a few years.  The value of money being then about three and a half times as great as now, this modest income was still a fair competence for one of his frugal habits, even when burdened with the care of three daughters.  The history of his relations with these daughters is the saddest page of his life.  “I looked that my vineyard should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes.”  If any lot on earth could have seemed enviable to an imaginative mind and an affectionate heart, it would have been that of an Antigone or a Romola to a Milton.  Milton’s daughters chose to reject the fair repute that the simple fulfilment of evident duty would have brought them, and to be damned to everlasting fame, not merely as neglectful of their father, but as embittering his existence.  The shocking speech attributed to one of them is, we may hope, not a fact; and it may not be true to the letter that they conspired to rob him, and sold his books to the ragpickers.  The course of events down to his death, nevertheless, is sufficient evidence of the unhappiness of his household.  Writing “Samson Agonistes” in calmer days, he lets us see how deep the iron had entered into his soul: 

                      “I dark in light exposed
    To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
    Within doors, or without, still as a fool
    In power of others, never in my own.”

He probably never understood how greatly he was himself to blame.  He had, in the first place, neglected to give his daughters the education which might have qualified them in some measure to appreciate him.  The eldest, Anne, could not even write her name; and it is but a poor excuse to say that, though good-looking, she was deformed, and afflicted with an impediment in her speech.  The second, Mary, who resembled her mother, and the third, Deborah, the most like her father, were better taught; but still not to the degree that could make them intelligent doers of the work they had to perform for him.  They were so drilled in foreign languages, including Greek and Latin (Hebrew and Syriac are also mentioned, but this is difficult of belief), that they could read aloud to him without any comprehension of the meaning of the text.  Sixty years afterwards, passages of Homer and Ovid were found lingering as melodious sounds in the memory of the youngest.  Such a task, inexpressibly delightful to affection, must have been intolerably repulsive to dislike or indifference:  we can scarcely wonder that two of these children (of the youngest we have a better report), abhorred the father who exacted so much and imparted so little.  Yet, before visiting any of the parties with inexorable condemnation, we should consider the strong probability that much of the misery grew out of an antecedent state of things, for which none of them were responsible.  The infant minds of two of the daughters, and the two chiefly named as undutiful, had been formed by their mother.  Mistress Milton cannot have greatly