If the date of this letter, as published by Milton himself, is correct, it was written on a Sunday.  Yet there can have been no particular haste; for Lady Ranelagh, who was to carry the letter to her son at Oxford on her way to Ireland, did not leave London for at least another fortnight.  The pass for “Lady Catharine, Viscountess of Ranelagh, and her two daughters,” with their servants, eight horses, &c., to go into Ireland, was granted, I find, by the Protector’s Council, Oct. 7, 1656, on the motion of Lord President Lawrence.[1] She was to be away in Ireland for some years, occupied with family business of various kinds; and Milton was thinking with regret of the blank in his life that would be caused by her absence.  For she had been to him, he says, “in the place of all kith and kin.”  How much that phrase involves!  Though we have no letters from Milton to Lady Ranelagh, or from Lady Ranelagh to Milton, and though the fact of their friendship has been left by Milton unrecorded in that poetical form, whether of sonnet or of idyll, which has preserved for us so finely other incidents and intimacies of his life, this one phrase, duly interpreted, ought to make up for all.  Perhaps in no part of any eminent man’s life, especially if he is bereft domestically, is there wanting this benefit of some supreme womanly interest wakened in his behalf.  Twice in Milton’s life, so unfortunate domestically hitherto, we have seen something of the kind.  Twelve years ago, in the old Aldersgate days of his desertion by his wife, it seemed to be the Lady Margaret Ley that was paramount.  More recently, through the Westminster years of blindness and widowerhood, the real ministering angel, if there had been any such, had been that Lady Ranelagh whom English History remembers at any rate as the incomparable sister of Lord Broghill and of Robert Boyle.  Let there be restored to her henceforth the honour also of having been Milton’s friend.

[Footnote 1:  Council Order-Books of date.]

The next extant Epistle of Milton, written when the Second Parliament of the Protectorate had sat nearly two months, is also quite of a private nature.  Of the German or Dutch youth to whom it is addressed, Peter Heimbach, I have ascertained only that he had been residing for some time in London, perhaps originally brought thither in the train of some embassy or agency, and that he had recently published in London a Latin letter of eulogy on Cromwell,[1] extremely enthusiastic and somewhat juvenile.  Milton’s letter suggests farther that he had been much about Milton, as amanuensis or what not, but was now on a visit to Holland.

[Footnote 1:  The Letter, which is in thirty-five pages of small folio, is entitled “Petri ab Heimbach, G.F., ad Serenissimum Potentissimumque Principem Olivarium, D. G. Magnae Brittaniae Protectorem, verae Fidei Defensorem, Pium, Felicem, Invictum, Adlocutio Gralulatoria:  Londini, Ex Typographia Jacobi Cottrellii, 1656.”  The praise of Cromwell is boundless; and his conduct in the Piedmontese business, and his care of learning and the Universities, are especially noticed.]