“As one who long in populous city pent,
    Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
    Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe
    Among the pleasant villages and farms
    Adjoined, from each new thing conceives delight,
    The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
    Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound.”

Milton was probably no stranger to the neighbourhood, having lived within thirteen miles of it when he dwelt at Horton.  Ellwood could not welcome him on his arrival, being in prison on account of an affray at what should have been the paragon of decorous solemnities—­a Quaker funeral.  When released, about the end of August or the beginning of September, he waited upon Milton, who, “after some discourses, called for a manuscript of his; which he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me and read it at my leisure.  When I set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled ‘Paradise Lost.’” Professor Masson justly remarks that Milton would not have trusted the worthy Quaker adolescent with the only copy of his epic; we may be sure, therefore, that other copies existed, and that the poem was at this date virtually completed and ready for press.  When the manuscript was returned, Ellwood, after “modestly, but freely, imparting his judgment,” observed, “Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?  He made no answer, but sat some time in a muse; then brake off that discourse, and fell on another subject.”  The plague was then at its height, and did not abate sufficiently for Milton to return to town with safety until about February in the following year, leaving, it has been asserted, a record of himself at Chalfont in the shape of a sonnet on the pestilence regarded as a judgment for the sins of the King, written with a diamond on a window-pane—­as if the blind poet could write even with a pen!  The verses, nevertheless, may not impossibly be genuine:  they are almost too Miltonic for an imitator between 1665 and 1738, when they were first published.

The public calamity of 1666 affected Milton more nearly than that of 1665.  The Great Fire came within a quarter of a mile of his house, and though he happily escaped the fate of Shirley, and did not make one of the helpless crowd of the homeless and destitute, his means were seriously abridged by the destruction of the house in Bread Street where he had first seen the light, and which he had retained through all the vicissitudes of his fortunes.  He could not, probably, have published “Paradise Lost” without the co-operation of Samuel Symmons.  Symmons’s endeavours to push the sale of the book make the bibliographical history of the first edition unusually interesting.  There were at least nine different issues, as fresh batches were successively bound up, with frequent alterations of title-page as reasonable cause became apparent to the strategic Symmons.  First Milton’s