How long Lady Ranelagh had known Milton is uncertain; but, as her nephew, the young Earl of Barrimore, had been one of Milton’s pupils in his house in the Barbican, and as we had express information that he had been sent there by his aunt, the acquaintance must have begun as early as 1646 or 1647.  And now, it appears, through all the intermediate eight years of Milton’s changes of residence and fortune, including his six in the Latin Secretaryship, the acquaintanceship has been kept up, and has been growing more intimate, till, in 1655, in his widowerhood and blindness in his house in Petty France, there is no one, and certainly no lady, that more frequently calls upon him, or whose voice, on the staircase, announcing who the visitor is, he is more pleased to hear.  They were close neighbours, only St. James’s Park between their houses; and his having taught her nephew, the young Earl of Barrimore, was not now the only link of that kind between themselves.  She had not been satisfied till she had contrived that her own son should, to some extent, be Milton’s pupil too.  “My Lady Ranelagh, whose son for some time he instructed” are Phillips’s words on this point; and, though we included Lady Ranelagh’s son, Mr. Richard Jones, afterwards third Viscount and first Earl of Ranelagh, in our general enumeration of Milton’s pupils, given under the year 1647, when the Barbican establishment was complete, it was with the intimation that this particular pupil, then but seven years old, could hardly have been one of the Barbican boys, but must have had the benefit of lessons from Milton in some exceptional way afterwards.  The fact, on the likeliest construction of the evidence, seems to have been that Milton, to oblige Lady Ranelagh, had quite recently allowed the boy to come daily, or every other day, from his mother’s house in Pall Mall to Petty France, to sit with him for an hour or two, and read Greek and Latin.  To the end of his life Milton found this easy kind of pedagogy a pleasant amusement in his blindness, and made it indeed one of his devices for help to himself in his readings and references to books; and Lady Ranelagh’s son may have been his first experiment in the method.  That he retained an interest in this young Ranelagh of a semi-tutorial kind, as well as on his mother’s account, the sequel will prove.

Strange things do happen in real life; and actually it was possible that, on the day of one of Lady Ranelagh’s visits to Milton, she might have had a call in her own house from Dr. Peter Du Moulin.  For her ladyship’s circle of acquaintance did include this gentleman.  He had been tutor in Ireland to her two nephews, Viscount Dungarvan and Mr. Richard Boyle, sons of her eldest brother, the Earl of Cork, and he had come with them, still in that capacity, to Oxford (ante p. 224), and so had been introduced into the whole Boyle connexion.[1] What amount of awkwardness there may have been in a possible meeting between Du Moulin and Milton themselves