"If faith alone by its own virtue and force."—Works, fol. p. 171.
I have not observed the fact remarked, that besides the use of his, her, hereof, thereof, of it, and the, it was customary to employ the unchanged word it for the possessive case. I will give an example or two. In the Genevan version, at Rom. viii. 20., we read "Not of it owne wille." This passage is thus quoted in 1611 and in 1622, but in a later edition of the same work, 1656, its is substituted for it. I have a note of one other instance from Perkins on Rev. ii. 28. (ed. 1606): "For as the sunne in the spring time quickeneth by it warme beames."
In conclusion, may I request that if any genuine instance of the use of this word its, is observed by any of your many contributors, they will communicate the fact to you? At present we can only go back to Shakspeare, in his Winter's Tale and Henry VIII.
B. H. C.
FAMILY OF MILTON'S WIDOW.
(Vol. vii., p. 596.)
As your correspondent Cranmore has long been a deserter from the ranks of "N. & Q.," I may perhaps, without presumption, for once "stand in his shoes," and reply to the challenge addressed to him by V. M.
Much obscurity has all along prevailed among the many biographers of Milton, in reference to the family of Elizabeth Minshull, his third wife, and eventually, for more than fifty years, his widow. Philips, Warton, Todd, and numerous others, state her to have been "the daughter of Mr. Minshull, of Cheshire,"—a very vague assertion when we consider that there were at least three or four different families of that name then existing in the county. Pennant, who delighted in particularities, sometimes even at the expense of historical fact, tells us, for the first time, in 1782, that she was the daughter of Mr. (or Sir) Edward Minshull, of Stoke, near Nantwich, and that she died at the latter town in March, 1726, at an advanced age. Mr. Ormerod, again, whose splendid History of Cheshire will be the standard authority of the county for ages after he himself is carried to his fathers, has unfortunately adopted the same conclusion, and so given a colour, as it were, to this erroneous statement of our Cambrian antiquary. The Rev. Benjamin Mardon's paper, printed in the Journal of the British Archæological Association for 1849, is another and more recent instance of the way in which such errors as this may become perpetuated. Another writer (Palmer) conjectures her to have been the daughter of Minshull of Manchester; but this also has been proved to be entirely destitute of foundation.
The truth of the matter is (and I am indebted to Mr. Fitchett Marsh's clear and succinct dissertation in the Miscellany of the Chetham Society for the information), the poet's widow was daughter of Mr. Randle Minshull, of Wistaston in the county of Chester, whose great-great-grandfather, a younger son of Minshull of Minshull, settled on a small estate there in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and so founded the house of Minshull of Wistaston. Milton was introduced to his Cheshire wife by his friend Dr. Paget; and