“Feb. 10, 1657-8, Mrs. Katherin Milton,” and again “March, 20, 1657-8, Mrs. Katherin Milton,” are two entries, within six weeks of each other, in the burial registers of St, Margaret’s, Westminster.  They are the records of the deaths of Milton’s second wife and the little girl she had borne him only in October last.  Which entry designates the mother and which, the child we should not know from the entries themselves; but a sentence in Phillips’s memoir of his uncle settles the point.  “By his second wife; Katharine, the daughter of Captain Woodcock of Hackney,” says Phillips, “he had only one daughter, of which the mother, the first year after her marriage, died in childbed, and the child also within a month after.”  The first entry, therefore, is for the mother, and the second for the child.  The mother died exactly at the time of the dissolution of the Parliament, and not in child-birth itself, but nearly four months after child-birth; and the little orphan, outliving the mother a short while, died at the age of five months.  And so Milton was again left a widower, with his three daughters by the first marriage, the eldest in her twelfth year.  His private life, for eighteen years now, had certainly not been a happy one; but this death of his second wife seems to have been remembered by him ever afterwards with deep and peculiar sorrow.  She had been to him during the short fifteen months of their union, all that he had thought saintlike and womanly, very sympathetic with himself, and maintaining such peace and order in his household as had not been there till she entered it.  And now once more it was a dark void, in which he must grope on, and in which things must happen as they would.

Small comfort at this time can Milton have had from either of his nephews.  Not that they had openly separated themselves from him, or even ceased to be deferential to him and proud of the relationship, but that they had more and more gone into those courses of literary Bohemianism those habits of mere facetious hack-work and balderdash, which he must have noted of late as an increasing and very ominous form of protest among the clever young Londoners against Puritanism and its belongings.  The Satyr against Hypocrites by his younger nephew in 1655 had been, in reality, an Anti-Puritan and Anti-Miltonic production; and, since the censure of that younger nephew by the Council in 1656 for his share in The Sportive Wit or Muses’ Merriment, he had naturally stumbled farther and farther in the same direction.  By the year 1658, I should say, John Phillips had entirely given up his uncle’s political principles, and was known among his tavern-comrades as an Anti-Oliverian.  We have no express publications in his name of this date, but he seems to have been scribbling anonymously.  Of the literary industry of his more sedate and likeable elder brother, Edward, there is authentic evidence. A New World of Words, or a General Dictionary,