there were not wanting those outside the family circle who were only too glad to take their place. Various young friends, who recognised his genius and revered his character, came to him regularly day by day, read to him, and acted as his amanuenses: among them, Cyriack Skinner, who has already been mentioned, and the young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, in whom he found sympathetic companionship as well as practical help. It is from this Ellwood, and from one or two of his more casual visitors, who were numerous, that we learn a good deal that is interesting about Milton's personal habits during these last years of his life. Rising early-at four in summer, at five in winter-he began the day by listening to a chapter or two from the Hebrew Scriptures. "Then," says John Aubrey, in his account of the poet, "he contemplated. At seven his "his paid secretary-" came to him again, and then read to him and wrote till dinner." Exercise, chiefly in the form of walking in his garden, followed. The afternoon was commonly devoted to music, of which he was still passionately fond; he played both the bass-viol and the organ, and sometimes he would sing himself, and sometimes his wife would sing to him. After this, he again listened to reading till six ; and between six and eight he received his friends. Conversation he greatly enjoyed; his own talk, we are told, was "extreme pleasant"; his youngest daughter, Deborah, the only one of his children who ever spoke of him with any

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tenderness, declared that he was "delightful company, the soul of conversation," by reason of a flow of subject, and an unaffected cheerfulness and civility." It is perhaps a little surprising to learn that a vein of humour often lightened his talk. At eight he took his supper" of olives or some light thing," for in eating and drinking he was exceedingly abstemious-and, having smoked a pipe of tobacco and drunk a glass of water, he went to bed at nine. Such was his simple and quiet way of life. As to his mode of work, we know that the poetic inspiration visited him very fitfully. Sometimes he would lie awake the whole night, vainly labouring to make a single line; at other times, the verses came unsought and flowed fast and freely-the "easy" and "unpremeditated '' verses of which he speaks. Night was often a favourite time with him for composition; but often, too, he would think out a passage, perhaps of twenty, or thirty, or forty lines, while walking up and down in the garden; and then he would return to the house that it might be put on paper by "" any one that was near and could write." We have a memorable picture of the great poet dictating-"leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it." Another picture we are equally glad to remember has been left us by a Dr. Wright, a Dorsetshire clergyman. "He found John Milton, then growing old, in a small chamber, hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale,

but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones. He used also to sit in a gray coarse cloth coat, at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather to enjoy the fresh air. And so, as well as in his room, he received the visits of people of distinguished parts, as well as quality." Despite age, physical infirmities, and the mental sufferings which had left their mark upon him, he was still a strikingly handsome man, with his white hair falling over his shoulders and his sightless eyes shining with undiminished lustre. Nor, as Mr. Stopford Brooke has well reminded us, must we think of him in these last years as an object of our pity. "None can read 'Paradise Lost' without wonder at the fulness of creative power which must have made him happy"; while dwelling as he so largely did in the highest regions of thought and imagination, he had consolations which the petty miseries of private life and the evils rampant in the world outside were alike powerless to destroy.

For at length he had leisure and opportunity to carry out his long-cherished purpose, and to realise the noble ambition which the enforced occupations of so many years had compelled him to lay aside. The great epic, projected in all the freshness and vigour of youth, was in this period of failing health and bitter disappointment to become an accomplished fact.

Something must now be said about the history of Milton's design, for this will be found to throw much light for us not only upon the

development of his character, but even upon the significance of "Paradise Lost" itself.

As early as 1637, it will be remembered, he had confided to his friend Charles Diodati that he had already fixed his mind upon a great poetic task and was silently but sedulously preparing himself for its accomplishment. The journey to Italy was for him only one more stage in this necessary preparation; even amid the distractions of travel the "inward promptings "' of which he was conscious " grew daily upon him; he held steadily to his proud belief "that by labour and intense study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die." 1 But meanwhile he was casting about for a theme. At first, as was inevitable with one of his enormous reading, the range of possibilities seemed almost bewilderingly wide. In a manuscript notebook preserved among the Milton relics in Trinity College, Cambridge, there is a list, dating probably from 1640 or 1641, which contains the titles of-in some cases, jottings for-ninety-nine different subjects, set down evidently as they occurred to him and for further consideration. Of these sixty-one are Scriptural, the remaining thirty-eight being taken from the legendary history of Britain. At the moment it would appear that his interest was gravitating strongly in the latter direction,

1 "Apology for Smectymnuus."

and especially toward the romantic subject of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. This is shown in a hint in a Latin poem addressed in 1638 or 1639 to his Italian friend Manso, and even more in a passage in the elegy on Diodati ("Epitaphium Damonis "'):

I too for strangely my pipe for some time past had been sounding

Strains of an unknown strength

I have a theme of the Trojans cruising our southern headlands

Shaping to song, and the realm of Imogen, daughter of Pandras,

Brennus and Arvirach, dukes, and Bren's bold brother, Belinus,

Then the Armorican settlers under the laws of the Britons,

Ay, and the womb of Ingraine fatally pregnant with Arthur,

Uther's son.1

But however favourably he may for a time have thought of the Arthurian legends as a theme for an English heroic poem, it was not long before he set them definitely aside and fixed his choice upon the Fall of Man. Four drafts, evidently written out before 1642, remain to testify to the prominence which this subject had already assumed in his thought. I here reproduce the last and fullest of them :

ADAM UNPARADISED 2:-The Angel Gabriel, either descending or entering-showing, since the I quote from Masson's translation of the elegy.

2 It may be noted that the title which heads the third draft is "Paradise Lost." The first two drafts are without titles.