But at last comes a new turn of the wheel to English fortunes. Cromwell is dead; the Commonwealth is ended; all London is throwing its cap in the air over the restoration of Charles II. Poor blind Milton[63] is in hiding and in peril. His name is down among those accessory to the murder of the King. The ear-cropped Prynne—who is now in Parliament, and who hates Milton as Milton scorned Prynne—is very likely hounding on those who would bring the great poet to judgment. ’Tis long matter of doubt. Past his house near Red Lion Square the howling mob drag the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton, and hang them in their dead ghastliness.
Milton, however, makes lucky escape, with only a short term of prison; but for some time thereafter he was in fear of assassination. Such a rollicking daredevil, as Scott in his story of Woodstock, has painted for us in Roger Wildrake (of whom there were many afloat in those times) would have liked no better fun than to run his rapier through such a man as John Milton; and in those days he would have been pardoned for it.
That capital story of Woodstock one should read when they are upon these times of the Commonwealth. There are, indeed, anachronisms in it; kings escaping too early or too late, or dying a little out of time to accommodate the exigencies of the plot; but the characterization is marvellously spirited; and you see the rakehelly cavaliers, and the fine old king-ridden knights, and the sour-mouthed Independents, and the glare and fumes and madness of the civil war, as you find them in few history pages.
Milton, meanwhile, in his quiet home again, revolves his old project of a great sacred poem. He taxes every visitor who can, to read to him in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch. His bookly appetite is omnivorous. His daughters have large share of this toil. Poor girls, they have been little taught, and not wisely. They read what they read only by rote, and count it severe task-work. Their mother is long since dead, and a second wife, who lived only for a short time, dead too. We know very little of that second wife; but she is embalmed forever in a sonnet, from which I steal this fragment:—
“Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis from the grave;
…
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shin’d
So clear as in no face with more delight.