though no such freedom is allowed to the "weaker vessel."

Professor Masson, Mr. Mark Pattison, Dr. S. R. Gardiner, Mr. Leslie Stephen, have sounded the depths that cover the strange history of Milton's marriage, and have said many sage things, but (through no fault of their own) perhaps not one that is convincing. Where these grave persons admit their difficulties it may be

a relief to turn to the delicate art with which Miss Manning has told the story, simply and with a true imaginative sympathy for a young girl's inevitable difficulties in the first weeks of married life. Milton, in later days, said that "the bashful muteness of a virgin may ofttimes hide all the unliveliness and natural sloth which is really unfit for conversation." It is very likely that he did not recognise, as those of poetic temper are very loth to do, that a man of thirty-four is not still in his first youth, while a girl of seventeen has not really reached womanhood; and there was in his soul, with all its

sweetness and purity, an underlying harsh

ness of temper.

"God's universal law

Gave to man despotic power

Over his female in due awe,

Nor from that right to part an hour."

Those are lines as bitter as any that his pen wrote in prose. But happily the spirit which wrote the Divorce treatises, and which even suggested that the banished wife might find a successor in his home, was not unquenchable. Before two years were out, in the house of friends, the young girl, not yet nineteen, threw herself at her husband's feet and was taken back.

They had four children, Anne, born 1646; Mary, 1648; John (who died an infant), 1651; Deborah, 1652; and the wife died in the year of the birth of her youngest child.

In 1656 Milton married Catherine Woodcock, who died in February 1658. In February 1663 he married Elizabeth Minshull, who lived till 1727.

All accounts point to much family disagreement, and Milton in the year of his death (1674), spoke to his brother of his "undutiful children." Yet here again the faults were not all on one side. The girls were taught to read aloud in five or six languages, without being allowed to learn the meaning of what they read. Only Deborah was taught Latin, and she became her father's amanuensis. Before he died they were all sent out to learn embroidery in gold and silver, that they might earn their living. Mary died unmarried, the others married poorly. It is a story even more pathetic than the first episode of misunderstanding, and it seems clear that it lasted to the end. Only Deborah appears in later days to have entertained a kindly memory of her father. Two years before her death, when she was sixty-three, she was shown a drawing without being told for whom it was meant. "O Lord!" she said at once, "that is the picture of my father," and she stroked down the hair of her

forehead with "just so my father wore his hair."

Miss Manning happily seized upon a year which we may hope may have been brighter than the rest of the poet's evil days, and something of her picture of the country retreat must certainly be true. It is not likely that the observant Ellwood would have failed to record it, if there had been much family disagreement in the house he so often visited. He was long Milton's friend and pupil, and the formal quaintness of his "History written by Himself" adds not a little to the pleasantness of the picture which imagination may draw of the brighter side of these last years. Ellwood himself suffered persecution for his opinions, and he could feel for the Puritan poet who had once been Latin secretary.

The words on which Miss Manning founded the main story of her “Deborah's Diary" are these: "Some little time before I went to Aylesbury prison," says Ellwood, "I was desired by my

quondam master, Milton, to take a house for him in the neighbourhood, where I dwelt, that he might go out of the city, for the safety of himself and his family, the pestilence then growing hot in London. I took a pretty box for him in Giles Chalfont, a mile from me, of which

I

gave him notice; and intended to have waited on him, and seen him well settled in it, but was prevented by that imprisonment. But now being released and returned home, I soon made a visit to him, to welcome him into the country. After some common discourses had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his; which being brought he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me, and read it at my leisure; and when I had so done, return it to him with my judgment thereupon. When I came home, and had set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled 'Paradise Lost.' After I had, with the best attention, read it through, I made him another visit, and