An interesting question arises in connection with Milton's official duties: had he any real influence on the counsels of Government? or was he a mere secretary? It would be pleasing to conceive of him as Vizier to the only Englishman of the day whose greatness can be compared with his; to imagine him playing Aristotle to Cromwell's Alexander. We have seen him freely tendering Cromwell what might have been unpalatable advice, and learn from Du Moulin's lampoon that he was accused of having behaved to the Protector with something of dictatorial rudeness. But it seems impossible to point to any direct influence of his mind in the administration; and his own department of Foreign Affairs was neither one which he was peculiarly qualified to direct, nor one in which he was likely to differ from the ruling powers. "A spirited foreign policy" was then the motto of all the leading men of England. Before Milton's loss of sight his duties included attendance upon foreign envoys on State occasions, of which he must afterwards have been to a considerable extent relieved. The collection of his official correspondence published in 1676 is less remarkable for the quantity of work than the quality. The letters are not very numerous, but are mostly written on occasions requiring a choice dignity of expression. "The uniformly Miltonic style of the greater letters," says Professor Masson, "utterly precludes the idea that Milton was only the translator of drafts furnished him." We seem to see him sitting down to dictate, weighing out the fine gold of his Latin sentences to the stately accompaniment, it may be, of his chamber-organ. War is declared against the Dutch; the Spanish ambassador is reproved for his protraction of business; the Grand Duke of Tuscany is warmly thanked for protecting English ships in the harbour of Leghorn; the French king is admonished to indemnify English merchants for wrongful seizure; the Protestant Swiss cantons are encouraged to fight for their religion; the King of Sweden is felicitated on the birth of a son and heir, and on the Treaty of Roeskilde; the King of Portugal is pressed to use more diligence in investigating the attempted assassination of the English minister; an ambassador is accredited to Russia; Mazarin is congratulated on the capture of Dunkirk. Of all his letters, none can have stirred Milton's personal feelings so deeply as the epistle of remonstrance to the Duke of Savoy on the atrocious massacre of the Vaudois Protestants (1655); but the document is dignified and measured in tone. His emotion found relief in his greatest sonnet; blending, as Wordsworth implies, trumpet notes with his habitual organ-music; the most memorable example in our language of the fire and passion which may inspire a poetical form which some have deemed only fit to celebrate a "mistress's eyebrow"[4]:—
"Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
Forget not: in Thy book record their groans
Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learned Thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."
This is what Johnson calls "carving heads upon cherry-stones!"
Milton's calamity had, of course, required special assistance. He had first had Weckherlin as coadjutor, then Philip Meadows, finally Andrew Marvell. His emoluments had been reduced, in April, 1655, from £288 to £150 a year, but the diminished allowance was made perpetual instead of annual, and seems to have been intended as a retiring pension. He nevertheless continued to work, drawing salary at the rate of £200 a year, and his pen was never more active than during the last months of Oliver's Protectorate. He continued to serve under Richard, writing eleven letters between September, 1658, and February, 1659. With two letters for the restored Parliament after Richard's abdication, written in May, 1659, Milton, though his formal supersession was yet to come, virtually bade adieu to the Civil Service:—
"God doth not need
Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best: His state
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."
The principal domestic events in Milton's life, meanwhile, had been his marriage with Katherine, daughter of an unidentified Captain Woodcock, in November, 1656; and the successive loss of her and an infant daughter in February and March, 1658. It is probable that Milton literally never saw his wife, whose worth and the consequent happiness of the fifteen months of their too brief union, are sufficiently attested by his sonnet on the dream in which he fancied her restored to him, with the striking conclusion, "Day brought back my night." Of his daughters at the time, much may be conjectured, but nothing is known; his nephews, whose education had cost him such anxious care, though not undutiful in their personal relations with him, were sources of uneasiness from their own misadventures, and might have been even more so as sinister omens of the ways in which the rising generation was to walk. The fruits of their bringing up upon the egregious Lucretius and Manilius were apparently "Satyr against Hypocrites," i.e., Puritans; "Mysteries of Love and Eloquence;" "Sportive Wit or Muses' Merriment," which last brought the Council down upon John Phillips as a propagator of immorality. In his nephews Milton might have seen, though we may be sure he did not see, how fatally the austerity of the Commonwealth had alienated those who would soon determine whether the Commonwealth should exist. Unconscious of the "engine at the door," he could spend happy social hours with attached friends—Andrew Marvell, his assistant in the secretaryship and poetical satellite; his old pupil Cyriack Skinner; Lady Ranelagh; Oldenburg, the Bremen envoy, destined to fame as Secretary of the Royal Society and the correspondent of Spinoza; and a choice band of "enthusiastic young men who accounted it a privilege to read to him, or act as his amanuenses, or hear him talk." A sonnet inscribed to one of these, Henry Lawrence, gives a pleasing picture of the British Homer in his Horatian hour:—
"Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise."