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tried, and, abandoned by the royal master whom he had served not indeed well but faithfully according to his lights, perished on the scaffold. A struggle for supremacy ensued between the king and the House of Commons, and in 1642 England was plunged into civil war. As in this tremendous conflict it was practically inevitable that every man should take a side, minor differences were for the time being obliterated. In each camp there were moderate men as well as extremists, but, speaking generally, the opposed armies represented the king and the Church on the one side, and Parliament and Puritanism on the other.

The language which Milton used regarding his return to England clearly suggests his intention of taking some personal part in public affairs. Apparently he found no immediate opening for his energies, for, "cheerfully leaving "the burning issues of the hour "first to God, and then to those to whom the people had committed that task," he himself resumed his former studious routine of life. He took lodgings to begin with in the house of a tailor in St. Bride's Churchyard, Fleet Street, moving thence in 1640 to a "pretty garden-house" in Aldersgate Street, then outside the walls and in a quiet, almost rural quarter of the city. Not even now did he adopt any definite profession, contentedly living in his simple fashion on the means provided by his father. But he employed much of his time in the education of his nephews, John and Edward Phillips, sons of his only sister

by her first marriage, and in this way he was led a little later to take a few other pupils into his house.

Meanwhile he had found that it was by pamphleteering that, as a private citizen, he could for the time being most effectively help his fellow-countrymen in their struggle for political and religious liberty. "I resolved," he says, "though I was then meditating other matters, to transfer into this struggle all my genius and all the strength of my industry." He now became active and influential as a prosewriter and controversialist, setting aside in obedience to the urgent claims of the hour the prosecution of those poetic designs upon which more than ever he had set his heart. But before we turn to the polemical work which, though he did not then guess it, was to absorb his energies and to withhold him from the "other matters " of which he speaks for the next twenty years, it will be well to outline the course of his private life.

Unfortunately, the record soon becomes disturbed by domestic troubles. In June 1643 he married Mary Powell, the daughter of an Oxfordshire squire. This was, as the immediate sequel showed, a most injudicious step. That Milton should have taken it, and taken it, as is only too evident, without forethought, is another fact which proves in how many important respects the popular conception of his character needs correction. As it was, the strong feelings and idealising imagination of the poet must

have blinded him for the moment to all consideration of consequences. He was now thirtyfive years old, a man of staid and somewhat austere manners, whose mind moved habitually upon the highest planes of thought, and was impatient of the trivial interests of the daily round of things. His wife was a commonplace and rather giddy girl of seventeen. Their tempers were thus entirely incompatible; and to make matters worse, she came of a Cavalier family. Accustomed to a large household and plenty of jovial company, she soon found the home to which her husband brought her lonely, and the way of life there unbearably dull. Misunderstandings at once arose; and before a month was out, she begged his permission to go back to her parents for the rest of the summer. He granted the request on condition that she should return by Michaelmas. Michaelmas came, and she still remained away; whereupon, according to the statement of one of his nephews, her husband "thought it would be dishonourable ever to receive her again." After the lapse of two years, and in accordance with a theory of his concerning the dissolubility of the marriage-bond, he even began to think of another marriage. Reconciliation, however, now took place between himself and his wife. The overtures came from the Powell family, who had been brought by Royalist reverses into great distress; an interview was arranged in a friend's house; and in the late summer of 1645 Mrs. Milton took her place once more in her husband's

home. As Mr. Mark Pattison suggests, it is impossible not to believe that Milton had the "impressive scene" of the reconciliation before his mind when, twenty years later, he wrote in “Paradise Lost" of the reconciliation of Adam and Eve:

Eve, with tears that ceased not flowing,
And tresses all disorder'd, at his feet

Fell humble, and embracing them, besought
His peace...

Her lowly plight

Immovable, till peace obtain❜d from fault
Acknowledg'd and deplor'd, in Adam wrought
Commiseration; soon his heart relented
Tow'rds her, his life so late and sole delight,
Now at his feet submissive in distress—
Creature so fair his reconcilement seeking ...
At once disarm'd, his anger all he lost,1

We can, I am afraid, scarcely suppose that any great happiness attended the reunion of the ill-matched pair; but at least we hear of no further quarrels or estrangement. That there had been faults on both sides must be admitted, and we need not try to exonerate Milton from his own share of the blame. But to his credit it must be added that, though never of a conciliatory temper, he consented in June 1646 to take the now impoverished family of the Powells into his household. Considering that Mrs. Powell had throughout been a chief influence in her daughter's headstrong behaviour, and 1 X. 937 f 7 £.

that the presence of these decayed Royalists was both embarrassing and irksome to him, the fact testifies to great magnanimity on his part.

his father had settled with him in 1643, and as three children-Anne, Mary, and Deborahwere in due time born to him, his family was now a large one. Fortunately, after the return of his wife he had moved into a more commodious house in Barbican, a street leading out of Aldersgate. There were, however, other changes of residence before his home-circle was broken by the death of his father in 1647 and that of his wife in 1653.

Such was the tenor of Milton's private life when, between 1641 and 1645, he was writing, before his marriage, his pamphlets on Church government, and after, his "Areopagitica " and his tractates on education and divorce. With these and other prose writings to be mentioned later we are concerned here only for their value in connection with our author's personality and aims. A few words about them will therefore suffice. To the ordinary lover of Milton's poetry they are indeed in themselves hardly attractive. They are marked by noble earnestness, passionate intensity of feeling, and bursts of splendid eloquence; but the issues with which they deal have for us to-day little more than an historical interest; their style (and Milton himself said they were the work of his left hand ") is habitually involved, cumbrous, and heavy; while too often they are rank with the fiercest spirit of partisanship and

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