now in the same condition of outside waiting and occasional looking-in.  “Received then of the Right honble.  Mr. Secretary Thurloe the sume of fifty pounds:  L50:  by mee, JOHN DRIDEN” is a receipt, of date “19 October 1657,” among Thurloe’s papers in the Record Office—­the words “by mee, JOHN DRIDEN” in a neat slant hand, different from the body of the receipt.  The poet Dryden, it may be remembered, was the cousin and client of Sir Gilbert Pickering, one of the most important men in the Council and one of the most strongly Oliverian.  The poet left Cambridge, his biographers tell us, without his M.A. degree, “about the middle of 1657,” and it was a taunt against him afterwards that he had begun his London life as “clerk” to Sir Gilbert.  As he cannot have got the L50 from Thurloe for nothing, the probability is that he had been employed, through Sir Gilbert, to do some clerkly or literary work for the Council.  No harm, at all events, in remembering the ages at this date of the three men of letters thus linked to the Protectorate at its centre.  Milton was in his forty-ninth year, Marvell in his thirty-eighth, Dryden in his twenty-seventh.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Council Order Books of date.]

[Footnote 2:  Marvell’s Rehearsal Transprosed (in Mr. Grosart’s edition of Marvell’s Prose Works), I. 322; Receipt in Record Office as quoted; Christie’s Memoir of Dryden prefixed to Globe edition of Dryden’s Poetical Works.—­That Marvell was appointed Milton’s colleague or assistant precisely in September 1657 is proved by the fact that his first quarter’s salary appears in certain accounts as due in the following December (see Thurloe, VII. 487).]

On the day on which Dryden received his fifty pounds from Thurloe there was this entry in the birth-registers of the parish of St. Margaret’s, Westminster:  “October 19, 1657, Katherin Milton, d. to John, Esq., by Katherin.”  The entry may be still read in the book, with these words appended in an old hand some time afterwards:  “This is Milton, Oliver’s Secretary.”  It is the record of the birth of a daughter to Milton by his second wife, Katharine Woodcock, in the twelfth month of their marriage.  The little incident reminds us at this point of the domestic life in Petty France; but it need not delay us.  We proceed with the Secretaryship.

Whatever share of the regular work of the Foreign Department may have been now allotted to Marvell, an occasional letter was still required from Milton.  The following Latin dispatches were written by him between September 1657 and Jan. 1657-8, when the Protector’s Second Parliament reassembled for its second session, as a Parliament of two Houses:—­