“What supports me, dost thou ask? 
    The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
    In liberty’s defence, my noble task,
    O! which all Europe rings from side to side;
    This thought might lead me through the world’s vain mask,
    Content though blind, had I no better guide.”

Noble words, and Milton might well triumph in his victory in the field of intellectual combat.  But if his pamphlet could have put Charles the First’s head on again, then, and then only, could it have been of real political service to his party.

Milton’s loss of sight was accompanied by domestic sorrow, though perhaps not felt with special acuteness.  Since the birth of his eldest daughter in 1646, his wife had given him three more children—­a daughter, born in October, 1648; a son, born in March, 1650, who died shortly afterwards; and another daughter, born in May, 1652.  The birth of this child may have been connected with the death of the mother in the same or the following month.  The household had apparently been peaceful, but it is unlikely that Mary Milton can have been a companion to her husband, or sympathized with such fraction of his mind as it was given her to understand.  She must have become considerably emancipated from the creeds of her girlhood if his later writings could have been anything but detestable to her; and, on the whole, much as one pities her probably wasted life, her disappearance from the scene, if tragic in her ignorance to the last of the destiny that might have been hers, is not unaccompanied with a sense of relief.  Great, nevertheless, must have been the blind poet’s embarrassment as the father of three little daughters.  Much evil, it is to be feared, had already been sown; and his temperament, his affliction, and his circumstances alike nurtured the evil yet to come.  He was then living in Petty France, Westminster, having been obliged, either by the necessities of his health or of the public service, to give up his apartments in Whitehall.  The house stood till 1877, a forlorn tenement in these latter years; far different, probably, when the neighbourhood was fashionable and the back windows looked on St. James’s Park.  It is associated with other celebrated names, having been owned by Bentham and occupied by Hazlitt.

The controversy with Salmasius had an epilogue, chiefly memorable in so far as it occasioned Milton to indulge in autobiography, and to record his estimate of some of the heroes of the Commonwealth.  Among various replies to his “Defensio,” not deserving of notice here, appeared one of especial acrimony, “Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum,” published about August, 1652.  It was a prodigy of scurrilous invective, bettering the bad example which Milton had set (but which hundreds in that age had set him) of ridiculing Salmasius’s foibles when he should have been answering his arguments.  Having been in Italy, he was taxed with Italian vices:  he