particulars, that in 1665 the Paradise Lost was completed; and that in that year, at Chalfont, he composed, or at least may have commenced, the Paradise Regained; and from this we may infer, that his amanuenses were probably his wife and daughters.

The pestilence ceased by the end of the year, but probably Milton did not return to London till the spring of 1666. It, in fact, is not unlikely that he had taken the house at Chalfont for a year from Midsummer. We have no information as to where he was at the time of the Great Fire, which broke out in the following month of September; but Bunhill Fields were beyond its range, and so he could not have sustained any injury from its ravages. His last Latin letter, addressed to a learned German, is dated London, August 15, 1666.

Milton having now two poems ready for the press, resolved to proceed to the publication of them, commencing with the Paradise Lost, as first in magnitude and in order of time. When we recollect that nearly the whole city of London was burnt in the end of the autumn of 1666, it may surprise us, but at the same time give us a forcible idea of the energy of the English character, to find that the agreement for the sale of this poem to Samuel Simmons is dated April 27, 1667; and our wonder would be raised still higher if the conjecture of Hayley were correct, that it had been already printed at the expense of the author. But this is not by any means a probable supposition.

It is well known that the terms on which this great poem were published were £5 in hand, the same sum on the sale of thirteen hundred copies of the first edition, £5 on the sale of the like number of the second edition, and another £5 after the same sale of the third;

F

no edition to exceed fifteen hundred copies. So that, on a sale of three thousand five hundred copies, the author was at the utmost only to receive £20! This really seems almost incredible. The book, no doubt, was sold at what we may regard as a very moderate price,— a small quarto, neatly bound, for three shillings; but surely publishing must have been a very poor trade, or Simmons a very dishonest man, which we have no reason to suppose, when the profits on three large editions would enable him to give the author,-whose share publishers at the present day usually calculate at half profits, only the paltry sum above-mentioned. Such however is the fact.*

This great poem even ran a chance of not being allowed to appear in print. Cromwell had magnanimously adopted the suggestion made on the subject in our author's Areopagitica, and abolished the office of Licenser; but the bigotry and despotic temper of Clarendon, Sheldon, and other advisers of Charles II., had caused it to be restored by Act of Parliament in 1662 Its duties were divided among the Judges, some of the Officers of State, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Poetry came under the supervision of the last, and Sheldon's chaplain, the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, to whom the task of examining the Paradise Lost was deputed, fancied he discerned something very like treason in the simile

* After the publication of the third edition in 1678, Mrs. Milton gave Simmons a general release, on the receipt of £8, dated April 29, 1681. Simmons transferred his right to Brabazon Aylmer for £25, who sold one half of it August 17, 1683, and the other half, March 24, 1690, to Jacob Tonson, at a great advance of price.-Todd, from Gent.'s Mag., July, 1822. We may remark, that Tonson gave Dryden £300 for his Fables, which do not contain many more verses than the Paradise Lost.

"As when the sun, new-risen,

Looks through the misty horizontal air," etc.

However his own good sense or the opinions of others prevailed, and the imprimatur was granted.

The first edition, of fifteen hundred copies, sold fast enough to entitle the author to his second £5 at the end of two years; and when we consider the state of the times, the ill-odour which the name of the author must have been in with the greater part of the aristocracy, the clergy, and the classes in general who were the chief purchasers of books, and other circumstances, we cannot regard the sale as a bad one. We should recollect the slow sale of the poems of Wordsworth and Southey in our own days. As to the assertion of the poem being above the age in which it appeared, we cannot regard it as correct; the knowledge of the Scriptures, the classics, and the Italian poets, was probably greater at that time than it is at the present day; and this is the knowledge requisite for understanding the Paradise Lost. What seems most strange to us is, that the remaining two hundred copies should have supplied the demand for the following five years, and that Simmons should then have ventured on another impression also of fifteen hundred copies.

The only work which Milton gave to the press for some years was his History of England, which he brought down to the Norman Invasion, and published in 1670. But he must have been at this time chiefly occupied with his great work, De Doctrina Christiana, which was not destined to see the light till after the lapse of a century and a half.

In 1671 he published Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, in a thin octavo volume, handsomely

printed. If Mr. Tomkyns was the examiner, it seems strange that he should have licensed the latter poem, which contains much more perilous passages than the simile in Paradise Lost. In 1672 he gave to the press his Artis Logicæ plenior Institutio, ad Rami Methodum concinnata, a work which he probably had had lying by him for years; it came to a second edition in the following year. In 1673 he published a new edition of his Poems, English and Latin, with some additional pieces, and the tractate on Education, in a duodecimo volume far inferior in typography and in correctness to the original edition of 1645. He also published this year a Treatise of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, etc.

In the year 1674, in which he terminated his earthly career, he gave to the world what appear to have been all that was now remaining in his scrinia, his Latin Epistolæ Familiares, or letters written to his friends at different dates from 1625 to 1666, and his Prolusiones Oratoriæ, which he had delivered during his residence at Cambridge. He seems in fact to have set a high value on everything he wrote, and therefore carefully to have kept copies of all his compositions. A translation of the Declaration for the Election of John Sobieski as King of Poland, appeared this year, said to have been dictated by Milton. The only English manuscript which he seems to have left was a treatise, named Moscovia, or Account of Muscovy, compiled from the narratives of the various persons who had visited that then semi-barbarous and little-known country. We have already noticed Milton's fondness for compilation.

He had been for some years afflicted with the gout, and in the month of July, conscious that his end could

not be far distant, when his brother-with whom he had always been on most friendly terms, notwithstanding their differences in politics and other matters-came to see him previous to going down to his residence in Suffolk, he declared before him what he wished to be understood as his last will, leaving all his property to his wife. It seems very strange that, with a brother a lawyer, he should not have made a formal will, but have made such a disposition of his property as was not in accordance with the strict requirements of the law, and, as was the result, liable in consequence to litigation.

We have little information respecting the remaining few months of this illustrious man's existence. A deponent in the suit respecting his will describes him as on a day in the beginning of October, dining alone with his wife in their kitchen, when he, she said, "talked and discoursed sensibly and well, and was very merry, and seemed to be in good health of body." It is pleasing to view him thus, in the enjoyment of some of the blessings of life, so near the time of his dissolution; for on Sunday, the 8th of the following November, he expired so gently and so free from all pain that the moment of his last respiration was unobserved by those who were in the room. On the 12th his remains were conveyed to the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, and laid beside those of his father, in the upper part of the church. "The funeral was attended," says Toland, "by all the author's learned and great friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the vulgar." Had he lived another month he would have completed his sixty-sixth year.

In his person Milton was rather under the middle