A History of English Literature

largely consisted, according to the custom of the time, in a disgusting
exchange of personal scurrilities. Milton's championship of the existing
government, however, together with his scholarship, had at once secured for
him the position of Latin secretary, or conductor of the diplomatic
correspondence of the State with foreign countries. He held this office,
after the loss of his eyesight, with Marvell as a colleague, under both
Parliament and Cromwell, but it is an error to suppose that he exerted any
influence in the management of affairs or that he was on familiar terms
with the Protector. At the Restoration he necessarily lost both the
position and a considerable part of his property, and for a while he went
into hiding; but through the efforts of Marvell and others he was finally
included in the general amnesty.
In the remaining fourteen years which make the third period of his life
Milton stands out for subsequent ages as a noble figure. His very obstinacy
and egoism now enabled him, blind, comparatively poor, and the
representative of a lost cause, to maintain his proud and patient dignity
in the midst of the triumph of all that was most hateful to him, and, as he
believed, to God. His isolation, indeed, was in many respects extreme,
though now as always he found the few sympathetic friends on whom his
nature was quite dependent. His religious beliefs had become what would at
present be called Unitarian, and he did not associate with any of the
existing denominations; in private theory he had even come to believe in
polygamy. At home he is said to have suffered from the coldness or more
active antipathy of his three daughters, which is no great cause for wonder
if we must credit the report that he compelled them to read aloud to him in
foreign languages of which he had taught them the pronunciation but not the
meaning. Their mother had died some years before, and he had soon lost the
second wife who is the subject of one of his finest sonnets. In 1663, at
the age of fifty-four, he was united in a third marriage to Elizabeth
Minshull, a woman of twenty-four, who was to survive him for more than
fifty years.
The important fact of this last period, however, is that Milton now had the
leisure to write, or to complete, 'Paradise Lost.' For a quarter of a
century he had avowedly cherished the ambition to produce 'such a work as
the world would not willingly let die' and had had in mind, among others,
the story of Man's Fall. Outlines for a treatment of it not in epic but in
dramatic form are preserved in a list of a hundred possible subjects for a
great work which he drew up as early as 1640, and during the Commonwealth
period he seems not only to have been slowly maturing the plan but to have
composed parts of the existing poem; nevertheless the actual work of
composition belongs chiefly to the years following 1660. The story as told
in Genesis had received much elaboration in Christian tradition from a very
early period and Milton drew largely from this general tradition and no
doubt to some extent from various previous treatments of the Bible
narrative in several languages which he might naturally have read and kept
in mind. But beyond the simple outline the poem, like every great work, is
essentially the product of his own genius. He aimed, specifically, to
produce a Christian epic which should rank with the great epics of
antiquity and with those of the Italian Renaissance.
In this purpose he was entirely successful. As a whole, by the consent of
all competent judges, 'Paradise Lost' is worthy of its theme, perhaps the
greatest that the mind of man can conceive, namely 'to justify the ways of
God.' Of course there are defects. The seventeenth century theology, like
every successive theological, philosophical, and scientific system, has
lost its hold on later generations, and it becomes dull indeed in the long
expository passages of the poem. The attempt to express spiritual ideas