Milton might reproach himself for having taken a Philistine wife, but not with having suffered her to shear him.  But the same could not be said of the English nation, which had in his view most foully apostatized from its pure creed, and most perfidiously betrayed the high commission it had received from Heaven.  “This extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed, to fall back, or rather to creep back, so poorly as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship!  To be ourselves the slanderers of our own just and religious deeds!  To verify all the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies, who will now think they wisely discerned and justly censured us and all our actions as rash, rebellious, hypocritical, and impious!” These things, which Milton refused to contemplate as possible when he wrote his “Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth,” had actually come to pass.  The English nation is to him the enslaved and erring Samson—­a Samson, however, yet to burst his bonds, and bring down ruin upon Philistia.  “Samson Agonistes” is thus a prophetic drama, the English counterpart of the world-drama of “Prometheus Bound.”

Goethe says that our final impression of any one is derived from the last circumstances in which we have beheld him.  Let us, therefore, endeavour to behold Milton as he appeared about the time of the publication of his last poems, to which period of his life the descriptions we possess seem to apply.  Richardson heard of his sitting habitually “in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather to enjoy the fresh air”—­a suggestive picture.  What thoughts must have been travelling through his mind, undisturbed by external things!  How many of the passers knew that they flitted past the greatest glory of the age of Newton, Locke, and Wren?  For one who would reverence the author of “Paradise Lost,” there were probably twenty who would have been ready with a curse for the apologist of the killing of the King.  In-doors he was seen by Dr. Wright, in Richardson’s time an aged clergyman in Dorsetshire, who found him up one pair of stairs, in a room hung with rusty green “sitting in an elbow chair, black clothes, and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones.”  Gout was the enemy of Milton’s latter days; we have seen that he had begun to suffer from it before he wrote “Samson Agonistes.”  Without it, he said, he could find blindness tolerable.  Yet even in the fit he would be cheerful, and would sing.  It is grievous to write that, about 1670, the departure of his daughters promoted the comfort of his household.  They were sent out to learn embroidery as a means of future support—­a proper step in itself, and one which would appear to have entailed considerable expense upon Milton.  But they might perfectly well have remained inmates of the family, and the inference is that domestic