THE EFFECT OF THE RESTORATION.—­Charles II. came back to such an overwhelming reception, that he said, in his witty way, it must have been his own fault to stay away so long from a people who were so glad to see him when he did come.  This restoration forced Milton into concealment:  his public day was over, and yet his remaining history is particularly interesting.  Inheriting weak eyes from his mother, he had overtasked their powers, especially in writing the Defensiones, and had become entirely blind.  Although his person was included in the general amnesty, his polemical works were burned by the hangman; and the pen that had so powerfully battled for a party, now returned to the service of its first love, poetry.  His loss of power and place was the world’s gain.  In his forced seclusion, he produced the greatest of English poems—­religious, romantic, and heroic.

ESTIMATE OF HIS PROSE.—­Before considering his poems, we may briefly state some estimate of his prose works.  They comprise much that is excellent, are full of learning, and contain passages of rarest rhetoric.  He said himself, that in prose he had only “the use of his left hand;” but it was the left hand of a Milton.  To the English scholar they are chiefly of historical value:  many of them are written in Latin, and lose much of their terseness in a translation which retains classical peculiarities of form and phrase.

His History of England from the Earliest Times is not profound, nor philosophical; he followed standard chronicle authorities, but made few, if any, original investigations, and gives us little philosophy.  His tractate on Education contains peculiar views of a curriculum of study, but is charmingly written.  He also wrote a treatise on Logic.  Little known to the great world outside of his poems, there is one prose work, discovered only in 1823, which has been less read, but which contains the articles of his Christian belief.  It is a tractate on Christian doctrine:  no one now doubts its genuineness; and it proves him to have been a Unitarian, or High Arian, by his own confession.  This was somewhat startling to the great orthodox world, who had taken many of their conceptions of supernatural things from Milton’s Paradise Lost; and yet a careful study of that poem will disclose similar tendencies in the poet’s mind.  He was a Puritan whose theology was progressive until it issued in complete isolation:  he left the Presbyterian ranks for the Independents, and then, startled by the rise and number of sects, he retired within himself and stood almost alone, too proud to be instructed, and dissatisfied with the doctrines and excesses of his earlier colleagues.

In 1653 he lost his wife, Mary Powell, who left him three daughters.  He supplied her place in 1656, by marrying Catherine Woodstock, to whom he was greatly attached, and who also died fifteen months after.  Eight years afterward he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, who survived him.