have been his amanuenses, if they had the requisite ability. But the eldest could not write, and she, therefore, is excluded. The second could write tolerably, and the youngest still better; and they may, therefore, have helped occasionally,-more especially the youngest ; in whose favour we have also Aubrey's note, for whatever it is worth, "Deborah was his amanuensis." Before the poem was completed, 5th of April 1750, Dr. Johnson writing a Prologue, and Bishop Newton and the publisher Tonson contributing handsomely. It is the calculation of Todd that the whole proceeds amounted only to £147: 14: 6, out of which about £80 had to be deducted for expenses. This, however, is hardly reconcilable with Dr. Johnson's account; who, after saying (Life of Milton) that "the profits of the night were only one hundred and thirty pounds," evidently implies that this sum was clear of all expenses by adding, "Of this sum one hundred pounds were placed in the stocks, after some debate between her [Mrs. Foster] and her husband in whose "name it should be entered; and the rest augmented their little stock, with "which they removed to Islington." All Mrs. Foster's children, of whom she had had seven, having died in infancy, she was then the sole descendant of Milton living, "unless," as she told Bishop Newton, "there were some in the East "Indies; which she very much questions, for she used to hear from them some"times, but has heard nothing now for several years." This refers to the family of her brother Caleb Clarke, mentioned above as Deborah's only surviving son. What became of this Caleb Clarke, the grandson of Milton? He had gone to India, apparently when a very young man; for, even if he was Deborah's eldest child, he cannot have been born earlier than 1676, and we find him in Madras in 1703. He was then a married man; his wife's Christian name was Mary, but her surname is unknown. He had three children by her, all born at Madras: Abraham, baptized June 2, 1703; Mary, baptized March 17, 1706, and buried in December of the same year; and Isaac, baptized Feb. 13, 1711. Caleb Clarke himself was afterwards, i.e. from 1717 to 1719, parish-clerk of Fort St. George; where he was buried on the 16th of October in the latter year. At the time of his death his son Abraham was in England; but he returned to India, and in September 1725, being then two-and-twenty years of age, married a wife whose Christian name was Anna. They had a child Mary, born at Madras, and whose birth is registered there April 2, 1727. This is the last glimpse of those Clarkes in Madras, unless we take their relative Mrs. Foster's account to Bishop Newton to mean that she had occasionally heard of them till as late as 1740. It is concluded that they all died out, and that consequently Milton's direct line is extinct. But the conclusion is not absolutely necessary. In 1727, Abraham Clarke, Milton's great-grandson, and the father of the infant Mary, was but four-andtwenty years of age. He may have had other children subsequently. His brother Isaac, too, was then only sixteen years of age, and remains unaccounted for. And what of the infant Mary, born in that year? Strange that this great-greatgrandchild of Milton, born in India, should have been in existence before the death of either her great-grandmother, Milton's daughter Deborah, or her stepgreat-great-grandmother, Milton's third wife, at Nantwich!

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however, there was at hand a fitter amanuensis than either in Milton's third wife. "Her husband," she told people afterwards in her widowhood, "used to compose his poetry chiefly in winter, and on his "waking in the morning would make her write down sometimes "twenty or thirty verses." ." Here, however, is a passage from Phillips, still more distinct :-"There is another very remarkable passage in "the composure of this poem, which I have a particular occasion to "remember; for, whereas I had the perusal of it from the very beginning, for some years as I went from time to time to visit him, in a parcel of ten, twenty, or thirty verses at a time,—which, being "written by whatever hand came next, might possibly want correction as to the orthography and pointing,—having, as the summer came on, not been shewed any for a considerable while, and desiring the reason thereof, [I] was answered, that his vein never happily flowed "but from the Autumnal Equinoctial to the Vernal [¿.e. from the end "of September to the end of March], and that whatever he attempted [at other times] was never to his satisfaction, though he exerted his fancy never so much so that, in all the years he was about this "poem, he may be said to have spent but half his time therein." What has been most generally noted in this passage is the interesting information that Milton believed his vein of invention to be happier in the winter than in the summer half of the year, and did actually produce most of his Paradise Lost in late autumn, winter, and early spring.2 But the information respecting the amanuenses is also worthy of notice. The poem was committed to paper, says Phillips, in parcels of ten, twenty, or thirty verses at a time, by any hand that | happened to be near. This might be that of either of the two younger daughters; latterly, it might be that of the third wife; but, quite as often, it may have been that of a hired amanuensis, or one of the numerous young men who came to his house at stated times to read to him for their own benefit. That he used such casual help in writing is otherwise known. In the volume of Milton MSS. in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, of which an account has been given at pp. 102-7 of vol. i. and pp. 43-47 of this volume, there are several scraps in other hands than Milton's own. These are either the first drafts or transcripts of some of his sonnets, written between 1642

1 Newton's Life of Milton, edit. 1761, p.. lxxv.

2 The same fact is stated by Aubrey; to whom Phillips had mentioned it verbally (1680) many years before printing it himself.

and 1658, inclusively. At least six different hands may be counted in these scraps: not one of them his daughter Deborah's, or his daughter Mary's, or his third wife's. Indeed, if the scraps were written at the dates to which they refer, it is impossible that any of them should have been written by the third wife, since he was not married to her till 1662-3. It is equally impossible that they should have been written by either of his youngest daughters, since neither of them was born at the date of the earliest, and at the date of the latest Mary was but nine, and Deborah not six, years of age. But, whether they were written at the dates to which they refer or were transcripts afterwards, it is clear that they were written by various persons, and each by whatever hand chanced to be at Milton's service for the moment. And so till Milton's death. In the last of his private letters extant,-dated London, Aug. 15, 1666, and addressed to the Peter Heimbach already mentioned as one of his foreign acquaintances, he asks his correspondent to excuse any faults in the writing or punctuation, on the ground that the letter has been written for him by a boy knowing nothing of Latin, and to whom he has been obliged therefore, in dictating, to spell out the words letter by letter. We can conceive Milton dictating parts of his Paradise Lost even to so unlikely an amanuensis as this; to whom, after all, neither of his writing daughters can have been much superior.

