Milton could hear the plaudits, he could not see the wreaths.  The total loss of his sight may be dated from March, 1652, a year after the publication of his reply.  It was then necessary to provide him with an assistant—­that no change should have been made in his position or salary shows either the value attached to his services or the feeling that special consideration was due to one who had voluntarily given his eyes for his country.  “The choice lay before me,” he writes, “between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight; in such a case I could not listen to the physician, not if AEsculapius himself had spoken from his sanctuary; I could not but obey that inward monitor, I know not what, that spoke to me from heaven.”  In September, 1654, he described the symptoms of his infirmity to his friend, the Greek Philaras, who had flattered him with hopes of cure from the dexterity of the French oculist Thevenot.  He tells him how his sight began to fail about ten years before; how in the morning he felt his eyes shrinking from the effort to read anything; how the light of a candle appeared like a spectrum of various colours; how, little by little, darkness crept over the left eye; and objects beheld by the right seemed to waver to and fro; how this was accompanied by a kind of dizziness and heaviness which weighed upon him throughout the afternoon.  “Yet the darkness which is perpetually before me seems always nearer to a whitish than to a blackish, and such that, when the eye rolls itself, there is admitted, as through a small chink, a certain little trifle of light.”  Elsewhere he says that his eyes are not disfigured: 

                               “Clear
    To outward view of blemish or of spot.”

These symptoms have been pronounced to resemble those of glaucoma.  Milton himself, in “Paradise Lost,” hesitates between amaurosis ("drop serene”) and cataract ("suffusion").  Nothing is said of his having been recommended to use glasses or other precautionary contrivances.  Cheselden was not yet, and the oculist’s art was probably not well understood.  The sufferer himself, while not repining or despairing of medical assistance, evidently has little hope from it.  “Whatever ray of hope may be for me from your famous physician, all the same, as in a case quite incurable, I prepare and compose myself accordingly.  My darkness hitherto, by the singular kindness of God, amid rest and studies, and the voices and greetings of friends, has been much easier to bear than that deathly one.  But if, as is written, ’Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,’ what should prevent me from resting in the belief that eyesight lies not in eyes alone, but enough for all purposes in God’s leading and providence?  Verily, while only He looks out for me, and provides for me, as He doth; teaching me and leading me forth with His hand through my whole life, I shall willingly, since it hath seemed good to Him, have given my eyes their long holiday.  And to you I now bid farewell, with a mind not less brave and steadfast than if I were Lynceus himself for keenness of sight.”  Religion and philosophy, of which no brighter example was ever given, did not, in this sore trial, disdain the support of a manly pride:—­