[Illustration:  JOHN MILTON, AET. 10.]

His Early Manhood and Life at Horton.—­In 1632 Milton left Cambridge and went to live with his father in a country home at Horton, about twenty miles west of London.  Milton had been intended for the church; but he felt that he could not subscribe to its intolerance, and that he had another mission to perform.  His father accordingly provided sufficient funds for maintaining him for over five years at Horton in a life of studious leisure.  The poet’s greatest biographer, David Masson, says “Until Milton was thirty-two years of age, if even then, he did not earn a penny for himself.”  Such a course would ruin ninety-nine out of every hundred talented young men; but it was the making of Milton.  He spent those years in careful study and in writing his immortal early poems.

[Illustration:  VISIT OF MILTON TO THE BLIND GALILEO AT THE VILLA D’ARCETRI NEAR FLORENCE IN 1638. From the painting by T. Lessi.]

In 1638, when he was in his thirtieth year, he determined to broaden his views by travel.  He went to Italy, which the Englishmen of his day still regarded as the home of art, culture, and song.  After about fifteen months abroad, hearing that his countrymen were on the verge of civil war, he returned home to play his part in the mighty tragedy of the times.

Milton’s “Left Hand.”—­In 1642 the Civil War broke out between the Royalists and the Puritans.  He took sides in the struggle for liberty, not with his sword, but with his pen.  During this time he wrote little but prose.  He regretted that the necessity of the time demanded prose, in the writing of which, he says, “I have the use, as I may account it, but of my left hand.”

With that “left hand” he wrote much prose.  There is one common quality running through all his prose works, although they treat of the most varied subjects.  Every one of these works strikes a blow for fuller liberty in some direction,—­for more liberty in church, in state, and in home relations, for the freedom of expressing opinions, and for a system of education which should break away from the leading strings of the inferior methods of the past.  His greatest prose work is the Areopagitica:  A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.

Much of his prose is poetic and adorned with figures of rhetoric.  He frequently follows the Latin order, and inverts his sentences, which are often unreasonably long.  Sometimes his “left hand” astonishes us by slinking mud at his opponents, and we eagerly await the loosing of the right hand which was to give us Paradise Lost.

His Blindness.—­The English government from 1649 to 1660 is known as the Commonwealth.  The two most striking figures of the time were Oliver Cromwell, who in 1653 was styled the Lord Protector, and John Milton, who was the Secretary for Foreign Tongues.

[Illustration:  FACSIMILE OF MILTON’S SIGNATURE IN THE ELEVENTH YEAR OF HIS BLINDNESS._From his application to wed Elizabeth Minshull.  Feb. 11, 1663._]