To whomsoever he dictated, one would like to know anything that is to be known of his manner of dictating. On this point we have no additional information more authentic than that which the painter Richardson had been able to collect from tradition when he wrote his sketch of Milton's Life in 1734. "Other stories I have "heard," says Richardson, "concerning the posture he was usually in "when he dictated: that he sat leaning backward obliquely in an easy "chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it. That he frequently "composed lying in bed on a morning ('twas winter, sure, then), I "have been well informed; that, when he could not sleep, but lay "awake whole nights, he tried [and] not one verse could he make, "[but] at other times flowed 'easy his unpremeditated verse,' with a "certain impetus and æstro, as himself seemed to believe. Then, at what hour soever, he rung for his daughter to secure what came. I have also been told he would dictate many, perhaps forty, lines, as it were in a breath, and then reduce them to half

"the number."1
We can believe part of this at least, though it
would have been better if Richardson had given his authorities.

Yet one final inquiry respecting these mechanical matters :-By whatever instalments, at the hands of various amanuenses, day by day and week by week through five or seven years, and especially the winters of those years, Milton succeeded in transferring his epic to paper in its first continuous rough copy, that copy, we may be sure, would not satisfy him. He must have changed his habits very much if it did. Of Shakespeare the earliest editors of his Plays say, "His "mind and hand went together; and what he thought he uttered "with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in "his papers." With Milton it was different. His mind and hand, indeed, also went together, and what he thought he uttered nobly at first; but he was always re-thinking, and compelling his hand to consequent modifications of what it had already executed. The drafts of his earlier poems, yet extant in his own hand in Trinity College, Cambridge, are a revelation in this respect. They prove him to have! been a most fastidious corrector of his own productions. They, and especially some of them, abound with erasures, marginal corrections, interlineations, re-insertions of words once erased, and even re-obliterations of these in favour of new changes. Almost uniformly, too, every correction is for the better, and the last form of a phrase or passage is the most perfect, both in meaning and in music. Now we cannot suppose that there was no corresponding process during the composition of Paradise Lost. Only we may suppose that much of the process was transacted mentally: that the poet, before he dictated a passage or instalment of his poem, had in many cases kept it sounding in his mind for a while and assuming the shape that satisfied him. Similarly, we must suppose him,-carrying as he doubtless did the whole poem, as far as it was composed, in his memory,-not unfrequently going back upon portions of it, and here and there improving expressions, or adding lines and passages for the sake of increased strength or beauty, or indeed making modifications that had become necessary in consequence of some new idea that had struck him farther on as to some part of the conduct of the story. Hence there would be changes, by his direction, in the aggregate copy that had grown out of his first piecemeal dictations. We have also Edward

1 Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost. By J. Richardson, Father and Son. London, 1734. Life, by J. R. senr., prefixed: p. cxiv.

Phillips's information that it was he that assisted his uncle in amending this copy, or part of it, in those more minute particulars of spelling, punctuation, etc., to which the original amanuenses were not competent, and in which it was difficult for the blind author to superintend them. Suppose all finished in this way, however, and still one fair copy at least would be necessary for the licencer and the press, not to speak of previous perusal by private friends. It must surely have been such a fair copy, and not the only manuscript in Milton's possession, that he lent to the young Quaker Ellwood at the cottage in Chalfont-St.-Giles, Buckinghamshire, in the summer of 1665. At all events, there was the fair copy that went to the licencer, Mr. Tomkyns, in the following year, and from which the poem was printed by Simmons. The first book of that copy is still extant (see ante, p. 6, note); and a facsimile of the first few lines of it will be found in vol. iii. of this edition. As the other books of the copy are not extant, we do not know that the whole was written by the same hand; but it would be something to identify the hand that wrote this fair copy of even the First Book. I have not succeeded in doing SO. The hand certainly is not that of any of Milton's daughters; it is not his third wife's; it is not Edward Phillips's, nor John Phillips's; it is not Andrew Marvell's; it is not Cyriack Skinner's; nor, as far as I have been able to examine, is it that of any of the amanuenses who were employed in writing the manuscript of Milton's Treatise De Doctrinâ Christianâ. This treatise, being in Latin, required perhaps amanuenses of a higher order than sufficed for the English poem.1 The hand in the extant manuscript of the First Book of Paradise Lost is what is called a "secretary hand" of the period, and is probably that of a professional penman. The manuscript is neat and accurate enough, but there are corrections in it by another hand.

1 It shows how firmly the legend of Milton's dictations to his daughters had taken hold of the popular mind that even an expert like Mr. Lemon supposed one of the hands in the MS. of the Treatise on Christian Doctrine,- -"a beautiful Italian hand," as he described it,-to be the hand of Milton's second daughter, Mary. It is the hand of Daniel Skinner, a relative of Cyriack Skinner's, and one of Milton's latest amanuenses.