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the other; factions which had alike injured and undermined the constitutional liberties of his country. To the misery which the one party had already brought on the nation, and to the disgrace which the other was now inflicting on its character, he has alluded in the following pathetic lines, which glance in the most affecting manner at his own personal misfortunes and endangered existence; and which appear, indeed, to have been written at the very period when the festivities of infatuated triumph, when the accents of riot and debauchery were yet sounding in his ears; orgies which, even had they issued from a friendly quarter, had been discord to the temperate habits and lofty spirit of the indignant bard. Yet, even then could he say,

--I sing with mortal voice, unchanged

To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compass'd round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when morn
Purples the east: still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.

But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamour drown'd
Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her son.
So fail not thou, who thee implores:
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.
P. L. Book vii.

Severe, however, and distressing as were the evils to which Milton, as a public character, was now subjected, they were exceeded by those which he had to endure in the privacy of domestic life. The happiness of man is necessarily, in a great measure, dependant on the degree and permanency of home-felt comfort; on the daily and hourly interchange of those attentions which spring from family affection and social kindness; and he who has to encounter the insults and persecutions of an unfeeling world, naturally turns to his own roof as to a shelter from the storm, as to the spot where love and sympathy are ever watching to welcome and console him. But for Milton, alas! and at the very period, too, when most he stood in need of

pity and protection, there was no such asylum to be found. We learn, in fact, from the depositions accompanying his lately discovered will, that at the era of the Restoration, and until he married his third and last lady in 1662, his domestic life was rendered miserable by the conduct of his ungrateful children.

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It is impossible, indeed, to read the evidence arising from the litigation of this oral testament, without deeply and painfully commiserating the situation of the unhappy poet, who in the portion of his life in which he has alone been deemed harsh or unamiable, is now proved to have been a meek and patient sufferer. When we are told by the witnesses, on this occasion, that his children "were careless of him being blind," and that "they made nothing of deserting him;" that they stole his books, and sold them in the most open and shameful manner; that they combined with, and recommended his maid servant to cheat him in her marketings; and that Mary, the second of these daughters, on being informed that her father was about to marry, replied "that that was noe news to heare of his wedding, but if shee

could heare of his death that were something;" when we are told these things, and learn too, that he was under the necessity of appealing to his own servants against their cruelty, and at the moment when his heart was wrung with anguish at their conduct, he forbore to apply any other epithet to them than that of his "unkind children;" how poignantly must we feel for the domestic misery of the hapless and the injured bard, and how forcibly are brought before us, the sorrows and the resignation of the Christian and the poet.

It was whilst thus suffering from the base and barbarous treatment of his unnatural daughters*, and just previous to his last marriage, that he wrote his Sampson Agonistes; and the following passage, the most gloomy and distressingly pathetic of all his allusions to his loss of sight, was no doubt intended by the poet as a faithful picture of himself and of his wrongs, during this disastrous period of his existence.

* It should be recollected however, that Deborah, his youngest and favourite daughter, was at this time but nine years old, and can scarcely therefore be implicated in this charge.

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!

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I, dark in light, expos'd

To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,

In power of others, never in my own;

Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave;
Buried, yet not exempt,

By privilege of death and burial,

From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs;
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,

Without all hope of day.

O first created Beam, and thou great Word,
"Let there be light, and light was over all;"
Why am I thus bereav'd thy prime decree?
The sun to me is dark

And silent as the moon,

When she deserts the night,

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.

That against privations and disadvantages, great and apparently overwhelming as were these, blind, infirm, ill-treated, and forsaken, the intellectual vigour of Milton should have struggled with such success, as to have carried on, during

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