To the Nightingale and On arriving at the Age of Twenty-three, in 1631.  In 1632, having given up the idea of entering the Church, for which his f. had intended him, he lived for 6 years at Horton, near Windsor, to which the latter had retired, devoted to further study.  Here he wrote L’Allegro and Il Penseroso in 1632, Arcades (1633), Comus in 1634, and Lycidas in 1637.  The first celebrates the pleasures of a life of cheerful innocence, and the second of contemplative, though not gloomy, retirement, and the last is a lament for a lost friend, Edward King, who perished at sea. Arcades and Comus are masques set to music by Henry Lawes, having for their motives respectively family affection and maiden purity.  Had he written nothing else these would have given him a place among the immortals.  In 1638 he completed his education by a period of travel in France and Italy, where he visited Grotius at Paris, and Galileo at Florence.  The news of impending troubles in Church and State brought him home the following year, and with his return may be said to close the first of three well-marked divisions into which his life falls.  These may be called (1) the period of preparation and of the early poems; (2) the period of controversy, and of the prose writings; and (3) the period of retirement and of the later poems.  Soon after his return M. settled in London, and employed himself in teaching his nephews, Edward and John Phillips, turning over in his mind at the same time various subjects as the possible theme for the great poem which, as the chief object of his life, he looked forward to writing.  But he was soon to be called away to far other matters, and to be plunged into the controversies and practical business which were to absorb his energies for the next 20 years.  The works of this period fall into three classes—­(1) those directed against Episcopacy, including Reformation of Church Discipline in England (1641), and his answers to the writings of Bishop Hall (q.v.), and in defence of Smectymnuus (see under Calamy); (2) those relating to divorce, including The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), and The Four Chief Places of Scripture which treat of Marriage (1645); and (3) those on political and miscellaneous questions, including the Tractate on Education (1644), Areopagitica (1644), A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (his greatest prose work), Eikonoklastes, an answer to the Eikon Basilike of Dr. Gauden (q.v.), The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), in defence of the execution of Charles I., which led to the furious controversy with Salmasius, the writing of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1650), the second Defensio (1654), which carried his name over Europe, and The Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, written on the eve of the Restoration.  In 1643 M. had m.