at the sign of the Key in St. Pauls Churchyard, near the West-end, 1658." Prefixed to the body of the volume, which is divided into twenty-six chapters, is a note “To the Reader," as follows:  “Having had the manuscript of this Treatise, written by Sir Walter Raleigh, many years in my hands, and finding it lately by chance among other books and papers, upon reading thereof I thought it a kind of injury to withhold longer the work of so eminent an author from the public:  it being both answerable in style to other works of his already extant, as far as the subject would permit, and given me for a true copy by a learned man at his death, who had collected several such pieces.-JOHN MILTON."[1]

[Footnote 1:  There were subsequent reprints of Raleigh’s Cabinet Council from this 1658 edition by Milton, with changes of title.  See Bohn’s Lowndes under Raleigh]

By far the most interesting fact, however, in Milton’s literary life under the Second Protectorate is that he had certainly, before its close, resumed his design of a great English poem, to be called Paradise Lost.  Phillips’s words might even imply that he had resumed this design before the end of the First Protectorate.  For, after having mentioned that, in the comparative leisure in which he was left by the conclusion of his controversy with Morus (Aug. 1655), he resumed those two favourite hack-occupations on which he always fell back when he had nothing else to do,—­his History of England and his compilations for a Latin Dictionary,—­Phillips adds, “But the highth of his noble fancy and invention began now to be seriously and mainly employed in a subject worthy of such a muse:  viz. a Heroic Poem, entitled Paradise Lost, the noblest,” &c.  In this passage, however, Phillips is throwing together, in 1694, all his recollections of the four years of his uncle’s life between Aug. 1655 and Aug. 1659; and Aubrey’s earlier information (1680), originally derived from Phillips himself, is that Paradise Lost was begun “about two years before the King came in,” i.e. about May 1658.  This would fix the date somewhere in the two or three months immediately following the death-of Milton’s second wife.  In such a matter exact certainty is unattainable; and it is enough to know for certain that the resumption of Paradise Lost was an event of the latter part of Cromwell’s Second Protectorate, and that some portion of the poem was actually written in the house in Petty France, Westminster, while Milton was in communication with Cromwell and writing letters for him.  In the rooms of that house, or in the garden that stretched from the house into St. James’s Park across part of what is now the ground of Wellington Barracks, the subject of the epic first took distinct shape in Milton’s mind, and here he began the great dictation.