although she may not have been the fit person to be the wife of Milton, one cannot but imagine the house in Petty France more desolate from her absence; the blind and austere widower left in one part of it to contemplations in which some thoughts of Mary Powell, as she was when he first bore her away from her Oxfordshire home, can hardly have been wanting; and the poor, motherless children, known to him only as tiny voices of complaint going about in the darkness near, with none but an alien voice any more to hush or overawe them!

1653-1658 (Milton ætat. 44-49). - Notwithstanding his blindness, Milton continued in the

active discharge of his duties as Latin secretary during the whole protectorate of Cromwell, which began on the 16th of December 1653, and terminated on Cromwell's death on the 3d of September 1658. Between seventy and eighty Latin letters, written by him in Oliver's name, are included in the collection of his state letters; and besides these he wrote a Latin state paper of some length on the subject of the Protector's differences with the Spanish court. He had, however, an assistant in his office who relieved him of a part of the work; and there is a council order, dated April 17, 1655, reducing his salary to £150 per annum, with the proviso that the same should be paid to him during his life. It seems, however, that both Milton and his friend Andrew Marvell, who was latterly associated with him in the office, received an actual salary of £200 a year. That Milton was not only an admirer of Cromwell's genius, - he had already celebrated him in a sonnet as “Cromwell, our -chief of men,"- but also an entire believer in the necessity and the advantage of his government, is proved by the tenor of his writings during the Protectorate. These consisted of three pamphlets growing out of the Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. As early as 1651, indeed, an anonymous reply to this treatise had appeared; but Milton, who attributed it to Bishop Bramhall, left the confutation of it to his nephew John Philips, and only revised what Philips had written. Another work having appeared abroad, however, in 1652, with the title Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Cælum adversus Parricidas Anglicanos, Milton, who was grossly and calumniously attacked in it, and represented as a

blind monster, thought it fit to reply in person. The real author of the work was the Frenchman Peter Dumoulin, afterwards a prebendary of Canterbury; but the reputed author at the time was Alexander More, a Scotchman, settled in France, who had been concerned in seeing it through the press; and against him Milton directed the full force of his vengeance. In the Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano, which was not published till 1654, Milton meets the personal accusations of his antagonist, and retaliates with scurrilities quite as coarse and offensive, though doubtless better founded; but he also returns to the main question, in the course of the discussion of which he introduces a splendid panegyric on Cromwell, and brief eulogistic sketches of some of the other heroes of the Commonwealth. Not content with what he had said in his own defence in this pamphlet, he followed it up by another entitled Authoris pro se Defensio contra Alexandrum Morum, Ecclesiasten (1655); and More having rejoined, he wound up with Authoris ad Alexandri Mori Supplementum Responsio, published in the same year. These pamphlets must necessarily have been written by the method of dictation; and in the first of them there is a passage written with express reference to his blindness. During the remaining three years of the Protectorate, Milton had leisure to fall back upon the compilations which he had on hand. During the same period he married his second wife, Catherine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney, of whom little or nothing is known. The marriage took place on the 12th November 1656, by civil contract; and in February 1657-58 Milton was again left a wid