sentence was performed on August 27th.  A Government proclamation enjoining their destruction had been issued on August 13th, and may now be read in the King’s Library at the British Museum.  He had not, then, escaped notice, and how he escaped proscription it is hard to say.  Interest was certainly made for him.  Andrew Marvell, Secretary Morrice, and Sir Thomas Clarges, Monk’s brother-in-law, are named as active on his behalf; his brother and his nephew both belonged to the Royalist party, and there is a romantic story of Sir William Davenant having requited a like obligation under which he lay to Milton himself.  More to his honour this than to have been the offspring of Shakespeare, but one tale is no better authenticated than the other.  The simplest explanation is that twenty people were found more hated than Milton:  it may also have seemed invidious to persecute a blind man.  It is certainly remarkable that the authorities should have failed to find the hiding-place of so recognizable a person, if they really looked for it.  Whether by his own adroitness or their connivance, he avoided arrest until the amnesty resolution of August 29th restored him to the world without even being incapacitated from office.  He still had to run the gauntlet of the Serjeant-at-Arms, who at some period unknown arrested him as obnoxious to the resolution of June 16th, and detained him, charging exorbitant fees, until compelled to abate his demands by the Commons’ resolution of December 15th.  Milton relinquished his house in Westminster, and formed a temporary refuge on the north side of Holborn.  His nerves were shaken; he started in his broken sleep with the apprehension and bewilderment natural to one for whom, physically and politically, all had become darkness.

His condition, in sooth, was one of well-nigh unmitigated misfortune, and his bearing up against it is not more of a proof of stoic fortitude than of innate cheerfulness.  His cause lost, his ideals in the dust, his enemies triumphant, his friends dead on the scaffold, or exiled, or imprisoned, his name infamous, his principles execrated, his property seriously impaired by the vicissitudes of the times.  He had been deprived of his appointment and salary as Latin Secretary, even before the Restoration:  and he was now fleeced of two thousand pounds, invested in some kind of Government security, which was repudiated in spite of powerful intercession.  Another “great sum” is said by Phillips to have been lost “by mismanagement and want of good advice,” whether at this precise time is uncertain.  The Dean and Chapter of Westminster reclaimed a considerable property which had passed out of their hands in the Civil War.  The Serjeant-at-Arms had no doubt made all out of his captive that the Commons would let him.  On the whole, Milton appears to have saved about L1500 from the wreck of his fortunes, and to have possessed about L200 income from the interest of this fund and other sources, destined to be yet further reduced within