Milton’s seminary, meanwhile, was prospering to such a degree as to compel him to take a more commodious house.  Was it necessity or enthusiasm that kept him to a task so little compatible with the repose he must have needed even for such intellectual exercise as the “Areopagitica,” much more for the high designs he had not ceased to meditate in verse?  Enthusiasm, one would certainly say, only that it is impossible to tell to what extent his father’s income, chiefly derived from money out at interest, may have been impaired by the confusion of the times.  Whether he had done rightly or wrongly in taking the duties of a preceptor upon himself, his nephew’s account attests the self-sacrificing zeal with which he discharged them:  we groan as we read of hours which should have been devoted to lonely musing or noble composition passed in “increasing as it were by proxy” his knowledge of “Frontinus his Stratagems, with the two egregious poets Lucretius and Manilius.”  He might also have been better employed than in dictating “A tractate he thought fit to collect from the ablest of divines who have written on that subject of atheism, Amesius, Wollebius,” &c.  Here should be comfort for those who fear with Pattison that Milton’s addiction to politics deprived us of unnumbered “Comuses.”  The excerpter of Amesius and Wollebius, as we have so often insisted, needed great stimulus for great achievements.  Such stimulus would probably have come superabundantly if he could at this time have had his way, for the most moral of men was bent on assuming a direct antagonism to conventional morality.  He had maintained that marriage ought to be dissolved for mere incompatibility; his case must have seemed much stronger now that incompatibility had produced desertion.  He was not the man to shrink from acting on his opinion when the fit season seemed to him to have arrived; and in the summer of 1645 he was openly paying his addresses to “a very handsome and witty gentlewoman, one of Dr. Davis’s daughters.”  Considering the consequences to the female partner to the contract, it is clear that Miss Davis could not be expected to entertain Milton’s proposals unless her affection for him was very strong indeed.  It is equally clear that he cannot be acquitted of selfishness in urging his suit unless he was quite sure of this, and his own heart also was deeply interested.  An event was about to occur which seems to prove that these conditions were wanting.

Nearly two years have passed since we have heard of Mary Milton, who has been living with her parents in Oxfordshire.  Her position as a nominal wife must have been most uncomfortable, but there is no indication of any effort on her part to alter it, until the Civil War was virtually terminated by the Battle of Naseby, June, 1645.  Obstinate malignants had then nothing to expect but fine and forfeiture, and their son-in-law’s Puritanism may have presented itself to the Powells in the light of a merciful dispensation.