discord had at length grown unbearable to all.  Friends, or at least visitors, were, on the other hand, more numerous than of late years.  The most interesting were the “subtle, cunning, and reserved” Earl of Anglesey, who must have “coveted Milton’s society and converse” very much if, as Phillips reports, he often came all the way to Bunhill Fields to enjoy it; and Dryden, whose generous admiration does not seem to have been affected by Milton’s over-hasty sentence upon him as “a good rhymester, but no poet.”  One of Dryden’s visits is famous in literary history, when he came with the modest request that Milton would let him turn his epic into an opera.  “Aye,” responded Milton, equal to the occasion, “tag my verses if you will”—­to tag being to put a shining metal point—­compared in Milton’s fancy to a rhyme—­at the end of a lace or cord.  Dryden took him at his word, and in due time “Paradise Lost” had become an opera under the title of “The State of Innocence and Fall of Man,” which may also be interpreted as referring to the condition of the poem before Dryden laid hands upon it and afterwards.  It is a puzzling performance altogether; one sees not any more than Sir Walter Scott could see how a drama requiring paradisiacal costume could have been acted even in the age of Nell Gwyn; and yet it is even more unlikely that Dryden should have written a play not intended for the stage.  The same contradiction prevails in the piece itself; it would not be unfair to call it the most absurd burlesque ever written without burlesque intention; and yet it displays such intellectual resources, such vigour, bustle, adroitness, and bright impudence, that admiration almost counterweighs derision.  Dryden could not have made such an exhibition of Milton and himself twenty years afterwards, when he said that, much as he had always admired Milton, he felt that he had not admired him half enough.  The reverence which he felt even in 1674 for “one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced,” contrasts finely with the ordinary Restoration estimate of Milton conveyed in the complimentary verses by Lee, prefixed to “The State of Innocence":—­

   “To the dead bard your fame a little owes,
    For Milton did the wealthy mine disclose,
    And rudely cast what you could well dispose. 
    He roughly drew, on an old-fashioned ground,
    A chaos, for no perfect world was found,
    Till through the heap your mighty genius shined;
    He was the golden ore, which you refined.”

These later years also produced several little publications of Milton’s own, mostly of manuscripts long lying by him, now slightly revised and fitted for the press.  Such were his miniature Latin grammar, published in 1669; and his “Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio; or The Method of Ramus,” 1672.  The first is insignificant; and the second even Professor Masson pronounces, “as a digest of logic, disorderly